I have been following the Linda Hirshman piece on why we ought to be telling women to pull themselves out of domestic violence by their bootstraps, and feeling somewhat frustrated at the interest the concept has provoked. There is a certain brutal truth about her point, in the sense that I am fully ready to believe that no one is much interested in helping battered women (other than feminists, that is), least of all Hirshman. No, Hirshman wants to make a splash by distinguishing herself as the feminist who has not fallen victim (heh) to “the current love affair with understanding.” This, of course, is the responsible position – she is responsibly advocating that everybody responsibly quit responsibly caring about other people. How responsibly awesome of her.
Now, Hirshman’s point would be responsibly revolutionary were it to actually change the current state of affairs, but the truth is, we are in no danger of having anyone think that battered women are not responsible for the state in which they find themselves. And I’m not just talking about those women blaming themselves for the state they are in. Not only do teenagers everywhere think that women are “asking” for fists in their face, the rest of us are all well, fine and good with letting this be a “private issue” between two people in a relationship. (Of course, “private issue” is mostly code for “not my problem” in this society, because we only say things are private when we don’t really care about them, which is why the contents of my uterus are still up for societal discussion 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.)
This, of course, is revealed by the fact that Hirshman appears to believe that the only relevant responsibilities in this equation are those of the abused and the abuser. (I shall grudgingly admit she pays minor lip service to the latter, if only to shrug it off in favour of her Greater Point About Responsibility.) About the responsibility of others to help those in need, she has much less to say. (Not to mention the responsibility to not be so fucking self-indulgent as to assume that your “responsibility epiphany” had never before occurred to a single living soul.)
Are you sick of the word “responsibility” yet? I sure am. Here are some words I’d like to hear, for once, come out of media people’s mouths about domestic violence: shelters, patriarchy, fucking assholes, zero-tolerance, etc. You catch my drift. But the truth is that I think Hirshman has fallen prey to that thing, you know that thing, where you say a word over and over and over again until it has no meaning? Other than “Please give me a way out so that I don’t actually have to care about battered women?”
A lot of bloggers have responded, passionately and articulately, with their own survivor narrative, or that of women they have worked with: a favourites of mine is here.
But I wrote this post because I think Hirshman’s position fails in an abstract way too.
I’ve been wandering over to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ place a lot on this just because most of his commenters don’t self-identify as feminists, but they are thoughtful and tend to give me good fodder to reinforce and qualify my views. Unfortunately, even Ta-Nehisi (who as you may know I generally think is amazing) seems to have fallen prey to the responsibility delusion, which he likens to a similar concept of agency in Malcolm X’s calls for black nationalism:
Those of us who preferred Malcolm to Martin did so, not so much out of animus towards whites, but because implicit in Martin’s message was, “your [sic] doomed if these people who hate you don’t see the light.” Malcolm, on the other hand, seemed to say, “Let white folks be white folks. You be you. You have the power to be you, and you have a responsibility to be you.”
Well, there are a number of problems with the analogy, not the least of them being that a societal conception of agency (i.e. overcoming systematic racism) is always going to be rather different from an individual one (i.e. being able to stop that fist from hitting your face). See, to my understanding Malcolm’s message was not, though it sounds like one here, a call to rugged individualism. It was a call to reclaim oneself as a member of a group with a history and an experience that was worth recognizing. Were I, tomorrow, to call for some kind of solidarity of womankind to “Let men be men, and us be us,” well, I don’t even know where to begin saying what “we” are. It seems to me Malcolm’s call has the fundamental advantage of, by claiming yourself, to also have the ability to rely on a community of like-minded people to help you agitate for further space in which you can “be yourself,” which, it seems to me, is the flipside appeal of black nationalism, the idea that by doing something for yourself you can help others.
Meanwhile back at the domestic violence ranch, there is a fundamental loneliness to being the immediate, fist-in-your-face victim of violence, again by someone whom you believe yourself to love. It is lonely because of the stigma, sure, of being the “kind of woman” who stays with a man that hits her. But it is also lonely because there is very little space, in such situations, to carve out the sense of self that has to be there for a call to “agency” to nurture in the first place.
But even more fundamentally, I can’t agree with Ta-Nehisi because I think he is falling prey to an old tautology about what it means to have free wil (or, again, as he calls it, “agency”). Being free to choose doesn’t have to mean that in every situation every choice is available to you. In the real world, which is to say the immediate, concrete one we live in every day, we know that this is the case. We know that this idea that you can shove aside all the societal and personal detritus in your life to “see things as they really are” is nothing more than that: an idea, perhaps fun to talk about on blogs and in college philosophy classes, but in no way reflective or helpful to actual victims of violence.
And the truth is, as in all conversations about the way the powerful (here the abuser) impose their will on those who are less so (here the abused), my loyalty is to the latter. I don’t care whether helping them is frustrating to me because I wonder why they stay. I think trying to help them is enough. And I think it’s the only responsibility there is that really matters.
1. There is nothing scarier than someone with a lot of power who can’t see the power they have because at one time that person/entity was seriously victimized and they can’t stop thinking that they are disadvantaged when they are, in fact, advantaged. Let me know if you want examples but I’m sure you can think of a few. For this reason I totally get the dangers of victim identity, and I am totally cool with disadvantaged groups including women organizing, arming, fighting back, dropping out, etc. As long as this doesn’t take away from societal efforts to eradicate the ill they fight against or put the onus entirely on the victim.
2. You make great points though about the isolation of domestic violence and there not exactly being a movement to join when one is actually being abused (later, as a survivor or ally, maybe) and the dangers of conflating all social movements and types of victimization.
3. HARM.REDUCTION. Harm Reduction. Harm Reduction! Why is it so hard? We want less domestic violence. Let’s use evidence based policies that lead to less domestic violence. Social shunning, shaming, “I told you so-ing” victims? As far as I can see WILL.NOT.STOP.DOMESTIC.VIOLENCE, either in the individual instance or in the aggregate.
JD, I’m not sure what any of this has to do with victim identity. I mean, I know that you know this, but women currently, right now, being abused by their male partners are, um, victims. Ain’t nothing wrong with calling that out where it is.
I am shocked at Hirshman’s assumption that there isn’t enough of the bootstraps bootstraps message in the dominant culture. As if the ideal of rugged individualism wasn’t something that gets crammed down our throats every minute of every day.
I love living in a society that makes it more convenient/palatable/acceptable/all of the above to talk about the responsibilities of abuse victims than the responsibilities of abusers.
Right PS, I understand that, I’m just saying I understand the impulse to make sure that a victim IDENTITY doesn’t form around the experience of victimization (which is undeniable), and if that is Hirshman’s goal (I am giving her the most generous reading I possibly can) I understand where she is coming from although I think she executes her argument insanely and incorrectly.
Kithkin, I think part of Hirshman’s whole schtick is that (American? one presumes? She never really accounts for her cultural, racial and class biases which are rife throughout all her work) men HAVE absorbed the rugged individualist ideology, which is why they are successful and on top in patriarchy. Instead of critiquing what gets a person power in our society, she tells women to mimic the behavior of the already-powerful in order to gain power ourselves (like in other work she advises women to consciously choose romantic partners who earn less than us so that we can maintain bargaining power over work and home life — men do this all the time by marrying younger, poorer or less educated partners). She is trying the same kind of tactic here, telling women to “act like” men — to not act like victims. But her sort of equality-feminism gone wild approach seems to outright deny the strength of the cultural and biological factors which make us so frequently victims of domestic violence.
What I don’t get is why she seems to feel so dignified and brave saying these things. Like if men have internalized the rugged individualistic ethic, where have women been that they haven’t been hearing it as well? Maybe it’s a function of my age but I feel like I’ve been hearing “if you want to succeed, act like a man” forever. It’s a tired and unhelpful refrain, so I simply don’t understand framing it as some kind of standing-up-to-the-(feminist)-establishment the way Hirshman does.
The entire problem with the “bootstrap” mentality, wherever it’s found, is that it is based on the mistaken idea that everyone, everywhere, has been issued boots.
The other really annoying thing about Hirshman’s article is that she acts as if “why does she stay?” is this huge taboo, unanswered question she is not allowed to ask. Ummm, newsflash, we know exactly why she stays: fear, brainwashing, low self esteem, threats of harm, economic dependency, emotional manipulation, ETC ETC ETC AKA EVERYTHING YOU EVER HAVE TO WORK ON AS A WOMAN IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO LEAVE AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP AND THEN FOR YEARS LATER IN THERAPY AND WOMENS SUPPORT GROUPS AT SHELTERS WHICH WERE FORMED BY “UNDERSTANDING” FEMINISTS. Like, what answer does she think she’s gonna get, “because I like getting hit?”
The whole “Why doesn’t she just leave?” question pisses me off SO much!! When people are kidnapped we KNOW that sometimes they develop an affection for their kidnappers, sometimes they work to protect those people, sometimes they work against being freed, this is so commonly understood that it has a name, it’s a fucking SYNDROME!
Why is it so hard to see the same thing at work in abusive relationships? And to a greater degree because marriages last longer than kidnappings, the people involved, ideally, chose to enter those relationships, and the abusive spouse probably does love their partner and isn’t an asshole dickface at least some of the time.
s.o.a.l.g. hits the point that upsets me the most – why is this always about the women, the abused and what they have to do to stop it/get out? Everyone needs to focus just as much time/energy/thought into teaching all boys & men that it is not acceptable in the first place. And that means wide-sweeping cultural changes from beer ads to news reporting. And sadly, our society has no desire to do that.