Recruiting proxy attackers
One of the main tactics of passive-aggressive abuse is ostracism or social exclusion. In order to ostracise your victim, you need the co-operation of most of the community. This means you have to persuade others to ostracise the victim as well. This is where the falsification of primate distress signals comes in. The tactic is to tell other people, particularly other women, that this man is an unsavoury character. This gossip is passed off as a warning. It serves a double function of both isolating the victim, and establishing moral and political authority for the gossip. “Gosh, thanks for telling us. If it hadn’t been for you, we would never have known”. The reality is that the women of the group have the power to decide who is excluded and who isn’t. If a woman tells her man that she doesn’t want to see a certain person any more, the chances are that he will respect her wishes. The reverse is not necessarily the case however, as I discovered.

The trouble with recruiting proxy attackers is you never quite know what you’re unleashing. They might get out of your control.

Creating a fake emergency
This attack generally involves the aggressor identifying their victim to the wider social group as a danger. They can be represented as either a danger to the aggressor in particular, or to the social group as a whole. What makes this an act of violence is that the distress signals raised by the aggressor are spurious because there is in fact little or no danger present at all, and that the whole incident has simply been manufactured by the aggressor in order to damage the victim. What makes it passive is that rather than confront their victim directly, the aggressor instead attempts to incite the entire peer group to damage the victim, either by social exclusion or by some other means.

The strategy relies on both aggressor and victim being in the same peer group, although this may be the entire nation in the case of a celebrity victim. The technique works best if the social group already perceives itself to be vulnerable beforehand. If so, then they are less likely to doubt allegations of danger in their midst. In addition, it is easier to use if your victim already suffers from a poor moral reputation. People will be more readily prepared to believe negative allegations about those whom they already distrust. If successful, the aggressor can publicly take on the role of a heroic ‘whistle-blower’ acting in the public interest. Of course if the aggressor’s ruse is discovered by the social group, then it is they and not their victim whose reputation will be damaged. Thus, the technique is easier to use if you enjoy a highly moral reputation to start with. If people think that you are simply not capable of deception, then they will be less likely to doubt you. It should not come as a great surprise that this strategy is used most effectively by women, and that it is used most effectively against men.

Feminism’s constant promotion of the ideas that (1) the world is a highly dangerous place for women, (2) the high moral quality of women, (3) the low moral quality of men, can all be seen as, among other things, a concerted attempt to create and maintain the cultural climate necessary to facilitate the use of passive-aggressive violence against men.