Another Post About Force Pt. 2
After writing this post, I started thinking a little bit more about what happens when victims do fight back during rapes that have so far only included the threat of violence.
A few years ago, I read the book , by Diana Sculley. Sculley interviewed hundreds of convicted rapists to try and learn something about their motives, their beliefs, their values, and their perception of sexual assault. The stated purpose of the book was to provide some information about rape other than “hay ladies no goin’ outside anymore, and you better be wearing gunny sacks from now on k thx,” and it was a pretty fascinating read. I’ve since lost my copy, and it’s tremendously out of print, so you’ll have to bear with my memory here.
Sculley discovered that the vast majority of rapists do not consider what they did to be rape. They will describe the act accurately, and their description will match up with legal and common definitions of rape. And if asked to describe “rape,” they will describe an act similar or identical to their own. But they will not admit that the act they committed was rape.
When discussing rape theoretically, the convicted rapists expressed a societally-appropriate level of disgust, hatred and venom. So it makes sense, Sculley theorized, that they did not want to integrate the social concept of a “rapist” — that of an evil, violent, depraved, and unanimously hated character — into their self-identification. And they managed to avoid this integration through societally-appropriate concepts of gender, sex, and control. Sculley found that these rationalizations existed entirely in the convicted rapist’s head; police and court records and the rapist’s own recollection of the rape indicated absolutely no external verification for their beliefs that negated the internal moral horror that raping a woman might otherwise create.
For example, a rapist might describe raping a woman who screamed in pain, cried, and begged him to stop. Yet he will claim what he did was not rape, because he could tell — through some kind of telepathic magic — that she was actually enjoying it. There is no evidence that the victim enjoyed it, but for the rapist to believe that he is not a rapist — that theoretical creature of evil and monsterhood — the victim must enjoy the rape, which will transform it into wanted rape-sex — sex that resembles rape and has all the desired benefits of rape (aggressive humiliation, sexual gratification, sadism, expression of power and domination) but carries none of the moral and legal baggage of real rape. This also aligns easily with gendered beliefs about men and women and sex: women secretly want sex, no matter what they say; men’s enjoyment of sex is the baseline to determine whether a sexual encounter is pleasurable; and that aggression, force, and a woman fighting back in pain is sexy and erotic. Thus, a rapist can rape a woman, but as long as he can find some way to convince himself she likes it, then it does not count as rape.
For another example, Sculley often found that convicted rapists would cite their impairment as a defense for rape. They were drunk, they were high, they wouldn’t have done that sober. This seems like a somewhat logical argument (though it doesn’t excuse rape), but our logic is based on our cultural assumptions. Sculley used the term “acceptable deviance” to describe an act that is normally considered deviant and wrong, but when performed in a certain cultural context, it becomes acceptable. In our culture, there is an awful lot you can do while drunk that is completely unacceptable while sober. This is a cultural construct, with no basis in biology. Alcohol and drugs do not actually make people lose complete mental control of themselves; it makes them more likely to act upon impulses otherwise reined in, precisely because they are unacceptable in any other context. But while impaired, deviant behavior becomes excused behavior, an outlet for otherwise punishable activities. So convicted rapists will often use their impairment — or the impairment of their victim — as a mitigating factor that makes rape into rape-sex.
That was just a general summary because I liked the book so much, and wanted to encourage anybody with access to a very stocked library to try to find and read it. Anyway, here’s my point: after compiling the information from these interviews, Sculley determined that the best rape prevention technique is to make more things culturally “count” as rape (she didn’t say it quite like this — this is my interpretation). Right now, we live in culture that provides too many contexts where rape is an acceptable deviancy. That’s what happens when somebody says something like “short skirt” “she was drunk” “she didn’t fight back” “they were dating.” They aren’t saying it wasn’t rape — they are saying that rape was okay, in that context, at that time, with those two people. That rape was an acceptable outcome, an acceptable form of sexual expression, and it doesn’t deserve punishment or consequences.
And so we maintain this double consciousness in our culture, where all of us grow up knowing that rape is bad, rapists are evil, and anybody who rapes deserves worse than death. And yet, when rape (frequently) occurs, victims aren’t believed, convictions aren’t made, and excuses for why it was okay abound. The only way to reconcile that — to claim that rape is evil but your brother-in-law who locked that drunk girl in a bathroom is not a rapist — is to consider rape an acceptable kind of sex. To consider it, as long as cultural context is provided, rape-sex. What if your brother-in-law told you, in so many words, that he had raped a girl, but then said it was okay because her sister owns a dildo? Or it was okay because she looks at bestiality porn? Or it wasn’t really rape, only rape-sex, because she wore shoes that were easy to take off? That all sounds ridiculous, but those excuses aren’t any more ridiculous or non-sensical than short skirt, not a virgin, and was making out beforehand. The only difference is, those non-sensical excuses for rape have cultural sanction, make rape into rape-sex and thus acceptable. We do not live in a culture where witchcraft is an acceptable excuse for strange behavior or unlucky circumstances — that sounds fucking retarded to us. Imagine how retarded we look when we claim that breasts somehow incite violent riots and attacks.
So Sculley believed we had to strip away these cultural excuses. That we had to stop saying there was any kind of circumstance or context where rape became acceptable. That having sex with a woman who has not consented is rape, no matter where you raped her, how you raped her, how you felt about her, how she felt about you, what she was wearing, what you were wearing, who was present, what you were thinking about. That by itself isn’t very radical, but it takes on a new meaning when you read the book, and understand just how many of these excuses really truly make a rapist feel like what he did was not rape. But she also took it over to the safety side. Because rapists build up a bulwark of acceptable excuses in their minds that make rape into rape-sex, potentially, a victim can lessen her chances of a completed rape by attacking these excuses. For rapists, the more a rape began to look like a rape, the less likely they were to continue, because their bulwark was crumbling, and their self-identification as not-rapists collapsing. So Sculley recommended that women fight back, because many of the rapists she interviewed stated they would have — or in some circumstances did — cease a rape attempt when the victim began to seriously struggle. As long as she was lying there motionless, he could project all sorts of theoretical sexual pleasure onto her, which made her a woman who could acceptably be rape-sexed without guilt or moral horror. When she was screaming “rapist” while trying to get away, the fantasy that this was rape-sex began to dissipate as it started to suspiciously look like the kind of rape that was evil and wrong.
I read this before my rape, and so I hoped I would be smart enough, and together enough, to fight back if I was ever raped. Of course it didn’t happen that way. Even if the books and statistics said I had a better chance of getting away, unraped, none of that bore any relation to my immediate terror. And, too, probabilities are probabilities. I might have a better chance, but I didn’t have an assured chance. And my surroundings made a difference. I was being raped by my husband, in his parents’ house. I had nowhere else to live. I had no money saved. I had no friends that weren’t also his friends. I could fight, and scream, and run… and then what? Get away unraped, and be homeless? Of course, I can look back now and see the thousands of things I could have done. But abuse — including rape — couldn’t operate effectively if a victim believed it was abuse, and believed she didn’t deserve it. I believed what my husband did to me was only right, because I was such a bad wife. I believed that if I was a good wife, I would not mind what he did, and he would not do it so much. But I was a selfish wife, and weak. I did not believe I belonged in a place like a women’s shelter, where women went when they had been abused. Because I had not been abused. I had been punished rightfully.
Because we have a cultural narrative where women who dress, drink, or act in a certain way are rapeable, these women also grow up believing that women who dress, drink, or act in a certain way deserve their rapes. And when these women are raped, they do not necessarily believe at that moment that it is abuse, and wrong, and evil. Nobody wants to be abused, nobody wants something so evil in their lives, especially when the evil thing is your husband. It is easier to believe that they earned this, deserved it, that they are being punished, and that perhaps in the future, if they act far better, it will not happen again. Victims believe the same things their rapists believe that help them rationalize rape as acceptable, because we all grew up hearing the same cultural story.
I’ve gotten way off topic. I meant to talk about fighting back when rape hasn’t yet included violence or force, but spun off again into all the reasons a woman might not fight back. Here’s what I meant to say:
Flint and I started dating in high school. Before me, he’d only had one other girlfriend — let’s call her Jean. I knew Jean, and honestly, didn’t care for her too much. Once I’d started dating Flint, I got suckered in by his abusive perspective of her. He would go on and on about what a horrible, selfish, manipulative bitch she was. Looking back, I can see plenty of examples he gave of what is actually normal healthy behavior in a relationship, but he considered those things to be indicative of why she was an evil person, and why evil things should happen to her. I internalized all that — he was, in effect, giving me a blueprint of all the things he would not allow me to do if I stayed with him. And I took my already very vague and general dislike of her and blew it up into an enormous and overwhelming allied hatred — Jean was evil, Jean was mean, Jean was a terrible person who would die a miserable death, and deserved nothing better. And I would never be like Jean.
It was in this context that Flint told me a story about something that had happened between him and Jean. Like all stories about Jean, he pitched it as some terrible emotional wound she had inflicted that he needed my help in overcoming — some unbelievable thing she had done that no sane woman would ever do to a man. He told me that one day, while they were making out, she had just attacked him. Just kneed him right in the balls, and then ran and locked herself in the bathroom, refusing to let him in.
Out of fucking nowhere, like.
It wasn’t long after that that she broke up with him. And she never would explain why she’d done it.
I asked him what was going on right before she attacked him. Oh, nothing, he said. They were just kissing. You know. Well, I asked, were you being too aggressive? He shrugged, and made a pained horrible puppy dog face. Oh god, he said, what if I was? What if I did something wrong and didn’t even know it?
I assured him he hadn’t. He was too good a person, and Jean, well, we all knew what Jean was like. Crazy Jean. Angry Jean. Evil Jean. And yeah, you don’t have to ask, I feel pretty fucking bad about that, even understanding why I said it. And I feel pretty fucking foolish. He couldn’t have been more obvious if he had given me a note that said, “Someday I will rape you, Harriet.” And I couldn’t have been anymore forcibly blind.
But this is the dilemma victims in “non-violent” rapes face. No physical attack has been made — at least nothing that, in our cultural narrative, we consider a physical attack, because somehow taking off a women’s clothing or grabbing her body without her consent is not an aggressive action. So to respond with a physical attack is to become the aggressor. Let’s not even bother getting into the cultural reasons that physical responses are difficult for women, who are not raised to ever expect to engage in physical violence. Beyond that, there’s a general impulse to, you know, not attack people for no goddamn reason. And especially if this person is your boyfriend/best friend/lover/husband. All the reasons a rapist might have created to make rape into rape-sex are also in the victim’s head, and luring her into thinking that she deserves this. And at the same time, all the very logical and natural fear of a worse physical attack is inhibiting her from screaming and punching and biting.
At the time, I couldn’t understand why Jean would have kneed Flint in the balls — jesus, couldn’t she have just tried talking to him first? Not even considering that she probably had, and Flint had just omitted this from his story, as he had probably omitted it from the event as it was occurring. I never went around mouthing off about that story, but I did go around telling people that Jean was just totally fucking nutso, seriously. And Flint got what he wanted — some kind of external validation for the story he had made up in his head, the story where he hadn’t tried to rape his first girlfriend, the story where his first girlfriend was just too crazy and, let’s face it, aware to submit to rape-sex. And he got a girlfriend that had now been told, in so many words, that physically attacking him would result in being labeled as a psychotic whore who deserved to die miserable and alone.
When I gave my list of options victims have when being raped, that’s pretty best-case scenario. That assumes that a victim has her wits about her while, you know, being physically attacked and placed in a frightening situation. Some victims would, but we should as a baseline assume that most people will freak when something terrible happens. And so, while I know there was a very rational little place in my mind clicking along that list — fight and be hurt, or submit and let this get over with — there was also another place in my brain aghast that I would even consider fighting. I mean, what would that look like? I was naked, in his parents’ house. I could have attacked him and ran away — no time to get dressed if things had gotten to an attack-and-run level — and then his parents would have found me naked and shivering, and found their son possibly bleeding. And the story would be, “She attacked me out of nowhere!” They would ask, had he become violent with you? And the answer was no. Had he hit you? No, he had not. So, that’s it: I attacked him out of nowhere. Obviously because I was so vengeful, so crazy, so evil. Because forcing sex on a woman who has not given consent is not considered a physical attack in and of itself. As long as the victim is vaguely known to the rapist, as long as she has had sex before, as long as she might possibly enjoy it, as long as she deserves it for leaving him, as long as he has not threatened to murder her puppy or something. It’s not a physical attack. For it to become “violence,” the victim has to wait for the rapist to do something even more horrible to her — and then she has half a chance of justifying her attack. Provided the violence hasn’t frightened her into submission.
So now, today, instead of being the person who attacked Flint “out of nowhere,” I am the person who accused Flint of rape, “out of nowhere.”
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Please…this post is so wonderful, so helpful. It, and the other three before it, so handily click into place a lot of thoughts I’ve been having that previously were disparate. Thank you.
…but there’s one part that’s jarring and upsetting to me. “that sounds fucking retarded” and “imagine how retarded we look.” Could you please remove those instances of the word “retard” as a slur?
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Quixotess,
Thanks for pointing this out. This is something that has actually been occurring to me lately. When I was younger, I was pretty much all about no censorship, use whatever kind of words I want, reclamation, yadda yadda. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’m trying to think in complex ways about how I use my language, and why, and how much context changes things. Some words I’ve ended up trying to drop from my lexicon, some words I’ve been more careful about how and where I use them, and for what purpose, and some words I’ve decided to learn more about while I figure these things out. “Retard” and “retarded” are two of those words that I have been noticing my usage of more often lately, and realizing I don’t really know anything about how those words might affect others, or when, where, or why I started using them. This is all some stuff that’s been simmering on a back burner that I expect eventually I’ll make a post about, but haven’t gotten there yet.
I don’t think I’m going to edit my post. I sort of like things to stand as they are, lumps and mistakes and all. If I’ve made a mistake or said something offensive, I don’t want to blot that out; I want it to become an opportunity for apology and growth instead. Part of the work I’ve learned to do with unscrewing racism and sexism and other isms in my head has included, for me, a dropping of that protective filter that only lets me say the things I think are socially acceptable. I feel I need to let the offensive stuff roiling around my head come out if I’m ever going to critically examine it (instead of simply not saying it but thinking it), much the way this came out and I got called on it.
As a sort of side example, a while back I wrote a rather angry post about the Nebraska Safe Haven Law. Since then I’ve had cause to be rather embarrassed by this post, as it seemed like immediately afterwards, situations started popping up at my work that helped me see what kind of desperate straits parents are in, and how unhelpful and short-sighted my anger was. I thought for a while about deleting this post, but eventually decided I’d let it stand, because I think it’s really lame to get rid of the things that embarrass me — I’d rather make another post explaining and making transparent my process since then (of course, it may take forever for me to get around to making all the posts I want, but this is still the basic idea here).
Likewise, this. My use of these words has been nagging me a bit at the corner of my mind lately, and now somebody pops up to make it more obvious. I feel like that’s a sign for me to start dealing with these words, but I don’t think it really accomplishes anything to pretend I’ve never said them, though I’d be less embarrassed if I did. This blog has gotten some readership lately, but I still consider it a personal blog. That’s why I started it, and that’s how I want to keep it. I feel like if I started making changes that I think an audience would like to see, or would find more palatable, that would make this much less enjoyable for me. So while I think you’re right — I think my use of this word is offensive and deserves an apology — I don’t want to edit it out of that post or any past posts, as I’m sure I’ve used those words multiple times. I want to have it stand that I screwed up, I want to thank you for publicly calling me out on it, and rather than revise it, address it in that “use of offensive words” post bouncing around in the back of my head, when I’ve got the time to put that one together.
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I think this post is amazing, to read this and see how the thoughts you once had grew and changed. I think it is very therapeutic for me to understand that I am not the only one to have experienced a shift in thinking because of experiencing an event. It seems that the path to becoming an adult woman in this world is filled with these intense and sometimes painful shifts in an understanding of sex and power. I am constantly feeling blown away when I remember ideas I once had and the ideas I know have. It makes me feel crazy and angry at myself to think I could have believed in some things. And I am always wondering if I am the only one to have this thought shift. Sounds like a fascinating book, I’ll have to read it.
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Quote
“…because I think it’s really [b]lame[/b] to get rid of the things that embarrass me…” End Quote
Lame is another bad word that I try to erase from my lexicon.
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I’m glad that Quixotess brought this up, because it’s such a good post, and I was really identifying with it, and then I read those words and they were like a physical blow. But they shouldn’t overshadow the rest of what you wrote — but I should say something — but I’m not feeling up to addressing all other reactions I had –
I was going to scroll away and try to forget about it.
I feel I need to let the offensive stuff roiling around my head come out if I’m ever going to critically examine it (instead of simply not saying it but thinking it), much the way this came out and I got called on it.
You see, it’s not just that it’s offensive. It’s hurtful. It’s not just that you’ve embarrassed yourself by being publicly ableist. It’s that people with disabilities will read this post and maybe start thinking about their own rape and/or abuse and maybe feel understood and then, all of sudden, “retarded.” And “lame.”
Here is something you can do besides either leaving it exactly as it is or silently editing it out:
…that sounds fucking retarded to us. Imagine how retarded we look when we claim that breasts somehow incite violent riots and attacks. [ETA: This was offensive and I'm sorry. I'm working on my use of words like this.]
Or:
…that sounds fucking [ridiculous] to us. Imagine how [ridiculous] we look when we claim that breasts somehow incite violent riots and attacks.
[ETA: Commenters rightfully called out my use of the word "retarded" here.]
Or, at the beginning:
ETA: Warning for use of ableist language. I messed up, but I don’t want to hide my mistakes.
These are all things I’ve done before.
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Thanks for this. It’s an elegant solution that I hadn’t thought of, and I really appreciate it. I can’t update for a bit (hiding in a cafe for 25 minutes away from the towering and never-ending boxes in my home) but I will put it on my list of updates to make when I have a personal life again.
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oh my god, you are talking about something as horrific as rape and you are getting called on word usage.?? I don’t get it. I love your writing. leave it as is. it is raw and unnerving and it should be. if all they got out of the post is the discomfort of those two words then they mised a hell of a lot of what you are saying.
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I have to say, my first reaction is totally with you, and even though I decided to err on the side of being considerate, that first reaction is still floating around and probably isn’t going to go away entirely.
On the other hand, offensive shit rarely ever arrives at a perfectly convenient time to interrupt everything and have a sit-down about it, so I support people taking the opportunities as they arise (provided, of course, that the calling out isn’t actually a thinly veiled attempt to misdirect the conversation entirely, but I didn’t feel it was here).
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Hello there, girl.
I was date-raped a few years ago, and still struggle with denial and self-blame, but your posts have helped me see things from a sane instead of a pain-blinded point of view. Rationally speaking my “no” should be fucking and enough. It’s not really that complicated.
You know what pisses me off. It took me three months to report it to the police because I was too scared and fucked up. And then when I did, the police officer didn’t even write anything down. He asked me if I wasn’t just a little bit attracted to him (the rapist). No, but what does that have to fucking do with it anyway.
When I told my mother she told me sometimes god’s love is tough love. He gives us pain to bring us back into his loving arms like some big rapist in the sky.
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Sculley’s “Understanding Sexual Violence” is available on Amazon:
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Dude, that has been Unavailable-Except-For-300-Dollars FOREVER!
Wishlisted!
Thanks for the heads-up!
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Oh my gosh. I’ve read your “marital rape” tagged posts, and Harriet, EXACTLY THE SAME THING happened to me when I was 20. The only real difference is the anal bit, my ex wasn’t into that. Other than that, basically the same. It’s…jarring after all these years to read. Jarring in a good way, I mean. About having to explain why I’m upset when obviously it wasn’t real rape or I would have fought back. And about how obviously he’s too nice a guy to be a rapist and why am I hurting his feelings calling him names? And…just…wow. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for these postings. I wish I could talk to you in person and I wish I had the courage to write publicly about what happened to me (I have written volumes privately, shared with a few people I am lucky to call my friends).
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Just out of curiosity – did you ever confront Flint about what he did? I’m chewing on the idea of writing my ex a, “you did X thing to me” as a way of working it out for myself, but then again, I’ve already confronted him, he’s repeatedly denied what he’s done, and in any case that may just open me up to more contact from him.
Advice?
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: I decided that the last thing in life that I ever wanted was to have any kind of contact with him again. It didn’t matter to me if the contact was one-sided (him talking to me, or me talking to him) or if we were both interacting — the idea of any contact felt, viscerally, like running my hands or face over something slimy and poisonous. I could figure out ways to verbalize why I felt it was a bad idea, but when my visceral gut feeling about contact was so intense, I didn’t feel a need to delve it out further. It just felt bad and wrong and no good, so I didn’t question it or try to make sense out of it. I trusted my sense of gross, impending doom (which was a new and difficult thing to do!).
That, of course, competed against the very natural desire to have him know that what he did was wrong. It was one part validation for myself; if he could understand and admit to what he’d done, I wouldn’t have to be the only person trying to convince others that yes, this was rape, yes, this was abuse. But it was mostly revenge. I wanted him to understand what a horrible human being he was, because for too long I’d been the one to feel that for him. But I couldn’t figure out a way to make that happen without contacting him, and, again, contacting him = slimy feeling, so I had to find other ways of coming to peace about it. Mostly, I considered the life he had built for himself, and what it had bought him. I had left him. All decent friends had left him. He was being coddled like a man-child baby by his family, which meant he had no experience of the real world and never would, and also meant there wasn’t a member of his family that respected him or treated him like a worthwhile, adult man of substance and worth. The only people he could still draw into his life were people like him, or people who could be manipulated and abused like I had been. And I know, when he was abusing me, I was half a person. I couldn’t give anything substantial in a relationship. All the best parts of me were hidden or destroyed. So the things that most people find gratifying in human connections are things he doesn’t have, will never have, as long as he thinks this is a good way to live. If I were to come up with the best revenge to put upon a normal person who had hurt me, living a life without human connection, a life without feeling love, a life without true friends, and a life where your family considers you a crippled and childish burden wouldn’t certainly be amiss. And he’s got all that. So there’s no need for me to dedicate more time or resources to making things worse for him; I have every faith that he can make his life just as bad as it deserves to be all on his own. That’s one talent he has in abundance.
For myself, I also didn’t want to explain things to him because I recognized that was a trap he had used more than once to get me to interact with him, stay with him, be involved. If he wanted sex and I said no, that wasn’t good enough — I had to explain, over and over, and defend, and rationalize, and defend more, and explain in another way. The conversation should have ended after no. But he was able to convince me that it couldn’t end until he understood, that anything else was unfair to him. If he had said, “You can’t say no, I get sex when I want,” I could have recognized that as abuse. But he did the same thing in a roundabout way, by telling me that it was mean and cruel and unfair to say no without explaining why. And “explaining why” became a moving target that could never be reasonably fulfilled, thus, I could never say no.
Eventually I felt like it was unfair to take any kind of action without making sure that everybody around me understood why. And when you’re surrounded by abusive people, “understand” is equivalent to “accept.” I think Flint could perfectly well understand my reasons for saying no to sex, but he didn’t accept them. And if I couldn’t find a way to describe my reasons that he would accept (“I forgot my pill and I’m ovulating and we have no condoms and the store is closed and I think I might have a yeast infection”), the conversation would never end. It was my responsibility to make him accept what I wanted as legitimate, not his responsibility to care about what I wanted. When I started to talk about leaving him, it became the same thing. I would point out something he did that I hated that I would no longer accept. Instead of changing his behavior (or just flatly stating that he wouldn’t change it), we would have conversations that lasted until 3 a.m. where I had to explain, over and over, why I hated this thing he did. If he couldn’t accept or understand my reasons for why I hated it, he had no obligation to stop doing it, and I wasn’t really allowed to hate it anymore (since I had no good reasons). And in the end, I always felt like I had failed, because we had a relationship dynamic where I didn’t have the right to be treated in the way I wanted to be treated. I had to earn it, I had to do his work for him, and if I failed to make him understand/accept, he didn’t have to change. If I failed to make him accept no, then I had never really said it, and couldn’t complain about anything that happened afterward.
I sensed that any “explanation” of why I left him would end up the same way. He would refuse to understand or accept it, and I would feel compelled to explain it again and again, because I really wanted him to understand what a monster he was. It was such a losing battle, because all he would have to do is say, “I don’t get it,” and he would have what he wanted, which would be me frustrated, upset, and interacting with him. He would be putting forth the tiniest amount of effort, and in return, he’d get an overwhelming amount of my time and attention. That my time and attention was now dedicated to hating him didn’t matter, because our relationship had never really been based on my realistic love and compassion — if he had really wanted me to care for him, he would have treated me in a way that inspired that. All he had ever really wanted from me was my unceasing attention, and he could get that just as well by making me an obsessive ex instead of an abused wife. Basically, I had to accept that I couldn’t control him. I couldn’t make him stop abusing me when we were together, and I couldn’t make him stop being an abusive person when we were apart. I had no control over his behavior; there was nothing I could ever do to make him change. But trying to make him change was everything our relationship had been based on. If I kept it up after we were divorced, it would be as if I never left him.
I decided that cutting him off completely and never speaking to him again was explanation enough of how horrible he was. After all, he was there, too; if he couldn’t suss out the details on his own, it would be because he didn’t want to. The fact that he told me and others that he didn’t understand because I never told him was just absolute more of the same — he had no responsibility to interpret the world around him, others had to explain it and hold his hand and mitigate the consequences for him. If he didn’t know why I left him, that in itself would have been reason enough for me to leave him, because that in itself indicates how little he knew me or cared about how I felt.
That doesn’t make it the answer for all abused women, and it also wasn’t an answer that came easily or quickly to me, either. I had to wait myself out, because my immediate impulse was to strike back at him as much as I could. I knew that I wasn’t healthy enough or distant enough from him to resist jumping into an argument, and an argument with him undercut any statements I’d made about how the only thing I wanted in life was to have him away from me. That was my end-goal, the only one I felt and understood with clarity and no reservations whatsoever. Coming out looking like the right party, or making him understand, or making others understand, were impulses that were complicated and confusing and difficult to navigate. But wanting him gone was pure and simple. So I held that above everything else, and if I felt a pressing need to call him up and tell him, “You know you raped me, right?”, I waited to see if the need would pass. It always did — my need to never hear his voice again, to never get caught up in his web of craziness again, to never let him provoke me into defensiveness again, overrode it.
By not contacting him to tell my side of it, I had to put a lot of faith in my perception of events without outside validation. That was something I’d never had the strength to do before. I had to hold fast to what I believed had happened, what I believed was right, when nobody else around me agreed. I had to do that because I knew it was best for myself, which meant I had to put what was best for myself above everything else in the world. That was the very first lesson I had to learn outside of that relationship, and it was very, very difficult. For me, I could only learn that by refusing to explain myself, to him or to anybody. If I said, “I left him because he was abusive,” that was good enough. If somebody needed me to justify that statement, they were asking me to justify myself, to justify my right to recognize what is painful to me and my right to avoid that pain. And anybody who needs me to explain my reasons for not wanting to be abused isn’t somebody who’s worth my time and energy; by asking me to explain, they are, in effect, stating that my perception of events is wrong and/or I don’t deserve to decide what is and is not hurtful to me. And I am, by responding, accepting that premise as a reasonable one to argue about. Trying to convince anybody else of what he had done (even him) was, at its core, explaining myself. By the time I started down that road, I would have already admitted that just saying “no” wasn’t good enough, that living life the way I wanted it wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t have the right to perceive the world through my own needs. And I was done living a life where “what you think and feel and want isn’t good enough” was the fundamental structure of everything.
He wasn’t a subtle abuser — there was plenty of evidence of how he treated me — so I decided that anybody who needed those dots connected for them wasn’t worth my breath.
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@ Harriet: Thanks for that. What you’re saying makes a lot of sense. I got to thinking about it last night after I posted my comment. The thing is, I *have* confronted him. I’ve said to him, “why are you raping me?” while he was in the act. He smiled, and said, “I’m not.” I’ve confronted him a lot of times, and he honestly believes it wasn’t rape. He admits that yes, I was in pain, yes, you did say ‘no’, and when pressed to give it another word that defines it, he can’t think of anything – yet he cannot admit it was rape. Same goes for his emotional abuse. “Yes, I said horrible things to you, yes, I only said them to hurt you. No, I wasn’t being abusive, I was merely upset.”
And I think you’re right. In fact, when I left him I said something along the lines of, “you’ve been married to two women in three years. We have both left you for the exact same reasons. If you ever want a marriage to work, you need to learn that you cannot treat people like that and expect them to stay.” He got angry at me for “insulting” him.
So, yeah. I think I’m just not going to go there. There is nothing I could confront him about that I haven’t confronted him about already, he clearly has no conscience or empathy to even understand WHY you don’t do that to people. Oh, well.
Thanks. It’s been scary and great reading your stuff all at the same time.
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