“Of Course There Are Times When a Man Has to Discipline His Wife!”

One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging lately is that I’ve been hard at work on an essay that I thought was going to be a very simple one to write. Instead, it has turned out to be one of the most challenging pieces I’ve tried to produce in a long time. Nominally about violence against women, the essay—which does not yet have a title—has turned into a meditation on my own commitment to feminist values, not so much where it comes from, which I’ve written about before, but rather how that commitment has taken shape in—and, in turn, has shaped—my life. Rob Okun, editor of Voice Male Magazine, commissioned the essay from me after he read a piece I wrote about one of my poems, called “Coitus Interruptus,” for my publisher’s blog. The poem, which is from The Silence of Men, and which is one of the most strictly autobiographical I’ve ever written, weaves together several of my own experiences with violence against women, while the blog post I wrote about it meditates on how of the many women I have known—family members, lovers, friends, students—have chosen to share with me the fact that they were survivors of some form of male, usually sexualized, violence.

Rob thought it might be interesting to hear about the experience of talking to those women from my perspective as a teacher—the blog post I wrote for my publisher begins with an anecdote about one of my students—and, at first, I agreed. Once I started writing, however, I began to realize that I didn’t have very much to say. The stories those women have told me are, sadly, not unique and retelling them, however briefly, just so I could talk about my own experience of women’s trust, seemed more self-serving than anything else. What did feel new to me, though, was trying to make sense of the connection, both implicit and explicit, between myself as a man and the men those women told me about, and once I had this focus, the three-part structure of the essay began to come together almost by itself. The first part of the essay delves more deeply into an incident I wrote about for Role/Reboot, when I confronted a man who certainly appeared like he might be getting violent with a woman outside my building; the third part—which is the one I am working on right now—goes back to something I first wrote more than fifteen years ago (but which I have since revised and posted to my blog) about a time when I saw a vision of myself beating my girlfriend to a pulp. The second section is the one I want to share with you a little bit. It begins like this:

“…consider the conversation I had not too long ago with a woman from Nigeria, a friend who will soon marry a man from her country. She was telling me about a friend of hers back home, a woman who’d been severely beaten by her husband. “Of course,” my friend concluded, “her husband might have gone a little too far, but there are times when a man has to discipline his wife. If she misbehaves, she deserves it.”

I had never before heard a woman defending a man’s right to violence like this, and when I responded that I couldn’t imagine myself “disciplining” my wife in any way, much less laying a hand on her, my friend was incredulous. “Sure,” she said, “but that’s because it’s illegal here.”

“No,” I told her, “It’s because I don’t think I have the right to hit her.”

“Of course you have that right.” Her tone was patient and didactic. “How else will your wife learn not to misbehave? If you don’t discipline her, she will disgrace you.”

If I had been talking to a man, I would have known immediately how to respond; but to hear a woman say these things and mean it—and my friend meant it—well, at first, it left me speechless. Finally, I told her that while I did not doubt she loved her fiancé, I could not imagine such love coexisting with the ever-present threat of violence that she described.

“I am sure I will never give my husband a reason to hit me,” she said, “but if I do, yes, it is his right and his obligation to do so.” Then she shook her head. “You and I could never marry. You are not strong enough to handle a woman like me.”

Leave aside, if you will—though I do not mean by this that it is unimportant—what this exchange reveals about my friend’s internalized oppression and self-hatred. That’s a subject for an essay I am not qualified to write. Instead, I want to talk about how those last two sentences made me feel. I liked this woman, and I knew that she liked me. Given her upcoming marriage, there was no possibility of a relationship between us, but there was chemistry. She was smart and funny, and that made her beauty, and she was very beautiful, compellingly sexy to me. I would be lying, therefore, if I told you it did not sting when she dismissed me for “not having the balls”—those were not her words, but it was what she meant—to hit a woman who “deserved” to be hit. Part of me, in other words, wanted to be man enough for her, and for a very brief moment I considered trying to persuade her that I was—not because I thought we could ever be together, but because I did not want to think she might no longer find me attractive.

I did not recognize this, though, until the first words of whatever I was going to say were ready to come out of my mouth, and then I stood there, awkward, silent, caught between the reflexive impulse to defend my manhood that I think many men would feel in this situation and the realization that once I started defending myself I would never not be on the defensive. Nothing I said would ever be definitive proof that I was “man enough,” because there would always be a next time when that proof could be called into question and demanded again; and even if I took it to the next step and tried to prove myself physically, by hitting her for example–which I cannot imagine myself being tempted to do–that “next time” would still always be there. I took a breath and relaxed. “You’re probably right,” I told my friend. “I’m probably not strong enough.” Her eyes went wide and her mouth closed into a kind of frown. This was not the answer she’d been expecting, and I took some pleasure in having rendered her momentarily speechless. That instance of verbal jiujitsu, however, does not change the fact that, for however brief a moment, part of me was willing to sacrifice my friend’s friend, a woman who’d been beaten by her husband, to prove that, like him, I was “man enough” to put a woman in her place.

It’s easy to dismiss the significance of moments like this because they take place almost entirely inside our heads. After all, in the end, I didn’t try to prove myself. The fact that I wanted to, however, raises the question of whether, under different circumstances—if, for example, my friend had not been engaged—I might have, and that is not a question I can dismiss so easily.

Author’s note: I have made some small changes in the essay excerpt to make clear that the “response” I am talking about in the last couple of paragraphs was a verbal and not a physical one.

Cross-posted on my blog.