Crabbypatter’s opening comments about bloggers here, and other DV advocates, being labeled combat-boot wearing libber nutjobs has had be thinking all week. She made some fantastic points about the far-reaching effects of DV, as well as the reactions in folks you’d thoroughly expect to immediately advocate for the victims. Hence the silence here.
This stereotype about feminism is something you hear all the time. The Limbaugh-esque notion that any woman who asks, no demands, to be treated as a human being, is somehow a weirdo nutcase intent on castrating any male within 500 yards. And let’s not forget that veritable pox upon gender relations, the so-called “Men’s Rights Groups”, who endlessly whine about how all women are manipulative bitches who get pregnant on purpose, suck their poor hapless husbands dry, then run of with the beloved kids only to hit said poor sad sacks up for more child support. Ahem. This bullshit has been so rigorously debunked that I simply don’t feel like going there again.
We ought to ask ourselves, honestly, WHY it is that we as a society feel so incredibly threatened by the specter of a woman who dares to demand her equal rights as a human. Seriously, what the hell is so threatening about that?
The other side of this is a bit darker and more complex; Crabby made an excellent point that the very women who advocated for DV victims that SHE knew, were made apparently so queasy at having to confront DV in their own community, that they abandoned her when she went to them. To quote another, far better writer, PFFFFFT on them. Shame on them.
I’ve got a tangent to pursue for a minute here, and maybe it sheds some light on this painful phenomenon: during a therapy session some years back, when discussing the abuse I’d been experiencing, I said to my therapist that I felt shame. I told her I felt shame about becoming a victim because I was such a feminist: I had all the women’s studies courses, I was so thoroughly empowered and otherwise in command of my life that it was ridiculous, and somehow I felt like I should have, I don’t know, KNOWN better or something. And she said to me that this was just a more convoluted way of victim blaming. After all, how could I have controlled another person’s behavior?
She was quite correct. It’s all of a sudden so much simpler when you realize that the argument that “If you are a good feminist/don’t wear a short skirt/don’t get drunk in bars/don’t take crap from some man/take women’s studies classes/insert whatever here” then you won’t be beaten ,raped, terrorized by your partner, or otherwise abused, is so unbelievably full of shit that it’s ridiculous.
Here’s a newflash: The system victimizes women. It victimizes a whole host of other categories, too, like people of color/LGBT/etc. It’s set UP to keep everyone nicely placed in the patriarchal hierarchy, and when an individual dares to refuse her category, then she’s punished for it. Or, maybe she’s just victimized randomly as a reminder of who’s REALLY in charge.
So I suspect that those sniveling cowards who slithered away from Crabby when she needed them the most, were made VERY uncomfortable and scared by a couple of gut-level realizations that her situation forced upon them. One, if SHE, a member of their safe little progressive community, was a DV victim, then THEY COULD THEREORETICALLY BE TOO. Two, if she was a DV victim, then their friend her husband WASN’T the demure little progressive dude he CLAIMED to be, and was in fact enjoying ALL the nasty little prerogatives of his privilege as a white male. Three, and this is truly sad, is that it’s a lot easier for some to protest some idea far, far away from you, than to actually confront it full on in real life.
Crabby tells me she’s got a post coming on the “typical” abuser. I bet it’ll prove her, and my point, even more roundly. This is not about what clothes someone wears, or how they vote, or anything else. It’s about the fact that this culture is predicated on control, not connectedness. And when you realize that this is sitting on your doorstep, or eating dinner with you at your kitchen table, it’s scary and freaky, and too often people just pretend it didn’t happen. Because it’s always scary when you realize that the monster is right next to you. But remember this: we used to sleep with the enemy, so we know what to do with monsters at the dinner table. We throw them out. And so should you.
