When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  Critics decried this thinking as a dangerous assault on women’s agency. “It perpetuates the specious notion that women are doomed to be the victims of the abnormal psychology of love at all costs,” Susan Brownmiller wrote in an editorial in The New York Times. Brownmiller was referring specifically to Nussbaum, who garnered sympathy from most people but also stirred up unease, because she wasn’t a trapped, dependent wife who couldn’t escape the clutches of her patriarch. She was a well-educated book editor. She came from somewhere, was fully intact, equipped with resources and a will to make her own choices. She chose, month by month, to stay with a man who belittled and bullied her, until finally she really did have no choice and was ruined. What was the crucial turning point? What happened along the way? What could other women learn from her experience?

  Documenting the Nussbaum case, journalist Ann Jones did not entertain these questions. She went into great, indignant detail about Joel Steinberg’s cocaine addiction but failed to mention Nussbaum’s own cocaine use or her abuse and neglect of her children. Considering the extreme collapse of Nussbaum’s life, any violence or addiction she fell prey to was hardly shocking. But it was no longer permissible to depict women as fallible humans, prone to flights of rage and dissolution. By the 1990s, battered women’s advocates had transformed their shield-the-victim strategy into a kind of whitewash campaign. Women weren’t merely normal human beings who didn’t deserve to be pathologized for the hell they’d gone through, which was the position Del Martin began with in the 1970s. Now they were to be seen as moral innocents, purer of motive than the male in every way. Hollywood cottoned on to this zeitgeist by casting doe-eyed Julia Roberts in the 1992 film Sleeping with the Enemy: not angry, just trembling, in flight from a Patriarch. Endless numbers of TV movies now employ this theme in their woman-in-jeapordy plots.

  If women were inherently blameless, it followed with mounting conviction that men were inherently blameworthy, to the point where any investigation of their motives was denounced as providing them with “an excuse.” Childhood abuse wasn’t relevant, because it was an excuse. So were individual pathologies, marital dynamics, personal circumstances—until the whole field of inquiry was blocked. Women’s roles couldn’t be analyzed because that was sexist. Men’s behavior couldn’t be analyzed because they didn’t deserve “the excuse.” The damage this vision of men and women did to family violence research was profound. Any attempt to disentangle the dynamics of cycles of violence with a respect for human complexity was condemned as a sexist conspiracy. “The search for causation [is] a wild-goose chase,” wrote sociologist Ellen Wilson, “because [wife abuse] is concerned with wider issues to do with the control of women by men.” In Canada, the final report of a multimillion-dollar government panel on violence against women, which canvassed experts from across the nation for several years, concluded in 1993: “If [a man] abuses his wife, it is because he has the privilege and the means to do so.” Ten million dollars to cough up a cliché. In the United States, the situation was no better. Those who advise policy makers had their view summed up in Ms. magazine’s 1994 special issue on wife beating: “Researchers are now beginning to examine the batterers,” wrote Ann Jones. “It’s the same old crap. Nobody wants to admit that men do this because they like to.”

  What began as a nuanced discussion of one of the most volatile arenas of human relating had been reduced to a bigoted creed. Men are evil. Women are good. Domestic violence is wife beating, and any man who finds himself at the receiving end of a woman’s fist is a liar or a freak.

  No agency will grant them space or funds, so Easton’s group congregates where they can. One very cold night in November, they meet in the children’s nursery of an empty community center. A dozen men sit scrunched up in a circle among brightly colored posters of giraffes and bears. In unison, their voices solemn and halting, they recite something Steve Easton wrote to begin each meeting, based on the letters in the word “Solutions.” S is for Safety: “I will accept responsibility for my own personal safety. I will no longer allow myself to become involved in situations which will cause me emotional and physical pain. I will be diligent on my own behalf.” They go through the letters, vowing to be Open-minded, Loving, Understanding, Trusting, Independent, Open-hearted, good at Negotiation, and willing (not embarassed, as men) to accept Support.

  A man named Charles is the meeting convener tonight, but he’s shy about it, tentative. He’s in his mid-thirties, a tall, gaunt man who has lost his hair. Except for a softness around his mouth and in his blue eyes, he looks rather skeletal. He cries a lot, apologizing to the group with an embarassed wave of the hand. He’s supposed to be following an agenda, but his words keep straying to his three-year-old daughter, Susy: how he had her for Thanksgiving, taught her to finger paint, how good she was; she drew a big “S” for Susy. He misses her. The other men listen in silence. They’ve learned their function here is to let each other be sad, fucked up, afraid.

  Next to Charles sits Ruben. Older, perhaps in his fifties, he is alert and bespectacled, with a briefcase by his chair. No longer in the thick of his own predicament, he acts more as a counselor. Beside Ruben is Dave, a bulky biker type in a leather jacket. His physical presence is so strong (and so incongruous, beneath a cheerful string of alphabet letters) that it’s hard to envision him as victim. When he speaks, his gruff voice is anxious and rambling, his experience so chaotic that he can’t tell it straight, sum it up, and it’s clear he’s a big, broken child. Life as a fractious sequence of injuries and anger, abused as a boy, roughed up on the street, his wife drunkly belligerent, his sons two small wrecks he can’t repair, he himself losing his temper with them. They’ve got to stop the fighting, he and Candi. She’s gotta stop with the booze. “Jesus Christ, I come home and Greg’s runnin’ around on the street, he’s two years old, and she’s passed out in the bedroom for Christ fuckin’ sake.” Dave’s lost control, he never had it, he needs it now. Can the others help?

  Asking for help is the hardest part. These men are mostly working class. Their identities are coded by masculine scripts. Among their buddies and colleagues, they have everything to lose by admitting they need protection from the blows of a woman, that they can’t stop the spiral of raised voices, too much booze, jealousy, insults, shattering glass. “For men,” says the sociologist Murray Straus, “[abuse] is a double whammy. Like women, they don’t want people to know that their partner is treating them badly, but there’s the additional shame of feeling that a ‘real man’ ought to be able to ‘handle his woman.’ ”

  As far back as the Middle Ages, men whose wives beat them were ridiculed by their fellows, paraded through the village streets backward on a mule. Now, they’re taunted with the phrases “pussy-whipped” and “henpecked.” They know to keep their mouths shut. Murray Straus once appeared on the “Sally Jessy Raphael” show with two men who’d been severely assaulted by their wives. On the way in from the airport in a limousine, the segment producer reviewed what questions Sally wanted to ask one of the men, a fellow who’d flown up from Tennessee. His wife had stabbed him several times and smashed his nose with a brass crucifix, a totem he was now carrying in his hands as if to ward off the further assault of TV. “We’ll start by asking you to recount the last time you were beaten,” said the producer, and the man interrupted her in a state of high alarm. “She never beat me!” he protested. The producer stared at him, astonished. “She stabbed me,” he corrected. “I ain’t going on the show if you say she beat me.” Puzzling the exchange over later, Straus realized why this distinction was so important: “to him, ‘beaten’ meant that she had subjugated him, gained dominance over him, and he couldn’t accept that.”

  How internalized that feeling is for men—whether they actively want to see themselves as dominant or it’s something they realize that other men expect of them—depends on the individual. Steve Easton didn’t want to dominate Ursula. He saw himself as her healer. Peter Swann was willing to let Dana be the strong one, as long as
they could get along without fuss. “These men are appeasers,” says the therapist Michael Thomas, referring to the battered husbands he counsels in Seattle. “They always back down to keep things calm, to keep the conflict from escalating. In my experience, the women [in these particular marriages] have a lot of problems with anger control. They are much more likely to throw things, they’re more likely to hit or kick when he’s not looking or asleep or driving. He doesn’t hit back because, number one, he’s conditioned to believe that you never hit a woman. Two, he’s afraid of losing his kids. Three, [our society] doesn’t think of violence as mutual—it’s always ‘him’ doing it to ‘her.’ So if he hits back, the attention shifts to him and he knows that he’ll be up against the wall.” By the time the men have reached Easton’s group, they’ve thrown up a white flag and surrendered the masculine visage: they are no longer “under control, cool under pressure, masters of their own domain.” They are children in tears in a nursery.

  Labeling goes a long way to explaining why domestic violence is such a cloudy picture where men are concerned. Consider the memories of Andrea, a Philadelphia lawyer whose mother is alcoholic. Throughout Andrea’s childhood, her mother berated, slapped, and kicked Andrea’s father in the evenings, when he came home from work. It never occurred to Andrea that her mother was abusive, because that was a label for men. Her mother was simply “a drunk.” Other women are “unstable” or “shrewish.” In comic strips, they throw frying pans, like the wife in “Andy Capp.” The ambiguity and trivialization of female-perpetrated abuse inhibits battered men from voicing need, but it also causes women to underestimate their impact, to see that what they’re doing is abusive. “I try to get these men to give her feedback when she’s hurting them,” says Michael Thomas, “rather than provoking her into lashing out more. The problem is that many of these women have no sense at all that they’ve hurt their partners.” Why would they? What information is there, out in their culture, to suggest that men are vulnerable? Female approval of husband assault remains as high now as it was twenty years ago: Twenty-three percent of women believe that “slapping the cad” is just fine.

  In 1993, the writer Ann Jones angrily cast aspersions on people who would dare to use such a nongender-specific phrase as “domestic violence”: “I suspect,” she indignantly penned, “that some academic researcher coined the term, dismayed by the fact that all those beaten wives were women.” It must be equally dismaying to those in Jones’s camp that some of those beaten women are gay.

  On a political level, violence within this strongly feminist community has indeed generated anguish. When the sociologist Claire Renzetti surveyed one hundred battered lesbians, she discovered that four of them couldn’t go to their local shelter for protection because their abusers worked there. Another woman told Renzetti that she and her partner were going to attend a national conference together on violence against women, but because she was covered in bruises, including the dark swell of a black eye, they decided that only her partner would go. Other lesbians, like battered men, are turned away from shelters for heterosexual women. “When shelter workers or advocates meet a situation that appears to defy their own understanding, the battered lesbian herself is seen as the problem,” notes psychologist Nancy Hammond.

  Barbara Hart, a counselor in Pennsylvania who was a member of the National Task Force on Violence Against Women, wrote in 1986: “[The revelation of gay violence] is painful. It challenges our dream of a lesbian Utopia. It contradicts our belief in the inherent nonviolence of women.” There were compelling reasons to be circumspect. The homophobia lesbians face would be further fueled by images of them as nasty, butch-dyke brawlers. It would reinforce the worst stereotypes of gay women, and no one wanted to see it happen. Lesbians seem to have been roundly abandoned on this point by their straight sisters. Feminists who refuse to admit that heterosexual women can also be violent leave the gay community by itself out on a limb, vulnerable to further slander by self-appointed keepers of public morals. There is a long tradition in our culture of depicting aggressive or criminal women as sexually perverse. That link can only be fortified if feminists refuse to concede straight women’s violence, forcing lesbians to appear as the only ones who abuse.

  In a Ms. magazine special issue on wife beating published in 1994, lesbian violence was discreetly confined to one column, with a feeble attempt to distinguish it from what men do. “The tactics may look the same on the outside,” the magazine quoted Valerie Coleman, a southern California psychologist who works with battered lesbians, as saying. “But, for the most part, heterosexual men feel they have a right—in the global sense—to abuse their partners, which lesbians do not.” How this is a meaningful distinction, given that both groups throw punches, is never made clear. Lauria Chesley, a therapist who works with abusive women, notes that global entitlement or lack thereof has little effect on the substance of gay violence. The women she counsels often use the same rationalizations for what they’ve done that men use. “They’ll say: ‘She knows I don’t like it when she does that,’ or ‘I warned her.’ “Coming from women, these justifications reveal how explanations are culled after the fact from a vocabulary of motive, rationales that anyone—male or female, gay or straight—may reach for to explain what is otherwise mystifying.

  That men have used a patriarchal vocabulary to account for themselves doesn’t mean that patriarchy causes their violence, any more than being patriarchs prevents them from being victimized. Studies of male batterers have failed to confirm that these men are more conservative or sexist about marriage than nonviolent men. To the contrary, some of the highest rates of violence are found in the least orthodox partnerships—dating or cohabiting lovers.

  A look at the gay community’s tumult reveals that relationship violence cannot be understood in terms of male social and economic power. In many abusive gay partnerships, it is the women with the higher earning power and self-esteem who get assaulted. In her survey of women who identified themselves as victims of abuse, Claire Renzetti found an important distinction between what might be described as “strength” and what we tend to describe as “power.” On the whole, the women who got abused tended to be more independent and self-sufficient, less jealous, and had higher incomes. Socially and economically, they were the ones with the “power.” At the same time, the gay women being abused saw themselves as the strong ones, possessing not only the economic power of self-sufficiency but the emotional power of stability, of basic strength. As a result, they considered themselves to be the anchor for their insecure, volatile partner: “Many expressed worry over what their partner would do without them,” Renzetti noted. Therapist Lenore Walker has made a similar observation of battered women in heterosexual relationships: “Many … believe that they are the sole support for the batterer’s emotional stability and sanity.” If he is the financial pillar, she is the emotional one, and so the house stands. That insight resonates in a comment that Hedda Nussbaum made at Joel Steinberg’s trial: “He was a little boy and I was his one-eyed teddy bear.” It also resonates in the experiences of men like Peter Swann and Steve Easton, who saw themselves as anchors for their lovers. In this sense, the masculine idea of “taking it on the chin” appears to be a value that’s internalized by both sexes, to varying degrees, with those who perceive themselves as the stronger partner more susceptible to its currency than those who appear more powerful politically or economically to the outside world. It becomes an important clue to understanding why economically self-sufficient men and women stay in abusive relationships. They aren’t kidnapped like hostages, or shocked like monkeys. They are making a decision that they can stand it, that they have the fortitude, the endurance to go the rounds. Quite often, they miscalculate. They lose their bearings and fall.

  In Naming the Violence: Speaking Out About Lesbian Battering, more than a dozen women agreed to come forward for the U.S. National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Lesbian Task Force, and write about their own experiences. Arlene Istar,
of Albany, New York, described her two-year relationship with a woman who had “intense displays of rage.” At first, “threats of violence” were accompanied by much pleading and cajoling. Her lover would insist that Istar was at fault for not being understanding. “[S]he explained that I was not respecting her honesty and vulnerability. She convinced me I was being rigid.” Istar was “expected to take care of her, and the kids, and the house, before I attended to my own needs.” Over time, Istar “was hit and slapped, often till I was black and blue. I was picked up and thrown against walls.… I was physically thrown out of the house in the snow with no shoes or coat. I had black eyes and fractured fingers. She destroyed things I loved. She would trap me, not letting me leave the room or the house or the car until the outburst was over.” Like Peter Swann and Steve Easton, Arlene Istar thought she could “heal” her lover, that she could ride out the early storm and, through her patience, impose some calm. “In the beginning, I ran from the room when she hit me. It was to be our pattern, her yelling, my yelling, her hitting, and my running.” After a while, however, Istar refused to run anymore. “I began to fight back.… I became so acclimated to living with violence that the only way I saw to get out was to fight my way out.”