Comments Elsewhere

Glaivester:

But a lot of people would never think of that unless they asked the question “why didn’t she just leave?” and then search for the answer.

There is more than one way to ask a question. If all you’re saying is that we ought to be willing to honestly inquire into the conditions that keep women in abusive situations, I can’t think of anyone who would disagree with you. (At most, feminists will — rightly — point out that we also need to inquire into why men abuse women, rather than simply treating that as a given fact.) If women who have survived abuse volunteer the information, all for the best. But if you mean that we are entitled to demand an accounting of her reasons from any woman who is battered or raped (rather than presuming that she did have her reasons, like any other human being, and letting her explain them or not explain them as she sees fit); and that we ought to interrogate specific women in specific cases about why they didn’t leave, and suggest that — whatever reasons they may have had — it’s that that’s necessary and sufficient for systematic male violence against women to continue — then what you’re doing is fucked up and it needs to stop. Because yes, that is victim-blaming, and yes, that is making excuses for the rapists and batterers, and yes, that is a hostile and hurtful way to treat survivors of violence. This kind of attitude can be either ignorant or malicious. Often it’s a bit of both. If it’s malicious then there’s precious little reason to care whether your response helps the interrogator to understand or not, because people who do this maliciously generally don’t care and don’t want to understand. If it’s ignorance, then I don’t think it’s obvious that sympathetically catering to ignorance is always either obligatory or helpful as a means to getting people to understand better. And, on the subject of ignorant interrogations that weren’t malicious in intent, you should be aware that it’s very easy to ask a question that you think is just honest inquiry, but which really comes across as a demand or an interrogation. Particularly to someone who has been through hell and is already struggling with self-doubt and self-blame.

Avenir:

Punish the individual men, for sure, but cure whatever societal disease is producing these men, too.

Glaivester:

I am not questioning why society is treating them like they are helpless. I am questioning what society is doing to make them helpless.

Avenir:

I do think that society raises women in a way that makes them vulnerable to victimization.

Y’all keep talking about “society” as if it were a gaseous medium or an airborne disease instead of a bunch of individual men and women living in roughly the same area. “Society” doesn’t “raise women,” or treat anyone like they’re helpless, or make them helpless, and male violence against women is not a medical condition that “society” contracted. Men and women raise children; men and women can choose to, or decline to, treat people as if they are helpless or make them helpless; and male violence against women is something that men choose to do to women, every day, everywhere. I mention these things because when you start to talk about “society” doing this or that you are quickly and thoroughly changing the subject from the real facts of real men and women’s daily lives to some reified abstraction, treated as if it were some looming presence outside of us (when in fact it just is you, and I, and our neighbors), and in the process nicely obscure questions such as: who in “society” is doing the actual hitting and raping; who in “society” is making the excuses for it in conversation, commentary, and high theory; who has the most power to determine what we learn to say and do when we are being brought up, and so on. Here’s a hint: it’s mostly men. If you sincerely want to stop encouraging passivity and irresponsibility, maybe you should start by talking in a way that actually demands that actual men be actually accountable for the specific things they do wrong, rather than passing the buck to “society” and treating male violence as if it were a given natural fact.