Over the years, the celebrity rap sheet of woman beaters has included Charlie Sheen’s apparent pummeling of porn star Ginger Lynn, and an ugly public court case against William Hurt, with an ex-lover seeking reparations for, among other things, his brutal and bruising temper. Perhaps it is simply seeing that the expected—Axl Rose, Sean Penn—and the unexpected—William Hurt? David Soul? Hutch?—seem equally represented on this roster of rogues can make it seem like all the men on earth are beating up all the women on earth. It’s hard not to think, though you know him not at all, that if that sweet, sensitive Jackson Browne with those gentle blue eyes and boyishly shiny hair, if that nice California guy who sings songs about girls who commit suicide can take a swing at a woman, then all bets are off. To assume the guise of public service and make us all feel connected to these sad stories of woman-beating, gossip items about domestic violence are often offered up with some version of these statistics: two thousand women per year are killed by their partners; every fifteen seconds a woman in the United States is beaten, a total of three to four million women annually; 30 percent of all female murder victims were killed by their husbands, ex-husbands or boyfriends; in 1993 alone, there were 300,000 domestic violence calls to the police in New York City; the Department of Justice, which has been keeping track of spousal abuse incidents only since 1984, reports that most acts of violence against women were committed by a man known to them.
The aforementioned statistics are, I would guess, as accurate and impartial as this kind of data gathering gets. On the other hand, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence asserts that at least one incident of abuse will occur in two-thirds of all marriages: now, this is the kind of statement that is just fodder for those who think this problem has been exaggerated. My guess is that in damn near 100 percent of all marriages, at some point somebody throws an object in an intentionally hurtful direction, somebody gets smacked in the face or kicked in the balls, and thoughts of a knife to the jugular or arsenic dumped into the pot roast could be daily events, but what that has to do with two-thirds of couples I don’t know. And then there are other statements that are more specific, and still dangerously misleading: Alana Bowman, head of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Domestic Violence Unit told The New York Times that “unofficial statistics from the coroner’s office” show a killing as a result of spousal abuse “every day and a half.” I defy anyone to tell me what that means. Why are these numbers “unofficial”? Why would the coroner know something that, say, the police officers investigating the death wouldn’t know? For that matter, if the death is sufficiently suspicious so that the coroner’s findings are consistent with a domestic violence homicide, why aren’t the cops looking into it? And wouldn’t it be easier to say “every thirty-six hours” than “every day and a half”? (It also seems worth noting that the coroner Ms. Bowman is referring to would be the same man, Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, who forgot to get renamed on his way through Ellis Island, took eight days of direct examination and droning exegesis in O.J.’s criminal trial to say, in essence, that stab wounds were the cause of death, and was called “loony” in The New Republic after demonstrating a decapitation technique on one of the prosecutors, substituting a ruler for a knife.)
In this numeromania of facts and figures—and many of these are so easy to find that they were in an appendix in Faye Resnick’s second book—it starts to feel like: So much gynocrime, so little time. And I don’t mean to be flippant, but this barrage of percentages and fractions and decimals and likelihoods and estimates, which is meant to give all this human mess the solid, spreadsheet feel of some simple bookkeeping, actually does just that: these numbers are reductive. Some try desperately to be accurate but none are unbiased: the Justice Department errs on the side of caution, women’s advocacy groups tend toward overstatement. Despite what is likely a wide margin of error, we trust statistics more than we trust anecdotal evidence, so much so that just after Nicole’s murder, in the same week Time, Newsweek, CNN and ABC all reported—completely erroneously—that domestic violence was the leading cause of injury to women ages fifteen to forty-four. All these respected news organizations made the same mistake because someone or some group released inaccurate data, and even those who should know better salivate over statistics, repeating and reporting them without question. Anecdotal information does not have the feel of fact, does not have the integrity of integers and percentage points.
But it is particularly this kind of situation—the unaccountable cognitive dissonance of two people sharing a home, by choice, with one party committing against the other the kinds of crimes you lock the doors to avoid—that makes it essential to know the details in order to understand how something euphemistically called “spousal abuse” can be presented as flat-out wife-beating. I knew nothing about Nicole when she was a living and breathing doll-woman, but after her death, the profusion of photographs presenting her image and pictures of her life and how she lived it made it feel to me like she was absolutely, 100 percent alive. The vacant, faraway stare that characterized all the stock glossies of Ms. Brown when she was alive—she often looked like a jack-o’-lantern, as if her eyes had been injected with steroids or her brain had been replaced by a halogen bulb—became rich with anxiety and panic and precarious circumstance: the vacancy was suddenly occupied, the furniture neurotically shifted and rearranged. (It’s all about: should I stay or should I go? Stay: I get Rockingham, lots of presents—though he’s generous when away also—family life, parents happy, get beaten. Go: live on wrong side of Sunset, get stalked, Marcus Allen’s dick, cute boys at Starbucks, get beaten.)
And just the same, however enlightening these public griefs and trials and tribulations may be, for most of us this is never going to be an issue. Whatever they are showing us on television, no matter how much blood John Woo can get into his movies, even if Wes Craven has made it into the mainstream, even if video games and comic books are red and gooey with misogyny and murder—no matter how shameless the vile display, most of us are going to go through life without ever receiving the benefit of a single violent experience on the home front. We may walk around quietly desperate, loaded up with bad and ugly thoughts about what would happen right now if I had a gun, if I had a hammer, if I could tear down that wall, if I could blow up that building. But very few women will be pulped by their spouses, and very few are even going to have hot wax dripped on their breasts—even if they ask for it. Which does not mean that domestic violence is not a problem: of course it is; even according to the most conservative statistics—if we say that “only” one and a half to two million women a year are battered—things are bad enough. But I take a look around me at most men functioning in the world, and they seem scared, more scared than women, frightened as cornered rats who can’t figure why everyone is jumping on the table for fear of a puny rodent. Men, quite simply, seem so benighted and bewildered about women, they are so unconfident in their dealings with us that the discussion of male violence against women or male hatred of women is strictly academic. Of course, it is in this atmosphere of bafflement that the male advantage—physical strength—is most likely to assert itself in frustrated agony, but looking at the world outside of celebrities and criminals, it really does seem that most men, like most women, are doing the best they can, and it’s tough enough without anyone wanting to toss the monkey wrench of physical violence into the brouhaha. Whatever is going on in the world where love is an extreme sport, most of us can’t master the mundane. Male confusion, fear, love-hate issues, all those Cosmopolitan articles: that’s reality for most of us.
And of course we are sick of discussing it.
All those conversations about how he won’t commit, he won’t move in with me, he won’t marry me, he never does his share of the laundry, he doesn’t spend enough time with the kids, he’s too possessive, he doesn’t like it when I wear short skirts, he wishes I wore sexier clothes, he hates it when I ask him if I look fat, he hates it when I flirt with other men, I hate it when h
e flirts with other women, I think he’s having an affair, he thinks I’m having an affair, I wish he would have an affair, I’m not ready to marry him, he’ll leave if I don’t move in with him, he’s too attentive, he never asks about my work, one day I just know he’s going to leave me, sometimes I wonder who it is that I have been living with all these years.
There’s a lot of potential for violence in all those thoughts, it is all so tenuous, all relationships, even the strong ones, have some tender and sensitive spot that can be so easily abraded, the smallest bit of rough touch and all unspoken issues threaten to explode and implode and mess up everything. Sometimes this is precisely what the relationship needs, but often enough—well, put it this way: lots of oysters are irritated by sand, but very few turn those granular intrusions into pearls. Some differences are meant to be ignored, not worked through. Which is why people in long-term relationships that are healthy learn to be careful, learn to live with what they cannot understand. Mostly I think that works: the great calm I sense in people who have been married a long time is not just that they’ve stopped asking the miserable unpleasant questions, but that they aren’t really curious any longer.
In “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” Irwin Shaw’s 1939 short story that is best known nowadays for lending its title to fashion spreads in May, a happy young couple bouncing about Greenwich Village on a sunny winter day suddenly hit upon a moment of truth in their marriage that would have best never surfaced. As they walk along lower Fifth Avenue, the wife becomes increasingly distressed at her husband’s ogling and double-taking and just plain staring at all the women who walk by. It makes her “feel rotten inside, in my stomach,” and on that note the young couple duck into a corner bar, they are deep into their brandy snifters, they are drinking Courvoisier on Sunday morning, breakfast is history. At first the husband tells her he’d never cheat, he’s happily married, but after a while she insists on having him tell her why he likes checking out girls so much, and pretty soon he lists every type of woman he likes to look at: “girls in the offices,” “salesgirls in stores,” “famous beauties who’ve taken six hours to get ready,” “young girls at the football games,” and of course, “the girls in their summer dresses.” He goes on about wandering near department stores at lunchtime to see the women shopping, he talks about women in furs, and women with strange hats, and after a while it’s clear there’s nothing in a skirt that he doesn’t like to look at.
Most women, I think, can live with men’s promiscuous eyes—partly, it is my guess, because they have no idea what kind of detailed and exaggerated visions men get just by looking—but in Shaw’s story, the husband’s confession, far from facilitating intimacy, creates a rupture that is going to put a permanent strain on their marriage. The husband admits that sometimes he wishes he were free to chase these girls. “Someday,” she asks, in tears, “you’re going to make a move … Aren’t you? Come on, tell me. Talk. Aren’t you?” The husband has no desire to go in this direction. “Maybe,” he says, although any sane man would have said no. She presses him some more, says that he knows he’s going to leave her someday. “Yes,” he finally says. “I know.”
He knows that one day when she is menopausal and undesirable, he is sure to walk out on her, one day he will no longer be able to resist the pretty young things.
After the husband’s confession—or reluctant admission—the day goes on, and the marriage goes on. But we all know there’s this tension, this death warrant, imposing its gloom on these people’s lives, and this couple is going to live with it, at least for a while, maybe for a very long time. This truth that the husband has revealed will lie between both partners like a cocked and loaded gun that either can grab and use at any time. The stupidest part of the conversation is that it is actually in no way predictive of what will happen to this marriage: it telescopes into the future on the basis of emotions that may only be true in the present. The husband may lose interest in all the pretty girls, he may decide his happy life and wife are more important, he may be paralyzed in a car accident and find that his fantasies have backfired—he may be wheelchair-bound while it is his wife who lingers around office buildings, checking out the handsome men in their Brooks Brothers suits, men whose arms and legs and other limbs still move.
Far better never to learn certain secrets.
But the alternative requires such willful resignation. Bruce Springsteen’s “Brilliant Disguise” captures the horror at the heart of intimacy like no other rock song I know of. “Now you play the loving woman / I play the faithful man / But just don’t look too close / Into the palm of my hand,” he sings, both advocating and despairing of the charade. “When you look at me / You better look hard and look twice / Is this me baby or just a brilliant disguise?” When you are in such close quarters with another person and still have to spend so much time just accepting all the things you can’t understand, the accumulated rage must be enormous, a murder waiting to happen.
And it extends to other relationships: 70 percent of child murders are committed by one or both parents; and when a child is killed, the FBI places the odds at 12 to 1 that the slayer is not a stranger. In general, if you are going to be killed, it will probably be by someone you know. One of the reasons it was so foolish for the police who leapt over the fence at Rockingham in the initial hours after Nicole Brown’s murder to claim that they were just trying to find O.J. to let him know his ex-wife had been killed before the media got there—this was their excuse for not getting a search warrant, later one of many details used to discredit the prosecution’s case—is that when anyone is killed, the spouse or closest equivalent is always the first suspect.
This is, of course, a hard thing to understand. I keep trying, I try really hard, to imagine how I might snap or what might happen that would make me kill anyone, much less someone I love. Now, if you think of killing as a logical extension of any number of activities, it makes sense: I don’t go around getting angry at people I don’t know, I don’t have any harsh feelings or feelings at all for strangers, and this is a sign that I am sane. Only the insane lash out at random. Those are the people who walk around muttering to themselves and punctuate that with the occasional outburst. So the decision, if you think of it that way, to kill someone you are close to is a sign that you are in your right mind, sort of. What is really weird is a guy like, say, Charles Whitman, who gets into the tower at the University of Texas and shoots at no one in particular, just a lone sniper sprinkling shots at whoever happened to be walking across the Austin campus on that particular day. Whitman’s crime is just nuts, whereas O.J. Simpson behaved in a way that, to anyone who has ever been in a jealous rage, is relatively coherent.
There are so many crimes—child abuse, incest, murdering a spouse or family member—that seem incomprehensible to most of us who are not perpetrators. Incest, in particular, is a hard one to figure. Children, I suppose, can be sexy, but what kind of sick person would want to fuck an eight-year-old—especially if she were his own child? As much as this activity seems clearly demented, as does the idea of murdering a first-degree relative, the horror and disbelief most of us feel in the face of a JonBenet Ramsey or a Hedda Nussbaum, or the smug ease with which we assign the label of unmodified and unmediated evil upon Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who drowned her two children in her car, our easy moral indignation against those who commit crimes against those they love, the ones who violate the most vulnerable, their trusting children, actually reflects how close to the surface our own feelings of rage and inappropriate desire within our own households are. How many mothers, left with a screaming and crying baby, a husband at work or out with the boys, have not wanted to throttle their own children?
As Sigmund Freud pointed out in Totem and Taboo, the reason incest, murder and other interpersonal offenses are taboo is not because they a priori disgust us, but precisely because they don’t—and we need to be made to see horror in them or we will destroy ourselves. “To explain [legal and moral prohibitions
against incest] by the existence of an instinctive dislike of sexual intercourse with blood relatives—that is by an appeal to the fact that there is a horror of incest—is clearly unsatisfactory,” Freud writes, “for social experience shows that, in spite of this supposed instinct, incest is no uncommon event even in our present-day society, and history tells us of cases in which incestuous marriage between privileged persons was actually the rule.” Similarly, Freud’s study of the dreams of “normal people”—those who are not neurotic and doomed to become one of his case studies—shows that “we ourselves are subject, more strongly and more often than we suspect, to a temptation to kill someone and that temptation produces psychical effects even though it remains outside of our consciousness.” For Freud, the man who introduced Victorian Vienna and then the whole Western world to the dark sub-rosa of the psyche, full of impulses just barely kept in check—repressed, restrained by law, inert as sticks of dynamite that have not yet been lit—many of us, without even knowing it, are just one cool remove from doing something terrible and sinful. If Johnny Cash, the original Man in Black, can boast that he “shot a man in Reno / Just to see him die,” most of us, who will in the end find that there is no better reason for our behavior than the one Mr. Cash gives, will commit our misdeed against the closest and nearest person, and tell ourselves it was the right thing to do.
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