dreamer_easy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dreamer_easy) wrote2009-10-13 02:38 pm
dreamer_easy) wrote2009-10-13 02:38 pm
Entry tags:
They Just Don't Get It
Here's an entry from my proto-blog, "Kate Almanac", dated 9 July 2000.
In June this year, I visited relatives in Washington DC. I packed my passport, my swimsuit - and a list of references to look up at the Library of Congress. Despite plundering university and local libraries around the world, there were still a handful of citations I hadn't been able to track down. I got the call numbers from the LC's Web page. But what I didn't get was an idea of just how difficult it was going to be to get my paws on that short list of research goodies.
One of my targets: a copy of Lenore Walker's 1979 classic, The Battered Woman. Surprisingly, I hadn't been able to find it anywhere. And all I wanted was to check one reference, a supposedly man-hating remark much quoted on the net. Here it is, as it appeared on the Men's Issues Page:
Jon accompanied me into DC on 12 June - a steaming hot Monday many Washingtonians will recall with rue, but more of that later. Now, the Library of Congress is divided between three main buildings. A map directed us to Reader Registration in the Madison building. We followed an ant trail to the photo ID office.
Uh-oh. First problem: I didn't have a US driver's licence, and I hadn't brought my passport. The desk staff explained that I could be given a temporary unverified reader's card. I could enter the reading rooms, but I couldn't request books or photocopy them. (I didn't ask what the point of this would be.) Luckily, Jon - a native Washingtonian - had his driver's licence. I joked that he could do all the work for me.
We were given our photo IDs by a woman who seemed not to care which planet she was on, let alone whether she was speaking to another human being*. It was at this point that I realised I had left my jumper in the ladies' room. I raced back, but it had already vanished. A security guard sent us downstairs to lost property to make a report, but the jumper was never seen again. I hope whoever stole it wore it outside and got heatstroke.
We exited into the melting heat and made our way to the Jefferson Building, where the Main Reading Room is. Somewhere. We entered through the tourist side of the building. A receptionist assured us we could reach the Main Reading Room from this side, by taking the elevator to the first floor. He was wrong; there is - and I kid you not - a secret passage on the ground floor.
At last! The Main Reading Room! And a super-friendly and helpful librarian!
Oops! We were in the wrong building! For my area of research, we wanted the Reading Room in the Adams Building.
More secret passages: the three LC buildings are connected by Disneyland-esque tunnels under the ground. At the Adams Building, another saintly librarian helped me put in my requests. My "unverified" card was just fine for requesting books, he told me. My reading choices would even be hand-delivered to my reserved desk within the hour.
Ninety minutes later, having walked miles in our quest for knowledge, we exited into dripping rain and undiminished heat, me clutching my bag of precious photocopies and notes to my chest. We got on the Metro at Farragut West.
We got off one station later at Farragut North. Three of the Metro's busiest stations had been closed as a safety measure after smoke was reported in a tunnel. Smack in the middle of rush hour. What seemed like the entire population of the District was oozing up onto Connecticut Avenue, spilling onto the street, milling about in search of non-existent
busses. Incredibly, there wasn't a riot.
We crammed into a decrepit cab with four others and crawled up Conn Ave through the chaos, listening to news reports about the tunnel fire. At one point I thought Jon would lose an arm trying to shut the taxi's disintegrating door. But in the end, despite everything, we weren't even late for dinner. And I still had my bag of goodies.
All that, to tell you this: I was right. "The rest of her story" gives a completely different picture.
The battered wife, Donna, blames herself for the particular incident described in the book. "I had been alone night after night after night, and I couldn't stand it anymore." She doesn't mean alone without her husband; she means totally alone. "Paul's tantrums and his weird behaviour had made it so I couldn't keep any friends, so I had no one to turn to." Donna snaps: "How can I make him notice me?" She throws a glass, which bounces off his head, then shoves a chair into his knee.
Paul responds by punching Donna in the jaw, sending her flying across the room. Hearing glasses smashing, she lunges at him, and he starts to slap and punch her. "All I can remember is being punched and slapped and hit and glasses breaking."
Paul isn't acting in self-defence. He's beating up his wife, and this isn't the only time he does it. But why does Walker say he was also "battering" Donna by "ignoring her and working late"?
Because she uses the term "social battering" to describe the abusers' deliberate isolation of their wives. Walker devotes an entire chapter to the subject, describing women "trapped by their husbands' high-powered jobs". It's not merely a matter of hard-working hubby staying late at the office. Hubby knows his wife's behaviour will reflect on his high-profile career, so he keeps control of her by cutting her off from other people.
The abuser insists on "approving, if not choosing" her friends. At social gatherings, she never knows if he will be charming, or ignore her, or humiliate her in front of everyone. He uses get-togethers as an excuse to heap accusations and criticisms on her - she's "too provocative, too plain, too dowdy", she flirts with other men. Her friends start to avoid the couple; she starts to avoid social gatherings. Plus she knows people respect him, and aren't willing to cross him. There's no-one to turn to for help.
By taking the Walker quote out of its context, anti-feminists make it seem as though husbands like Paul are merely being "inattentive", as Cathy Young puts it. They just don't get it. Paul wasn't merely ignoring Donna; he beat her, and he deliberately cut off her from everyone she knew. The extreme isolation suffered by battered wives, on top of physical and verbal abuse, leads to depression and thoughts of suicide. Hard-working Paul isn't such a hero
after all.
The moral of the whole story is this: it takes so little effort to distort the truth, and so much effort to find it.
Postscript
In April 2001, I walked into a second-hand book shop in Canberra, and almost the first thing I saw was a copy of The Battered Woman. That's the way it goes!
* I visited the LC again in February 2004; the same woman was still there, and still just as unhelpful.
In June this year, I visited relatives in Washington DC. I packed my passport, my swimsuit - and a list of references to look up at the Library of Congress. Despite plundering university and local libraries around the world, there were still a handful of citations I hadn't been able to track down. I got the call numbers from the LC's Web page. But what I didn't get was an idea of just how difficult it was going to be to get my paws on that short list of research goodies.
One of my targets: a copy of Lenore Walker's 1979 classic, The Battered Woman. Surprisingly, I hadn't been able to find it anywhere. And all I wanted was to check one reference, a supposedly man-hating remark much quoted on the net. Here it is, as it appeared on the Men's Issues Page:
One of Lenore Walker's examples from her classic book The Battered Woman(NY: Harper Colophon Books, 1979, p. 98) saysWhat a shocking thing for Walker say! In fact, it's so shocking that I've always suspected that her meaning had been distorted - in order to make anti-domestic violence activists look like villains who trivialise violence against men. You won't be surprised to hear that my suspicion was right. But first, I had to get my hands on that book."There is also no doubt that she began to assault Paul physically before he assaulted her. However, it is also clear from the rest of her story that Paul had been battering her by ignoring her and working late, in order to move up the corporate ladder, for the entire five years of their marriage."So, the message Walker gives to women is: if your husband is working late, trying to support his dependents, just SLUG HIM if you don't like this. You're the victim, not him, and we will back you up 100%.
Jon accompanied me into DC on 12 June - a steaming hot Monday many Washingtonians will recall with rue, but more of that later. Now, the Library of Congress is divided between three main buildings. A map directed us to Reader Registration in the Madison building. We followed an ant trail to the photo ID office.
Uh-oh. First problem: I didn't have a US driver's licence, and I hadn't brought my passport. The desk staff explained that I could be given a temporary unverified reader's card. I could enter the reading rooms, but I couldn't request books or photocopy them. (I didn't ask what the point of this would be.) Luckily, Jon - a native Washingtonian - had his driver's licence. I joked that he could do all the work for me.
We were given our photo IDs by a woman who seemed not to care which planet she was on, let alone whether she was speaking to another human being*. It was at this point that I realised I had left my jumper in the ladies' room. I raced back, but it had already vanished. A security guard sent us downstairs to lost property to make a report, but the jumper was never seen again. I hope whoever stole it wore it outside and got heatstroke.
We exited into the melting heat and made our way to the Jefferson Building, where the Main Reading Room is. Somewhere. We entered through the tourist side of the building. A receptionist assured us we could reach the Main Reading Room from this side, by taking the elevator to the first floor. He was wrong; there is - and I kid you not - a secret passage on the ground floor.
At last! The Main Reading Room! And a super-friendly and helpful librarian!
Oops! We were in the wrong building! For my area of research, we wanted the Reading Room in the Adams Building.
More secret passages: the three LC buildings are connected by Disneyland-esque tunnels under the ground. At the Adams Building, another saintly librarian helped me put in my requests. My "unverified" card was just fine for requesting books, he told me. My reading choices would even be hand-delivered to my reserved desk within the hour.
Ninety minutes later, having walked miles in our quest for knowledge, we exited into dripping rain and undiminished heat, me clutching my bag of precious photocopies and notes to my chest. We got on the Metro at Farragut West.
We got off one station later at Farragut North. Three of the Metro's busiest stations had been closed as a safety measure after smoke was reported in a tunnel. Smack in the middle of rush hour. What seemed like the entire population of the District was oozing up onto Connecticut Avenue, spilling onto the street, milling about in search of non-existent
busses. Incredibly, there wasn't a riot.
We crammed into a decrepit cab with four others and crawled up Conn Ave through the chaos, listening to news reports about the tunnel fire. At one point I thought Jon would lose an arm trying to shut the taxi's disintegrating door. But in the end, despite everything, we weren't even late for dinner. And I still had my bag of goodies.
All that, to tell you this: I was right. "The rest of her story" gives a completely different picture.
The battered wife, Donna, blames herself for the particular incident described in the book. "I had been alone night after night after night, and I couldn't stand it anymore." She doesn't mean alone without her husband; she means totally alone. "Paul's tantrums and his weird behaviour had made it so I couldn't keep any friends, so I had no one to turn to." Donna snaps: "How can I make him notice me?" She throws a glass, which bounces off his head, then shoves a chair into his knee.
Paul responds by punching Donna in the jaw, sending her flying across the room. Hearing glasses smashing, she lunges at him, and he starts to slap and punch her. "All I can remember is being punched and slapped and hit and glasses breaking."
Paul isn't acting in self-defence. He's beating up his wife, and this isn't the only time he does it. But why does Walker say he was also "battering" Donna by "ignoring her and working late"?
Because she uses the term "social battering" to describe the abusers' deliberate isolation of their wives. Walker devotes an entire chapter to the subject, describing women "trapped by their husbands' high-powered jobs". It's not merely a matter of hard-working hubby staying late at the office. Hubby knows his wife's behaviour will reflect on his high-profile career, so he keeps control of her by cutting her off from other people.
The abuser insists on "approving, if not choosing" her friends. At social gatherings, she never knows if he will be charming, or ignore her, or humiliate her in front of everyone. He uses get-togethers as an excuse to heap accusations and criticisms on her - she's "too provocative, too plain, too dowdy", she flirts with other men. Her friends start to avoid the couple; she starts to avoid social gatherings. Plus she knows people respect him, and aren't willing to cross him. There's no-one to turn to for help.
By taking the Walker quote out of its context, anti-feminists make it seem as though husbands like Paul are merely being "inattentive", as Cathy Young puts it. They just don't get it. Paul wasn't merely ignoring Donna; he beat her, and he deliberately cut off her from everyone she knew. The extreme isolation suffered by battered wives, on top of physical and verbal abuse, leads to depression and thoughts of suicide. Hard-working Paul isn't such a hero
after all.
The moral of the whole story is this: it takes so little effort to distort the truth, and so much effort to find it.
Postscript
In April 2001, I walked into a second-hand book shop in Canberra, and almost the first thing I saw was a copy of The Battered Woman. That's the way it goes!
* I visited the LC again in February 2004; the same woman was still there, and still just as unhelpful.