See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  The fourth and final shame response – attack others – is the most destructive of all. Attacking others can replace feelings of shame with pride. But that pride may be short-lived, and the act of attacking can lead one to feel even more shame. This is where we see shame at its most destructive: as ‘humiliated fury’. As Nathanson explains, ‘These are the people in our society most of us find truly dangerous, for no one can really avoid shame successfully, and we live at risk of their wrath. Those who must attack rather than withdraw make our common turf into a terrain of danger.’16

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  Most often, those who react to shame by attacking others are men. Which begs the question: why? The answer is usually summed up in four syllables: testosterone. Common belief has it that testosterone, which is vastly more abundant in men than in women, is the ‘aggression hormone’. It’s the reason men are more violent than women, case closed.

  Well, if that’s what you’ve always thought, it’s time to reopen the case file on men’s violence, because it’s not testosterone that causes it. Hang on, I hear you say: surely there’s something to the idea that testosterone is connected to violence? Well, yes and no.

  Weighing up the role of testosterone in male violence, one of the world’s leading experts on biology and neurology, Professor Robert Sapolsky, lays out the essential point: when testosterone rises after a challenge, it doesn’t prompt aggression. ‘Instead,’ writes Sapolsky, ‘it prompts whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status.’17 In other words, testosterone is not an aggression hormone – it is a status-seeking hormone. Male primates maintain status through aggression. But what happens, Sapolsky asks, ‘if defending your status requires you to be nice?’ Here we see how our biological reactions are shaped by the culture we live in. If men truly believed their status would rise on becoming the World Toilet Cleaning Champion, their testosterone levels would surge as they knelt before the bowl. ‘The problem,’ says Sapolsky, ‘isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression’18 – and not clean toilets.

  And today, there may be no greater status for men than the appearance of being in control.

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  James Gilligan has spent much of his adult life working in prisons across North America and Britain, treating thousands of criminally violent men. Among the men he has worked with, Gilligan has found one common element. ‘Universal among the violent criminals was the fact that they were keeping a secret. A central secret. And that secret was that they felt ashamed – deeply ashamed, chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed.’19 Gilligan, who grew up with a violent father (and is married to ‘rock star’20 feminist, ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan), was struck by how often his prisoners and mental patients gave exactly the same reason for having assaulted or killed somebody. ‘Time after time, they would reply “because he disrespected me.”’ In fact, prisoners used that phrase so often, they abbreviated it into the slang phrase, ‘He dissed me.’

  Of the small group of scholars who look at the connection between shame and violence from the perpetrator’s perspective, Gilligan is the most widely respected. After more than thirty-five years working with violent perpetrators, he has arrived at a compelling idea: all violence begins with shame. In fact, he argues, the very purpose of violence is to banish shame and replace it with pride.

  Shame is a concept few people understand, so Gilligan lists its synonyms – and there are dozens: being insulted, dishonoured, disrespected, disgraced, demeaned, slandered, ridiculed, teased, taunted, mocked, rejected, defeated, subjected to indignity or ignominy; ‘losing face’ and being treated as insignificant; feeling inferior, impotent, incompetent, weak, ignorant, poor, a failure, ugly, unimportant, useless, worthless. Envy and jealousy are siblings of shame, says Gilligan, since they trigger – and are underpinned by – feelings of inferiority. So central is shame to the human experience, writes Gilligan, that we have as many words for it as the Inuit are said to have for snow.21

  Like Gilligan’s violent criminals, domestic abuse perpetrators are often exquisitely sensitive to the merest hint that they are being dissed, and commonly interpret harmless behaviour from their partners as a deliberate personal attack. Phone counsellors on the National Men’s Referral Service helpline hear this kind of talk from offenders all the time. I met with a group of phone counsellors at their head office. Its address is not listed, to protect staff from aggrieved perpetrators looking for someone to blame. When men call this helpline, it’s usually because their partner has either urged them or given them an ultimatum. A typical call goes like this: ‘I just had an argument, I behaved violently; I’m not sure why I did that or what’s going on. My partner has been telling me for a while that this has been an issue, and she gave me this number. But now it’s just escalated and blown up, and I’m a mess and I don’t know what to do.’

  More often, though, the calls are outgoing. Phone counsellors here call men who have recently been charged with a domestic abuse–related offence. Their numbers are provided to the helpline by police. Guy Penna is the helpline’s team leader, and he’s heard every excuse under the sun. ‘I’ve had guys have [violent] incidents – where the police have been called – about how their partner’s put the rubbish bin out. “It wasn’t straight to the kerb, it wasn’t square.”’ The real cause almost never gets written on the police report. ‘Sometimes it takes you a little while to get to the why, and the “why” might be that, oh, she disrespected my mother three weeks ago,” adds counsellor Brett Tomlinson. ‘Or, “She went out with her girlfriends four months ago and didn’t say sorry, and I just haven’t let it go since.”’

  These are the real stories behind ludicrous headlines like ‘Man Murders Wife for Burning Toast’. Consider the very public throttling of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson by her art collector husband Charles Saatchi, at an upmarket London restaurant in 2013. Lawson later testified in court that she had noticed ‘a sweet baby’ in a stroller nearby and had casually mentioned to Saatchi that she was looking forward to becoming a grandmother. At that, Saatchi grabbed her by the throat, growling, ‘I am the only person you should be concerned with – I am the only person who should be giving you pleasure.’ He described the incident to the press as a ‘playful tiff’.22

  That violent men feel shamed for such trivial reasons further compounds their shame, writes Gilligan, and drives it deeper underground, to a place where, deeply concealed, it is even less likely to be acknowledged, and more likely to manifest as violence. They feel ‘acutely ashamed, over matters that are so trivial that their very triviality makes it even more shameful to feel ashamed about them, so they are ashamed even to reveal what shames them’.23 Penna says one of the most common phrases the phone counsellors hear is ‘pushing my buttons’. ‘If you’re not agreeing with me, if we’re not in 100 per cent solidarity in everything I say and do, then you’re challenging me,’ he says, describing the mindset of many male callers. ‘If you’re challenging me, you’re undermining and attacking me. There’s this sense that my worldview is the only view, and any challenge to that is automatically unsettling and requires [them] to react, as opposed to respond.’

  Shame can create terrible distortions in the way we perceive what is said or done to us. As Judith Graham, from the University of Maine, describes: ‘A shame-obsessed person hears ridicule even when none was intended. A shame-obsessed person loses the ability to distinguish between their inner feelings of worthlessness and everyday happenings.’ They see themselves as ‘objects of derision’.24 In the abusive mind, men sense that they’ve been somehow shamed by their partners – however ridiculous that may be. That is why perpetrators commonly see themselves as victims of their partner’s ‘abuse’.

  Since they’ve already been attacked, the thinking goes, they are well within their rights to strike back – either in the moment, or by devising an ever-tighter regime of control to stop their partner hurting or disrespecting them again. As Germaine Greer notes in he
r essay On Rage, ‘A red-blooded man is not supposed to take insult and humiliation lying down. He should not let people get away with doing things he thinks wicked or unjust. He demands the right both to judge and to act upon his judgment.’25

  The victimhood of abusive men can be astonishing. For her PhD thesis, Michelle Jones interviewed sixty-six men who’d agreed to attend a twelve-week behaviour change program in South Australia.26 One man, Peter, took what he’d learned about the various kinds of abuse and twisted it into proof that it was he who was being victimised. As Jones writes, ‘Peter claimed that he was the victim of his partner’s sexual violence, as she had refused to have sex with him.’

  Abusive men – many of whom have actually been charged – commonly play the victim card on the phone to the Men’s Referral Service. Brett Tomlinson says these calls usually have a distinctive tone: ‘A woman rings up and she wants the violence to stop. A man who rings up and says he’s a victim; he wants her punished. There’s a big difference. You can tell by the tone of her voice – the way she apologises for what she’s about to say, doesn’t want to make him look bad, but just wants it to stop. Whereas he rings up and says, “I’m the victim, punish her. Where can I send her?”’

  For Matt Boulton, being dissed was a major ignition point for his own violence. ‘I didn’t see [respect] as something I had to earn – I just saw it as one of my rights.’ Boulton looks back on his time as an abusive man as a period of deep insecurity. ‘We were married when we were twenty. I came straight from my parents into married life. I didn’t know how to be a husband or even really what it meant to be a man. Looking back, I was a boy trapped inside a man’s body, just playing the game, as a lot of guys are, at that age especially.’ When he started to feel like he wasn’t getting the unconditional respect he ‘deserved’, he began ‘crossing lines’. It started gradually, he says – ‘raising my voice, swearing and name-calling’ – but with each conflict, it got a little bit worse, until the abuse became physical. ‘Again, that began with lower-level [acts] … It might have been locking the door, saying, “No, we are going to talk about this now,” hitting the wall, physically lashing out at things, and then restraining and that sort of thing.’ Today, Boulton runs his own behaviour change program for abusive men, called ‘Circuit Breaker’, in churches across southern Queensland, with men who come voluntarily to deal with their abusive behaviour. ‘What we’re dealing with is a national epidemic,’ says Boulton, ‘and there’s not enough experts in the field to deal with it.’ Early in the program, the men are asked to describe why they feel the need to control their partners. Over and over, Boulton gets the same response. ‘If a guy has been powerfully controlled – could be bullying, growing up with DV (domestic violence), sexual abuse – all of that can flick a switch where he says, “I’m never going to be controlled again. From now on, I’m going to be the one in control.”’

  But many of these men also have an almost infantile need for their partner to love them – a sense of vulnerability and dependency that drives their controlling abuse. Andre Van Altena has, through leading men’s behaviour change programs in NSW jails, often worked with abusive men who have struggled through life. When these men finally find someone who accepts and loves them, he says, they’re not giving that up in a hurry. ‘The fear is, “If I let go of the control I have over this person, then she will leave me. I will be abandoned, and I know what that feels like. I’ll be disrespected, because she’ll hook up with someone else.” So to prevent that from happening, you hold on tight. You keep every other bastard away, and tuck her under your arm and protect her from the wider world. Of course, if you hold on that tight, smother people, and violate them when they step out of line … they’re going to lose any love they had for you.’

  This sense of dependency and powerlessness – one of the strongest triggers for male shame – can often (though certainly not always) be traced back to the perpetrator’s childhood. But their childhood needn’t have been overtly abusive. In their book The Batterer: A Psychological Profile, Donald Dutton and Susan Golant identified two parental types that most commonly lead boys to become abusive as men: a cold, rejecting mother, or a shaming father. For boys in particular, this type of upbringing can set a future trajectory:

  There is a pool of shame in such an individual that can find no expression – that is, until an intimate relationship occurs, and with it the emotional vulnerability that menaces his equilibrium, the mask he has so carefully crafted over the years. Perhaps it is the mask of a ‘tough guy’, or a ‘cool guy’, or a ‘gentleman’. Whatever identity he had created is irrelevant. Now a woman threatens to go backstage and see him and his shame without the makeup. Then, to his own surprise, the rage starts. He feels it like an irritation, and sometimes like a tidal wave. He is shocked and surprised. He may apologise and feel shame immediately after, but he can’t sustain that emotion; it’s too painful, too reminiscent of hurts long buried. So he blames it on her. If it happens repeatedly with more than one woman, he goes from blaming her to blaming ‘them’. His personal shortcomings become rationalised by an evolving misogyny … [At this point] the man is programmed for intimate violence. No woman on earth can save him, although some will try.27

  When abusive men emerge out of violent childhoods, in which they watched their fathers beat and humiliate their mothers, they are doing more than just repeating learned behaviour. Rather, as Dutton and Golant write, abusiveness is ‘a learned means of self-maintenance. The abusive man is addicted to brutality to keep his shaky self-concept intact. The only times he feels powerful and whole is when he is engaged in violence.’28 Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm is more direct: ‘The passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being … is [the] transformation of impotence into omnipotence.’29

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  ‘Kevin’ learned about shame from his father at a young age. On the isolated family farm where he was homeschooled by his father – a Baptist preacher with a background in sales, police and the military – Kevin was whipped for being dishonest and lashed with harsh putdowns if he screwed up his chores. In the motel room where nineteen-year-old Kevin choked to death his fiancée, ‘Joanna’, investigators found a note addressed to his father: ‘I’m sorry I was a disappointment to you, but I love you.’

  Professor Neil Websdale was part of the team that reviewed the killing. The details here come from Websdale’s report.30 It is a rare forensic analysis because it includes the perpetrator’s point of view. The report describes a young man, raised on a rigid code of southern paternalism, who ‘failed’ to live up to its expectations of masculinity. In adolescence, the young farmhand was chronically ashamed of a limp he got from falling off a horse, and embarrassed by his short stature, which drew ‘harassment’ from his peers and turned him off sport. At fourteen, he began a ‘destructive relationship’ with beer and whisky, against the stern admonishment of his father, who told his children that alcohol was ‘from the devil’. Soon he was getting into trouble – fighting, accruing speeding tickets, and getting arrested for drink-driving. Kevin was ‘enraged’ by his failures, and despite looking like ‘one of the boys’ and crowing about his sexual prowess, he was actually extremely isolated and prone to fits of anger. For relief, he would take his 12-gauge shotgun to the back paddock and ‘just shoot something like the end of the stock tank or whatever’, or ‘beat the shit out of something – not somebody’.

  Kevin’s attitude towards women was not obviously misogynistic; indeed, it appeared to be quite the opposite. Raised ‘not to hit a woman’, he went out of his way to look after female friends. As his childhood friend wrote in a letter to the judge: ‘Kevin would take me home so I would not have to walk alone … He was always a gentleman. Every time we went somewhere, Kevin would always pay, no matter what.’

  This chivalry, however, hid something darker. Taken to the extreme, this kind of rigid, protective masculinity – a trait often coveted by women – can mask something just as destructive as brutish misogyny.
As Rodney Vlais from Victoria’s No to Violence organisation explains, abusive men commonly cite their duty to protect as the reason for their abuse. ‘We don’t just go into the work assuming that men don’t care about the safety of their partners and families,’ he says. ‘Yes, some men certainly don’t. But for other men, it’s like, I’m here to protect. But it is that hyper-masculine form of protection: I guard the family from the perils outside, I guard the family’s finances. If the woman gets in the way of that by disobeying him, then another attitude takes hold, one where he believes she needs to be brought back into line – supposedly for her own safety.’ If she refuses his protection – if she shames him by disobeying – then she risks becoming that other type of woman: a slut who warrants no protection whatsoever, and deserves whatever she gets.

  The chivalrous Kevin joined the air force against the wishes of his father, and that’s where he met Joanna – an independent, ambitious woman who had joined the force ‘to see the world’. Kevin idealised Joanna – she was more competent, sexually experienced and mature than he was – but was afraid that she would ‘see my weakness, my lack of worth, and leave me’. After a month-long whirlwind romance, Kevin asked Joanna to marry him. When she agreed, he began pressuring her to agree to a wedding date, worried she would soon discover that he was immature and ‘not very capable’. These were not traits immediately obvious to other people: Kevin was described as an easygoing ‘nice guy’. One friend of Joanna’s, however, did glimpse his dark side: she described Kevin as ‘tightly wound’ and said that in explaining his goal to become a technical instructor in the air force, he had told her that ‘getting in people’s faces and screaming at them was exactly what he wanted to do’.