The Violence in Rejection

By Rachel Rundengan |Staff Writer|

It is not a mystery nor is it a secret that being rejected sucks.

I can safely say that everyone has at least been rejected 10 times, by the age of five.

As we grow older though, rejection becomes a little bit more intense and we begin to notice just how much damage a rejection can cause.

There have been too many incidences of violence against women due to the outcome of rejection.

“More than 80 percent of women worldwide experience some form of street harassment in their lifetime,” stated Lauren McEwen, a writer for the Washington Post.

“One out of every six women in the U.S. have been the victim of completed or attempted rape, and almost three out of every 10 women have been the victim of physical, rape or stalking at the hands of an intimate partner,” continued McEwen.

A simple “no” from a woman could backfire and take her on a ride of foul text messages, a solid punch in the face, and sometimes even her death.

You might read this and think how dramatic this all sounds but this is the truth.

A woman raped and beaten, a woman slammed on the ground, a woman attacked with acid, a woman stabbed to death, these are all real life cases of violence that some women experience after they reject the sexual and relational advances of men.

“When a man interacts with a woman, his greatest fear is sexual rejection and humiliation,” stated Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller, writers of thoughtcatalog.com.

“This causes him to spend as much time and energy on defensive strategies to protect against rejection as he does on mating strategies to attract women,” continued Max and Miller.

As a result, rejection can really ruin a person’s self-esteem – even if it meant well, we have the tendency of blaming ourselves for the things we lack, making the pain worse.

According to British novelist Graeme Shimmin, being unable to deal with rejection is not a male or female trait, it is a human trait.

“MRI studies show that the same areas of the brain become activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain – this is why rejection hurts so much (neurologically speaking),” stated Guy Winch, psychologist and author of Emotional First Aid.

So if the feeling of rejection is equivalent to getting punched in the throat and slapped in the face, it’s only natural that one would react as self-defense, right?

I am not in any way defending these assaults against women, I just want to emphasize the pain and anger that may come with being rejected, so we can better understand the aggression that occurs from a simple “no.”

It is unfair for a woman to have to worry about rejecting a man’s sexual advances.

“This places too much responsibility for women,” said Dr. Liliana Gallegos.

We shouldn’t have to intently think about the outcome if we refuse to comply with a guy and his approach.

“Men have to be actively educated,” concluded Dr. Gallegos.

These lashes of violence against women can be prevented by expression of compassion, applying the golden rule, and withholding retaliation from rejection.

To the man who has physically hurt a woman after she rejected you, put yourself in her shoes and ask yourself, how wonderful it is to be beaten, attacked, and punished for refusing to do something you just don’t want to do?

Ask yourself how punishing a woman for saying no to you makes you a man.

And if that’s not enough, then I suppose you were never really one.