When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  In retrospect, Istar wrote, what troubled her was that she didn’t see herself as the battered woman she’d read of in books. “I want you to know that I am an assertive and powerful womon [sic]…. Most lesbians I know who have been battered impress me with their presence and strength. None of them fit my stereotype.” In the arena of family violence, stereotypes abound. The only figure for which there is no prevailing image is the heterosexual violent woman.

  Research on the motives and feelings of abusive heterosexual women is scant, for the obvious reason that they aren’t supposed to exist. Like abusive men, however, the available studies show them to be a widely heterogeneous group who defy simple labels. Some are alcoholics, others addicted to drugs, still others perfectly sober. Some (perhaps 25 percent) have “personality disorders,” such as psychopathy. Some are immature and impulsive, others depressed, others dramatically damaged by childhood. The styles of violence also differ, from spontaneous gestures of frustration to years-long campaigns of manipulation and control.

  Perhaps the most well-documented cause of domestic violence for both men and women is the “intergenerational transmission of violence.” The female abuser is repeating the style of communication she learned as a girl. She saw her mother beat her father, or she and her siblings were beaten themselves. “Violence is a learned behavior,” says Debbie DeGale, who runs an anger management course for women at the Elizabeth Fry Society in Winnipeg. “Women, as well as men, have witnessed or experienced it in their childhoods.” Family patterning is a force so powerful that it transcends gender conditioning. A woman may lack models for aggression in the public arena yet still find them in her home. Children who are beaten by their fathers tend to grow up to become victims, whether they are boys or girls. Children who are beaten by their mothers, on the other hand, are more likely to become victimizers. One theory about why this would be is that men act as authority figures in children’s lives, breeding in them habits of submission that last a lifetime. Women are teaching figures. They are most likely to show their children how to communicate emotionally.

  The effects of child abuse, depending upon the sex of the parent, explains how a man who was abused as a child can tolerate abuse from his female partner. “About eighty percent of the men coming through the program,” says Steve Easton, “were also abused as children. And so were their wives. We’re picking each other.” Soon after he fell in love with her, Easton began to see that Ursula was insecure about him because love had always come packaged for her in the sour wrapping of insults and fists. Her mother, Annie, had beaten both her and her brother. When Ursula grew up, she fought her mother back. Several times, Easton watched Annie and Ursula in the hallway of his apartment building, swinging at each other, yelling, “You cunt!” and “You bitch!” while he sat there, tense and quiet in the kitchen.

  A person’s experience of childhood abuse or abandonment may have been so horrific that she experiences her emotional vulnerability as virtually life-threatening. To need and to trust, she recalls, is to hurt like no other pain. Women who feel this way are perhaps more likely to use violence instrumentally. They need to control and diminish their mates in order to feel safe with them, to convince themselves that they are not the weaker of the pair. “Domination begins with the attempt to deny dependency,” notes the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin. “The primary consequence of the inability to reconcile dependence with independence … is the transformation of need for the other into domination of him.” I love you, therefore you terrify me, so I must strike you down.

  Thus the beloved is not allowed to go out with friends, or wear certain clothes, or read certain newspapers, or spend time exclusively with children, or simply walk around looking upbeat, because betrayal lurks behind all of these gestures. If the beloved can be controlled absolutely, it will be safe to love.

  One interesting finding from the annals of psychology is that male batterers score high on tests for anxiety, low self-esteem, and neuroticism. Men generally bring to adult life more trouble with the concept of dependency, and more inclination to thwart it, purely on the level of gender identity. Claire Renzetti speculates that lesbians are more uncomfortable with the notion of feminine dependency than heterosexual women are. “She who is dependent is likely to feel weak and ashamed, since dependency is associated with a destructive, culturally proscribed female role.” Since feelings of dependency ranked high among the emotional traits of abusive lesbians in Renzetti’s survey, it may be that, like male abusers, they experience their vulnerability as a threat to their identity, as well as their psyche, and try to vanquish that dependency by controlling their partner and empowering themselves through violence.

  Mutual abuse makes up about half of all domestic violence scenarios, although only recently have scholars focused on the role of women in provoking and perpetuating conflict. In a 1990 study of one hundred mutually combative couples in Austin, Texas, William Stacey and his colleagues found that both sexes engaged in taunts, insults, and threats, hitting and shoving, destroying household property, preventing each other from seeing friends, and stalking or closely monitoring with suspicions of infidelity. Couples’ violence “ultimately results from partners’ personal insecurities,” the researchers concluded, “and lack of trust in their separate relationships.” Judith Shevrin and James Sniechowski have described the dynamic as a “dance of mutual destructiveness,” in which both partners “need each other to perpetuate personal and collective dramas of victimization and lovelessness.” Clinical social worker Eve Lipchik, of ICF Consultants, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who treats couples engaging in mutual abuse, cites the example of a young African-American couple who, during a six-year marriage, “had spent most of their time drinking heavily and fighting violently, aided and abetted by their extended families, who fanned each partner’s jealousy.” Through couple therapy, Lipchik got them to give up drinking, think about more peaceful ways to solve conflict, and “not allow themselves to be manipulated into fighting.”

  “Hitting is just one part of the overall dynamic,” says Michael Thomas. “There’s a huge amount of psychological warfare going on. A husband may stonewall [emotionally], so out of frustration the woman’s violence escalates.” Stacey and his colleagues cite the case of William and Carrie: “William locked her out of the house. She destroyed $700 worth of his leather clothes, carved an X on the top of his car, and threatened to stab him.” Or the reverse scenario unfolds, with the woman as provocateur and the man retaliating. Ninety-two percent of the women studied in Austin admitted to “name-calling, belittling, or insulting” their partners, with much of the taunting “aimed at the men’s resources or abilities as providers and childrearers”; 72 percent of the women withdrew emotionally as a form of punishment; 46 percent threatened to use violence.

  Police officers frequently encounter the messy and confusing mutuality of violence. According to former patrol officer R. Kim Rossmo, now at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, domestic violence calls are extremely difficult to mediate; officers have to interpret a set of interpersonal dynamics that have little to do with rote gender divisions. “You can’t count on anyone to tell you the truth, not your victim, not your suspect. The phone call [to 911] may be for the express purpose of getting back at him, or the call may be to just put out the fire and she doesn’t want it to go to court. Sometimes you get there and she will deny that anything’s happened, even though you think that it’s happened, or sometimes she’s complaining about him but she’s equally at fault, or sometimes she’s actually commited a criminal offense and he hasn’t.”

  Society demands that these situations be portrayed in black and white. But reality inevitably throws us back into a gray zone. In 1988, Annette Green, of West Palm Beach, Florida, shot her lover, Ivonne Julio, after a stormy eleven-year relationship in which the violence—which Julio started—grew more and more reciprocal. At her murder trial, Green mounted a battered woman syndrome defense, citing several instances in which she’d been attacked ph
ysically by Julio. But her two adopted daughters testified that she’d once held a gun to Julio’s head, and friends came in to say they’d seen her kick Julio at a party. On the night Julio died, she was hiding in a closet. Green chased her down, cornered her, and pulled the trigger. Who was the victim? Who the abuser? Who was the man, and who the woman?

  The same question arises in the case of Mae Favell and Ernie Pelly of Northern Ontario, for whom alcoholism and family violence patterning proved a marital Molotov cocktail. In 1985, Favell accidentally knifed her lover to death when they were both drunk. Favell was well known by neighbors and relatives in her small community to be as assaultive as the more diminutive Pelly, whom people called the “Pin Cushion” for the scars and scabs that dotted his physique. Favell and Pelly also took cracks at each other with, for instance, a baseball bat. In addition, Mae Favell abused her children and, on one occasion, assaulted her elderly neighbor. Her sixteen-year relationship played out as a passionate, alcohol-fueled brawl, not unlike the union of Martha and George in Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, except that the battle consisted in body blows instead of quips.

  The couple’s neighbors figured that, sooner or later, one of them was going to go down for the count. As it happened, it was Ernie, whom Mae left lying on the floor one night after stabbing him in the leg. She then staggered off in search of some music, and when she returned, having invited over the people next door, she discovered that Ernie had bled to death. The tragic mutuality in their alcoholism and aggression wasn’t remotely reflected in Favell’s sentencing hearing, where she was positioned as a victim of battered wife syndrome. She was a battered wife; there’s little question. But she had a battered husband, and she killed him.

  Women are seldom the victors, strictly speaking, in cases of mutual abuse, but it is irresponsible and counterproductive to promote them exclusively as the victims. For one thing, it deprives them of access to counseling. As one Austin woman whose husband had received treatment for wife assault said, “[Now] he tries to understand my side of the argument. He talks to me rather than hits me. I still hit him, however. I would like to enroll in a class in anger management, but the shelter for battered women does not help women with this problem.”

  Therapist Laurie Chesley notes that a lot of gay women who were abused in one relationship go on to be the abuser in the next one. The feeling that the psychoanalyst Alice Miller identified in the battered child—“I will never, ever let this happen to me again”—seems to well up in adults, too, in the aftermath of their own adult experience. The possibility that love can shatter us so many times as adults that we are changed by it, made brittle, fearful, and hateful, is central to the experience of the postwar generations. The Sexual Revolution generated a many-partnered cycle of loving, being left, and leaving, while we amassed scars to make us flinch and ghosts that come to haunt us. For those who have been physically and psychologically wounded by love, the need or desire to retaliate may carry over into the next relationship. This cycle was largely obscured in earlier generations because of the greater commitment to monogamy.

  The phenomenon might be called shadowboxing. It is the ghost of a former lover you’re reacting to, not the person who sits there before you now. Say a woman has a love affair in her twenties with a man who demeans her by sleeping around. She suppresses her rage because his is the stronger personality, the one in control. Years later, she finds a loving union with a faithful man, with whom she is the stronger partner. Her new lover glances at a beautiful woman or has a flirtatious exchange, and she “sees” her former beau’s behavior. A terrible anger wells up in her. She lashes out. Shadowboxing seems to describe the fate of Ruben, the divorced, fifty-year-old man from Easton’s support group. Ruben lives in a tiny studio apartment in Toronto’s East End. It is a space decorated in a surprisingly childlike manner, with posters of dolphins and Sesame Street characters on the wall, brightly crocheted pillows on his bed: home sentimentally envisaged as one’s childhood bedroom, a safe and trusted place. He is a handsome man, with the long-lashed dark eyes of his native Greece and a lush mouth that always hovers on the edge of a smile—uncertain, and appeasing. Ruben is the sort of man a woman might retreat to when she wants to flee from love’s combative field. His presence would be reassuring but placid, a source of warmth without too much heat. Women sometimes derisively call men of this character Milquetoasts. But Ruben isn’t dull; he is thoughtful and observant.

  He and his future second wife met in 1983. After an exchange of smiles on a long subway ride, the two began to talk, leaving the train with each other’s number pressed into a pocket, a purse. Ruben was a lonely divorcé who wanted companionship. Jenny was a former waitress who’d had it rough and was looking for a stretch of peace. “Later,” says Ruben, carefully stirring a cup of instant coffee, “I found out she was from an abusive background. When she was a teenager she did an abortion on herself. She told me that her ex-husband tried to hit her. She got a divorce for that reason. When she was a waitress, a man tried to rape her. So she was coming from a lot of bad experiences with men. She had a lot of rage, a lot of rage. She used to say to me all the time that men are evil.”

  When they married, Jenny’s stipulation was that Ruben get a vasectomy. She said she couldn’t fathom having children—she was thirty-nine. Perhaps she was also so traumatized by her past that the only way she could accept Ruben was to diminish his power to violate her. “I married her in August,” he says, “and three months later I had the operation. A few days after that we were sitting at home watching television and all of a sudden without any provocation she hit me on my groin. I hit the roof with pain. I had to go to the hospital to make sure there was no internal bleeding. She told me that this was an accident, and I bought that. But then she out of nowhere kicked my chair from beneath me, and this time I realized there was something wrong with the marriage.

  “She became very irritable and noncommunicative and she had been a very, very good communicator [before]. She was outgoing, she used to confide in me. Now, every day she would come home and throw herself in front of the television, and watch it for hours, and sleep a lot. She was extremely depressed, no question about it. We never went anywhere, and any time we did, she used to get lost on me. I’d turn around and she’d just disappeared into the crowd. I used to spend hours looking for her.”

  The next instance of physical violence was connected to sex. After months of mutual solitude, with Ruben’s sense of rejection simmering into anger, he entered the separate bedroom she’d taken, intending to insist that they make love: They were husband and wife. Hovering over her in the bed on his sad, desperate mission, Ruben got a vicious knee to the head. “She grabbed my head and pulled it down and hit me with her knee above my right eye. Blood started running, and she called the police. She told them, “I hit my husband.” The police arrived, took me to the hospital, I received six or seven stitches. The police brought me back, but they wouldn’t press charges against her. They said I could do it myself.”

  It was this fact—that Jenny reported her assault—that lent the impression she was shadowboxing and knew it. Ruben’s presence elicited a rage in her that she must have realized had little to do with him as an individual but rather with the men that came before him. Her 911 call was a call for help on his behalf. Ruben responded to his wife’s extremely indirect expression of concern by expressing his hurt and resentment in an equally indirect manner: He pressed charges. When the judge reviewed his complaint and audibly chuckled, however, Ruben was so humiliated that he dropped them.

  “It was so confusing,” he says. “I did not have anybody to talk to. When I told my friends about it they just didn’t believe it. I started missing lots of time from my work because I was going to the hospital. Finally I confided in my boss, I told him ‘My wife is beating me,’ and he immediately responded, ‘Well, why don’t you hit her back?’ “But unlike Peter Swann and Steve Easton, who both eventually did hit back—and got arrested for do
ing so—Ruben couldn’t do it. “I don’t believe in violence, I wasn’t taught to be a violent person, I just don’t do it.”

  Within the year, the physical violence abated and Jenny withdrew into a punishing silence. When he pleaded with her for discussion, she wouldn’t reply. Instead, she got up and left the room. Being ignored, Ruben says, was far more harrowing than getting hit. “You’re treated like nobody, like you don’t exist,” he says. He sighs very deeply, still stirring a now tepid cup of coffee. He couldn’t move out, because it was his house, and he didn’t want to ask her to leave. He wanted to reconcile. She left anyway, in spirit. Ruben, for his part, disappeared into a bottle.

  “I became an alcoholic. One day I woke up in my bedroom. It was Sunday morning. I started thinking about alcohol, how I wanted to drink. I went into a rage looking for a bottle in the house, unable to understand why they were all empty because I didn’t know that I’d consumed four bottles of vodka the day before. When I realized it, it really shocked me. I went back into my bedroom and I got totally undressed. I looked into the mirror and I just didn’t like what I saw: a scuffed-up, liquor-beaten, watered-down man. I sat down and took a complete inventory of my life, and in every aspect the bad part was far more than the good. I realized that I had to get out, I had to figure out what it is I had going for myself.”

  Ruben and Jenny harbor no ill will toward each other now, he says. What is sad is that in addition to one woman’s wounded spirit there is now one wounded man, and he has begun to shadowbox in turn. He doesn’t lash out, because he doesn’t have the temperament. But he winces and jumps. Recently, his apartment building elevator got stuck between the sixth and seventh floors. The only other passenger was a woman he didn’t know. She reached for the phone, and Ruben began to tremble, panicked by the irrational conviction that she was going to phone security to say he’d attacked her. She didn’t, of course. She reported the fact that the elevator was stuck.