See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

by Jess Hill

Men abuse women because society tells them they are entitled to be in control. In fact, society says that if they are not in control, they won’t succeed – they won’t get the girl, they won’t get the money, and they will be vulnerable to the violence and control of other men.

What this reveals is that there is nothing uniquely weak, helpless or masochistic about victims of domestic abuse. Faced with the universal methods of coercive control, their responses are no different from those of trained soldiers.

She is ‘taken prisoner gradually, by courtship’. Before she feels trapped by fear and control, it is love that first binds her to her abuser, and it’s love that makes her forgive him when he says he won’t abuse her again. Abusers are rarely simple thugs or sadists – if they were, they’d be far easier to avoid or apprehend. Instead, like all men, they can be loving, kind, charming and warm, and they struggle with personal pain and uncertainty. This is who the woman falls in love with.

Fairytales and Hollywood movies have led us to interpret the warning signs of domestic abuse – obsession, jealousy, possessiveness – as signs of passion, not danger.

What should surprise us about domestic abuse is not that a woman can take a long time to leave, but that she has the mental fortitude to survive.

What is happening in the minds of these men to make them sabotage the lives of their partners and children – to the point where they destroy even their own lives?

‘Men are afraid women will laugh at them, and women are afraid men will kill them.’

Though our culture excels at finding ever more sophisticated ways for us to feel shame, it’s important to understand that shame itself is not a learned emotion. It is one of the nine primary ‘affects’#11 we are born with, on the same level physiologically as anger, sadness, fear, joy, anticipation, surprise, dissmell (the avoidance of bad smells) and disgust.

Shame is a concept few people understand, so Gilligan lists its synonyms – and there are dozens: being insulted, dishonoured, disrespected, disgraced, demeaned, slandered, ridiculed, teased, taunted, mocked, rejected, defeated, subjected to indignity or ignominy; ‘losing face’ and being treated as insignificant; feeling inferior, impotent, incompetent, weak, ignorant, poor, a failure, ugly, unimportant, useless, worthless. Envy and jealousy are siblings of shame, says Gilligan, since they trigger – and are underpinned by – feelings of inferiority. So central is shame to the human experience, writes Gilligan, that we have as many words for it as the Inuit are said to have for snow.

They feel ‘acutely ashamed, over matters that are so trivial that their very triviality makes it even more shameful to feel ashamed about them, so they are ashamed even to reveal what shames them’.

Shame is felt by both genders. In fact, women have it drummed into them that their very femaleness is a shameful thing. Shame is something many women spend their lives trying to overcome. But women do not commit most of the world’s violent crime. Men do.

‘Women are humiliated and shamed as well, and they don’t go off on shooting sprees,’ says Kimmel. ‘Why not? Because they don’t feel entitled to be in power. [For men], it’s humiliation plus entitlement. It’s the idea that “I don’t feel empowered, but I should.”’

Misogyny is a ghost in the machine of our culture: it is what makes men and women alike believe that women are not as competent, trustworthy, reliable or authoritative as men, and that women are better suited to caregiving roles than jobs that require clear thinking and decision-making.

‘The way we “turn boys into men” is through injury,’ he writes. ‘We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, from sensitivity to others. The very phrase “Be a man” means suck it up and keep going.

‘The question is not “How do we stop that man from doing that to us?” but “How do we stop men feeling like they’re entitled to?” We have to start looking at what we are doing to little boys to make them feel entitled. We need to sit down and start addressing the social problem, because we are still the second sex.’

Rather than idolising “real men” who don’t hit women, prevention campaigns could be valuing the other kinds of choices boys and men make, such as caring for others, supporting those in need and working for the collective good.’

In believing themselves to be at fault, children actually create what they need in an otherwise helpless situation: a sense of agency.

In a bizarre twist, the introduction of women’s refuges in America – an innovation to save the lives of women – has actually done more to save the lives of the men who terrorise them.

**Pence went on to say that while the sector needed to own up to women’s violence, stopping individual acts of violence wasn’t the real work of the movement. Their work was to change the social conditions that cause domestic violence. What would change, she asked, if women stopped being violent to men? The answer is clear – nothing like the change that would occur if men stopped being violent towards women.