Hitting Women

I’m, as a rule, an airhead. I sit around talking non-sense, reading non-sense, listening to non-sense, and basically enjoying my life. But every once in a while something passes by me that hits home, and for some reason I get really worked up about it. Just recently I read this article that a journalist wrote, and it touched upon a topic that I feel quite passionate about.
This guy wrote about an evening that he had spent out late with his friends. They were sitting in a room playing cards, talking, and somehow a man admitted: I hit my wife. The admission of guilt could have ended at that, but no, he decided to add in his defense: but so what? It happens in all homes.
God I was so outraged to read that.
And the journalist said, he was in such shock, as these were his close friends, and he could not imagine them doing such a debasing, undignified thing to a woman. He asked all 6 of them if they had ever hit a woman in their lives, and 5 out of 6 said yes. Yes, they did hit women. And the 6th one? Well, heheheh, he wasn’t married. He professed that he used to cry silently whenever he heard his father hit his mom. But then he added (much to my disappointment), that although his father hit his mom, he had never seen a man love and pamper a woman like his father did his mom. Basically, even if you love your wife, you get to hit her.
And the unexpected part was, the journalist had a skeleton in the cupboard that he owned up to: and after he had done it and shaken off the horrid rage trance he was in, much to the shock of his wife, he went to the toilet and cried his heart out.
Why do men hit? Those guys said that women liked it, and that a woman needs a man to show her his “muscle”. They also said that sometimes the women would drive them so mad she would actually earn a slap in the face.
So what happens when a man drives a woman absolutely mad? Where does it say that men are allowed to hit women when they get them angry, and never the other way around? And those men answered the question saying: I’d cut her hand off if she laid a finger on me.
Is that it? Is it because men are ‘stronger’ then they have earned the right to hit a woman? Has a relationship become so hardhearted and insensible that now we believe we ‘own’ the person we are with? And that gives us full ownership of their body? Nobody has a right to hit. Nobody. It just doesn’t work that way.
The truth is, I think the fact that a woman is capable of controlling herself and not degrading her husband by hitting him just proves that it is the woman who is stronger, and that it takes an extremely, incredibly weak man trying to prove himself “manly” if he hits his wife.