The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
If you hope to make it through the day without losing all hope in humanity, you may not wish to read the following thoughts on Ray and Janay Rice from our old friend from The Spearhead, W.F. Price.
I know people instinctively and reflexively sympathize with the victim of a brutal attack, but …
Yeah, I’m giving you all one more chance to back out of this right now, because we all know that nothing good is going to come after that “but.”
… there comes a time when one has to ask whether or not the victim bears some responsibility for putting herself in this situation. Does Janay really think that will be the last time Rice gives her a beatdown? And even if she does, what statement is she making in marrying a man willing to treat her like that?
The statement is clear: she thinks the violence is a reasonable tradeoff for whatever she gets in return for her relationship, whether it’s sexual gratification, status or money. …
But feminists would have us believe that domestic violence is a patriarchal imposition, despite the fact that married women in patriarchal families suffer the lowest rates of domestic violence of all partnered women in the United States.
Price cites a previous post of his as evidence for this claim, though to declare it wildly misleading would be an understatement. While domestic violence rates among married couples are lower than among cohabiting couples, this isn’t a clean comparison; as Joanna Pepin notes on The Society Pages, it ignores “that selection out of cohabitation and into marriage – and selection out of marriage through divorce – creates an apples-and-oranges comparison between these two groups.” It’s also worth pointing out that as marriage rates have fallen over the last several decades, domestic violence rates have fallen as well.
In fact, study after study after study after study find that domestic violence rates tend to be highest amongst those with traditional – that is, patriarchal – values.
Let’s let Price continue, as we haven’t even gotten to the worst stuff yet.
Maybe feminists think the patriarchy has secretly implanted little chips in women’s brains that lead them to seek out men who will beat them up.
Somehow, instead of choosing granola-crunching lesbians, these women make a beeline for musclebound athletes, beefy bikers and ghetto thugs.
How many different types of bigotry can he fit into one sentence? I count three.
But maybe it isn’t the patriarchy. Maybe there’s something about female sexuality that defies feminist ideals. Perhaps it’s kind of a chaotic, anarchic thing that doesn’t pay attention to pronouncements about what’s right and proper.
Maybe, just maybe, the only way to really cut down on intimate violence would be to restrict women’s sexual freedom.
Well, aside from the fact that this is, uh, an utterly appalling thing to say, particularly in response to an incident in which a man knocked out his then-fiancee in an elevator, it’s also completely wrong. Indeed, studies show the opposite – that the more control women have over their lives, the less domestic violence there is.
Oh, but Price stops just short of explicitly advocating that men should be put in charge of women’s sexuality.
Would I advocate for that? No. As adults, women should make their own decisions in that regard. However, to blame men in general for the results of women’s sexual decisions is absolutely unacceptable.
As terrible as Price’s post is, the comments from The Spearhead’s regulars are, as usual, even worse.
According to the fellow who calls himself TFH,
The biggest error that Western Civ ever made was assuming that women could be ‘adults’. …
The woman’s brain-gina interface is obsolete. She is programmed to get gina tingles from men who were suited to excel in the world of pre-historic times, while she is programmed to be revulsed by the man who would have fared poorly then (the introverted STEM guys of today).
One cannot fully understand why women write love letters to serial killers and continue to get back with violent boyfriends, without also realizing the hate that women have for tech nerds, and how there is an obsessive push to divert tech money to women (i.e. they hate that money is appearing in the hands of men their gina does not tingle for).
Again, the brain-gina interface of women is obsolete. That is the most complete explanation.
I should point out that TFH – also known as The Fifth Horseman – is considered one of the leading intellectual lights of the Men’s Rights movement, with his loopy 2010 manifesto The Misandry Bubble winning praise from everyone from A Voice for Men’s favorite therapist Dr. Helen to self-promoting British MRA Mike Buchanan to crusty old Counter-Feminist Fidelbogen. Oh, and WF PRice, too.
Back in The Spearhead’s comment section, meanwhile, Eric J Schlegel trots out some evo-psych just-so stories to buttress a similarly backwards conclusion:
Women get the ‘gina tingle from the alpha male because, from an evolutionary perspective, those are the genes that contribute to survival. Trouble is, those same sociopathic thugs are not at all any use as protector and provider, so she takes the results of her selective breeding, along with her black eye, and finds a beta schlub provider to help raise them. … [P]erhaps others here have similar stories where female aquaintances chose assholes in their hormoned youth, only to settle for a nice guy with 3-4 thug bastards in tow. Women such as the one you’ve talked about here are those who have not overcome their animal instincts, every bit as much as the men who put them in ICU. The authority that a man used to have over his daughters as well as his sons used to act as somewhat of a check on this social dynamic, but we all know what happened to that…
I think it’s safe to say that if you ever run across a dude who refers to “‘ginas” instead of “vaginas” you should run as far away as your legs will take you.
Someone called Stoltz concludes
This is what happens when a society tells women they are equal – no,no – superior – to men. Movies and TV shows that show a female character acting like a hellish b*tch, goings around kicking everyone’s rearends. … Feminist and a feminist-backed government who tell women they have no responsibilities, and all the rights, so they believe they can do whatever they please to whoever (of course, the ‘whoever’ are men).
Meanwhile, another commenter suggests that the only solution is “to repeal the civil rights laws that prevent people from keeping ‘those’ people out.” Yet another declares that “Ray Rice triggers my gaydar pretty hard” and suggests that Janay “looks like a tranny.”
Price himself shows up with some comments even worse than his post, arguing that abused women stick with their abusers
because it feels good. Having a dominant man is a pleasurable feeling for a lot of women. It’s like a shot of dope for a heroin addict, who knows that he’s taking a big risk each time he injects the drug into his arm, but can’t stop himself from doing so anyway.
Just a couple days ago there was a power outage where I live due to some construction/maintenance in the area. I had to go to a nearby hotspot to do some work online and so did a few neighbors. One of my neighbors was an ordinary, middle-aged woman. She left her phone on speaker for some reason, and she got a call from her man that I heard as clear as day. He called, and then when she didn’t pick up immediately I could hear him yelling at her in a threatening manner for not answering promptly. Then, the guy demanded she get power of attorney over her mother so he could drain the old lady’s bank account, and when she raised reasonable objections to it he was insistent and angry. I was just shaking my head, but this mild-mannered, very plain 40-something white lady looked positively radiant upon receiving this kind of violent attention from her thuggish, scumbag boyfriend.
This is what English teachers like to call an “unreliable narrator.”
Yes. I should have been more clear about that, and it’s on me that I wasn’t. “You did what was best for you” doesn’t mean you were super-selfish and thinking only about yourself. It means you were taking care of yourself, but also that you were taking care of the things and people that you value, or perhaps your values themselves. “What’s best for you” always includes a constellation of things around you, which are important to you.
It’s baked into the concept, but I didn’t think that probably this is not common knowledge and I should have been clearer.
Oh! No no, I was just elaborating, not snidely criticizing you for not exhaustively elaborating on the concept!
@Queex
X-inactivation isn’t that simple. The inactivated X-chromosome is capable of partial re-activation under certain circumstances, such as if an important protein is not expressing in sufficient quantities in the cell. This is how women who carry the genes for hemophilia on one X-chromosome are able to have, for the most part, normal blood – if the X with the bad gene is the one expressing in the cell and the other one is inactivated, the inactivated X will partially come out of retirement to take up the slack.
So let’s say that this happens with the alpha-domestic-abuser gene even if the other chromosome is already expressing the domestic-abuser protein, leading to an overload and death. Don’t ask me how this would work. There are already many reasons why this whole concept that men who are assholes can’t help it because: genetics is complete bullshit. What’s one more implausibility?
@Policy of Madness
I appreciate the kind words, and I have a feeling many people need to read/hear that there is no reason to be ashamed. However, many of us still feel a deep shame because we thought ourselves too smart/tough/independent/able to be caught up by an abuser or coerced into staying. Then there’s the media telling us that victims are to blame, too, because they take the abuse or provoked the abuse. It’s hard to see past the big, bright anchors shaking their heads at our gullibility and tolerance of that type of treatment and realize that no, the fuck we didn’t deserve, provoke, or tolerate it. We performed stunning mental acrobatics to justify it to ourselves, but that’s much different from “tolerating” something.
Then there was my family, telling me I had no right to tell me story because there were two sides to everything and people might look down on me. If I was still in communication with them, I’d tell them they and a couple “friends” were the ONLY ones looking down on me. Everyone else thought I was kind of a badass, and yeah I am kind of a badass. So is every survivor. We went through a hell that was meant to consume or kill us and were able to fight our way out of it past obstacles that included our own brains.
@Alais…..thanks for the apology, but it really wasn’t necessary. I didn’t feel that I was getting jumped on by anybody. This is an emotional issue, no doubt. But, I’m glad that you understand what I was trying to say.
@ryeash
Your feelings are not wrong, but I nevertheless hope you can let go of them. Not because it’s wrong to have them, but because it hurts you to have them.
Your family, on the other hand, was/is very wrong, and I’m glad you had the strength to cut it off with them.
Hi Woody, you’ve never interacted with me before, since I started commented after your challenge! It gives me great pleasure to say….
Shut up, Woody.
Oh, and I’ve mentioned this before, but have you asked Paul Elam if you can have Janet Bloomfield’s PR job at A Voice for Mannheim Steamroller? Even though you’re an annoying troll with auto-pilot responses, you’re still far ahead of Janet Bloomfield in the “spin” game.
I’m getting to the point where I don’t get that knee-jerk shame reaction when I see people victim-blaming. The latest issue I had was with my own violence in the relationship. That’s another thing that can cause survivors guilt and feeling as if they asked for the abuse. The funny thing is I wasn’t violent before and haven’t been since and the violence was only in response to his. So I read up on roles in an abusive relationship and was able to put my mind at ease. DBT has been really helpful with the shame. Checking the facts makes all the difference sometimes.
Hi Woody!
Shut up, Woody.
Wood, I edited your comments for accuracy. You’re welcome!
I will help you out in the future with this service. Other MRAs are also welcome to my editorial services.
“Metaphor puree”…yup. All mixed up and too gross to swallow.
Also, SHUT UP, WOODY.
Ryeash: not trying to excuse them but it occurs to me that the very same anchor/talking heads sitting up there being Mr. And Ms. Mcjudgey might themselves be in abusive relationships. The things they’re saying might well be the things they say to themselves.
And we all know that one way people avoid acknowledging that shit can happen to them is by convincing themselves and others that bad things like that only happen to those who aren’t as smart, aware and savvy as themselves. It’s also a very convenient way to encourage apathy, inertia and avoid empathy and responsibility for ones actions.
Thank you and hugs for all the people sharing their experiences of abuse. You’re amazing.
*trigger warning for violence*
I had a neighbor once whose bf beat her in the head with a hammer in a public street. He was friends with the sheriff. Nothing happened to him. When she got out of the hospital, she went back to him because she had no resources (abusers are good at making sure you can’t leave), she knew he would kill her and get away with it if she didn’t go back and she had some dogs that she used to show before she got with him that she could not take when she left. In order to leave, she waited for him to go to sleep, put one of her dogs on a leash and walked out the door and down the road with nothing but the clothes on her back. She got away. She somehow made it on her own. The reason she left was that she believed he was going to kill her no matter what she did, so she might as well try to run. That was so brave of her and how she found that spirit within herself after being torn down and mistreated for so long, I do not know. I’m just glad she did. I think she was right. I think she’s be in a hole in his backyard right now if she hadn’t run. I’m glad she escaped. I wish everyone being abused could escape safely. It isn’t as easy as the victim blamers make it sound, though.
I’ve fostered abused teens. One came to me crying one night, not long after settling in to our house. She had run away from an abusive home. That meant that she was the one in trouble wit the law. She came to us from a baby jail. (Other people call them juvenile detention centers. They’re baby jails.) She told me she really liked us and liked our house, but she she could already tell that she felt off kilter because there was no fighting. (She was sooo sharp) She knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep pretending to be OK. Fighting was what she knew and she was smart enough to know that the day when she let loose on us was coming. She didn’t want that day to come, but we seek familiarity when we’re uncomfortable and being moved in to a home full of strangers is pretty uncomfortable. All I could tell her was that day was not today and not to borrow trouble. She was right too. All her anger and frustration had to go someplace. She also went back to her abusers. Her lawyer told her not to. The judge told her not to. We told her not to. Her doctor told her not to. Her neighbors told her not to. Her folks told her they’d “let” her come home and that her little brother missed her. She found out that learning to live a different way was hard, especially carrying all that baggage. It made going back look easy. She was such a smart girl, but she had learned to live a certain way and it is hard for anyone to break that cycle. She missed home, because good or bad, it was home. So, she asked to court to let her go back. Kids and teens often do. Are these creepy douchebags going to claim that children are drawn to abusive parents?
She called me one Christmas. She was married. She was trying to get her husband help, because when she had tried to leave him he had locked himself in the bathroom with a shotgun and threatened to kill himself. She was raising his kids from a previous relationship and could not leave them either because he could not care for them and his ex wouldn’t care for them. She did not consider herself to be in an abusive relationship. The cycle continues…
*End of Trigger*
I’ve known foster kids to secretly pack a go-bag, sneak out a window and try to bicycle to another state to get back to their abusive parents. Some will deny the abuse ever happened and beg to go home, even if the abuse happened in public and was severe. They want to protect their siblings and often their parents too. Kids will choose to live on the streets with their families rather than be placed in foster care. The family bond is a strong and wonderful thing, but it can hurt us. Other kids have bragged that they can take the abuse because the people in their family are tough. (Family is tied to identity at that age.) They’ll tell you they don’t mind the roaches, rats, dirty clothes and lack of food, because they aren’t soft like other people. They can take it. They’ll tell you they are not neglected, it’s just that their parents trust them to look out for themselves and their siblings because they are so mature at 7 or 8 years old. (They’ll even get pissed off if you try to care for them, because how dare you treat them like children!) They’ll tell you no one ever touched them in a bad way, no matter what the people at CASA and the doctors say. They. Are. Fine. They feel better at home because outside of their abusive home, people tend to think they are weird and their behavior strange…because it often is and they often are. Back at home, they can feel comfortable again. We all like stasis. It’s comforting. They do not want to be hurt. They sincerely believe they will not be hurt again, for the same reason kids believe in Santa Claus if their parents tell them to. We all trust the people we love, whether we should or not.
As an example, here’s our story:
When my adopted kids came to me, it was not originally a permanent placement. My oldest boy was only 6 and emotionally and mentally he was much younger. Every evening he packed his bag and his younger siblings’ bags and insisted that they were leaving in the morning when their mommy came to get them. We let him do it for the first couple weeks. Once, he even sneaked onto his old bus rather than get in the line we picked him up from because he knew that bus would take him to his grandparents house and that the last he’d heard, that’s where his dad was. If they would not come to him, he would go to them. I cried alot at how much he loved his parents and how much more dedicated to them he was than they were to him. That’s not unusual in my experience with kids. Kids act out. They misbehave. They tease each other, talk back, hit, lie and tear things up. They pour bags of cat food down the floor vents and whole containers of soap down the drains. (Yes, that happened here.) They also love their families deeply, even when those families mistreat them. It’s a solemn and sacred thing, a child’s love. It can be tough to live up to.
Skipping ahead nearly 5 years without sharing too much personal info, they’re still here and here is where they want to be. We’re a family now and share a strong, loving bond. Still, I expect the loss of their original family to be a reoccurring pain for my kids for a long time. It does not matter that they were rescued from a bad situation. It was still traumatic and a horrible loss. It can be that way for adults leaving an abuser too. We can do some horrible things to ourselves in the name of love and loyalty.
If anyone is reading this and they have not left their abuser, please do not believe the blamers when they tell you it’s your fault. It is not your fault and whenever you are ready, you deserve help and you deserve to be free from abuse.
I would like to thank everybody who shared their stories here, and also all the interesting links on this subject. It has helped me a lot in trying to understand, so thank you.
@PoliciofMadness
When you say that every person always makes the right choice, given what they know of the situation, doesn’t it sound a bit tautological to you? What does “right choice” mean, if all choices ever made by anybody are right? To me it almost sounds like saying that nobody makes mistakes, ever. Isn’t this the end of personal responsibility? These are real questions, not rethorical ones, I really don’t know what to think. On one side, I see very well what you mean; on the other, a world like that doesn’t sound healthy.
How does one try to teach children that staying in an abusive relationship is a huge mistake, without sounding judgemental towards the people who do stay in an abusive relationship?
The Just World Fallacy, probably the most damaging mind plague in history.
@dorabella
This is what I’m saying. I’ll put it into economic terms first, then generalize.
Let’s say you have $100. Your cupboard is empty, and you also have rent due. The rent is $80. If you pay it, you have only $20 to spend on food, and you know that won’t feed you for a month. You’ll have to ration and you’ll be hungry. Or you can spend the $100 on food, be fed, and have to move out and live on the street. Your landlord won’t negotiate with you, so this is an either/or decision.
What do you do? What is the “right” choice? Both options suck. Neither one is going to make you happy or improve your wellbeing. No matter what you do, your wellbeing is going to decline precipitously. So what do you do?
The answer is that you will think about it, you will decide what is more important to you (food or shelter) and you will make the decision that minimizes the harm to you. No food will harm you, and no shelter will harm you, but one of these will harm you more than the other and only you can decide which option you want to avoid more than the other. Then you will choose the option that avoids the more-undesirable result.
If I were in that position, I might make a different choice than you. That doesn’t mean I made the wrong decision. It doesn’t mean you made the wrong decision. It means that my priorities are different than yours, and perhaps my information is different than yours (more info, less info, or just different info).
This can be applied to more than just money. I have a certain amount of energy per day. How do I “spend” my energy? I have a certain amount of time per day. How do I “spend” my time? How do I “spend” my emotional capacity to care about things? Everything you possess is a limited resource, and you “spend” those things to either maximize your happiness, or at least minimize your unhappiness.
And I will note here: “spending” your energy, time, etc. on other people is included, because you care about those people and making them happy (or less unhappy) is a priority for you. It’s just as much a priority as food and shelter, and you’ll rank it according to how important it is to you, the same as you would rank food vs. shelter.
I don’t know how you gathered that from what I said. What I am saying is that you will ALWAYS choose the option that you believe will lead to the best (or least-bad) outcome. Your information may be wrong, and if you had better information perhaps you’d make a different choice. But, in fact, in the moment, your information was what it was, and you made the choice you did based on that information, and that choice was the best one you could have made under the precise set of circumstances in which you made it.
Of course people can make mistakes. We can all look back and say, “I should have done X instead of Y. Oops!” But hindsight comes equipped with a set of information that you didn’t have when you made the original decision. You know how it worked out with X, and you can make an informed guess as to what might have happened if you’d done Y. At the time you made the decision, this information was not available to you.
I don’t know how you would get “the end of personal responsibility” from that. This is the ultimate in personal responsibility. The only person who can make decisions for me is me, because I’m the only person who can decide what is most important to me and what is the best way to “spend” my time, energy, money, whatever.
What it does mean is that people who are not me need to let go of the idea that they can second-guess me. “Well, you should have done Y instead of X,” is not a valid statement to make to any other person. That person did X because X was reckoned to be the best option, given that person’s ranking of priorities and the suite of data that person possessed at the time of the decision.
The term “personal responsibility” is used as a bludgeon. It’s used by people who want to hammer “I told you so, or I would have told you so if you’d asked me” onto perfect strangers, in complete disregard of the agency and intelligence of those strangers. I’m going to assume you don’t mean it that way, so I’ll just say: it’s a loaded term, usually has racial connotations, and probably not a great phrase to use.
I wish Xena The Warrior Princess would drop-kick Rice through some goal posts! I wish someone would create an agency that specialized in helping battered spouses/lovers escape abusers safely.
Who’s Ray Rice? Nevermind. I don’t want to know.
Also, thanks for the warning. I can’t deal today. Sick headache.
I have to agree with this. “Personal Responsibility” as a phrase makes me itch, because I’ve so often seen it used so often to deflect responsibility on to the victim, and away from the perpetrator, and the failed regulatory or enforcement systems.
By not framing it as a huge mistake. Teach children that they don’t have to “earn” love because they are loved for who they are and it can’t be taken away from them if they do something wrong. Teach children that they deserve to be treated with respect. Teach them that they are allowed to have feelings and don’t have to prove or justify the correctness of those feelings. Give them consistency and don’t make them live with ever-shifting goalposts.
The primary reason why I was trapped with my abuse for so long was because I felt like I had to prove and justify why I was not happy. Whenever I tried to raise issues with my ex, he spent hours lecturing me, trying to “prove” why my feelings were wrong, and then as the cherry on the shit sundae, would barrage me with all the things he thought I was doing wrong in the relationship. Maybe if I had had more self-worth, and realized that I was entitled to my emotions instead of being a slave to his emotions, I would have realized that what was happening to me wasn’t right and wasn’t what I deserved.
I still haven’t internalized that I am loveable and loved for who I am instead of for what I do or don’t do. I still fall apart over the slightest mistake because my self-worth was tied into being such a good obedient girl when I was growing up. I went from one abusive home right into another and didn’t even realize that it was abuse. I thought I was broken and didn’t deserve any better.
I’m not saying that all people suffering abuse have no self-esteem or -respect. There are so many reasons why people stay. But I don’t think enough children are taught that they deserve to be treated with respect, and that their emotions are valid and don’t need to be “proven”.
Thank you Policy of Madness for taking the time to explain, I really appreciate it. I wasn’t aware that “personal responsibility” is racially loaded term (not a native speaker), and I can very well see how it can be used as a bludgeon. I didn’t mean that. I meant it in the way Conservative Girl used it.
I do understand what you are saying, I really do, and I agree with most of it. I often support the same concept, in discussions with friends; my way of saying it is: “People always do only what they want to do, given the circumstances”.
The only thing I cannot get my head around is: if we are not ready to say that staying in an abusive relationship is wrong, how on Earth are we going to teach this concept to our daughters? How do we teach our daughters to value themselves more than their abusers, if we cannot say that accepting abuse is wrong?
I mean, do we really want to tell young girls that “if you are in an abusive relationship, what you should do depends on your set of values and priorities, and every case is different?” I can’t do this. I want to tell young girls that if they have priorities that make them stay with an abuser, then their priorities are just wrong. In the wrongest possible way, and they should work on changing them. But this is judgemental, of course. So how do we get out of this conundrum?
Dawn Incognito our comments crossed. I saw that you gave your answer to my puzzled questions. Thank you very much for your input. I need to think about this stuff, and this place is helping me a lot.
@dorabella
The term “personal responsibility” is used in the United States generally by upper-class white people, and it’s what we call a “dog-whistle” because it has some coded racism in it that is intentionally there, but not stated explicitly so that it passes by the notice of folks who are not primed to hear it (the way a dog whistle is heard only by dogs and the sound is not heard by humans). The term usually means that poor black people need to take responsibility for their poverty, get jobs, get out of the ghetto, and become respectable members of society. It erases the many reasons for poverty that are beyond the control of the people stuck there, and places the entire onus onto the poor people themselves and absolves everyone who profited off of making and keeping them poor, and is also pretty racist in other respects which you can probably see in the sentence immediately prior to this one.
It’s been picked up by a lot of folks who don’t mean it that way, and I give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure you didn’t mean it like that. I’m sure Conservative Girl doesn’t mean it like that. It IS like a dog whistle, and many many people hear it without hearing the racism in it, pick it up, and use it in innocence.
However, the concept that you probably want to convey is better expressed with the term “agency,” which doesn’t have the same racist baggage.
By teaching them that other people also make choices, which are the right choices for them but not necessarily the right choices for their partners. By teaching them that not everyone shares our priorities, and some people prioritize their own happiness far above the happiness of the people around them, and are willing to harm the people around them in order to maximize their own happiness. By teaching them that some people have toxic ideas about what constitutes happiness, and you can’t love that kind of toxicity out of another person.
And you should also teach this to your sons, because men need to know how to not abuse, and how to not be abused. These things are gendered, but it’s not a good idea to erase men, no matter what side of the equation they’re on.
@ Lea – Yep. And that’s why I don’t work paediatrics any more. Good on you for being a foster/adoptive mom. That is truly good work!