{"id":18321,"date":"2014-02-09T08:18:30","date_gmt":"2014-02-09T16:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18321"},"modified":"2014-02-09T15:11:49","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T23:11:49","slug":"of-course-there-are-times-when-a-man-has-to-discipline-his-wife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18321","title":{"rendered":"“Of Course There Are Times When a Man Has to Discipline His Wife!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the reasons I haven\u2019t been blogging lately is that I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve tried to produce in a long time. Nominally about violence against women, the essay\u2014which does not yet have a title\u2014has turned into a meditation on my own commitment to feminist values, not so much where it comes from, which I\u2019ve written about before<\/a>, but rather how that commitment has taken shape in\u2014and, in turn, has shaped\u2014my life. Rob Okun, editor of Voice Male Magazine<\/a>, commissioned the essay from me after he read a piece I wrote about one of my poems, called \u201cCoitus Interruptus<\/a>,\u201d for my publisher\u2019s blog. The poem, which is from The Silence of Men<\/a><\/em>, and which is one of the most strictly autobiographical I\u2019ve 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\u2014family members, lovers, friends, students\u2014have chosen to share with me the fact that they were survivors of some form of male, usually sexualized, violence.<\/p>\n

Rob thought it might be interesting to hear about the experience of talking to those women from my perspective as a teacher\u2014the blog post I wrote for my publisher begins with an anecdote about one of my students\u2014and, at first, I agreed. Once I started writing, however, I began to realize that I didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, when I confronted a man who certainly appeared like he might be getting violent with a woman outside my building; the third part\u2014which is the one I am working on right now\u2014goes back to something I first wrote more than fifteen years ago (but which I have since revised and posted to my blog<\/a>) 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:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026consider 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\u2019d been severely beaten by her husband. \u201cOf course,\u201d my friend concluded, \u201cher 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had never before heard a woman defending a man\u2019s right to violence like this, and when I responded that I couldn\u2019t imagine myself \u201cdisciplining\u201d my wife in any way, much less laying a hand on her, my friend was incredulous. \u201cSure,\u201d she said, \u201cbut that\u2019s because it\u2019s illegal here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d I told her, \u201cIt\u2019s because I don\u2019t think I have the right to hit her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course you have that right.\u201d Her tone was patient and didactic. \u201cHow else will your wife learn not to misbehave? If you don\u2019t discipline her, she will disgrace you.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014and my friend meant it\u2014well, at first, it left me speechless. Finally, I told her that while I did not doubt she loved her fianc\u00e9, I could not imagine such love coexisting with the ever-present threat of violence that she described.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am sure I will never give my husband a reason to hit me,\u201d she said, \u201cbut if I do, yes, it is his right and his obligation to do so.\u201d Then she shook her head. \u201cYou and I could never marry. You are not strong enough to handle a woman like me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leave aside, if you will\u2014though I do not mean by this that it is unimportant\u2014what this exchange reveals about my friend\u2019s internalized oppression and self-hatred. That\u2019s 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 \u201cnot having the balls\u201d\u2014those were not her words, but it was what she meant\u2014to hit a woman who \u201cdeserved\u201d 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\u2014not because I thought we could ever be together, but because I did not want to think she might no longer find me attractive.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cman enough,\u201d 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. \u201cYou\u2019re probably right,\u201d I told my friend. \u201cI\u2019m probably not strong enough.\u201d Her eyes went wide and her mouth closed into a kind of frown. This was not the answer she\u2019d 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\u2019s friend, a woman who\u2019d been beaten by her husband, to prove that, like him, I was \u201cman enough\u201d to put a woman in her place.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019t<\/em> try to prove myself. The fact that I wanted to, however, raises the question of whether, under different circumstances\u2014if, for example, my friend had not been engaged\u2014I might have, and that<\/em>\u00a0is not a question I can dismiss so easily.<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Cross-posted on my blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the reasons I haven\u2019t been blogging lately is that I\u2019ve 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18321"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18329,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18321\/revisions\/18329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}