I guess I will start with my own doubts, saying in advance that I know the PC words to say and I know what I ought not to say to be a "good" feminist.

I used to work as a victim advocate. I was also once married to a man who did not abuse me except for one slight shove and an incident I won't go into because it might identify me.

My response to the shove was to ask him if he knew why a gun was called an equalizer. Even before I married him, I was quite clear with him that I would tolerate no physical abuse. I was clear on this because my mother -- who had many flaws of her own -- told me this when I was a teenager: "You are no daughter of mine if you ever let a man abuse you!"

I later passed the same information to my daughter, only not quite so emphatically. She's my daughter no matter what.

When I became a victim advocate, I received the usual training with the usual correct point of view: Ask not why women stay; ask why men batter. This did not really prepare me for the feelings -- the anger -- I had when I met women who were battered and refused to leave. I wanted them to be tougher. I did not realize that they were already tough. Some of them took abuse standing up that would have had me crawling on the floor. Why didn't they just leave?

Now, we have better statistics on the dangers of leaving. Men really do kill women who leave and they do so frequently.

I read the excerpt but I would have to read the book to be convinced that there is nothing in these women's backgrounds that predisposes them to stay. I would like to know what sort of behavior their mothers modeled for them.

My own motto has always been that it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. I know from some personal experience that I would have found a way to leave.

I cannot be more explicit -- but there ARE ways to leave.

After all, if he holds her in such contempt, such low esteem, as to threaten and abuse and deride her constantly, he can't really love her or think he has a better life with her around, right? If she's such an albatross, let her go.

I asked an abusive guy that once (on the phone, from 1,000 miles away). He was doing what abusive guys do: trying to turn his wife's friends against her to isolate her. So he was talking a bunch of smack about her, but I knew what was really going on, so I simply asked, why, if he detested her so much, do they not just get divorced.

He didn't answer, but my feeling is, he needed her, on some basic level.

This story has a happy ending because she moved back to her big ethnic family and her father and cousins scared the guy enough to keep him in line. She went back to school and found another guy and married again.

But in the meantime, his life completely fell apart. He lost his job, he couldn't seem to clean his house. He only got it back together when he found another woman to sort of look after him.

Being a man I cannot speak for to abusive men, but more than once I have been on the wrong end of physical and mental abuse inflicted by women, so I can shed a bit of light on this.

Part of the reason why we victims don't leave the relationship is that we recognize that the violence is ultimately a symptom of weakness, and that they (violent partners) act in this way because they feel weak and inadequate. Therefore we try to find ways to divert their pathetically weak self esteem into more constructive outlets than beating on us.

Of course we also know that they can be dangerous, and we don't want to be injured.

In my case, ultimately the drinking, the drugs, the threats, the occasional violence etc. eventually made the entire relationship worthless to me and I evolved exit strategies.

However exit strategies invariably must involve deceiving the abuse, which we feel guilty about, because just telling them that we are tired of the abuse and want out does not get us anywhere. They will then tell us they love us, take overdoses, cut themselves, get sick, have chest pain, kill us, or whatever their chosen mode of self expression may be.

Not to harsh on Evan Stark one tiny bit, because he's very well-respected in the violence prevention field, but duh... The battered women's field has been saying this over and over and OVER for years. Batterers are tremendously good at threatening, coercing, frightening, subduing, and manipulating their victims. Many will stop at nothing.

I know this well. Part of my job is to track and record the murders of women by their partners in the state where I live. I see the same thing again and again in these tragedies. The victim tries to leave and the batterer stalks and threatens her and eventually kills her. Battered women who choose to stay are indeed making a calculation that it's safer to be in a somewhat controllable situation, rather than going out into the cold night, knowing that he will most likely try to murder him.

Does this mean that battered women should never leave? Of course not. It just means that we need to offer more and better services for battered women and their children, such as shelter, legal options, etc. We must make sure that batterers are held accountable for their actions. If a batterer violates a protective order, he should be arrested and charged with the violation. The legal system has to stop allowing batterers to plead down from a charge of domestic assault to disorderly conduct. We have to actually enforce the federal law that states that batterers with protective orders are not allowed to possess handguns. The family court systems in this county need to better understand the dynamics of domestic violence and stop giving custody of children to abusers.

I hope Stark's new book will bring more publicity to the true dynamics of battering as a system of power and control and we can stop blaming victims for making the choices they all too frequently have to make to try their best to stay alive.