There are buttons they can press
Victoria Smith has a brilliant piece about male anger and how women experience it.
Years ago, I lived with a man who hit me, though not most of the time. Sometimes he would only shout at me, but again, not most of the time. I couldn’t predict when things would go wrong, though I tried to work out a pattern. One day, you’d say something and it would be fine; the next, you could say the same thing and you’d know, instantly, that you’d ruined everything.
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Sometimes it would end in physical violence; sometimes it would not. This made little difference to the initial terror because, of course, you didn’t know. Afterwards, if no blows had actually been struck, it would be decreed that “nothing happened”.
I think a lot of women live with “nothing happening” an awful lot of the time. A man does not have to hit you more than once for all the occasions upon which he could have hit you to have the required effect. He might not have to hit you at all. One of the reasons why it has been so important for feminists to promote awareness of coercive control is that physical violence is not the only means by which men terrorise women. There are women who live in constant fear of men who can justifiably say, “I never even touched her.”
And, I think, there are women who live in something much less acute than constant fear, but still more than nothing. An aversion to male rage, if nothing else. I’ve mentioned a few times that I experienced very occasional male rage growing up (and after growing up), not the physical kind, only the shouty kind, but the shouty part alone was terrifying to me. It seems to me that men should know better than to do that. We can’t know ahead of time that the shouting isn’t going to proceed to violence, even if it never has in the past. It feels pre-violent.
Whilst very few men might risk treating a woman in public the way an abuser would treat her in private, there are buttons they can press, ways of occupying space that show an awareness of who has the upper hand. There can be an expectation of deference, and a belief that it is acceptable to treat insufficiently deferential — that is, insufficiently fearful — women as aggressors.
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An example of this would be the recent behaviour of Labour MPs Ben Bradshaw and Lloyd Russell-Moyle towards female MPs speaking about Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill. To many women, myself included, the shouting and bullying felt disturbingly familiar.
Yes. Yes yes yes fucking yes. That contorted face on Russell-Moyle – how dare he?
The sense of moral superiority expressed by Russell-Moyle in the aftermath, claiming that his “passion” led him to adopt the wrong “tone”, was utterly predictable. She, Miriam Cates, made him do it. Anyone with principles would have done the same. Who could call that abusive?
I know I am not the only woman who saw this and felt genuine dismay. This behaviour should have no place in public life. It should have been condemned by Keir Starmer rather than airily written off with platitudes about “respect”. Starmer claims to care about violence against women and girls but seems oblivious to the broader dynamics that underpin it. If nothing happened in the House of Commons, then nothing is happening in most abusive households either, until something does happen and we all have to pretend that nobody could have foreseen it.
Afuckingmen.
I do not like feeling the things I do when I see men shouting at women in ways I know they would never dare shout at men (no matter how “passionate” they are feeling). I would rather not make the connections I do. It is not opportunism. It is not a weapon I like to wield. In many ways I would rather un-feel all this, but I can’t. As long as I can’t, it enrages me that men who exploit the fear of women — who have enough insight into male dominance to exercise it, but not enough to acknowledge it — still have the nerve to tell women which men we “really” need to worry about.
Along with everything else they feel like telling us.
I am quite aware that, just as I never found a way of backing out of a confrontation in the past, there is no way of expressing this persuasively to men who like yelling at women. To them, I am weaponising trauma. I am whiny and manipulative. I am playing the victim. I am seeing threats of violence everywhere.
They will say “nothing happened”, and on a basic level they will be right. I think that “nothing” matters, though. I think that “nothing” deserves to be named.
Victoria Smith is a stone cold genius.
And there are ways without the threat of violence or violence itself; men often sit in the driver’s seat even if they don’t do anything like that. The unspoken threat of retracting love given, or just extreme disapproval can be enough to squash the desires of a woman who has been brought up to believe it is her role to please.
Once you learn those lessons about being lesser, about needing to please, it is painfully difficult to unlearn them. At the age of 62, I have unlearned most of them, but there are still shards of glass waiting to dig into my brain if someone looks displeased.
And even living with a non-violent, loving man, a childhood full of terror, followed by an adulthood of bitter loneliness and depression, can be enough to make you watch like a hawk if you sense displeasure. We are conditioned. I was getting breakfast this morning when I felt a large fist slam into my back; I couldn’t breathe. Nothing happened…literally nothing. There was no one in the room with me, except memories. Why today? I wish I knew. But that’s what violence does to us.
JFC!
Can we please let the women just takeover now?
Us men can fish, hunt, watch TV, scratch our balls, and talk bullshit over beers while the women get on with being the sensible sex.
Seconded.
iknklast, sure but that kind of thing is also available to women. The point about the rages is that they can be a precursor to male violence, so they’re viscerally frightening in a way that women’s rages aren’t.
My father used to beat my mother up, starting when I was 10 years old. That caused me to distance myself from him, which he felt and resented and complained about to his friends. But he also had an intense hatred of religion, particularly of the protestant variety. To him it was as a red rag is to a bull. A professed atheist himself, he had friends who were catholics and jews, but not protestants, for whom he had a particular dislike. Which inclines me to the view that he was likely sexually molested when he himself was around 10 years old by some born-again Calathumpian when left by his parents with family friends to stay in an isolated mountain community in West Virginia, while they went on a holiday touring the US.
Rape and molestation involve extreme loss of power over one’s own body, leading to the well-established fact of the abused becoming in turn abusers of others in a cycle of abuse; possibly as an effort to compensate by in turn asserting lost power. And so it goes on.
It can be a long chain, seriously affecting lots of lives and relationships.
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-cycle-of-sexual-abuse-22460
During the second year of the pandemic, I was listening to a frightening story on the BBC as the UK government declared a new period of lockdowns. There was no consideration for women who lived with violent men. A woman reported that she was listening to the news with her abuser as Johnson made the announcement. I don’t recall if it was her husband or not, but he looked over at her and said “Let the games begin.” He knew that he had her isolated. It was chilling, and I had that same feeling that I get when I am watching a horror movie, that I want to turn it off; but it was even worse because it wasn’t a movie nor fictional but a very common reality for many women and especially during the pandemic.
It’s been my observation in reading and listening to abused women, and some studies I had read in college, that such men use the unpredictability over whether or not they will be menacing or violent to keep their victims off balance and it’s a way to control their behavior. The buttons are hidden, and their victims will be tentative on whatever they say or do in order to avoid accidentally pulling a hitherto unknown trigger for rage. The claim that their victim is responsible for the violence is post-hoc justification.
What happened in Parliament during that debate mimicked what these men do, and they full well knew the effect that they were having on their female colleagues.
Of course I’ve lost the source, but some Anglo-Catholic publisher once said:
Substitute ‘passion.’
@6 yes, I remember decades ago having my mind blown by a similar conversation.
Man: I am sorry I hit her, but I just got so angry I couldn’t help myself.
Counselor: Do you ever get angry at your boss?
Man: Yes of course.
Counselor: Have you ever hit your boss?
Man: What, are you crazy? I’d lose my job.
I get angry at my boss. I get angry at my husband (not often, but…). Also my cats and my dog. I have never hit any of them, and don’t plan to.
When I get that angry, I disappear into my own space and write. It helps me cool down. I know that doesn’t work for everyone, because not everyone has their own space, and not everyone can write. But it is possible even for those who are not middle-class or above to find ways to work off their anger. Many do. My father (we were poor then, so it’s relevant) used to disappear to the barn; we wouldn’t see him all evening. Some guys disappear to the pool hall. None of those are ideal, but if you are unable to control your temper (at least in your own mind), removing yourself from the situation can work.
My father never hit my mother…or anyone else, except my brother once after he hit my mother. I wish I could say the same for the rest of my family.
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@8 these men are perfectly able to control their uncontrollable temper when they know there would be consequences if they were unable to (the men who genuinely can’t are the ones who actually end up in prison). They just don’t believe they need to bother when it’s just assaulting the women under their control.