I guess I’ll never quite understand this whole alpha thing.
Over on his Alpha Game blog, the reliably awful Vox Day is defending the ALPHA DOG honor of British art collector Charles Saatchi – you know, the guy recently in the news for choking his wife, TV chef Nigella Lawson, in a very public argument – sorry, a “playful tiff”– at a restaurant.
Lawson responded to Saatchi’s totally playful and not at all violent behavior by moving out following the incident; she’s reportedly been spotted without her wedding ring.
Saatchi, apparently recognizing that she was through with him, officially announced he was divorcing her with a whiny, self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing statement to The Daily Mail on Sunday. It read, in part:
I feel that I have clearly been a disappointment to Nigella during the last year or so, and I am disappointed that she was advised to make no public comment to explain that I abhor violence of any kind against women, and have never abused her physically in any way.
The row photographed at Scott’s restaurant could equally have been Nigella grasping my neck to hold my attention – as indeed she has done in the past, although not in front of Scott’s with a photographer snapping away.
I must stress again my actions were not violent. We are instinctively tactile people. Yes, my hands were around her neck, and they had been touching her arm.
Difficult as it may be to believe, for those who have seen the pictures, there was no pressure applied to her.
Having seen the pictures, I will agree that this is indeed difficult to believe.
Vox Day doesn’t seem to care if Saatchi choked Lawson in anger or just put his hands around her throat because that’s just what nice people like to do sometimes for fun when they’re eating out. He’s just blown away by what a total ALPHA DOG COOL DUDE Saatchi is for divorcing her. According to Day, the whole thing shows that
If you don’t show respect for and loyalty to an Alpha, he will wash his hands of you without thinking twice about it.
… several weeks after you move out and make clear that you want to have nothing to do with him.
Vox goes on, attributing Lawson’s refusal to publicly absolve Saatchi and back up his story about their “playful tiff” in the restaurant to … her worry about how she would appear to other women:
Lawson, instead of doing her part and presenting a united front to the media, was more concerned about how she would look to her female friends and audience if she didn’t play the poor abused victim than she was about her husband’s reputation.
In short, she made it clear her loyalties did not lie with him, but to her public image. This is the one thing a woman married to an ALPHA absolutely cannot do. The ALPHA always knows he has options, and in the absence of the one thing he absolutely demands, respect, he will not hesitate to exercise them. Once a woman shows herself to be disloyal in some manner, few Alphas are inclined to forgive or forget.
And what is true of Alphas is also true, in lesser amounts, of lower-ranking men. It appears that Lawson miscalculated and didn’t realize how important his reputation was to Saatchi. She is not the first woman to make this sort of mistake and she probably will not be the last.
I’m hard pressed to see how walking out on a narcissistic asshole who literally grabbed her by the neck during a fight in a restaurant can be seen as any kind of a mistake. But I confess I don’t fully understand how abusers, and those who make a points of defending abusers, think.
Lawson will go forward with her life and her career; Saatchi’s reputation will be stained forever by his actions at the restaurant, as it should be, and he has no one but himself to blame. I’m not sure what Vox Day’s excuse is.
What do you, pray tell, think is wrong in such situations?
Actually, I’m gonna chime in with a little confession here: Between ages nineteen and twenty I was with a guy who treated me like shit. He never hit me, but he was terribly mean, could reduce me to tears with the crap he’d say to me.
Usual story: It started out as a really sweet romance, and the emotional abuse came gradually. And you know, we’re ALWAYS told that it’s wrong to break up as soon as there’s a bit of conflict in a relationship, that you can’t have love unless you’re prepared to fight for it and compromise and struggle with the relationship… We’re told this over and over and over again in every relationship advice column and relationship book and magazine EVER. It’s naive and unrealistic to expect a relationship to be all sunshine and roses, there’s gonna be fights, there’s gonna be conflicts, you have to fight for your relationship. Plus every depiction of romance in pop culture EVER have lots of fights and conflicts and making up again. We really, really, REALLY get it drummed into us that this is NORMAL.
Now, this guy never hit me, as I said, but God knows if I’d broken up if he had eventually done so, what with the ginormous amount of crap I was already prepared to put up with in the name of luuuuurve. Sure, women are also told, besides the importance of compromising and struggling for the sake of relationship, that they ought to break up immediately if a boyfriend hits them. Just like women are told, besides the importance of being über-nice to all men and never sticking to your boundaries, that they ought to fight like Wonder Woman if some guy tries to straight-out rape them. But real people just don’t work like that.
So anyway… after breaking up and “reconciling” several times, I finally broke up with this guy thinking that “this is for GOOD!”. Although, strangely enough, I still didn’t spell out to myself that I had to break up with him because he treated me like shit and made me unhappy – instead I told myself that “the spark” just wasn’t there anymore. Like I couldn’t admit to myself the amount of crap I’d put up with. So I broke up, and, sort of as a precaution against getting together again I think, I immediately went out to a club and had a one-night-stand with a guy. You see, one of the things Mr Shithead always went on about when he was being mean to me was what a dirty slut I was for having had sex with multiple guys before I met him. So, on hearing that I had had a one-night-stand a few days after breaking up with him he told me that I was like the sluttiest slut in the world and that he’d never speak to me again.
And that’s really the last I ever heard of him.
Only AFTER he’d announced that he’d never again speak to my slutty self, did I admit to myself how terrible he had been to me.
And I don’t think any of this happened because I was an unusually unintelligent or weak-willed person.
Wow, this is crazy. I’m a graphic design student and I’ve seen a lot of Saatchi & Saatchi stuff before. Never would have thought he was such a low-life. The photo of him and his wife are disturbing, if someone did that to me I would be out of there too. Good for her for leaving, I hope she never looks back.
@gillyrosebee I am so curious about these stories.
@La Strega I get what you mean, but from everything I’ve seen and heard these things can sneak up on you. Plus abusers are experts at convincing you that what they are doing isn’t wrong, that it’s your fault, that they’re so sorry and they love you, or they just get so bad you’re scared to leave (especially if you have kids or live with them).
I think a lot of people don’t like thinking that a person that can be so manipulative and frightening that a perfectly normal, healthy, stable person and get trapped in an abusive relationship with them. It happens though, and as awful as a thought it is, it’s good to realize that.
Dvarg, I’m sorry. Hugs if you want. My history is pretty similar in a lot of ways, although no two people’s experiences are ever exactly alike.
I’m no longer ashamed that I didn’t leave him for good one of the many times we broke up. He is the one who should be ashamed for what he did.
Dvarg: Glad you’re free of that mess.
My own is nowhere near as traumatic, but it still emphasizes the point. The relationship wasn’t ‘abusive’; instead, it was toxic. We both had bad behaviors that just happened to mesh in the worst possible ways. I’d forget something; she’d get pissed, and continue to bring it up long after the matter was resolved. I didn’t want to deal with the tantrum, so I stopped telling her when I forgot something. So if there was no issue that arose, she’d not get upset at all; but if she found out because a problem occurred, she’d double-down on the anger. This, in turn, led me to start directly lying to keep her from finding out things that would set her off–again, fewer incidents, more and more intense.
But neither of us could quite bring ourselves to say, “This is a failure, and we’re making one another miserable,” in part because it was the first time either of us had had a serious relationship, and there was a mutual delusion that recognizing that the relationship was so bad for us would mean that WE were failures. So even if one of us said, “That’s it, I can’t stands no more,” the other would immediately push for ‘reconciliation’.
It finally exploded, and about the only ‘upshot’ for me was that I was the one to call it quits the last time. But it was an ugly, ugly six years, for both of us, and looking back, I am often bemused by the first time I tried to walk away–if I’d only done so right then, we’d’ve been better off.
This reminds me very much of an old post from Fugitivus. Most of you have probably seen it, but it’s worth a read if you haven’t.
Another post about rape.
auggziliary: Thanks for a happy-ending story, and good for you for standing up for yourself.
Hugs to Dvarg and Dee. La Strega – please stop. You’re contributing to the atmosphere that encourages women not to leave, albeit unwittingly. If victims have already been told that there must be something wrong with them to be in that situation in the first place, how do you think that’s going to impact their self-esteem and sense of themselves as capable people who can get out?
The fact that Vox Day thinks that Lawson should be sad that her abuser is divorcing her is almost funny. How’s that rationalization hamster doing, Vox? Remember to give it extra food for the next few days since you’ve been working it so hard.
Saatchi, otoh, has just publicly done the equivalent of someone who’s just been fired in front of a crowd of people saying “yeah well I quit!” and storming off in a huff. He’s managed to make himself look like both a petulant child AND an abusive creep.
@Ace of Sevens –
Plus, Nigella Lawson has serious family connections (I think her father used to be Chancellor of the Exchequer) and, as tigtog describes on Hoyden About Town, he’s not the only wealthy, heavy-duty family backup she has available.
So ALPHA = abusive asshole. Got it.
Dee, welcome! Hugs if you want them, and Oww about the burns.
Nice to see another agent of the Furrinati delurking. I’m thinking we’re going to need a different term, since there are Scalinati and Skininati and Featherinati and goodness knows what other variations. Critterinati, maybe? 🙂
What are your chickens like? I’ve read a few things from people who
serveown them that they’re more characterful than they’re usually given credit for.@La Strega – not wanting to pile on, but yeah, the “something wrong” is that the abuser has their victim justly in fear of zir life; gaslighted to believe zie’s in the wrong and the abuser really loves zir if only zie’d do better; has control of zir finances, and may have kept zir in a situation (this applies far more to women) where zie hasn’t done paid work for years, and lacks the current job skills or confidence to look for, let alone find, work – and we all know what it’s like trying to live on welfare, especially if there are children involved. There’s also the matter of threats to others: children, other family members, pets. With pets, those threats are often enough carried out.
You might want to look up the name Phil Cleary. He’s a former VFL footballer and coach and indepenent member of Parliament. He’s a very strong advocate for speaking out about violence against women, against entrenched misogyny in law and society here. And why? Because his sister was stalked and murdered by her ex, and he got away with it on the grounds that her leaving him was provocation. When that scum Adrian Bayley was sentenced for raping and murdering Jill Meagher, Cleary spoke out saying, “Why aren’t we calling this what it is? Why aren’t we using the M word? He wasn’t a psychopath. He was a misogynist. Why wasn’t the issue of violence against women mentioned in court?”
So yeah … lots wrong with victims staying with abusers. But it’s the abuse that’s wrong, nothing in the victims’ actions.
Acts of self preservation are always consider disloyal by abusers. However, they will sometimes forgive you for them if you go back to them and present a united front with them in pretending that grabbing you by the throat was just a playful gesture that observers totally misunderstood.
Criminy! I know people don’t want to believe this is a thing but it is a thing. A horrible thing. It is the “I’m sorry you perceive grabbing you by the throat to be abusive” thing that abuser almost always do as part of the crazymaking.
Dvarg – hugs for that first total crap relationship. (Hugs for everyone else, too.)
I think that “there must be conflict, you have to work for it” trope is even toxic as one that says real love doesn’t have anything go wrong, no stresses at all, or none you can’t overcome. Like you said, it only encourages the idea that putting up with abuse = ordinary differences or the odd argument, and that it’s No Reason To Leave. It probably encourages the idea that simple incompatibility is no reason to leave. At least the overly romantic trope might carry a “don’t put up with this” message, possibly.
The fight-and-make-up model makes me think of Mr K’s earthly life. Almost every relationship he had – all romantic, two of them sexual as well – was hugely up and down, fights and needling even when he and the love of the time were very compatible (ie. Saint-Simon), and hit was hell on legs when the love was a bullying piece of work as well (d’Hautefort, Cinq-Mars – being king was no guarantee against being treated like shit). That’s no pattern for a happy or contented life for anyone concerned.
Also I think what Saatchi is getting at is partly that he’s annoyed that friends aren’t siding with him (the bit about Lawson not being advised to defend his reputation). Either that or he’s trying to control her by hinting that if she doesn’t play nice he’ll be nastier during the divorce proceedings (ie her lawyer isn’t giving her the “right” advice).
That’s how I read it. Also I think he’s trying to plant the suggestion that her law team is inventing the abuse in order to win her more money in a divorce. Trying to court the sympathy of the “family court is misandry, women make up DV for fun and profit” brigade.
Quite how Vox Day got to be as prominent as he is is something of a mystery. The guy is a one-man monument to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s planning to give her hell in the courts. I hope she gets a legal team that leaves him in tatters.
Thing is, Lawson doesn’t need his money at all, so if Saatchi wants to get nasty, that’s all his bruised ego talking.
Which is why I think he might be sulking because none of their mutual friends have talked her into defending him.
I just hope he hasn’t the insolence to lay claim to any of her money. Not that I think he’d succeed, but causing her pain is what he’s about. At least the children aren’t his and are past the age where he’d be claiming custody just to get at her.
Oh, yeah. Guys like him who haven’t heard a “NO” in years tend to freak the fuck out when they finally get told and can’t do anything about it.
Actually given that he’s known her kids for a while now I wonder if it was the son he was referring to.
@La Strega
Yes, sometimes there is something wrong with a person who stays with an abuser. The person who abused me certainly used my mental and physical ill health to his fullest advantage. And at the height of the abuse, I did not have the strength to leave; indeed, I didn’t have the strength to get out of bed. Might I have left if I weren’t so sick? Probably. I did leave eventually, once I got back on my meds. But I hardly see how this was a point in his favor, that he decided to abuse a mentally ill person who was becoming more physically disabled by the day. I was vulnerable, yes, but so were the foreign exchange students he had previously targeted.
But often there is nothing wrong with someone who stays with an abuser.
I missed that, Cassandra, what did he say? I know they were arguing about the kids at the restaurant.
I’m referring to the same quote as before, it just occurred to me that he must know her kids very well by now and the person that escorted her out of the shared house and has been with her since is her son.