I would never expect a real man to do anything like this, shame on anyone who considers it.
I don’t think it’s a matter of fairness. I hope I don’t sound like a martyr or anything, but the important thing is preventing the behavioral patterns from recurring. A big part of that is taking ownership of it. To latch onto your elephant analogy, my interest is to prevent another rampage that might hurt my wife or anyone else; I can’t undo what caused the first rampage.
Supply antecedents for your pronouns makes it much easier for your readers to apprehend your meaning. The “quote” button is helpful.
Have a relationship with a bird purely for revenge on another bird.
Fair enough to shag a whore or something, but entering a relationship on false pretences is not the activity of a man.
Protip: Women take sex and especially relationships seriously, so it’s not fair to abuse that. Even if they do it all the time 
Suddenly I feel incrementally better about myself.
Wow. This is a really upsetting thread. When my ex was abusive, most of my problem with it was just wondering why someone would be like that. My friends telling me countless times that he was an asshole and some people are just assholes, didn’t help. I’m of the philosophy that we’re all in this life together, and one of my biggest hangups is not being able to know that some people are just assholes. But - and here’s the other upsetting thing - he still thinks he did nothing wrong. To have someone deliberately trying to fuck with my head, just for the hell of it, would destroy me if I found out about it, just for the realisation that some people can be like that.
I think I’m going to go and have a short cry now. 
PS - none of this is directed at you, Skald - you just brought back a few bad memories.
I am very sorry that my story upset you. I don’t like making people cry anymore. I hope you can find a way to cast tis man completely from your heart. Please don’t concern yourself with whether he ever changes; all that matters is that you not be hurt by him again.
I can’t give you a medal for your attempt to make amends, skald, but I think my respect for you comes from you not asking for one. What you did was shitty and horrid and wrong and you know it. Welcome to humanity. It may not be comforting here, but it’s honest.
What will you do when your wife gets older and no longer sees you as the wise, older man? It’s none of my business, but I cannot help but think that her age and naivety has a lot to do with her appeal to you. I wish you both well, btw–I don’t mean any of this in a snarky way.
Good for you. I can do puppy eyes too. But ultimately I have integrity and the smug satisfaction which comes with it. Do you know how that feels?
Actually I like her bitchiness & snark. I seriously doubt she sees me as the wise older man, except maybe when she’s in a depressive state.
As for when she gets older: well, I’ll always have two decades on her, so between that, the diabetes, the high blood pressure, and the fact that there are a few people who would surely like to see me fed to caterpillers, I expect to be dead when she’s 50 anyway. Hopefully she’ll then seduce a much younger man and use her charms to educate him in sensual wickedness.
I was referring to my not calling women birds & whores, actually. I’d go on, but I don’t want to.
You clearly feel remorse for what you did, but I don’t see you as trying to be a martyr.
I think if you’re going to have peace with it, ever, you’ll need to acknowledge the things that made you vulnerable and were NOT your doing. If your parents hobbled you, you’d walk with a limp. Don’t deny the limp (if it’s there) because you think you have to protecting them or be loyal to them or be ashamed of something that wasn’t your doing, etc. IMO you should put that blame on them—or at the very least NOT on yourself.
You can’t fault anyone, including yourself, for doing the best that you can do, at the moment, given the strength and skills they possess at the time.
The only way they could stop the elephant was to put him down. I think it’s fucking unconscionable that they abused an animal and then, because of that abuse, had to kill him. If you put an untrained elephant in there, he probably would have been scared and tried to escape—but NOT generalize it like “every human wants to whip me” and deliberately kill everybody in sight.
Well you’re the elephant and your parents can’t unwhip you. I veto the idea of putting you down.
Just realize: you can’t fault anyone, including yourself, for doing the best that you could at the time, given the strength and skills you possessed when it happened. If that was piss-poor in part because of events beyond your control that pre-dated it, c’mon…you can’t shoulder 100% of the blame.
I’m getting there. And hey, you didn’t make me cry, the memory of my ex did. Fuck it. His loss. 
Skald: I have to give you credit for seeing and acknowledging the wrongs you’ve done, even more for trying to do better now. Keep it up. It’s nice to know that it happens.
mudkicker: Yes, his loss. Some people are like that, some people have become like that. If they choose to stay like that we can still move on. Keep letting go of him. No, keep putting him behind you.
This is what I meant when I asked if you planned out the evil things you meant to do. It doesn’t sound like you did. You didn’t sit down, knowing the things you were doing were evil and planning to do them on that basis.
While I’m guessing based on what you’ve said that you knew that it was wrong on some level, you had either justified it to yourself or used another reason to continue.
A lot of what you’re saying sounds like it comes in hindsight, not like you knew exactly what you were doing and why.
I believe most people do things that aren’t right at some point in their lives and do better when they know better. Some people admit it and some don’t. Some figure it out and some don’t.
I also think that a lot of this sounds larger than life, which doesn’t mean it’s not true. But it’s framed in a way that makes it a focal point.
I’m going to respond to Heffalump and Roo’s last post, because it’s a reasonable question, but from this point on, I’m no longer going to speak about specific things I did; any further response I make in this thread will have to be theoretical or abstract. This isn’t just because I’m ashamed of what I did (although I am), but because being too descriptive is dangerously close to boasting, and could become eroticized, in the same way that certain streets and bars of my home town are eroticized (and thus triggers for destructive and evil thought processes) for me. The hate-filled, abusive addict part of me isn’t dead, just caged, and I don’t want to engage in behaviors that might unlock it the cage. You may wish to check out this section of the Wikipedia article on sexual addiction, particularly the part about being obsessed with preparatory and ritualized activities.
Anyway…
That’s kind of you, but not true–at least not after my son died. Most especially with Lynn, who was the basis of this thread. But even with other women, being hurtful was as much the point as getting laid, and I’d think of ways to fuck with their minds because that made the sex better.
I can see how it could seem larger than life, which is why I try to be careful to point out the essential cowardice I displayed during that period. I wasn’t Spike (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer); I didn’t want anywhere near a challenge or a fair fight. I avoided physical abuse and rape because I decided it was too dangerous: that is, too likely to get me arrested, prosecuted, and jailed. I’d time acts of humiliation to protect myself as well: making sure it was in an environment I controlled. That could be as simple as making sure we were in my apartment and that I was between the woman and the kitchen (read: potential weapons). I would never have tried any of this crap with a woman who was big enough to be a physical threat. If Lynn had been of a size or strength that she could ever present a physical danger to me unarmed, I’d never have dared fuck with her as long or malevoently as I did. I’m really glad I never found myself in a situation where my cold-hearted cost-benefit analysis would have led me to a different answer than it usually did.
I knew they were hurtful. I justified it because I decided that all women deserved it, except for my female relatives and friends. I did a lot of mental acrobatics to justify putting them in the “Always Protect, Never Fuck With” category, while every other women got put in the “Fuck Over Systematically As Long As It’s Not Dangerous” category. Just as life is’t My Name Is Earl, it’s not the Buffyverse. Nobody gets up in the morning and says, “I am committed to evil on a philosophical level and thus will act to cause maximum chaos and suffering.”
And I’m done talking about evil things I’m done. If anybody has questions about recovering from sexual addiction in a non-12-step context, or entirely hypothetical points to make about good and evil, I’ll engage, but I don’t want to risk boasting and thus ritualization.
OK. I sure don’t want to risk anything bad happening from this thread.
Thanks for participating. It’s been fascinating.
Thanks for the candor, Skald. Hope I didn’t offend.
Not in the slightest. We simply have a difference of opinion on the best way to handle moral rehabilitation: you think the provenance of the person’s corruption is more important than I do. Nothing about that is offensive.
You’re welcome.