“If batterers had green dots on their heads warning women, no one would get involved with them,” says Sherry Frohman, the executive director of the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “It’s just a fact that so many men are shits and women just have bad luck.”
I, of course, don’t believe this. I feel certain people are knowing participants in their own sick dramas, and the ninety-minute telephone conversation I have with Ms. Frohman exhausts me, saddens me in a way that’s tiring because it serves to underscore the great divide between advocacy and clear thinking. Which is to say, if you are going to be an advocate on behalf of victims of domestic violence—or of anything, because even crimes that don’t require your complicity often receive your retroactive consent—you can’t think about it too much. Like Andrea Dworkin, you have to just say, It’s the perpetrator, stupid, and leave it at that. You really have to believe that these women would have avoided the man with the green dot on his head, though I believe that, quite the contrary, they’d have been more drawn in, more quickly.
I recall an astute moment in the movie 9½ Weeks when Elizabeth, the female character, asks the domineering man who has so easily absorbed her into his sadomasochistic love scheme, “How did you know? How did you know I would respond to you as I have?” His response—something about seeing himself in her—does not nearly address the complexity of the question, which was, of course, the problem with the whole movie, with its depiction of sexual violence lite. But still, the screenplay knew enough to ask—and in a certain way, it also showed the good sense not to try to really explain too much in a movie that was, after all, not an art house film, but rather aimed at a popular American audience.
In the end, trying to understand a phenomenon like domestic violence is always going to be interesting and wasteful. On the one hand, it is not relevant to most of our lives except as a source of fascination, and on the other hand, if you happen to be a person who cares enough to want to help battered women, to work in a shelter or become a counselor, the best thing you can do is feel sympathy and warmth and kindness and just never ask why. I’ve got this strange feeling that if you try too hard to understand, you will probably end up saying, Go back home, you belong together, don’t you see you’ll never escape?
“No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun,” wrote King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 8:17. “Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.” Solomon was, of course, said to be one of the wisest men of all time—the title of smartest, which is distinct in that intelligence is not the same as wisdom, probably belongs to his father, King David—and this statement reflects his good sense. During his prosperous, productive, peaceful reign, Solomon mostly managed to keep away from trouble—the Queen of Sheba being his bète noire—and to avoid examining too closely that which is clearly nuts. Solomon grew up the fair-haired, favorite son in a royal household where brothers raped sisters and siblings slaughtered siblings, and he probably perceived that much of this discord could be attributed to the overly contemplative David, who as the patriarch of this whole paradigmatically dysfunctional family, spent far too much time meditating on his sorrows and too little time just insisting that everyone behave. And sometimes it seems that with domestic violence, diplomacy is the only correct approach, because reason shall surely fail.
Trying to comprehend the illogic of accepting aching acts from or levying an attack on someone you love is like studying Scientology or the Moonies or any cult from the outside or trying to understand alcoholism or drug addiction if you’ve never had a taste for much more than the mild recreational high: no matter how many times you are explained by the insiders, by the experts, by the escapees and by the recovered wrecks, the emotional illness that draws people into these situations cannot be truly grasped by anyone who is not experienced. We all come so close, at one time or another, to craving what is bad for us—as teenagers, as college students, as directionless twenty-nothings—and yet it is the impulse that stops us from crossing that line, the simple survivalist instinct, which is so inborn and obvious, that makes it absolutely impossible to imagine why anyone would be so foolish as to step over that boundary. Put it this way: to a normal person, it makes sense that a Jew who has walked across the Alps into Switzerland to escape Nazi Germany may turn and look back longingly on Deutschland, his country, a place he still feels is home. But if that same man chooses to retread his path through the snow back to a certain death on the other side of the German border, we start to think that he deserves Dachau. In fact, even the Jews who walked around Berlin and Frankfurt with yellow stars and the Juden stigmata sewn onto their clothing, but still, despite all these disasterous omens, had faith in all their atheism that reason—if nothing else—would ultimately prevail, and who refused to leave the land of Beethoven and Goethe—neglecting to remember that it was also the land of Wagner and Nietzsche—are kind of hard to sympathize with.
It is difficult to be nice when you just want to scream: You idiot!
Women who stay after signs of violence emerge, after they escalate, after they multiply, after they reproduce like roaches in a kitchen full of dirty dishes, are easy to despise: easier to despise than they are to defend. What was delightful, in a dingy and ugly way, about Hedda Nussbaum’s victimization at the hands of Joel Steinberg was its consummate nature. Unlike Nicole, who probably did not undergo daily beatings, who had a life, who fought back, who never lost her beauty to her taste for the boot, Hedda was a mangled disaster: her nose flattened, her hair patchy and sere as an unwatered front lawn, her walk limped, her entire bone structure dislocated, rearranged as if Steinberg were some perverse Pygmalion, trying to redesign this woman into his strange notion of perfection. Hedda is so hideous that by the time we see her in police photographs we want to beat her up too, we can’t blame anyone for what they might have done to a woman who allowed this to be done to her. When Hedda says of her deceased adoptive daughter Lisa that she was “glad to have known her,” we lose whatever sympathy we may have had left for this fellow human who has succumbed to her own dehumanization.
We know about battered wife syndrome: we know how it makes women stay, how in their isolation and fear they lose perspective, they mistake their prison for a palace, and like hostages suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, they begin to identify with their jailers. And yet, I can say succumbed to her own dehumanization, because at some point, there was a moment of choice. “It’s funny how you can lose your innocence all at once, without even knowing that you’ve passed into another existence,” writes Julio Cortázar in Hopscotch, and that is precisely the point: a big mess happens all at once, it seems beyond your control if you even notice it at all, and just the same, as long as most women manage not to date or marry men who beat them, we must maintain the belief that it is perfectly possible to resist passing into that other existence.
Somehow it has to be possible to reconcile the contradictory notions that women in situations of domestic violence have made a choice, and that, at the same time, they are victims. Sherry Frohman has to deny the choice in order to have her agenda as an advocate and counselor taken seriously; someone like Camille Paglia, on the other hand, has to insist on the choice so that her brand of primally motivated and sexually liberated feminism can stand. In both perspectives, something is missing, and that something can be called complexity, but what it really is is sanity.
It’s been on the docket of most reasonable, thoughtful feminists to turn all the “either/ors” of womanhood into “both/ands.” The most useful lesson most of us can derive from the domestic violence model is how we might implement this delightful reading of the world into everyday life, how we might say “she wanted to get laid” without it ever implying that “she deserved to be raped.” We will truly have made a breakthrough if we can accept this syllogism: 1) pornography, prostitution and stripping exploit women, but women should be free to enter these professions just the sam
e, and more to the point, women who believe these industries are inherently misogynistic are still allowed to enjoy their products; 2) but we should still support all efforts of any women wishing to escape life as sex workers without exacting a toll in shame (which, after all, is just more exploitation) or insisting that they renounce all and accept Jesus in order to gain our sympathy; 3) and finally if we can manage and master the first two items, we will be able to judge the past without becoming judgmental in the future: we will have the right to say that certain behaviors are not okay, but we couldn’t help ourselves, we like them anyway, we are human and stupid and fallible and we ought to be able to cop to our fuckups without getting arrested by the politically correct thought police, without being branded as scarlet women—we ought to grant ourselves and our fellow females just a little bit of grace. If we can find a way to accept without question the disturbing choices that some women make, if we can insist that they accept responsibility for the potentially horrible consequences, and we can still, somehow, find it within our hearts to be forgiving enough to be helpful when we can be, then there will no longer be a need for the naivete projected by Sherry Frohman or the cantankerous and, at this point, ad hominem bravado blustered about by Camille Paglia.
And no one should mistake this for letting women off the hook too easily or babying them in any way. When I heard, in the summer of 1997, that the dismissed CEO of AT&T had been granted a $14 million golden parachute, I kept asking people—once the company began its search for a replacement—if they had any idea how I might get hired for the job, swiftly prove my incompetence and walk away with a similar deal. The gifts that men are meted out for failure—consider the fate of just about every axed studio head in Hollywood who is set up with his own production company, an office on the lot and a lucrative development deal for all his bad judgment, for green-lighting Heaven’s Gate or Howard the Duck or worse—should make us feel perfectly fine about being generous with women who fuck up their lives.
The only hope we have of ever redressing the imbalances in our intimate realm is in our shameless honesty.
The alternative is to start believing in green dots.
And sometimes we will just have to recognize that nothing we can do will help, that sometimes situations are so far wrong that no amount of feminist—or any other—wisdom is going to make a damn bit of difference. The personal is not always political. Some women who get out of situations of domestic violence just don’t do it soon enough. Sherry Frohman would say that most women murdered by their husbands are killed after they have moved out of the marital home, which is why it is unfair to ask, Why doesn’t she leave? But this argument fails to account for the amount of time each woman stayed. There was a moment—it may seem as ancient as the Bronze Age to the woman in question, but there was a time—when she received the first blow. And there are people who walk away after that initial punch, or the second or third or even the tenth; and there are people who let years go by.
And when you finally get out, you will pay for the years because that is how life works. There are choices that you just can’t walk away from. You do your best, but the feeling we all have that it’s not fair is because, in fact, it’s not fair.
Diana got taken in as a royal brood mare when she was too young to know better, and she too paid with her life. And I’m not sure what the police can really do for someone like Nicole—whether she leaves or stays—because the law is straightforward and the couple dynamics are anything but. Perhaps as a result of being the child of a contentious divorce, I tend to accept, perhaps too readily, that a lot of what is involved in what we tell ourselves is love is pretty damn ugly: that idea just doesn’t seem so weird to me—sad, but normal. People do terrible things to each other and call it love all the time—and I’m not sure they’re completely wrong. And I think when Nicole and O.J. went for it and at it and over it and under it with each other, they knew what they were doing.
According to Paula Barbieri, “O.J. read all the latest novels and quoted easily from Shakespeare. And not just two or three lines, like a lot of people, but three or four minutes at a stretch from Macbeth or King Lear.” There is a lot in this statement that is difficult: first of all, while I think the difficulty of Shakespeare is greatly exaggerated by circumstances—i.e., the only time anyone reads the plays is in high school, which makes us all think what is easy reading is in fact academic and tough going—I have trouble believing that O.J. reads much of anything. If he had any kind of exposure to words on paper, he could not be so orthographically challenged. So I don’t even really believe he reads Dean Koontz, much less the Bard’s great tragedies. Furthermore, if he were reciting soliloquies with random improvisations, who among his crowd would know to correct him? But more to the point, if we must invoke Shakespeare, two less appropriate plays are not in his repertoire. Which brings us to Othello, the most unmentionable of the plays that might be adjoined to O.J. since it is just too tight a fit: a black man kills his blonde wife in a fit of jealous rage. In fact, O.J.’s suicide/fugitive note, in which he claims to have loved Nicole too much, is an updated version of Othello’s last speech, in which he says, “Then must you speak of one that loved not wisely but too well.”
Othello’s jealousy springs from his fear that Desdemona will come to her senses and go back to liking white boys. Of course, Othello could not have been worked into such a tortured, paranoid and self-loathing blather without his henchman Iago—truly one of the great creations of villainy of any era or aeon in the history of the stage, far more corrosive because he so well disguises his false intentions as friendship—but we also understand that racial prejudice is so touchy and sensitive that it is not really hard to prey upon Othello’s sense of inadequacy. Long before the civil rights movement and affirmative action, Shakespeare understood how subtle manipulations involving our most superficial human traits—literally so: for what is more on the surface than skin color?—can be used to hamper and destroy the human spirit, a person’s potential. To rise so high as Othello, to be so beloved of Brabantio, a senator, that he happily allows his only daughter to marry you—to have every indication that you have been accepted not as a Moor, but for yourself—and to have it all so gruesomely and murderously destroyed, to have it end in an unnecessary bloodbath, is tragic.
O.J.’s jealousy, which revolved around Nicole and would seem to have something to do with her whiteness (he was not this way about Marguerite, although in light of Nicole’s murder, two complaints of abuse that she filed were unearthed), was misplaced since the only other man who satisfied her, at least according to Faye Resnick (who seems nuts, but strangely credible, her intimacy with the situation too strikingly believable), was Marcus Allen, another black all-star athlete. And Nicole was the daughter of some guy in Orange County, not a noblewoman like Desdemona. At any rate, it’s fair to say that interracial romance has changed since Shakespeare’s day, at least some. But O.J. married a white woman and made self-blanching a lifelong effort, and yet he is thought of as more black for having Nicole by his side than he would be if he just stuck with Marguerite.
Shortly before the verdict, there was a candlelight vigil held outside Nicole’s home, and many people wore angel earrings and pins, as Denise Brown had been doing for all her public appearances, as some sort of sign that Nicole was now a winged spirit in heaven. One little girl interviewed on a television broadcast said that Nicole was an angel because she was dead. This really annoyed me. Nicole was not an angel, as far as anyone knew. She wasn’t a bad person either, but there was no reason to think she was especially good. It was as if the means of her death bestowed upon her some honorary heroism that her life could not. I was pleased that they didn’t call her a nigger lover or that the trial hadn’t tried to make it seem as though her going out dancing all the time meant she was a slut who deserved to die. But just the same, it amazed me that there were only these two choices, slut or angel, that there just didn’t seem any way to portray her as an overtly sexual woman who liked to p
arty who was also a good mother.
Sometimes things have no meaning, sometimes senseless acts of violence are just that. Nicole’s death, despite what are probably some well-intentioned but still fruitless attempts to make it into a clarion call for domestic-violence awareness, was just the stupid waste of a life of a woman who had not yet really learned how to live. In fact, if the people involved would accept that what happened is nothing more than senseless, they would at last begin to get the meaning after all: the meaning of cruelty and what terrible things people visit on each other for what seems to them, in the deep dark pond of narcissism and obsession that they drown in for just long enough to kill or injure someone they believe they love, to be a good reason. She cheated on me, etc. They don’t realize how quickly the feeling will fade, first in the context of their own life and then into the slipstream of human history. After all, Cain and Abel taught us some kind of lesson, but how many other sibling rivals over time do we never hear about? How many pairs of people have battled to the death causing strife and misery all around them only to become among those “signifying nothing.”
But everyone tries for significance, for justice, revenge, restitution, closure. Even though the death penalty has never been shown to deter murder—rather it seems to actually increase the rate where it is sanetioned, or Texas would by now be a bloodless state—people continue to call for it. Even though shelters and antibattery task forces are probably damn near useless to a woman madly in love, we go on hoping that someone may find a safe harbor. I don’t mean to imply at all that nothing can be done to improve our human lot, but what would really be useful is for someone to take that little girl who thinks Nicole is an angel and tell her that isn’t so: that a woman is not made heroic by her death, but by her life. Tell that little girl that she is the real angel here, that this is her world to invent, that history begins with her story, and she gets to write it. Tell her that she can be anything she wants to be this time around—tell her not to worry about the afterlife. You see, I believe, with the wholest hope, that we can get it right the first tine, that the urge to punish and correct and memorialize is not a way to honor the dead—who are, after all, dead—but to avoid learning how to find meaning in our own lives.
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