I appreciate your being someone who has a response deeper than a call for some sort of cathartic vengeance. I'll fill in some details.

Being slapped? Two or three times over a five year marriage, spaced like a year apart each.

Here's the rundown. Wife separated from ex, handles that situation pretty admirably, 50/50 custody, no lawyers, etc, etc. We start seeing each other, she had moved in with her mom because she let the ex get all the furniture, dishes, and all. After a bit, we get a place together.

Her kid was 11 when we got married, and I got along with her pretty great for like a year. Then she started to get kind of weird about stuff, covering up for her dad (I mentioned earlier, an alcoholic) when he messed up.. One example, he got a DUI and she knew about it, but tried to help her dad hide the story from us.

Anyways, my step kid had awesome grades, did after-school activities, pretty much made it easy-mode to pretend to be skilled parents, until the end of eighth grade and into starting to think like high school was going to make her a badass. I started to clamp down on the attitude she started throwing at us, and the wife was avoidant of backing me up, because the wife was afraid that the kid would turn her back on us or blow her off. The alcoholic dad helped make the situation an arms race over fighting for her favor, and I never played that game, which sort of caused a panicked, existential despair for my wife. It took me a long time to convince her not to let her daughter treat either me OR her disrespectfully without consequences, such as you mentioned with the phone and things teenage girls shrivel and die without.

Well, because it took the wife a while to see what I was telling her I was seeing, which she has admitted has been wishful thinking on her part, the step kid began to see me as "the master vampire," for a metaphor that describes the situation where in her mind, I'm the REAL cause for the trouble she's finding herself in these days.

The slapping, for both of them, happened in the sort of transitional period where the wife admits she was deflecting her issues onto me, basically living in denial that her daughter was becoming a teenager and starting to let her grades slip, mislead us about where she was going or why, just all the sort of shit that teenagers by their natures do.

See, my story was about women taking liberty with the idea that they can get away with slapping people, which I very obviously think is a stupid idea, but somehow it came across as me whining that my life is out of control or something.

When I think of abuse, I think of people who don't talk about shit and can't end an argument rationally, so those situations devolve into a lot of unproductive things like hitting and arguments that pull in irrelevant stuff that is just there to piss each other off. Or people who don't ever let it go, and keep a continually poisonous environment, just waiting for someone to say the wrong thing. It's not like that over here. We have a lot of good times, things just got overcharged and tense because my wife got confronted with a lot of stuff that's scary for her, that she did a terrible job of processing. She actually saw a therapist to talk to about how to handle her daughter, which is a pro-active step.