Although I’ve never been the victim of abuse by a partner and I am reasonably certain I’d be out the door immediately should it happen, I was abused as a child. Your sense of reality gets very warped when you are a battered child (or victim of any sort, I presume), I recognizing how wrong the other person is and that nothing you did deserved such treatment simply doesn’t register. It’s taken me over a decade if therapy to untangle my feelings of guilt and responsibilty for my own abuse.

I feel so sad for Rihanna. I wish we could all give her the self esteem to see what we see so she could escape before things get worse.

JetGirl: Yep. I’ve done work with abused women mostly in the context of immigration petitions, and some of them stayed through absolutely horrific abuse. And these were canny, resourceful women. Just… the internal issues are what they are.

Basically, I am having a hard time articulating how I am feeling about this, because I’m just getting mad/frustrated. Which is why I should perhaps step away from the Internet…..

here is what I think. I want to live in a world where no one hits anyone ever, for any reason. I don’t think anyone “deserves” it. I don’t think you did, and I don’t think Rihanna did, and I don’t think kids do. I think the only reason we think of these things as not cut and dry is because we think violence is inevitable, and I just don’t think that, at least not from the perspective of someone who thinks people can and do change, that we are not stuck with what we’ve already got. That’s the best I can do. I think the Jezebel commentariat is somewhat… young about these difficult issues sometimes. But I think they are speaking their judgement from the place of never wanting anyone to get hit, and to the extent they are, I get that they’re going to phrase their anger poorly.

I am afraid of having a bounded private sphere ever, just because it is traditionally in private spaces where people suffer most directly at the hands of other people, and cutting society out of the conversation – when to me it was there anyway, influencing those people’s choices, allowing someone to think that when they are angry it is worth hitting someone else about – well, I just can’t do it, not entirely. My perspective may be limited from the outside, but the truth is, perspective on the inside gets limited too. It’s nihilism otherwise, because detail upon detail get piled up.

I don’t know what the answer is, sadly. Like this, as like most other bad things that happen to women just because they are women, I just feel profoundly sad. And I want to give them my cat to snuggle. She is very soft, and dislikes how human upset harshes her mellow, and so works to make people laugh.

Also, I am really sorry to hear about your cousin, PS.

I feel like I am in some kind of alternative Universe all of a sudden.

Chris Brown really needs to stand up and do some major talking, if this is true. None of the sort-of apology bs.