The religious far-right have dedicated themselves to programming girls and young women into believing that being beaten and abused is acceptable and normal.
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How are MRAs suffering from Stockholm syndrome? They like and support men dominating women by any means necessary.
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we had agreed not to speak some time ago. Your question illuminates to me a possible misunderstanding/miscommunication, and lets leave it there if we can.
My apologies.
And that story does not reflect badly on you. Well, I didn’t need to know the last bit.
If I hit a woman and said in my defense; “but she slapped me,” I’m sure I couldn’t live with myself.
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It’s not at all surprising. Nearly all men behave differently during courtship than they do after marriage. Even if they haven’t soaked their brain in the toxic bullshit of PUA forums, they tend to try harder to be empathetic and pay attention and be considerate of her wishes when dating/courting, and to stop trying so hard after the wedding. They do that because media representations and cultural attitudes and their friends all tell them, directly or indirectly, that that’s how things are supposed to work.
So far too often a woman discovers that the man she fell in love with isn’t nearly as nice as she thought he was once they tie the knot. But she doesn’t take this as a warning sign that she made a mistake and needs to call a divorce lawyer… because media representations and cultural attitudes and their parents all tell her, directly or indirectly, that maintaining the relationship and maintaining his degree of nice guy-ism is her job, so if he isn’t as wonderful as he seemed at first, it’s her fault, and she just needs to try harder to cultivate and nourish the nice guy that is hidden somewhere inside him, and not do things to provoke the not so nice guy he turned out to be once the honeymoon was over.
And by the time she realizes that the culture is full of bullshit and there is no nice guy to bring out, it’s far too late – she’s pregnant or they’ve made a down payment on a house or both, the sunk costs are too high and there’s huge social pressure to make it work because they had that huge wedding and told all their friends and relatives that they were madly in love and made vows about “till death do us part” and so on. My sister stayed in a marriage that was past its stale date for over a decade because she didn’t want to put her kids through the stress of a divorce, so she stuck with him until both her daughters had graduated from high school.
And men who batter are mostly just like everyone else. It’s only when they start feeling stressed and out of control of their lives (like everyone who works in the Trump White House) and have reached the breaking point that the warning signs of possessiveness and trying to control their partner’s life turn into full fledged violence. Lots of women tell themselves the warning signs can’t be all that bad. Or they were brought up in a patriarchal household and don’t know that these are warning signs, or even that better, less shitty men exist. Until it’s too late and the beatings start.
All that is not taking into account that these are right wing Republicans we’re talking about. If the marriage is a cold financial transaction, like the trophy wife arrangement between Mr and Mrs Trump, then she might be willing to put up with a lot of bullshit and shitty behaviour as long he honours the prenup and she continues to get her monthly expense stipend. And when he finally becomes openly violent, well, if she’s lucky and hired a good lawyer before the marriage, that’s covered in the prenup and she files for immediate divorce. If she’s unlucky, she tells the media about what a shit he is in order to ensure that the divorce judge will sympathise with her, and he’s forced to resign in disgrace the next day.
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Do you really think that’s true, though? I mean, I get where you’re going - that the culture pushes men to pursue, than catch women, then start to feel “trapped” though they themselves pursued the relationship. I guess I’m just uncertain about it being most men? I dunno… how many people actually push against our cultural norms and seek out more healthy patterns of interacting with those around them?
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Good metaphor but the pedantic fisherman in me would like to point out that, no, fish rot from the guts out like everything else. The digestive tract is filled with digestive enzymes and bacteria which are kept in check by the living immune system, so once that is gone they run wild.
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I’ve been mulling this over, actually. Certainly the Prez wouldn’t fire them over this, he’d just take the line of, “Whatever, it’s fine. You’re one of us.”
But the fact that they’re stepping down and the Prez is tweeting “More lives ruined just by allegations” means that they recognize there’s a price to be paid now for not reacting. #Metoo is working, and they can’t sit by and do nothing after they saw how the Democratic party handled the Franken allegations.
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Yes, pretty much all men. Note that the degree of change varies. A lot of the time it’s just things like he asks her opinion more often when they’re dating and less often after they move in together – or he’s more willing before the wedding to do stuff that she likes than after.
On the one hand, for men who have the potential to become abusive, the warning signs are going to be somewhat muted before the wedding. On the other hand, she’s going to be so very used to men undergoing a downgrade once the relationship gets serious that she might miss the warning signs.
ETA:
No, no. Abusive men don’t abuse because they feel trapped. They abuse because it gives them a feeling of control. They might feel trapped and powerless in every other aspect of their lives – put upon by their boss, financially stressed, whatever - but when they shout at or raise their fist to their wife, they feel in control. That’s why one of the red flags of a potentially abusive husband is if he’s overly controlling.
My google fu is weak and I cannot find the citation, but I remember long ago reading about a study where they hooked heart and blood pressure monitors up to couples who were in counselling because of the husband being abusive, and monitored them as they fought (I have no idea how this study got past the research ethics board). And the finding was that when the men started shouting and acting angry at their wives, their heart rate and BP went down - fighting and bullying their wives made them calmer and more at peace inside. Because they felt more in control. (OK, I think I might have read about this in Donna Ferato’s book “Living With the Enemy”).
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I guess I just think it’s hard to make such generalizations… isn’t it more that our society encourages and tries to get men to replicate that behavior?
Note the quotation marks… it’s the excuse used, not necessarily what they’re actually doing. But yes, I’m aware it’s about control here.
That’s fucked up, but really unsurprising, in a way. They clearly need help. It also shows that fixing this set of problems is far more complicated than just telling the women to leave or telling the men to be better.
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this! i think bell hooks said, at all points of her books, that the [white supremacist capitalist] patriarchy has no gender, meaning that it is not explicitly ‘made by men’ but it’s a system of control over all genders, and all genders can suffer from it; ‘the feminine’, however, is more punished and suffers more so under it.
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Donald Trump: Lives are being ‘destroyed’ by allegations
Hmm bbc app not copying link… brb
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Where do you stand on shitbags and fuckfaces?
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tl;dr = td:lg?
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I don’t know what it would take, but I think that whatever we could do to reduce the ‘sunk costs’ of relationships… would be a smart/good thing. I fantasize about “new couple apartments” in which young relationships are nurtured with less trappage.
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I would say that nearly all people do. In a larger sense, I think that the problem is that people make “getting the girl/guy” their ultimate goal. And just as a runner slows down after they cross the finish line, they slack off after courtship is over. It isn’t just that popular culture like rom/coms typically have a happy ending when the courtship ends. At some level, this is a result of traditional marriage for life. That makes a woman’s marriage not only the most important choice in her life, but one of the last significant choices. So as a society, HUGE pressure has been put on women and men to get that right, and therefore huge emphasis on courtship, and much less on marriage. But in reality, marriage is a beginning, not a happy ever after.
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This one actually strikes me as a bit more complicated than the Rob Porter case. I read David Sorensen’s statement, and the perspective it offered changed my initial take on the situation.
I rolled my eyes at the start, because of course he’s going to deny it, then I got mad at the mindfuckery of him turning it around and making her out to be the bad guy, and then I started to check out the contemporaneous texts, photos and emails…and his story took on the ring of truth. The dated photos of injuries were almost laughably mild, which actually helped convince me he wasn’t making it up (if you’re going to fake it, you’d go bigger, these are opening him up for ridicule). The fact that he felt they needed to be documented is telling.
The old messages to Sorensen from Jessica Corbett’s friends also lend credence to the possibility that he was the one being abused.
I’m just saying that this story is complicated, and the guy might not be the monster that he’s being portrayed as.
Yeah, you’re just sayin
I just knew you’d get around to saying that you’re just sayin
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