"In the early 20th century it was commonly believed among psychologists that all women were essentially masochistic. They really want to be hurt and mistreated. This belief has since been challenged by feminists but it still remains strong in popular culture.

The problem for men trying to understand women is that the behaviour of women who give unconditional love without complaint and those who are masochistic are very similar. The difference is that a person who gives unconditional love is acclaimed as a saintly person, while the masochist is thought of as being mentally ill, with self-esteem issues.

As a result, women with abusive male partners are hit with a double whammy. Not only are they being abused, but it's claimed they secretly like it, because they have a mental illness. Men who mistreat women want to believe this, because it justifies their behaviour. As many men who abuse or rape women like to claim, “she was asking for it.” It's a rationalisation. If they conceded that they were gratuitously hurting kind and caring people, their behaviour would be seen as abhorrent, even to them.

Fortunately, not all men want to treat women badly, but even when this is true, women often have further problems. Some men want to go from one extreme to the other. Instead of being men who mistreat women, they want to be men abused by women. This was clearly true in the case of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

So if men who hurt women are a mystery to women, what are they to think of men who want women to be cruel to them? In the Femdom scene men ask, plead and even pay for women to dominate and humiliate them. Again we can make sense of this if we go back to men’s competitive instincts.

There are men who still instinctually desire to compete against women for dominance, but because they recognize that women are caring and loving people, they don't want to hurt them. It's the first step on the road to loving women. As far as they are concerned, there is only one other option - it means that women have to abuse them. In men’s competitive games there has to be a winner and a loser. It's very black and white thinking. If a man cannot be a winner because he is not ruthless enough to compete with and dominate a woman, then the price he has to pay is to be a loser. He is not macho enough to be a winner. Given the choice, such men would prefer to be in a relationship where women mistreat them, than the other way around.

For most women this makes no sense at all. They see no problem with simply being equals in a relationship. They are used to co-operating instead of competing. But the competitive instinct is too strong in men, even when they are aware of it. It's what is normal for them. Just as caring and supporting people is normal for women. In most situations men naturally compete to get their own way or to impose their views, even if it makes their partner or children miserable. It's a very powerful instinct and difficult to ignore.

In the wild, male animals can only co-exist by establishing a hierarchy of some kind. When two males meet each other, they growl, threaten and even fight each other, until one male backs down. This then makes him subordinate to the other male, and a pecking order is established. Most male animals end up playing the subordinate role because there can only be one male leader in any group of animals and he will demand constant submission.

Men are not much different. The whole of patriarchal society has been created by men as a hierarchal system, though the pecking order in human society is mostly established by who has the most money. Men have to do this, because it's the only way they can co-operate without constant conflict. As with other animals, most men end up playing a subordinate role, because in all patriarchal societies there are far fewer Chiefs than Indians.

Men want the same system in their relationships with women. They want one of them to be established as the boss for the relationship to work. If this doesn’t happen, then the man becomes unhappy until the pecking order is sorted out. He needs to know whether he's in charge or not.

This constant jockeying for position can be a problem even in the Femdom scene. Women complain that Femdom men try to “top from the bottom”. They instruct women how they want to be dominated or abused, so they hang on to control that way. They still want to be in charge even though what they are ordering is that women whip them and abuse them. As a result, if a woman doesn't keep making it clear that she is the boss, she can find herself simply acting out their fantasies, just like any other woman.

This might be just another habit. Men who pay a dominatrix become used to telling her their fantasies and having them acted out. Truly dominant women have to put them right about this and change the relationship from fantasy to reality. This is why in femdom relationships, men have to frequently go through rituals like kissing the woman’s feet, to remind them of their subservient role. Femdom men call this 'going into sub-space', which is the feeling they have when submitting to female authority.

A relationship where the woman is the boss solves most problems for women. She can make her male partner take his fair share of looking after the house and children. She can decide to continue working and make her male partner leave his job to become a househusband. This allows a woman to have both a career and children at the same time, if that's what she wants.

A truly dominant woman doesn’t have to involve herself in the femdom game of abusing her male partner. We cannot assume that a woman is cruel and vicious just because she is dominant. It’s perfectly possible for a bossy woman to be a compassionate and caring person. Just because dominant men tend to be brutal and selfish, it doesn’t mean dominant women have to be the same. It is women’s strong maternal instinct that makes it possible for women to be caring and loving leaders, who do not abuse their position.

For women, love is instinctive and natural, so much so, that it has been suggested women 'love too much'. For this reason, women who try to participate in the competitive games men play in sport, business, politics or even war, are encouraged to suppress their loving feeling towards others and try and be as ruthless as men are. Some women are able to do this, but not the majority. Because of their maternal instincts, female leaders feel they want to be a good mother to the people they rule, not a cruel tyrant.

Men are also capable of love, but their competitive instinct gets in the way. It's not easy to love someone you are competing against, but it happens. Take boxing for example. Before a fight, the two boxers will insult each other to try to “psych each other out”. Then they will fight and try to inflict as much damage as they can on each other. Afterwards, they will embrace and even show genuine love for each other.

The same is true in all competitive sports, where sportsmen demonstrate a degree of both love and hate for each other. It is also true of businessmen or politicians. They use all sorts of dirty tricks to try to outsmart their business or political opponents, but are still able to socialise with each other. It is even true of soldiers in war, who are trying to kill each other but then can show genuine love for their enemy when the fighting stops. Unfortunately, it can also happen when men have relationships with women, much to the confusion of the woman. Women do not understand why men can be both loving and cruel in their relationship with others.

Men complain women are very mysterious and complicated. What is ironic and not so well-known, is that women say the same thing about men, as we see with the Germaine Greer quote at the beginning of this article. The big problem for women is that they are largely unaware that competitive men tend to love and worship winners and despise losers. If a woman presents herself to a competitive male as a loser, not able to beat him, then the man will feel contempt for her. When women try to appease an abusive man, all that happens is that they receive even more abuse.

There is a saying that, “people can only love us to the degree we love ourselves”. This is the lesson women have to learn in their relationships with men. A woman who doesn’t love herself is a sitting duck in any relationship with a man. She is far more likely to accept either verbal or physical mistreatment from men. By doing this, she unwittingly encourages them to do it even more. This is also true for mothers caring for children. A mother who is too self-sacrificial can be taken for granted and even treated badly by her own children.

A woman with an abusive male partner can find herself in a vicious cycle. She accepts selfish and cruel behaviour, which undermines her self-confidence and causes her to hate herself. The man picks up on her self-hate, thinks she is a loser or a masochist and assumes, “she is asking for it”. The abuse becomes even worse.

It seems that men can love and worship women who love themselves, but find it much harder with women who are less self-confident. One way out of this dilemma is for the man to train or encourage woman to love themselves, as sometimes happens in the Femdom world. Even though women will find it a very crude way to do this.

In relationships between men and women, women can teach men how to love others, but only if they are able to love themselves and take the leadership role. Likewise, a man can teach a woman to love herself, if he is able to love and respect women himself. What seems to get in the way of this is popular culture.

Many women read romantic stories, in which the heroine is swept off her feet by an alpha male type. This might be fine in fiction, but when acted out in real life it means the woman can find herself the victim of abuse. We can see this clearly in romantic novels like, “Wuthering Heights” and “Fifty Shades Of Grey”. In these stories, the heroes are cruel and sadistic men. The women who are their victims appear to enjoy being treated like objects for the pleasure of the man. It's a powerful message of the wrong kind.

Men are exposed to similar ideas in books and films, where the action/adventure heroes are mostly violent men. These heroes become role models for many boys and men and the underlying message is reinforced - that all problems can be solved with force, violence and aggression. It becomes a disaster when men apply the same solutions to problems in their relationships with women or even their own children.

What is clear from all this, is that men need to learn how to love others, so they will not hurt and mistreat them. Women need to learn how to love themselves and reject ill-treatment from sadistic men. This can only happen in a relationship where the woman becomes the dominant partner. Equality is something most men cannot deal with, because of their competitive instincts. So the best way a woman can protect herself from abuse and violence in a relationship with a man and get him to love her, is to take on the leadership role. She needs to demonstrate that she is, at all times and all circumstances, a winner and the person in charge. That way the whole family will benefit, as the head of the family will be a loving and caring person." Rasa Von Werder