Women report rape, battery, broken bones, miscarriages, knife and gunshot wounds. Men talk about “marital problems.” Women walk around with bruises, brain damage, paralyzed limbs, shredded genitalia, bullets in their heads. Men mention “domestic disputes.” Deborah Evans complained to Detective Felix Grabowski of the Roselle, New Jersey, police that Clifton McKenzie had abducted her, assaulted her, and held her prisoner for three days in her apartment, repeatedly slapping her, raping her, and threatening her life. When Detective Grabowski learned that Deborah Evans had formerly lived with McKenzie “in an intimate fashion,” he told her to come back next week and advised the prosecutor that there was nothing to prosecute. The following Monday morning, when Deborah Evans headed for the police station again, she disappeared. She was found in the trunk of a car in the parking lot of a motel where McKenzie had overdosed on drugs. He had beaten her up, locked her in the trunk, and left her to freeze to death. Later Detective Grabowski said that in all his years on the force “he had not filed a single domestic violence complaint or report,” although he was required to do so by the New Jersey Domestic Violence Act; and he “made a practice of not informing victims, such as Evans, of their rights and options under the Act.”1
Why is it that the violence women endure and describe seems to so many men—including so many men with the power to do something about it—to be no more than ordinary “marital problems” or “lovers’ quarrels,” mere skirmishes in what some jokingly call “the battle between the sexes”? Certainly the answer to that question is complex, but part of it lies in the way we conceptualize violence in intimate relationships. The way we talk about “the problem” is part of the problem.
Throughout history, men have had things their way, thanks in large part to their strategic use of coercion and violence. And history, as we know, is written by the victors, not the vanquished. Thus, men who shape events also define them. When men and women experience an interchange differently, it’s men who specify what happened. When men and women look at an event differently, it’s men who apply the label. Men are privileged to call an assault an “argument,” or rape “making love.” Battered women in particular find their violent and terrifying world tamed—domesticated—transformed by gray flannel nametags into a benign, cheery, and vaguely titillating place. They say it makes them crazy.
In defining common experience, batterers are backed up by the best authorities. The “science” of sexology, for example, has assured us, ever since it was invented at the turn of the century, that men find pleasure in inflicting pain on women during sex, and that women welcome it. In Ideal Marriage, a book that went through forty-five printings in the United States between 1930 and 1965 and shaped the sex life of generations of middle-class Americans, the Dutch sexologist Van de Velde wrote: “What both man and woman, driven by obscure primitive urges, wish to feel in the sexual act, is the essential force of maleness, which expresses itself in a sort of violent and absolute possession of the woman. And so both of them can and do exult in a certain degree of male aggression and dominance—whether actual or apparent—which proclaims this essential force.” He quotes with approval the opinion of the eminent British sexologist Havelock Ellis that “a certain pleasure in manifesting his power over a woman by inflicting pain upon her” is a “quite normal constituent of the sexual impulse in man”; and, in any event, the “normal manifestations of woman’s sexual pleasure are exceedingly like those of pain”—a “very significant fact.”2 From the decidedly male point of view of Ellis and Van de Velde, it was all the same.
Such ideas persist. In The New Joy of Sex: The Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking for the Nineties, an updated version of the perennial bestseller, Alex Comfort reminds readers again and again that “our image of love is uptight about the very real elements of aggression in normal sexuality.… To need some degree of violence in sex, rather than the glutinous unphysical kind of love which … tradition propagates, is statistically pretty normal.” (He does not provide the statistics.) In his version of “normal” sexuality, however, women “who dig an extra sensation of violence and/or helplessness” seem to require artificial restraints—being “held down or tied up”—while for men, intercourse itself can be delightfully violent. “Men can take out quite a lot of the violence component,” Comfort says, “in the actual process of penetration and working for orgasm.” He mentions in passing that “real, spiteful violence from a partner is a common cause of death or injury in women,” but he maintains that the masculine “range of needs” for violence is not in itself “scary.” Violence “can be stopped spilling out of sex into cruelty,” he writes, and while “normal resentments” build up between people who live together, violent sex “tends to discharge them.”3 He doesn’t say how.
Psychologists get into the act, too, touting the beneficial effects of aggression. It stands to reason that if a little violence mixed up with sex is good for us, then unalloyed aggression must be positively therapeutic. A whole school of psychology said it was so. The “ventilationists,” as they came to be called, became popular in the early 1970s with the publication of several bestselling books proclaiming what seemed then an iconoclastic and “liberating” notion: anger is good for us. Restrain anger, the books said, and it will build up inside like water behind a dam until it suddenly bursts out; better to drain off the “reservoir” by expressing anger whenever you feel it, preferably often. Better to “blow off steam,” “get it off your chest,” “let it all hang out.” Such spontaneous venting of anger supposedly produced countless benefits: it was said to relieve depression, cure psychosomatic ills, produce “catharsis,” make relationships “real,” and incidentally get you what you wanted. All over America, therapists’ offices filled with angry patients screaming and attacking pillows with fabric bats. (One is reminded of Robert Bly’s new Wild Man running out of the woods to “shout and say what he wants.”)4 In 1970, the Book-of-the-Month Club peddled a bestseller, significantly titled The Intimate Enemy, which promised to teach readers how to fight with their marriage partner.5
The first curious thing to notice about the ventilationists is their assumption that intimate partners are necessarily resentful and hostile—in a word, enemies. This conception of marriage as an adversarial relationship is reminiscent of the American “justice” system which, as we have seen, also proceeds by hostile confrontation. It reminds one, also, of Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum that for Man, the essential subject, Woman is the inessential object, the Other.6 It seems that men conceive of the whole of life in terms of opposition, that they simply can’t get along without an object who is not only Other but enemy. Robert Bly says the 1950s model of manhood (of which there are many examples around, including Ronald Reagan) “isn’t sure that he is alive … unless he has an enemy.”7 And Bly too sees the eternal male and female as “opposites” exemplified in flamenco dance: “defender and attacker …, attractor and refuser, woman and man.… Each is a pole with its separate magnetic charge, each is a nation defending its borders, each is a warrior enjoying the heat of extravagant passion.”8 Bly eagerly leads his followers away from women altogether; his concern is a man’s self, not his wife and kids. But the ventilationists, having defined women and men as enemies, advised them how to conduct the battle of their relationship. They defined the antagonism between them as “love.”
Unfortunately, there was no scientific evidence for ventilationist theory. It was popularized chiefly by practicing therapists who apparently drew their ideas from their own infuriated patients, while ignoring or distorting the findings of experimental psychology. The authors of The Intimate Enemy, for example, cite the famous experiments of psychologist Harry Harlow, who raised monkeys with mechanical surrogate mothers only to find that when they grew up, although they appeared normal in most respects, they didn’t play with other monkeys and they didn’t reproduce. To the ventilationists the experiment improbably “showed that an exchange of hostilities is necessary between mates before there can be an exchange of love.”9 Harlow himself thought it showed that to learn how to interact with others, a monkey needs a mother.
Another bestseller (from 1974), with topics like “Fight for Better Sex,” counsels: “Lovers who exclude aggression from their bedroom cheat themselves of a total and exciting experience, and in fact will probably be unable to achieve genuine erotic fulfillment.”10 The authors note that married men impotent with their wives have “no problem” with prostitutes with whom they are “not afraid to be themselves” and to “behave aggressively” and make “authentic demands for sexual satisfaction” without having to worry about being “insensitive or harsh.”11 Without having to worry, in other words, about the feelings or desires or “needs” of another person.
It can hardly be coincidence that the bestselling anger mongers all were men. In the first place, the easy equation of anger and aggression is not one a woman is likely to make. Aggression may be a basic human drive, as Freud would have it, but it manifests itself in ways shaped by context, by culture, and, as a growing body of psychological research and theory demonstrates, by gender. A man or a woman in the grip of the aggressive drive might just as well ask for a raise, close a business deal, or practice the trombone as get angry. An angry man or woman might take a walk, count to ten, work out, cry, write a letter to a senator, sulk, join a picket line, have a drink, run around the park, go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, call a friend, mow the lawn. In other words aggression is not anger, and anger need not be expressed aggressively. And when anger is at its worst, the angry woman is more likely to smile than to throw a punch, especially if the person she’s angry with is bigger than she is.12
We can trace the anger mongers’ notions back to Freud’s contention that “aggressiveness forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people,” but Freud at least noticed that mothers seemed to love their children (their male children, he said) without aggression.13 (As always it was women—what do they want?—who eluded his rules.) All these years—until the anger mongers came along with their account of “mutual” conflict in marriage—psychology has studied the absence of “normal” (read “male”) aggression in women as a problem. (Indeed, the closest thing to the anger books by and for women at the time was a popular little self-help book called How to Be an Assertive (Not Aggressive) Woman in Life, in Love, and on the Job which coached women to overcome “mousiness” without falling into “unfeminine” aggression.14 More recently, the 1985 bestseller The Dance of Anger instructed women not to stupidly blow off steam, but rather to manage their anger, firmly and quietly.)15 The world might be different indeed if psychology had studied as a problem the presence of abnormal aggression in men, the absence of normal human care.16 But the male psyche—aggression, hostility, anger, and all—has always been taken as the “human” norm.
The ventilationists elevated anger to a therapeutic tool, and what they seemed particularly to like about anger is its single immediate benefit to a man in an intimate relationship: it intimidates his partner. Take this pronouncement: “Anger, directly and constructively expressed in a spirit of good will, energizes its communicator and grabs the ear and involvement of the person it is directed against. While it may be threatening to the other person, if it is motivated by a desire to communicate a genuine feeling and not to overwhelm, it creates a communication reality.”17 One wonders how anger can be expressed in a spirit of good will, since anger by definition is what we feel when all good will has flown. But who can doubt that a threat creates a “communication reality”? Short of a punch or a gunshot (which often follow) a threat is about as real as communication gets.
One may also wonder about the relative size of the “communicator” and the poor person whose ear is grabbed by the communicator’s genuine emotion. But the ventilationists proceed as though an angry woman and an angry man ventilating have an equal impact upon an intimate “enemy.” Psychologist Carol Tavris notes the danger for women in that false egalitarianism. In her wise book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, she quotes a rhetorical question from another ventilationist bestseller, this one by a male psychoanalyst: “‘Are you aware that your anger will not kill anyone and that no one’s anger will kill you?’” And she answers: “Yes, but only because I am a woman who has never been beaten by her husband or father. I imagine that thousands of battered wives in this country would have a far different response.”18 Tavris points out what experimental psychology and our own observations can tell us: “that the people who are most prone to give vent to their rages get angrier, not less angry.” She concludes that “the major side-effect of the ventilationist approach has been to raise the general noise level of our lives, not to lessen our problems.”19
In fact the ventilationists have increased the problems of women by foisting upon women and good-natured men a “general” psychological theory apparently based upon nothing more than the experience of some angry male psychologists and their angry patients. And the theory persists in therapeutic practice, even though it has long been discredited in the literature of both psychological research and popular psychology. Psychotherapist Harriet Goldhor Lerner, for example, reported in The Dance of Anger in 1985: “The old anger-in/anger-out theory, which states that letting it all hang out offers protection from the psychological hazards of keeping it all pent up, is simply not true.”20 Nevertheless, one woman I interviewed told me that when she persuaded her abusive, alcoholic husband to seek help in 1990, his “therapy,” based on ventilationist theory, made things worse. “His therapist said he needed to get his anger out,” she reported, “so he was supposed to shout whenever he felt like it. But every time he started shouting, what he shouted was abuse—and the more he shouted the more vicious it got. When he got tired of shouting, he’d have a few more drinks and go to sleep; and I’d sit up all night shaking.” He felt relieved, she felt terrified. He felt liberated, she felt oppressed. He felt free of anger, she felt furious. “If I’d ever shouted about how mad it made me to have to listen to that,” she said, “he’d have broken my jaw. But he and his therapist couldn’t have been happier about his great progress. They took what I thought was his ‘sickness’ and made it much worse, and then they called it ‘mental health.’ Before therapy he was abusive and apologetic; after therapy he was abusive and self-righteous.”21
Scorning self-control, restraint, politeness, and common civility, ventilationist psychology gave new license to bullies already too free to grab ears. It brought aggression into the bedroom in service of Eros (incidentally, a male god) so that “sensitivity” became dangerously “inhibiting” to the “hostility” necessary for sexually “liberated” love. And it so grabbed the ears of America that we’ve heard little else for two decades. The self-serving notions of ventilationist psychology so thoroughly became our popular assumptions, that you may not even notice we’ve passed into the land of doublespeak—the land where violence is love, and vice versa.
Try this bit of doublespeak from The Intimate Enemy: “We recognize that there are times when roughness can be pleasurable and sexually stimulating.… We believe that the exchange of spanks, blows, and slaps between consenting adults is more civilized than the camouflaged or silent hostilities of ostensibly well-behaved fight-evaders who are ‘above it all’ … Fists, fangs, and fingernails come into play quite naturally for many (and perhaps most) spouses and lovers.”22 So physical blows are both “natural” and “civilized”; and friendly, peaceable, good-natured folks are just devious “fight-evaders,” secretly seething. Clearly, for placid men and women, this is a no-win situation.
Some ventilationists even rose to defend batterers. Take, for example, this lament for the plight of the poor wife beater, persecuted by strident victims and by a society which unreasonably considers him a criminal. (The authors use the euphemism “mate beating” and throw in an unconvincing female example, but it’s evident that they have wife beating in mind.)
Everybody is against mate beating. Legal and moral authority encourage the righteous protests of its victims. “How dare you hit me!” they shout. Or, “You must be insane!” Or, “Only a coward would beat a woman!” Or, “No real lady would attack a man!” And even though a tongue lashing may hurt more than physical violence, a physical fight between adults constitutes criminal assault and places anyone who switches from verbal to physical blows at a great disadvantage. He may become a target of shame and condemnation and may even provide the victim with an excuse to exit and “win” a divorce. Unfortunately, society’s judgment does not help people understand why many perfectly “civilized” partners occasionally blow their cool and turn to violence. The fact is that such violence may not be irrational. Like the violence perpetrated by the American colonists against the British crown in revolutionary times, it may be a desperate bid to be taken seriously when nonviolent measures failed. It may be a cornered mate’s last stand, a final attempt to show deep concern.23
This is doublespeak with patriotic frills: battering and the Boston tea party, wife beating as revolutionary duty—though you’ll recall that the colonists sought freedom from tyranny.
But it gets worse: “Intimate fighters should also understand the psychoanalytic discovery that people sometimes unconsciously desire to get hurt.… There are people who all but specialize in getting beaten, exploited, robbed, or raped.”24 (Here we arrive at another popular, and untenable, position: blaming the victim, about which I’ll have more to say in the next chapter.) Sex becomes violent, and violence sexy. We’re not talking sadomasochism here; this advice arrived courtesy of the Book-of-the-Month Club, not in a plain brown wrapper. We’re talking ordinary everyday normal “erotic fulfillment” for Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. But so snarled become the conceptions of sex and violence that the terms “sadism” and “masochism,” which used to distinguish certain extraordinary practices from “normal” sex, become meaningless. And we are only a step away from the so-called “rough sex” murders: women choked to death, smothered with duct tape, strangled, and mutilated because they got “carried away” with sex.25 What could be trendier? And the trend continues. As Alex Comfort puts it in his “gourmet guide to lovemaking for the nineties”: “If you haven’t learned that sexual violence can be tender and tenderness violent, you haven’t begun to play as real lovers.”26
This thrilling intermingling of sex and violence is familiar to millions of women steeped in the ideology of modern romance, piped in like nerve gas through television, movies, pop music, “women’s” magazines, paperback romance novels, and advertising. It’s always some variation on the same old story: some beautiful woman (an Elizabethan virgin, a neolithic cavewoman, a stockbroker, an astronaut, etc.) breaks through the ruthless, arrogant crust of the violent, untamed, craggy-faced hero (named something like Damian Savage or Stone Fury) to find the warm, sweet, cuddly, soft-hearted teddy bear within by the sheer “power” of her selfless love for him, and then is swept away, surrendering passively, breathlessly, to the overwhelming force of his bruising but tender passion. This is a fairy tale, of course, but such a pervasive one that it impinges upon real life. For one thing, it inspires many an abused woman to keep “working on” her “relationship” with an arrogant crust, waiting in vain for the nonexistent teddy bear to put in an appearance. And it inspires bystanders to overlook violence in anticipation of the joyful ending. When Peter Martins, artistic director of the New York City Ballet, was arrested for assaulting his wife, the ballerina Darci Kistler, a spokesman for the company dismissed the incident as a “personal matter” and said: “People hope that they can live happily ever after.”27
While women succumb to novels of sexy “smoldering” (suppressed) violence, men enjoy scenarios of violent sex, or plain violence, in which men do whatever they want to others, usually women.28 Men study pornography. They get off on the fabulous fantasy at its heart—the fantasy of dominating and totally controlling another human being. The pornography industry—which sociologist Michael Kimmel describes as “men producing images for men to consume”—is a billion dollar business in the United States, and growing all the time.29 Its customers are millions of normal men. There can be no doubt that it affects the lives of all of us. In his famous studies of American sexual behavior, Alfred Kinsey found that pornography was one of the most common sources of a boy’s first information about sexuality, and today, as Michael Kimmel notes, pornography “is one of the major sources of sexual information that young males have about sexuality, and thus a central mechanism by which our sexuality has been constructed.”30
Campaigning against pornography during the last decade, radical feminists charged that pornography is violence against women (real women are coerced and raped in the making of it), that it causes violence against women, and that it numbs consumers to the violence around us. A great many of the abused women I have interviewed during the last fifteen years—survivors of battery, rape, incest, attempted murder—described their male partners as pornography consumers, who in many cases coerced them to act out the pictures.31 (Indeed, it would be hard to find better instruction manuals for batterers than those for sale at any local porn shop.) These painful firsthand accounts, describing a direct causal connection between pornography and violent “sex,” are discounted by social scientists as merely anecdotal evidence; but research psychologists now confirm that “experimental evidence is clear with respect to the effects of [aggressive] pornography”—that is, pornography which shows “injury, torture, bleeding, bruised, or hurt women in sexual contexts.”32 Researchers Edward Donnerstein and Daniel Linz report that while “research over the last decade” demonstrates that sexual images in themselves don’t seem to facilitate aggressive behavior, the impact of “aggressive pornography” and “sexually violent mass media images” is quite different. Research shows that “exposure to aggressive pornography increases aggression against women in a laboratory context.”33
Even if this were not so, even if the worst that could be said of pornography was that it provided “young males” with “sexual information,” it would still be a danger to women; for the information it provides is that sex is violent and violence sexy, and the total control of another person is sexiest of all. And it is this intoxicating concoction of violence and sex and tyranny that misguides “young males” and provides both a violent scenario and a sexy justification for the batterer, or indeed for the average man. For example, in 1981 when Bernadette Powell appealed her conviction for the murder of her husband, the prosecuting attorney admitted that the dead man had in the past repeatedly assaulted Powell, but this fact, he wrote in his legal brief, “regardless of her acquiescence or lack of it,” was “not any proof of … violence toward her” or grounds for her to have any “reasonable fear” of injury because the man’s assaults were “sexually motivated.”34
To see things as the district attorney did in this case, you have to see them from the point of view of the dead man—which the justices did—and not from the point of view of the woman who, if the act of shooting her husband is any indication, saw his sexually motivated assaults quite differently. (Her view didn’t count; her appeal was denied and her sentence of fifteen years to life confirmed.)35 But how could she have expected to be heard? The pornographic conflation of sex and violence is a product of the male imagination—(“men producing images for men to consume”)—a version of sexuality that overrides the desires of women, threatens our integrity, restricts our choices, demeans our humanity, endangers our lives, and silences our protests. Civil libertarians, of course, defend pornography as free speech, but it is a peculiar kind of free speech by and for men which can exist only by silencing the speech of women.
I call particular attention to the many ways in which pornography impinges on women’s lives because it is all the more difficult for women to secure freedom from bodily harm when our free speech is silenced on the very subjects we must shout about. The speech of Bernadette Powell, for one, was silenced when her husband tied her up and raped her, and again when the prosecutor labeled that assault sex, not violence, and again when the judge discounted her evidence and sentenced her to prison, and again when the justices of the New York State Supreme Court upheld that conviction. Somehow sexual motives make violence okay—which must be what the Milwaukee cops thought, too, when they returned a dazed, naked, and bleeding fourteen-year-old boy to the custody of his “lover” Jeffrey Dahmer. Konerak Sinthasomphone became Dahmer’s thirteenth murder victim.36
Young people learn from other sources, too, that sex and violence go together. TV, movies, videos, the latest mainstream ads for jeans or perfume, pop songs and rap (with their pornographic record jackets) all help to construct a world of sexy violence and violent sex. Take, for example, this heavy metal “love” song recorded by “Sarcofago” on the Kraze label:
Tracy you hurt me and broke my heart …
Putting my lust and feelings apart
Tracy i loved you and didn’t wanna do it.
Your rotten flesh is now so sweet
Too cold you are driving me to a intense orgasm
Licking your body i realize my dream
Why did you force me to kill?37
Or consider a 1991 NWA (Niggas with Attitude) album which includes songs such as “Findum, Fuckum & Flee,” “She Swallowed It” (lyric: “If you’ve got a gang of niggas, the bitch will let you rape her”), “To Kill a Hooker,” and “One Less Bitch,” the last a song about tying a “bitch” to a bed, fucking her, then blowing her away with a forty-five.38 Or this 1990 rap from The Geto Boys:
Her body’s beautiful so I’m thinking rape,
grabbed the bitch by the mouth, drug her back ’n
slam her down on the couch, whipped out my
knife, said if you scream I’ll cut you, opened her
legs and commenced to fuckin’, she begged me not
to kill her, I gave her a rose, then slit her
throat and watched her shake ’til her eyes closed,
had sex with her of course before I left her, and
drew my name on the wall like helter skelter.39
Disc jockeys at the radio station of Mount Holyoke College, the oldest women’s college in the country, told me that record promoters are amazed and angry when the women refuse to play these songs on the air. “All the other schools play ’em,” the promoters say.40
Whatever our sources of information or entertainment, it seems, we can’t escape the peculiar amalgam of sex and violence that is now widely regarded as normal love. Expressing this “love,” men batter and rape and kill women. When Alan Matheney broke into Lisa Bianco’s house in 1987 to beat and rape her, he told her he was doing it because he loved her. At a sentencing hearing, Matheney’s attorney explained his client to the judge this way: “Mr. Matheney, I don’t know why, could never let go of this woman.… Just to call it love would be wrong. Although I’m sure that’s what Al perceives it as. I perceive it as an obsession. A love obsession.”41 When Matheney beat Lisa Bianco to death two years later, he did it because he still loved her.
After Michael Cartier gunned down Kristin Lardner in Boston in May 1992 and then killed himself, a friend of his told a reporter: “He loved her a lot and it was probably a crime of passion.” Lardner had ended what the friend called “their relationship” because she wanted to date other people; she had known Cartier two months and was afraid of him. “He was in love,” said Cartier’s friend. “He didn’t do it because he’s nuts.”42 Kristin Lardner’s roommate and best friend said that Lardner had done just what abused women are advised to do: she stopped dating Cartier after the first incident of abuse, and when he persisted, knocking her down in the street and kicking her into unconsciousness, she got a restraining order. Yet even Lardner’s friend still bought the “romantic” view of Cartier’s violence. She said that Kristin Lardner “cared” about Cartier, “and she was the only one who ever did. That’s what pushed him over the edge … when he lost her.”43 But Rose Ryan, Cartier’s former girlfriend, had cared about him too and tried for months to redeem him with love and kindness and Christmas presents before she brought the assault charges that got him jailed for six months. Rose Ryan is a valuable witness to the “lovemaking” of Michael Cartier. “After he hit me several times in the head,” she said, “he started to cry.” He would say, “I’m so sorry. I always hit the people I love.” And the hook: “My mother, she never loved me. You’re the only one.”44 It’s a confusing and powerful message for a woman—when two things we believed to be incompatible, “love” and violence, become inextricably snarled.
It’s a confusing message for journalists, too, whose job it is to describe clearly to us what’s going on in our world. The muddling of sex and violence has knocked the meaning out of so many perfectly good words—or “gendered” them—that these days when crimes of violence against women are reported in magazines and newspapers, women have to read between the lines. Rape, assault, and even murder are crazily described in the language of “love”—as though Miss Lonelyhearts were working the police beat. This is not merely a semantic problem. It has measurable consequences in the lives—and deaths—of women.45
Take, for example, this item reported in the Baltimore Sun in June 1989: “Kevin Lee Kern received the maximum 10-year sentence yesterday for strangling his wife in what he said was a fit of jealous rage last year, after he collected her from a bar, punched her, made love to her in the woods near their home, then was told their youngest child wasn’t his.” The euphemism “made love” is currently so commonplace a term for rape as to be unremarkable. But what degree of force is masked by that odd, innocent word “collected”? Batterers very often display pathological jealousy, accuse “their” women of infidelity, and force them to “confess” that children were fathered in adultery; and it’s impossible to tell from the newspaper account of the courtroom proceedings whether Denise Kern’s revelation was either voluntary or true.46 In any event, Kevin Kern choked Denise Kern for “five minutes or possibly longer,” which, as the judge observed, “is a very lengthy period of time.” Time enough, one would think, for even the most impassioned and jealous “lover” to collect his wits, but the jury was remarkably generous. They declined to convict Kevin Kern of murder, opting for simple manslaughter instead. “This is a very fine line that was drawn between second-degree murder and manslaughter,” the judge said, “as fine a line as I can conceive a jury ever drawing.”47
Doubtless the jury was influenced by the defense attorney’s argument that “Kevin Kern loved his wife, Denise. His support for his wife, his love for his wife, his willingness to stay with her were evident in his life.” All this although he was “devastated by his wife’s drinking and broken promises to quit.” The judge, in possession of a presentence report which revealed that Kevin Kern had had “a serious drinking problem since his teens, several drunk driving arrests and drug use, including LSD, PCP, amphetamines and marijuana,” was less charitable; he handed down the maximum ten year sentence.48 And when Kern sought in 1991 to have his sentence reduced so that he might spend more time with his motherless children, the court turned him down. (Like so many other intensely controlling men, however, Kern is a model prisoner, eminently respectful of those who temporarily have power over him; his “good” behavior will almost certainly win him early parole.)49 At the time of sentencing, Kern was still living with his three children, eight, five, and three years old. Apparently it occurred to no one to suggest that an alcoholic drug addict who assaulted and killed the children’s mother might be an unfit parent, especially for the child whose very existence had made him mad enough to kill. But why should anyone think him a murderer, and why should anyone think him an unfit father when his problem is defined as an excess of love and his murderous rage as only a normal passion?
What could be more useful to “aggressive” men than this confusion of sex/love and violence? It gives a man an excuse for assault: “I did it because I love you so much.” It gives a woman an explanation—“He did it only because he loves me so much”—which snares her in forgiveness, understanding, compassion: staying on. (Writer John Stoltenberg observes: “Forgiveness from a woman represents her continued commitment to be present for him, to stay in relationship to him, enabling him to remain by contrast male.”50 Forgiveness is the visible sign of his total control.) The confusion of sex/love and violence gives all of us—newspaper readers, television viewers, jurors, voters, taxpayers—an understanding: things happened that way because he loved her so much.
All these misconceptions and self-delusions persuade us that “a certain amount” of “fighting” is “normal” in relationships, just as a certain amount of swatting and shaking children passes for “discipline.” But if some physical violence is acceptable, how much is too much? Where is the line? Are we to draw it as we do in the boxing ring—no punches below the belt? No jabs to the kidneys? Or shall we follow the rule so many batterers use: body blows only, where the bruises don’t show?
On this question—how much is too much?—the battered woman is as confused as everyone else, and with good reason. She lives in the gaslit zone of doublespeak. The rapist/batterer says to her: “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love you so much.” Or: “You made me do it.” Or: “Where did you get that black eye?” Or: “What black eye?” Then the cop looks straight into her bloody face and says, “What seems to be the trouble here?” The marriage counselor suggests: “Why don’t you help him get his anger out?” The clergyman asks: “What did you do to make him angry?” Meanwhile, to keep the peace, to get through, she gives way here and there. She compromises. She tries to understand, to be loving, to be strong, to care, to cope. Faced with what seems the hard prospect of being a woman alone, or a woman alone with her children, she submits—not in spite of the violence but because of it. Then the abuse becomes too much, and although she knows it’s not her fault, she knows she’s implicated. She hears about “victims of domestic violence,” but she can’t think of herself as a victim. Because she did provoke him. She did get angry with him. She did refuse to do what he wanted. She hears about “battered women,” but surely she is not that. They are “passive” and “helpless”; but she is a strong woman, trying to hold her own. They get hit because they’re “passive”; but she gets hit because she doesn’t do what he wants. She keeps trying as best she can to work out her “marital problems.” After all, he loves her.
Actress Robin Givens tried to work out “marital problems” with heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in what reporters jokingly referred to as “The Tyson-Givens fight.” After they “broke up,” Tyson, who had just knocked out a challenger in ninety-three seconds flat with a punch he said “wasn’t that hard,” allegedly stalked Givens, turning up at her home, sometimes to tell her he loved her, sometimes to “whack her around.” (Referring to an attack in May 1989, “a source close to Givens” told a TV Guide reporter: “He didn’t break anything—just injured her.”) Givens tried to describe Tyson’s stalking to the reporter. She said, “The phone rings night and day … and it’s him.” She said that when she worked, he would come to the location, wait “patiently” until she was finished, and take her back to her hotel. He showed up unexpectedly at her house. “I never know when he’s going to be there,” she said. “He might be there now.” The reporter wrote that Givens spoke of these things with “a mixture of fear and longing on her face.”51
Mike Tyson, as the world now knows, is a dangerous man—dangerous to women precisely because sex and violence seem to be all the same to him. When he was brought to trial in January 1992, charged with rape, confinement, and “criminal deviate conduct,” Miss Black Rhode Island told the jury that Tyson had pinned her on a bed with his forearm, stripped her, and raped her. She testified: “I said, ‘Please, you’re hurting me! Please, stop!’ And he started laughing, like it was a game.”52 It was her word against his, of course: her word “rape” against his word “sex.” (He claimed she was a “one night stand” who got mad because he was too tired to walk her downstairs after the “lovemaking.”) But Tyson was convicted on all three counts, largely because the jury found his eighteen-year-old victim an unimpeachable witness—a remarkably pretty, outgoing, and intelligent high school honor student and college scholarship winner who taught Sunday School, coached the youth softball team, assisted the mentally retarded as a volunteer, and served as an usher at her church.53 She was everybody’s idea of what a “nice” young lady ought to be, and she was absolutely clear about what Mike Tyson had done to her. Tyson was sentenced to six years, and with good behavior will probably serve three.54
Robin Givens, on the other hand, was never taken seriously because she had spoken so often in the early days of her relationship with Tyson about the “romantic” notions that got her into the marriage: “The thrill … the danger.” She said that when she talked “too much,” Tyson told her to shut up. When she didn’t want to get in the car, Tyson picked her up and put her in. “Wow!” she said, “I was definitely attracted to that.” (This drama is an updated version of Gone With the Wind.) “I think what people don’t realize with a certain type of woman,” Givens said, “is that there are times when she wants the man she is with to be … a man.” Then again, there apparently are times when even Robin Givens would rather not shut up, not get in the car. Who gets to decide? Where is the line? And who draws it? Givens talked about the way Tyson tracked her, and the TV Guide reporter wrote: “Every confusing emotion of Robin Givens’ own internal struggle is evident, even in the twinkle of her eyes.”55
But the “struggle” is not Robin Givens’s alone. It’s a struggle imposed on all women by a culture that muddles sex and violence, considers “hostility” and “blows” in marriage both “natural” and “civilized,” pronounces the angriest among us the most “healthy,” calls terrorism “love,” and then projects this monumental obfuscation onto individual women, labeled “crazy” for “love.”
Not that men don’t go “crazy” for “love” too—like Kevin Kern—but when they do, it’s a tragedy. We’re supposed to understand and sympathize with them. (Imagine how poor Kevin Kern must have felt, being told the child wasn’t his!) And poor Donnie Moore. On July 18, 1989, he shot his battered wife Tonya three times and then killed himself. That “tragedy,” like Mike Tyson’s rape, was covered in the sports pages because Donnie Moore was the former California Angels’ pitcher who gave up a home run that cost the team a decisive game in the 1986 American League playoffs. Tonya Moore had left her husband a month before the shooting, complaining to the neighbors that he beat her; and miraculously she survived, thanks to her seventeen-year-old daughter who drove her to the hospital. A reader could learn the condition of Tonya Moore from the wire service accounts, after wading through all the details of that crucial eleven-inning game against the Red Sox and the two subsequent games that put Boston in the 1986 World Series. Donnie Moore’s “friends and teammates” mentioned that he had “marital problems” and “financial strains,” but his real problem was said to be this: “He could not live with himself after Henderson hit the home run. He kept blaming himself.” The New York Times headlined this tragedy: “A Ballplayer’s Life Turns on a Home Run.”56 (And his wife’s life?)
And what about poor Felix Key, the New York City cop who on May 19, 1989, dragged his “girlfriend,” Jean Singleton, into the street in front of police headquarters, shot her four times, killing her, and then killed himself. Jean Singleton reportedly had been trying to end the relationship, saying that Officer Key was “too jealous and overprotective,” and the police had “disciplined” Officer Key before for threatening another woman at gunpoint; yet the Police Department’s official spokesperson (a woman) described the killings as “a lover’s quarrel between the two of them.”57 Nobody used the term “murder.” And the New York Post ran a banner headline on the front page: “Tragedy of a Lovesick Cop.”58
Surely the fact that people lost their lives in these incidents gives them greater significance than the “Tyson-Givens fight.” Yet isn’t there a curious imbalance here? Why is a man “crazed” by love tragic, a woman merely crazy? Why is it that even when a man murders a woman, or tries to, the tragedy is somehow his? And when the heavyweight champion of the world whacks his wife around, why is it her responsibility and a great joke besides? This double standard alone is enough to make women crazy.
One of the most popular films of the last decade, Fatal Attraction, reverses typical sex roles; “nice guy” Michael Douglas, trying to end an adulterous fling and keep his wife in the dark, is stalked by Glenn Close, a woman who won’t be flung out. She practices many of the batterer’s favorite techniques: harassing phone calls, unexpected appearances at home and work, killing pets, abducting children, faking suicide, assault with deadly weapons. And theater audiences scream with terror and sympathy for poor Michael Douglas, haunted by this deranged bitch from hell. Formerly battered women, watching the film, rarely scream in the right places, for they are watching their experience and their terror—with the gender turned upside down. One bewildered woman I interviewed asked, “How come when I was going through shit like that nobody saw it from my point of view?”59 Good question.
The point is that as long as “a certain amount” of sexual and physical “fighting” is thought natural, civilized, desirable, or necessary in marriage, violence will always be thought to occur with the woman’s consent, the woman’s provocation, the woman’s solicitation, the woman’s pleasure, just as rape was once thought to be provoked, solicited, consciously desired, and subconsciously needed by women victims of rape. Battering (which commonly includes marital rape), like stranger rape, is a crime of power and control committed mainly by men against women, a crime in which the perpetrator does not consult the victim’s wishes and from which he will not let her escape.
But rape and battery are different crimes. Stranger rape is an isolated act of violence, while battery recurs within a continuing relationship in which the woman appears to be a full participant, a consenting adult, a collaborator.60 So it seems, but in any relationship with a violent person, there can be no such thing as full and equal participation. What the battered woman participates in, as best she can, is an effort to regain the relationship she once had and hopes to have again—(Didn’t he promise?)—the relationship without the violence. Trying to save a marriage, or save her life, or save her children, a battered woman may submit to violence, just as a rape victim may submit to rape for fear of being killed. But submission is not consent.
Still, to some, the distinction seems a fine one; and it’s confusing precisely because we still accept that “certain amount of fighting” in marriage. Think of the messages a battered woman receives: A good marriage is worth fighting for. You can’t just walk out at the first sign of trouble. It’s up to you to make it work. He needs you. Stand by your man. For better or worse. Til death do us part. Love means never having to say you’re sorry. A good man is hard to find. Good husbands are made by God, good marriages by women. Children need their father. You owe it to him to help him through this. And so on, ad nauseam. And don’t forget, he loves you.
How much is too much? It’s never the battered woman who gets to decide. A violent man backed up by all the coercive force of our male-defined world tells her to stay, and if she complains, we say: “She’s a participant, a consenting adult, a collaborator.” An African-American woman I interviewed, the mother of four boys, was convinced by her family, her church, and her black pride that she had to make her marriage work. She was determined not to fall into what she called “the white folks’ stereotype” of the black family: “mama on welfare and a bunch of delinquent fatherless children.” She said, “I put up with violence all those years trying not to be that welfare mother white folks hate, and then those same white folks had the nerve to turn around and tell me I should’ve left my husband and applied for welfare.” Black or white, that’s always the kicker. The all-purpose question: “If she doesn’t like it, why doesn’t she leave?” The final obfuscation. Designed to make us think that she too finds “a certain amount of fighting” just fine.
And when a woman does try to escape, do we help her? Rose Ryan, the young woman who escaped Michael Cartier, told a reporter: “They can pass as many laws as they want, but until people decide to get involved, nothing’s going to change. Michael beat me around the corner from where he killed Kristin, people were there in the street, kicked me in the face with steel-toed boots when I was on the ground. Nobody did a thing. He punched me in the mouth in the subway, in front of all kinds of people. Again, nothing.”61
For battered women, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. And it will be so, until we can say—as we now say of rape—battering is always wrong, no matter who the woman is or what she does, no matter what she provokes or solicits or submits to or consents to or consciously desires or subconsciously needs, and no matter how much the assailant loves her. Robin Givens’s “internal struggle” is one private version of what has become, as battered women compare notes, an external, public, political struggle for recognition of what they have learned the hard way: all women have an absolute right to be free from bodily harm, the language of love notwithstanding.