I’m writing a lot about men this week.
Below yesterday’s reprint about men being unable to articulate their deep emotions, Brian writes:
Reconciling some kind of commitment to egalitarianism with the conflict between how it plays out in practice with how people say it ought to isn’t very obvious, or straightforward… how can you reconcile “Figure out what you want, and require it†with “renounce male privilegeâ€? Doesn’t sit right in the gut, you know?
I appreciate the question, and I see the concern.
In any healthy relationship, we don’t get to confuse our “wants” with what we “require” from our partners. The oldest truism in the book is that relationships require compromise. But compromise in heterosexual egalitarian relationships does involve several key things that aren’t always fully understood.
First of all, as I’ve written before, we (all of us, men and women alike) need to work on fighting fair. Part of that involves the recognition that it is very unlikely that in any given argument, all the truth is found on just one side. People tend to end up in relationships with partners who are more or less at their own level of spiritual and emotional health, which means that the propensity to be wrong is likely to be evenly distributed. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that the batterer and the batterree are equally at fault for the violence that happens in the relationship, but they may be equally at fault for the issues that were being fought over at the time the battering took place.)
Years ago, in my brief incarnation as a hardcore evangelical, I read Intimate Allies: Rediscovering God’s Design for Marriage and Becoming Soul Mates for Life, a book written by two Christian pastors. It has as its chief virtue a belief in mutual submission; the authors reject the “man is head of the household” trope, understanding that when it comes to marriage, Ephesians 5:21 trumps Ephesians 5:22. I remember one line that was very helpful, but since I don’t have the book with me anymore, I’m likely to misquote it. The authors, Allender and Longman, suggested that a marriage couldn’t work unless each party could honestly acknowledge the other’s essential sinfulness. To put it in secular terms, until you can see your spouse’s most serious flaws, and acknowledge they are real, you can’t truly love him or her, chiefly because you’ll be unable to help them do the valuable work of becoming a better person. Allender and Longman suggested that at least some of the time, it is well-meaning men who have the most trouble with this, believing that truly loving their wives means never noticing any flaw. Marriage requires forgiveness, they wrote, but not a refusal to see where someone else is broken. And women, the authors noted, have just as much brokenness as men. The tendency to put women on a pedestal is well-meaning and foolish at best, demeaning and destructive at worst.
For men who are feminist allies (and not evangelical conservatives), is there any usefulness in what Allender and Longman are discussing? Yes. If you’re a feminist man in a heterosexual relationship, you know that both you and your female partner have been impacted by a sexist, often misogynistic culture. You know already how hard it is to root out the inculcated expectations about gender roles. And you may know the important idea we discussed on this blog last fall, that “privilege conceals itself from those who possess it.” But rather than be incapacitated by this awareness, we need to remember that our knowledge of how gender dynamics work is a tool for better understanding ourselves and our relationships. What we get from this knowledge and this work is, one hopes, discernment: the ability to distinguish what about our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (and that of our partner) is sexist role-playing and what are the needs of our own authentic self.
Not to verge dangerously onto philosophical ground, but I think most of us (even if we haven’t read Plato or been washed in the Blood of the Lamb) think we have a “true self” somewhere deep inside, somewhere deeper than the corrupting influences of a sexist patriarchal culture could reach. Overcoming sexism or racism is about overcoming learned lessons, not about changing our very nature. The fact that the lessons began to be taught before our conscious memory doesn’t change the fact that they were learned after birth rather than encoded in our genes or written on our hearts. And the feminist man in an argument with his female partner needs to remember that both he and the woman he loves have had their perspectives warped by society — and that each of them has an uncorrupted self which is no more or less valuable than that of the other. Those born with penises were not maimed from the start, carrying from their mothers’ wombs obtuse and violent hearts. (Sorry, William B.)
Obviously, we can’t unlearn everything. It would be absurd to say that fair fighting requires each person to speak from their “pure, true, untainted selves.” Deprogramming ourselves is always going to remain partly aspirational. As good as we get at purging the effects of the toxic soup in which our younger selves marinated for so long, we’re not going to finish the job in this lifetime. But we do our best. And when I, as a feminist man, fight with my wife (and we do fight), I remember that we both are still struggling to unlearn what we were taught. As I wrote last October:
Sometimes my wife is wrong. (Yes, my love, you are, even if it’s only every fifth Tuesday.) Sometimes I am right. We quarrel like any couple, though our experiences have given us tools like “fair fighting rules†that not everyone, alas, possesses. We know that in our marriage, each of us is equally important, each of us is entitled to his or her opinion, each of us deserves to be heard. But we also know that we didn’t come into this marriage as disembodied souls; we brought in our gender identities, our class backgrounds, our skin tones, our multi-generational family histories. And just as it’s absurd to pretend that we’ve come from equally privileged backgrounds, it is equally absurd to pretend that those backgrounds have not at least in part shaped our worldviews. Again, power obfuscates; oppression clarifies. So when the topic at hand is gender dynamics or race or class, the epistemic privilege is not mine. And thus the burden to reflect just a bit harder, is.
But not every fight is going to be about gender dynamics or race or class. And even when it is, the burden to reflect just a bit harder doesn’t mean the burden of always being in the wrong.
Hey Hugo. First of all let me just say, well written! This was a bit hard for me to grasp at first glance and may require a bit of “Mulling it over” time. I am curious as to how you would define a feminist man?
I really like this, and I think your idea of the uncorrupted self could also be fruitfully applied in any diverse setting, like a classroom or workplace, where people are trying to overcome mistrust due to privilege/oppression. The “total depravity” perspective might make the members of the non-dominant group feel better in the short term, but it just puts the dominant group on the defensive and creates despair in would-be feminist men (for example).
Ah – I spent so much time trying to decide on what verb to use before settling on “require”, too. Merely “wanting” seems insufficient, if we want to imply that our desires are legitimate and are something we should voice, advocate for, whatnot. Maybe I’m more used to talking about relationships in a traditional context, or at least viewing the language in that way, than you are Hugo.
But I think your message here still leaves me with the same problem I was trying to articulate before (if poorly, I suppose). But if I’m going to require (yes, deliberate word choice) I be equally important, or equally entitled to [my] opinion, I have to claim a piece of the moral high ground, something I wouldn’t do in a traditional relationship. I have to hold my girlfriend/wife more accountable than I would traditionally. You emphasize power obfuscates; oppression clarifies, and here I am supposed to require more power, my opinion/perception/desires be taken more seriously, which certainly strikes me as contradictory.
As far as I can tell, I’m simply not starting where I’m “supposed” to be starting, and all the maps that get handed out for how to handle these things are so difficult to read if you don’t know where you are. I’m told I should be coming from a place where I’m seen as more valuable to my partner than she is to me, but I’ve never been remotely near such a place; I’ve never been remotely as valuable to my partner as she’s been to me. That I should be coming from a place where women are charged with building and maintaining relationships, but I’ve never had a relationship where the common narrative didn’t put all the fault for whatever went wrong on me. And so I’m stuck with two contradictory sets of instructions.
If power obfuscates; oppression clarifies, and I’m the oppressor and she’s the oppressee, then my point of view isn’t as legitimate as hers, the value and consideration flow is worse than I perceive it to be, and I don’t see how I can avoid taking the traditional route, and just surrendering in any conflict.
I’m not sure that I’m getting fully what you are saying, but want to respond none-the-less. My sense is that we need to consider different areas of understanding, meaning and reacting to both our own feelings and those of our partners.
In my case in understanding my relationship with my partner I need to consider at a minimum:
1.) Male (me), Female (she)
2.) White (me), Black (she)
3.) Age – I’m 59, She – 47
4.) My tendencies to keep quiet/avoid confronting potential conflict vs. her very different approach to this,
5.) My lack of ties to popular culture vs. her attachments to some of popular culture,
6.) Where I am Secure vs. where She is Vulnerable
7.) Where She is Secure vs. where I am Vulnerable
8.) How I love her vs. How she loves me,
9.) How I express my love to her vs. How she expresses her love to me,
10.) How we each- have responded in the past to conflicts and various life experiences
(and other less significant in most cases things I’ve forgotten in the moment or am choosing to omit.)
While our differences related to gender, race and age – may seem very important, their importance often relates to context. I’m driving around with her in a car – and I have no fears that we will be “racially assaulted” because of her Blackness, so I don’t mind getting lost or asking for assistance of others etc., while for her it may be different.
In other areas – she may not seem “Black” or “Female” – if we are stuck in looking at each other in “little boxes”.
Hugo – I think that your words can be clearer in Newer Relationships among people who share certain commonalities. I’m not sure that you and I disagree – but I think we may look at some of this a little differently.
I hope that I’m not totally missing the point – or twisting your words in a totally “wrong” direction. Thanks!
The post is interesting, but I have a serious quarrel with this point:
Please, as a feminist especially, do not spread the myth that battering is just a matter of someone’s temper getting the better of them during a legitimate quarrel. In my experience and what I’ve learned about it, that’s not how it works, not at all. In fact, I would argue that batterers in fact enjoy being as wrong as possible and winning the argument through getting their partner to submit. Watching someone submit to “2+2=5″ is absolutely the way that batterers work. In fact, they usually work up to the battering by being deliberately wrong a lot of the time and picking fights to test how vulnerable their partner is to bullying. If she’s willing to be like, “Okay, 2+2=5, I don’t care, just leave me alone,” then he knows he can escalate next time.
You see this with the Mel Gibson tapes. The strategy is:
1) Say something just flat out wrong.
2) When she resists you, freak out on her.
3) To survive the encounter, she will eventually submit.
4) Sit back and enjoy. You’re the man!
Of course, if she starts getting tired of this shit, you have to start kissing her ass to get her to stay. Usually, the only thing the victim wants is for the batterer to stop being so mean. If you can fool her into thinking that will happen, she’ll stay.
But on the Mel Gibson tapes, you really see this in action, because he tests her by saying stuff that no one thinks could possibly be true: That she deserves to die, that she deserves to be beaten, that he is entitled to rape, etc. Getting a woman to submit to these kind of flatly wrong statements is part of the process.
I missed what you addressed Amanda! I saw the first part and missed the second!
I think that Any Type of Forced aggression – whether: murderm rape, domestic violence, or verbal abuse is 100% the fault of the abuser, not of the survivor (if s/he survives).
It is one thing to talk of a survivor of domestic violence killing her offender and how that might be justifiable.
No matter What my partner says to me, I have a responsibility to keep control of myself. There is a HUGE difference between saying some things we may regret during an argument and Assaulting Another.
I was addressing myself to Hugo. He suggested that battering is like normal fights between a couple—where it’s possible that either person is in the wrong, and equally likely—but that it just goes too far. In reality, the *content* of battering incidents is as different from normal fights as the methods.
Batterers seek out things to pick at their victims about in hopes of starting a fight. They will make stuff up, find inconsequential insecurities to exploit, and they will often play mind games by being super changeable. So, for instance, a batterer will decide that his partner is at fault whenever something is dirty in the house, and go after her for it. He probably hopes she speaks up for herself and says, “You should do half the housework instead of demanding I do it all,” so that he can then go nuts on her.
Should he get his way, and she submits and does all the housework to the standards laid out during the “fight”, it’s probably just a matter of time before he starts complaining that she works too hard on housework. Because he starts to get antsy if she feels she can gain a measure of control by at least following instructions. The point is concocting excuses for battering, because she must never have any control.
The point of battering is to remove comfort and security from the victim’s life, keep her on edge and under control. Being right is something batterers are indifferent to, and often hostile to. Because if you get someone to submit to logic, that’s not the same as getting them to submit to your will.
As I so often do, I wrote a parenthetical statement too quickly, without thinking. Amanda is right, of course — batterers batter verbally as well as physically, and they create scenarios that disempower, terrify, and humiliate their partners, rendering them dependent.
Battery is rarely an escalation of normal conflict, but a style of relating that is toxic from the very beginning.
While Amanda’s comment is absolutely correct about a lot of batterers and incidents I think so is Hugo’s.
Amanda’s view can also be dangerous – when someone sees with their own eyes a woman behaving really badly and treating her lover terribly and then he batters her – it’s in no way less of a crime and 100% fault of the batterer and it happens – painting all battered women as submissive women with no temper is factually untrue and causes people who see the screaming/mean/cussing woman to figure she’s ‘not really abused’ and that what they’re seeing is a different category than traditional abuse.
Some battered women are lovely, nice and amazing people and some are mean and cruel and unpleasant – the characteristics of the victim or their personality has no bearing on how absolutely wrong the crime is.
I don’t disagree, Victoria. It’s always wrong to hit, no matter what. But the relationship between making excuses for the batterer and how “right” he was isn’t really there. People rarely know what the fuss was over, and are eager to blame the victim, and will buy any line. Like with this Mel Gibson thing. Like I said, he said things that we all agree are complete nonsense, and forced her to submit to these lies. But his defenders don’t care.
The reason this is critical is that the incorrect image that’s out there that abuse is just the same old conflict but escalated is precisely that this image makes it easier for people to make excuses for batterers. They assume it’s a matter of losing your temper and we should just forgive if they beg hard enough and swear to change. But of course, begging and swearing are part of the larger strategies.
In theory, I accept someone somewhere has lost his temper and hit his partner. I’m sure it’s happened. But it’s really not the predominant theme, and there’s a lot of danger in promoting that idea, even if you mean well. Certainly, victims who can convince themselves that their partners didn’t mean it and just lost their temper are way more likely to stay. Victims equipped with the understanding that battering doesn’t just happen in a vacuum are the ones who are better equipped to leave early, when it’s safer.
Also, thanks, Hugo. Sorry to get so pedantic; I’ve just been seeing a lot of well-meaning people talk about Mel Gibson’s “temper”. I don’t think he has a temper. I think he knows exactly what he’s doing.
I think it important to recognize that the domestic violence is an epidemic. It is Not something that occurs Related to the Actions of Those who are Battered!
Obviously there may be Rare instances of individuals Assaulting their Partners related to a Specific Incident or of a Physical Fight being “mutual”, however This is NOT “Domestic Violence”.
Those Who batter do so as Part of a Pattern of Behavior. They are batterers because their behavior repeats itself and repeats itself, etc.
The Myths that Domestic Violence is “getting Angry” and/or Justifiable Rage or similar are Little Different from Rape being “rough sex” or someone being a little out-of-control.
While there are Women who assault Women and Men, by far the most predominant Violence is Perpetrated by Men.
The Issues that relate to Domestic Violence also relate to Rape, Child Abuse and Stalking (with its common murder,suicides).
Control is the Issue and How one tries to maintain control!
Talking of “abusive women” who “asked for being abused” is comparable to victims of robberies and burglaries. IF I flash money or carry expensive items in public I may being acting foolish. I am Not, however justifying anyone from robbing me. If we leave our house unlocked, we may be foolish, but that does not justify someone burglarizing our house.
I’m really not concerned if a woman “dresses wrong” or is a “tease” or is obnoxious or whatever. This doesn’t justify a Man Beating or Raping her. Thanks!
Brian, if you’re in a relationship where “everything you do is wrong” and you are blamed for everything, whether or not it’s in your control, then at best you have a severely dysfunctional relationship, if not an emotionally abusive one. This is not a problem that requires you to become an expert in feminist theory. Setting aside privilege does not mean setting aside human dignity and the right to be treated with the same respect and courtesy due anyone.
Mythago – I didn’t mean it in the former sense, I know we’re talking about abusive situations, but that’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about. I don’t think I’ve ever had a relationship where “everything I did was wrong”, as opposed to ‘everything that went wrong got attributed to my actions.’ There’s a dynamic that comes out of the courtship model where relationships are (the man) trying to win (the woman)’s approval. If I say “… I’ve never had a relationship where …” – who’s the common element? I’ll cop to having some gendered socialisations.
It’s probably mostly (or entirely?) my socialisation that’s generating that dynamic.
But then it’s stickier to … be comfortable with trying to push towards equipartition of responsibility for the state of our relationship, because the usual theory will be that women are assigned that responsibility, and people will talk this way, argue morality this way, etc., and so to … not feel responsible for everything, I have to push against my socialisation, but also against the direction suggested in feminist contexts (at least, typically), which makes me feel uncomfortable/unethical?
I think people are conflating common couple violence and patriarchal terror.
In some sociological literature, when two partners have a fight and it turns to physical aggression where one or both of the partners uses physical aggression it’s referred to as common couple violence. This is the sort of mild (but not OK or healthy!) violence that some socoiologists believe is equally common in men and women. Murray Straus, who self-identifies as a feminist, has written extensively on the subject.
The other sort of interpartner violence is called patriarchal terrorism, and is what I think of when I think of a “batterer.” Listening to Mel Gibson’s horrible tapes lead me to believe that he is engaging in patriarchal terrorism. These are the types of men (and this category is almost exclusively male, hence the name) that use physical and emotional aggression not out of emotional frustration but as a weapons to keep their partners submissive, weak, afraid, and with a low sense of self-worth.
The former group needs anger management and most could benefit from couples’ counseling. The latter group needs intensive psychiatric intervention, which may very well be futile because of their high degree of sociopathy. And they need to be called out publicly for their monstrous behavior.
Brian,
I have to respond to this because I’ve actually been in relationships where I was on the opposite end of what you’re describing. And it frustrated me a lot because it didn’t seem fair but I also could not figure out how to fix it without his cooperation.
Look where something is wrong in a relationship – I’m going to obviously and naturally see what he’s doing wrong easier – and I’m going to articulate it because… that seems like the healthy thing to do and the way to fix what’s wrong. But when he either can’t or won’t articulate what I’m doing wrong – I will have a hard time figuring out what I’m doing wrong. In order to put any equality into the – we’re both going to adjust out behavior for each others sake – you need to actually tell your partner what you want your partner to change! It’s very hard to see what you yourself are doing wrong and none of us can read each others mind.
So yes if she’s the only one who’s talking it going to seem like everything that goes wrong is mostly your fault but the easy way to fix this is to talk . Saying what you think and feel is kind of cornerstone of healthy relationships.
I’m also a big believer in that if you don’t articulate your frustrations/upsetness in reasonable ways you’re going to build it up inside and generate a lot of resentment and then when it explodes your partner is going to be pretty shocked in an unfair way.
Arg – I guess I’m not very clear (and do a bad job of anticipating my audience.) I don’t think the specific issue is very interesting, but the general problem of resolving discomfort with trying to proceed towards what you think is the target when you’re not where the guiding ethical framework assumes you ought to be. Maybe I should’ve chosen something more clearcut. (For instance, in both instances where I’ve cohabitated, I was responsible for all the cooking, and that was assigned to me without any discussion. Which is generally fine, because I love cooking/like food shopping/am happy to do dishes. But if I ever don’t want to – which happens occasionally – pushing household chores from a man to a woman flows against the grain of what’s expected to be ethical, which is disconcerting, even if it might seem reasonable in context. And if we accept the Privilege Obfuscates mantra, I can never be particularly confident I’m not already slacking in household chores.)
Privilege obfuscates, but it doesn’t have to blind. Sitting down and discussing who is doing what chores, and how to fairly divide them, is far different than “pushing” household chores on your female partner.