To suffer and soothe

The Bakker, Pickton, and Lepine murders are not aberrations, but are symptomatic of what defines all men and their relationships to women

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

Donald Bakker has been accused of viciously raping as many as nine girls and 51 women. If these allegations hold up in court, many men will argue that he's just an aberration. They'll say the same thing if Robert Pickton's found guilty, just as they said it about Paul Bernardo and Marc Lepine. I, for one, am not persuaded. If the men who hurt women are truly aberrations, why are there so many of them?

Violence against women is commonplace. The University of Victoria's Sexual Assault Center reports that one in four Canadian women will be sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. A woman is raped every 17 minutes in Canada, and 62% of these attacks result in physical injury. Only one in ten sexual assaults will ever be reported to the police. According to a 1993 Statistics Canada study, 36% of women(1) have experienced violence in a current or previous marriage (the national average is 29%). 43% of all wife assaults result in medical attention; this means that, in BC, 20.5% of women(2) have required medical attention as a result of domestic violence. Similar statistics have been produced by the BC Institute Against Family Violence. According to the Institute, half of all spousal assault victims suffer injury. 88% of these injuries are borne by women, and only 12% by men. According to a study released by the institute in 1994, in the lower mainland between 1984 and 1992, women were murdered by intimate partners more than twice as often as men were.

Given these statistics, it seems that the sadists on the nightly news are only the most visible expressions of a much deeper and more pervasive phenomenon. I suspect this phenomenon is rooted in the culture of patriarchal shame.

Men are taught from an early age that to be worthy of any respect they must be strong and successful. To encourage masculine competitiveness, boys receive far less affection from their parents than girls do. Boys who show any sign of weakness, or who appear gentle and sensitive, are harshly ridiculed and occasionally beaten by their peers. Sometimes, their parents treat them the same way. Girls, socialized to desire boys who are powerful and unemotional, refuse to date anyone their peers might call a "loser". This pattern of humiliation and exclusion blocks the emotional maturation of even popular boys; unpopular boys fare far worse. As boys become men, they enter a working world that often reinforces the psychologically debilitating lessons of their childhood, a world where humiliation cements hierarchies in place.

Excruciating feelings of shame and rage are inevitable consequences of this process, but these emotions can rarely be expressed towards the people responsible for triggering them. Each level of the social hierarchy uses the glamour of power and the threat of reprisal to insulate itself from criticisms from below. People are therefore forced to redirect their feelings downwards. Those at the top use and abuse whomever they please; those lower down use and abuse whomever they can. In this way, the powerful soothe themselves with the suffering of the powerless.

Since women have historically had less financial, political, and physical power than men, they've been forced to "suffer and soothe" more than anyone else. The roles traditionally available to women can usually be reduced to these two basic functions.

Of course, women have needs of their own. Like men, they desire independence and recognition; left to their own devices, they'll pursue their own ambitions. This threatens many men, because autonomous women are rarely willing to be enslaved for the sake of someone else's ego. These men therefore try to restrict women's freedom. There are a lot of ways of keeping women subservient, but the most effective way is to simply hurt them. Like all forms of political terror, violence against women is strategic. When a woman is beaten or raped, her psychological capacity for autonomy is often mutilated. Overwhelmed by terror and self-loathing, she typically looks for protection from people who she thinks are unlikely to be victimized themselves. Since every woman is at risk of such violence, she tends to turn to men for protection, exchanging her freedom for security. Seeing her plight, and hoping to avoid a similar fate, many women who haven't been victimized do the same.

This makes it easier for men to find companionship. Even an unattractive and uninteresting man may appeal to a frightened woman, so long as he seems nonviolent and protective. Once in a relationship, the fear of losing their guardian's favor encourages women to be submissive and supportive. In this way, even ethical men benefit from violence against women.

These dynamics currently prevent a large percentage of men from achieving emotional maturity. Unless such maturity becomes the masculine norm, men will continue to suffer intolerable shame, and will continue using women to salve their injuries. This shame is the foundation upon which the abuse of women rests; to eliminate the violence, this foundation has to crumble.

To bring this about, it's not enough to empower women; we also need to radically change the way we construct masculinity. Parents, teachers, and the media need to begin acknowledging and addressing boys' emotional needs, and to begin providing incentives for boys to explore their vulnerabilities. In both private and public spheres, men need to stop humiliating each other, and to start caring about one another's psychological well-being. They must display these virtues publicly, modeling them for boys and younger men. Finally, these changes need to be supported by the rapid spread of egalitarian economic and political institutions.

In the end, for women to be freed from patriarchal violence, men must be freed from patriarchal shame. On that day, when men can soothe themselves, the abusers among them become the aberrations we pretend they already are.

But at the moment, I'm sitting in a café not far from the pig farm. Donald Bakker's picture is on the cover of the newspaper on my table. Nearby, a group of men are making fun of feminists, and complaining about the "bitches" in their lives. I sip my coffee and wonder if that day will ever come.

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Errata:

The author of the article wishes to make the following corrections since publication:

1 This statistic should read "36% of ever-married British Columbian women" (back to article)

2 Likewise, this statistic should also read "20.48% of ever-married women" (back to article)