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.
Hugs to Viscaria and Dvarg. I know that even long after getting out of abusive relationships, the scars can still be there for a long time.
And yeah, to add to what others said, the thing is that it is very easy to get caught up in an abusive relationship without realizing how bad it is until you’re trapped. It starts out with smaller things, the red flags, that can be so subtle other people don’t pick up on them. The victim wonders “Is this all in my head? Am I overreacting?” Abusers are masters at playing mind games and turning everything around to make the victim think its all her fault. I wanted to “fix” my ex, and I felt sorry for him.
TW about DV:
But things just got worse. At first he was shouting and belittling me, and then he started grabbing, pushing, and knocking me around. He broke my stuff, cut me off from friends and family, and monitored my every movement. Then it finally progressed to hitting. One of the worst incidents was when he pinned me to the floor, grabbed my shoulders, and knocked my head into the floor a few times because “I wasn’t listening” to him.
Abusers don’t pull that shit on a first date. That stuff happens after you’re living with them and financially dependent. One of my worries about leaving him was that I was living in his apartment and felt stuck with him in order to finish my college. I was also embarrassed to admit what was going on because people might judge me or not believe me.
I think victim-shaming in the case of abuse is pretty similar to victim-shaming in the case of rape, in that it feels nice to imagine that I will obviously never ever be the victim of something like that, since I’m a good/strong/intelligent/non-slutty/whatever woman.
This. I was proud before then thinking “There’s no way I’d let a man treat me bad” but I learned that even strong, intelligent women can end up in these situations, and it’s not their fault. It is all the fault of the abusers.
Sorry if this is over sharing. I just wanted to clear up any misconceptions about dv.
All the hugs, thebionicmommy. I don’t think it’s oversharing at all.
Small funny note: remember what you said about consent not having to be “May I put my penis in your vagina” and me saying it could work in the right (silly) mood?
It does. 😉
Cassandra – ah, gotcha, thanks.
Also I think Saatchi is seriously underestimating how fond the British public is of Lawson. He may or may not get whatever it is that he wants in court, but he’s not going to win the battle for public opinion, especially given that everyone has already seen the photo.
It would be nice if Saatchi had a get-a-grip friend in his life to tell him to let it go. I highly doubt he does.
Someone in the Telegraph is on about how he’s trying to “destroy” (according to the headline writer) her with PR, the divorce announcement, etc, etc. Humiliate, sure, but destroy? Bullshit. With any luck he’ll destroy himself. It’s only scumbags who’re taking his side in this, with the “Oh poor man, nasty public opinion is piling up on him” garbage. “How dare people say they know what was happening in the marriage!!!111eleventy!!!” Don’t need to, he attacked her in public, he has history of violence including the very same thing – choking people – that says quite enough.
@Kittehserf
LOL, that’s awesome. High five! I give better advice than the PUA’s, because my advice treats everyone as people and ends up with everyone happy.
I’m now sending you an invoice for getting someone in to clean the soup out of my keyboard.
I’m offering hugs and kittens/puppies to anyone who needs one, and the hopes that your lives are all happier and safer now.
The Daily Fail ran a story that was very (between the lines) supportive of Saatchi, quoting unnamed “friends” of the couple who said they had a very physical relationship but that Nigella had totally confided in them that Saatchi never hurt her physically. (Given that no real friends would ever blab to the Daily Mail, I think we can take those accounts with a grain of salt.) It was nice, though, to see that the top comments were ALL supportive of Lawson. Even Daily Fail readers are onto that shit.
I read about the Daily Fail and the Evening No Standards running their usual misogynistic tripe about this.
Something is definitely wrong, but it may be institutionalized power dynamics that would prevent the abused person from leaving the relationship without being ruined financially or abandoned by family and peers. It may be a profound lack of empathy in a small community that could punish and ostracize an abused person who decided that enough was finally enough. It could be a clear eyed assessment that the repercussions of leaving would be visited punitively on vulnerable elders or children in fiscal, emotional and physical form. It may very well be the result of overwhelming fear of an uncertain future leading a person to accept the demon they know over the inchoate unknown.
I suppose I agree that when a person stays with someone who so clearly and demonstrably wishes them harm, there must be something wrong, but I think it is unfair and fundamentally lacking in empathy and imagination to think that failure must lie solely with the person who stays. Sure, it’s tempting to say we would do ‘better’ were we in their shoes. Maybe some would. I choose to err on the side of trusting them to know the possibility and risks of their situation better than I do, as much as it often shatters my heart to witness what some people endure.
::applause::
OT did you avoid the Cat Anger Consequences last night, gillyrosebee?
Blech. Uncool, La Strega.
I spent a couple years in denial about my raping year, because I didn’t want to give up the image of myself as a Tough Guy. I was strong, okay, and macho, and MANLY. Getting raped for a year was bad enough; I didn’t want to admit it was to some whiny little manchild who believed himself to be a Sensitive New-Age Guy who wrote us crappy love poetry and cared very deeply about our feelings, but also believed that the only way to cure my frigidity was to fuck me through it until I stopped crying and went numb. Then I could learn to enjoy it.
Because I mean, forget what it said about him, what’d it say about ME? What kind of wimp was I, to get used by someone like THAT?
I chose homelessness over continuing the toxic dynamic with my family, but I can’t judge someone for choosing differently. Most people don’t have the support system I do, or the luck.
@Kittehs I thought so, but this morning the evidence was left all over the hall outside my room. Apparently there was this piece of newspaper that was having ideas above it’s station, requiring that it be wrestled into submission and its guts strewn to the four winds (all over the hallway and into the bathtub).
Aiieeeeee! Those are serious cat anger consequences.
I refuse to contribute to Theodore Beale’s pretense that he is the voice of God. I’ve had interactions with him in other fora: There is a reason he seldom leaves his sandbox.
If it weren’t for his parents, I’d like to think he be a total non-entity, rather than the semi-non-entity he is. I suspect he’s about to get kicked out of SFWA, which will make him the first person ever to be so.
Yes, my girls have a very unhealthy relationship with paper products. I can’t leave any loose paper, especially newsprint, where they can reach it. Adora loves the sound of paper when it is crumbled, and my balling up a piece of paper will get her to come running no matter where she is in the house. Evie doesn’t kid around, though. She’ll sit down on it and just bite and tear any piece of newspaper into little bits.
Yup, I’m another one who had been in an abusive relationship. I didn’t live with him,Thank God, but he was a big guy and he hit hard. And I stayed. I stayed because I made all these excuses for him – he had poor role models as a kid, he was confused and angry about his sexuality, I was really annoying some times. I stayed because he was just so gorgeous, and the sex was great and I wanted to be seen to be dating a guy like that. Never mind that I couldn’t really tell anyone about us (or the hitting) because he was so far in the closet. I wanted to heal his hurts and then he’d be better. He didn’t get better. Eventually I moved towns and he decided to go for another attempt at being straight. Only after I stopped having to worry about making him mad all the time did I realise how much energy I was spending trying to keep him happy.
I watched abusive relationships. The dynamics are interesting (we had a tenantish housemate, who had an abusing boyfriend, I got to watch it close up). He cultivated allies (poorly), and played on her vulnerabilities.
When she’d finally had enough, he was told to never darken our door again.
He tried once: I pointed a loaded rifle at him. That was what it took to make him realise it was over.
“If you don’t show respect for and loyalty to an Alpha, he will wash his hands of you without thinking twice about it.”
…
Because building a relationship based on mutual esteem and respect is too much like hard work, amirite? (I went to the blog. I read the comments. Now I want a shower.)
I’d bet real money that pecunium is of the “don’t point guns at things you don’t intend to shoot” school. Just how much of an asshole was he?!
Relatedly, my brother, his best friend, and some guns are going to a friend’s in Maine tomorrow. My father spent the day lecturing him on shit he already knows (when he wasn’t telling me to do my laundry for my own safety [any able to explain that one?])
Back on topic! Yeah, I stayed with the gaslighting narcissist as I was working at his father’s law firm, living with him…because he threatened my fish… (*sigh* he made good on that, I lost a dozen loaches and another dozen glass cats // Congo tetras…that tank was gorgeous)
Thanks for the hugs! And hugs also to Bionicmommy. 🙂
And I’m fine now, it was a long time (sixteen years) ago now. 🙂
(trigger warning like whoa)
The day I successfully spirited my kids out of my abuser’s reach he beat me off and on for the next 48 hours. He told me the only reason he didn’t kill me was ‘that would be too quick’.
I had no car, no job, no money. The only way I got my kids out of there was to call and beg my family to come get them- even though they flat out told me it was give them the kids or they’d let them go to foster care when he killed me. Oh, and no I was not included in the offer of escape. They wouldn’t even give me a ride into the nearest town.
After I did get out I spent two years semi-homeless and then had to prosecute him for unrelenting harassment. Which involved, among other things, periods of several hours of constant calls to threaten me with rape, dismemberment and death. Fifty plus calls in ONE HOUR. Calls I had to answer and log for several weeks in order to get the authorities to tap my phone and build a case against him.
(Twenty plus years ago, and I still nearly threw up when that lovely bit of victim blaming appeared in this thread. Thank you to every single person who called out that bullshit.)
oraclenine – ALL THE HUGS.
That’s beyond horrible.
There is so much grey area where DV is concerned. My mother had two relationships where she was physically abused. The first one was her second husband, when I was about 4. He hit her, raped her and would beat up my aunt if she tried to intervene. Some of my earliest memories are of tears and screaming and the strobes of a police cruiser outside my house. The last straw was the night he was pummeling her and I tried to defend her with my little baby teeth. My mom, her husband and my divorced aunty shared a duplex. One of my cousins is about my age and at this time we had discovered biting as a battle tactic apparently. She says that we would get into curfuffles and they would find him and I locked onto each other. I don’t remember this, apparently my fights with the cousin weren’t that big a deal to me. But it explains why I thought it a good plan to scrabble up on all fours and lock my teeth around Papa’s ankle to make him stop. Well in pain and rage he turned on me and that is where the memory (as vague as it is anyway) goes dark. From that time on I just remember being sad that Papa wasn’t around and my mom saying that he had to go away. Years later we saw him again, we went out to dinner with him. He was an alcoholic and had sobered up. Part of his treatment was to make amends to all the people he hurt (I didn’t know this at the time I was only 12). It was gross and I still remembered things then that I probably don’t now. Needless to say if he was trying to get back with her it didn’t work because I remember being distinctly bratty and insolent the whole night. I guess my point is that there are these memories about him that contradict the abuse too. He could be a great guy, I called him Papa even though they didn’t ask me to do that. I remember him smiling and carrying me on his shoulders. I know enough people have piled on this, but it is true that just because a woman is in an abusive relationship that doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with her. Sometimes it’s like they are living with two distinct people and the one who is so wonderful and loving has this other bad person attached to them. It is hard let the good side go away forever even when you know it is for the best.
To everyone who’s been in an abusive relationship: *hugs*
@La Strega: It’s not easy to understand the dynamics of abuse. If you want to know why people stay, here’s a post on the Pervocracy that explains the reasons very well:
http://pervocracy.blogspot.fr/2011/07/why-does-she-stay-with-that-jerk.html