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In my own experience, I find it very difficult for people who have never lived in an abusive environment to understand the workings of an abusive environment. This is not to say that people aren’t capable of it, or that they’re willfully ignorant, just that many people do not seem to understand the complexities of what goes into living with a psychopath.

It took me a while to accept this; to accept that a lot of people thought I was exaggerating or lying when I would talk about things my father had done or what life was like for my family, but now I can see how difficult it is for someone who has never had experience with someone so manipulative, devious, self-serving, hurtful, and abusive to believe that people like that exist.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people espouse their lack of sympathy for “abused women” because, from their perspective, the woman’s situation was one of her own making. Why can’t she stand up for herself? Why’d she marry him if he was already hitting her? Why didn’t she ever try to leave him? There are several reasons that people adopt these opinions, and almost all of them amount to a gross misunderstanding of what living in an abusive environment is like, or about the mentality of a victim of perpetual abuse.

It’s not that easy to leave when the person you’re trying to get away from has a legal right to your children, has isolated you from your family and friends, has a stranglehold on your family finances, knows how to find you wherever you are (a problem my family encountered for various reasons), is a pathological liar who can manipulate his way around most problems and obstacles, and has vowed to hunt you down and kill you if/when you try to leave. The police don’t matter to them. Whatever consequences they might face don’t matter to them. There is no deterrent, just a constant, futile effort to try and pacify their anger while weathering the abuse.

Even when there is a physical way to safely leave, abuse victims are often mentally incapable of it. Many of them have extremely low self-esteem from years of being verbally and physically battered and convince themselves they deserve the abuse for one reason or another. They still believe that the abuser can change. They tell themselves that, despite all evidence to the contrary, an abuser would never consciously hurt them. They blame abusive behavior on whatever outside factors they can - alcoholism, drug use, children misbehaving, work related stress, everything. They believe that the abuser loves them and they cling to the idea that, someday, that love will make the abuser stop.

To blame an abuse victim for this mentality and withdraw all sympathy for them and their children is cruel, illogical, and shortsighted. It’s a mental illness; a coping mechanism that can’t instantaneously be shut off when they are finally able to live in a normal, stable environment. I was very frustrated with and angry at my mother for many years for never leaving my father. Towards the end, before we did finally leave, I started hearing statements similar to the ones above come out of her mouth less and less. She actually started to get up when he would knock her down, push back when he would shove her. That made him angrier, but it demonstrated the beginnings of a distinctive mental change for my mother.

I was prompted to think about all this when I came across one of the articles about Mary Winkler and what she’s currently going through trying to keep her children. I have been surprised throughout the course of the proceedings by how little sympathy people have for her. I was distressed by some of the quotes included in the article since they reminded me of things my mother would say from time to time while I was growing up.

From this CNN.com article:
“That’s where I will always grieve the fact that I failed Matthew in not bringing it to his attention how bad it was,” she said.

Yeah. She really failed Matthew. Matthew, the man who suffocated their child so he didn’t have to hear her cry. Matthew, the man who abused Mary, sexually assaulted her, and threatened her with death at his hands. Matthew failed his family. Matthew was an irrational, violent psycho who should never have been allowed to get to the point he was at, and whose fault was that? It was Matthew’s.

The behavior of Matthew Winkler’s parents is appalling. They’ve demanded an apology from Mary Winkler - have they made a public apology to the Winkler children for what they had to endure at their father’s hands, or to Mary? If the object here is to point fingers at unfit parents, maybe it’s not in the children’s best interests to place them in the home their father grew up in. He was obviously a real gem.

EDIT: Video footage from Mary Winkler’s interview with Oprah is available through CNN. In the video, she is constantly making excuses for his behavior. It’s sad and interesting to watch. The CNN headlines for the story - “Wife who shot preacher calls sentence too short” - are deliberately inflammatory and tragically misleading.

NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to the Pearl Jam song, “Can’t Find A Better Man”.

A boy I knew growing up murdered his x-girlfriend the other day. While I was reading an article about the incident, I remembered wondering what became of him once I had moved away. I didn’t know him very well until I was forced to sit across from him in class. He didn’t know me before that either, but he immediately keyed into the fact that I was an upstanding goody-two-shoes and that, without a lot of effort, he could get a reaction out of me.

Most of the time he wasn’t mean to me. He wanted my attention and he would say or do whatever he thought would work to get it. His way of engaging me was through harassment - the time-tested technique many adolescent boys use to get girls to pay attention to them. Sometimes he could hold a civil conversation; sometimes he couldn’t; but I used to talk to him and periodically he would open up and tell me things about himself.

He grew up in a rich/upper-middle-class white neighborhood. He was fascinated with violence and gangster movies. Once he told me that his dream was to run off to New York City and join the mob. He had a very short attention span and would become antsy and distracted very easily. When he was in a good mood, he was hilarious and charming. When he was in a bad mood, he was cruel and abusive. He wasn’t stupid but his grades were poor. He got thrown out of class at least once a week. He would alternate between having violent outbursts and lethargic moments where he could hardly stay awake. Maybe our teacher sat him with me because she thought I would be a tempering influence on him or something. My good-girl status was often getting me punished like that.

Last week, this same kid - the kid who once jumped up on our table in the middle of class and shouted, “Praise Jesus!” - beat, strangled, and stabbed the woman he once dated. He left her body in the bathtub of their apartment, his fingerprints smeared in the blood along the wall. This is what allowed the police to immediately connect him to the murder and arrest him shortly after.

Even when he was a kid, everyone knew he needed help. That was back when he was merely dreaming of becoming a violent criminal; back when someone could have attempted to stop the destructive, tragic path his life was on. I wonder if it would have even made a difference.

I think about the person he was when he was doing well, when he was happy, and how much potential that person had. I think about how he was constantly getting in trouble and it resulted in nothing. No one ever wanted to deal with him. He always seemed to be punished in the same way, in a useless, cyclical fashion, even when his inappropriate behavior escalated. I remember thinking many of these things at the time, too, but hoping he would ‘grow out of it’ despite the fact that there was no reason to believe that he would. Now a well-meaning girl who probably saw a lot of the same things I saw in him is dead.

What a complete waste.

I should post some of the spam comments I’ve received in the past 24 hours here so that people can see how hateful and repulsive they are, but it doesn’t really seem necessary. You could probably guess. “cunt” this and “rape” that, child porn fantasy fulfillment stories, disturbing images, random empty spam material, etc. etc. All this because of what I said below. Wow.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

- Virginia Woolf

Blogging While Female

I just wanted to highlight the abuse that this woman has received for having the nerve to defend abused women, condemn pornography, and offer women a space where they can speak freely without fear of retribution.

I can’t think of a better way to give credence to the arguments of radical feminists.

EDIT: It makes me incredibly sad that this is one of the top posts on WordPress.

I was treated to a splattering of posters for the Bratz movie around Manhattan today, a film based upon the popular doll/cartoon/puzzle piece franchise. These are Bratz dolls:

Ewwwwwwww… It sends a shudder down my spine to even have to upload the picture. You’ve probably seen them. A quick glance, they look like any twiggy thin Barbie doll, then you do a double take because their hideous makeup-caked faces have made an imprint on your brain.

Here, in a succinct little bite-sized portion, is why Bratz dolls are clearly created, endorsed, and owned by satan or other satan-related affiliates:

WHY WOULD YOU GIVE THIS TO YOUR DAUGHTER?! I guess someone may have said that about Barbies, once, too…

1) They celebrate stupidity.

They’re called “Bratz”. Need more? Look at their website, watch the cartoon, go see the upcoming movie, which I’m sure is a shining example of progressive pro-feminist ideals developed by women for a smart, impressionable female audience.

2) They take the laughably unrealistic beauty standard and blow it out of the water.

I mean, Jesus, just look at them. The nose thing kills me. They hardly have them. Oversized, pouty Angelina Jolie lips. Eyes drowning in eyeliner and eyeshadow. Why is it that girl dolls are never allowed to have noses? Is being able to smell unattractive? Their faces look almost identical, save for the slightly differing skin tones and preferred shades of makeup. I’m not even against makeup in every way, shape, or form. I’m fine with teenage girls playing with makeup, but not when it’s to tear down their first face and create a new one.

3) They’re teaching girls… what?

To plaster industrial strength makeup on their faces much earlier than ever before; to dress as provocatively and mass-market targeted as possible; to adopt the attitudes that very insecure, self-bankrupt older women adopt now rather than later; to achieve a level of thinness thought impossible by human test subjects; to get plastic surgery so that their noses are extra itty bitty and cwute (meaning barely visible); to gloriously and proudly refer to themselves as ‘bratz’, a word that, by my recollection, used to mean you were obnoxious and self-entitled; to love shopping without reason or rhyme; to be cliquey and exclusionary; to predicate their lives on fashion, fun, and flirtatiousness.

It annoys the hell out of me that these dolls have managed to become so popular. Why can’t girls be assertive rather than ‘bratty’? Why can’t they have dolls that reflect something of what their lives are actually like? And, if they actually live lives like those of Bratz dolls, why would we encourage anyone to celebrate or idolize that mentality?

Thank God my sister missed this craze by a small margin, because if I had ever seen her playing with a Bratz doll I may have had to remove it from her presence, tear it’s head off, and chuck it in the trash.

I stumbled across an article on MSN today titled, “‘Momblocked’ mothers edged out by dads”.

Wait - what?

Am I insane, or is that a very strange and deliberate play on words within the title -’momblocked’ instead of ‘cockblocked’? Cockblocked, of course, being the phrase that men use when their predatory attempts to coerce a woman into sex fail due to some unforeseen barrier. Was this their sad and disconcerting way of trying to attract men’s attention?

Journalistic sexism rears its ugly and perplexing head once again.

Laurelin in the Rain has posted the 39th Carnival of Feminists, and there’s definitely some interesting reads in there. Just wanted to mention it. Tra la la.

If you hate doing it as much as I do, you’ve probably wondered the same thing yourself. It’s fucking stupid. I only do it when suckered into it or when feeling particularly insecure. The information below is interesting. Enjoy.

From The Straight Dope:

I knew if I procrastinated long enough on this often-asked question somebody would eventually do the legwork for me. Sure enough, Pete Cook of Chicago has sent me a 1982 article from the Journal of American Culture by Christine Hope bearing the grand title “Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture.”

The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.)

The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn’t know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.

For the remainder of the piece, which I assure you is very interesting, click the link above.

… and here’s a fun site to browse, if the mood strikes you:

Beauty and Hygiene Advertisements from the 1920’s to the 1950’s

If you’re an undergraduate turned stripper.

Academic Stripping? Student Strips For Thesis
Professor Applauds Student’s Courage

OMAHA, Neb. — A University of Nebraska-Omaha student took a job recently as a stripper for class credit.

Jenny Heineman, a sociology student, said she wanted to bring sex workers out of the dark, so she felt she had to enter their world. Her thesis, “Gender and Work: An Ethnography of a Midwest Strip Club,” got her a B and she graduated this spring with high honors.

I would really like to see what her analysis was. I’m going to look through her thesis. Was she really doing critical, meaningful work? Are her assertions really that groundbreaking? Because other women have done this already; it’s not exactly a novel, innovative concept. What’s the nature of her “fascination” with the world of sex work?

The most striking part of the whole story to me was that she received a B. That’s right. Her professor praised her courage. Just not enough to give her an outstanding grade, I guess. She would have needed to prostitute herself for that.

I found this while browsing Google, looking for Annie Leibovitz photographs. It’s selections for Leibovitz’s book, Women, hosted by the New York Times, along with a written accompaniment by Susan Sontag and an interview with Ms. Leibovitz herself.

Women by Annie Leibovitz

I was thinking about this because of the attention Annie Leibovitz’s recent photo of Queen Elizabeth of England is getting, which can be seen in pretty large detail here.

It’s a provocative photograph, even without nudity or anyone “bathing in asses’ milk”, as one of the articles quoted critics as fearing. Some of the British are disappointed with it, lamenting that it’s a reflection of Helen Mirren’s recent portrayal of the Queen rather than the Queen herself.

I like the photograph, more for its artistic goals than its value as a portrait. It’s thought-provoking, the dark clouds looming outside the palace; the Queen enshrined within, turning her face to the world and the faint light that falls on her while selectively remaining in her gilded retreat. I agree that the photograph is a distinct reflection of the issues brought about by the film, and that probably plays a role in why the British people feel uneasy about it. It’s important to note that Leibovitz is an American photographer. I think that any perceived criticism would be taken defensively as a result since it’s not coming from the Queen’s own people but from the outside world.

Regardless, the photographs in the Women exhibit are wonderful. They showcase the wild distinctive essence of each individual woman while collectively highlighting strength and cosmic beauty. Take a look. It’s inspiring.