wildfire/07_chap3.html

<h1>CHAPTER 3</h1>
<h2>The Great Divorce</h2>
<p>As I have talked to slightly bewildered audiences across the country about women's relationship with the patriarchal state, trying to make clear what I thought we ought to do about it and why, a way of understanding and expressing it more clearly has come to me. Earlier, I had recognized that the system behaved - in the case of <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, for example - in the same manner toward women generally as one husband behaves specifically toward one wife. My seeing this brought women's situation in patriarchy into much sharper focus.</p>
<p>All women are battered women in patriarchy. Every woman born is in an abusive relationship with men as a class and with their system since the raison d'etre of all men's institutions - political, legal, educational, religious, economic, and social - is to achieve and perpetuate the slavery of women and the dominion of men. Therefore, if we can understand why one woman stays in an abusive relationship with one man<a href="#fn1">[1]</a> - and the Women's Movement has taught us much about this-we can understand why women as a caste stay in our abusive relationship with the state. It follows that if we can understand what it takes for one woman to extricate herself permanently from a battering situation, we can understand what it will take for <i>all</i> women to extricate ourselves permanently from patriarchy - our brutal relationship with men as a class. Finally, if we can understand what happens to a marriage when a woman finally and unequivocally leaves it, we can predict what will happen when women finally and unequivocally leave our marriage with our husband the state.</p>
<p>Many of us grew up watching our fathers abuse our mothers - physically or emotionally or both - and were filled with confusion and rage. We couldn't understand why they took it, why they didn't just <i>leave</i>. Standing outside our mothers' situations, we could see that they had options, reasonable options, and we assumed that they could see them too.</p>
<p>What we have learned since, however, from our own sad experience or from listening to other women's stories, is that in the midst of cruelty, many women really cannot see any way out; as far as they are aware, they have no choices. They are trapped in the invisible reality of their feelings and perceptions and beliefs.</p>
<p>How does a woman lose her consciousness of alternatives? What are the mechanisms that have to come into play not only to make her believe that she is choice-less but also to weld her so tightly to her aggressor that leaving him seems life threatening?</p>
<p>On the most overt level is what I call SHATTER- Self-Hatred and Terror-the continuing education program her husband or husband-surrogate subjects her to in his capacity as agent-in-place for the male hegemony. His job is to reinforce and intensify the conditioning of her other intensive trainers-the media, her parents, ministers, teachers, society in general. In this guerrilla warfare against her, he has global male culture as his model, his authority, his back-up, and his resource.</p>
<p>Though not every abusive husband employs all the following indoctrination and intimidation tactics, most must use many of them to achieve the desired effect. A man intent on dehumanizing a woman, for instance, often tries to isolate her, to control what she does, who she sees and talks to, and where she goes. He may harass her economically by trying to prevent her from getting or keeping a job, making her ask for money, giving her an allowance, or taking any money she makes. He is likely to force her into sexual acts against her will, attacking the sexual parts of her body, raping her, and generally treating her as a sex object. And, of course, physical abuse is standard: he beats her, throws her down, twists her arms, trips, bites, pushes, shoves, slaps, chokes, pulls her hair, punches, kicks, grabs, and/or uses a weapon against her.<a href="#fn2">[2]</a></p>
<p>He is busy at the same time with verbal strategies, humiliating, scapegoating, and threatening her. He tells her that she is stupid and disgusting, barely fit to be his servant; that she's lucky she's got him because no one else would have her, he's better than she deserves, any other man would treat her worse; that she needs him to make the rules and important decisions because she is incompetent and would botch everything; that she's responsible for his bad luck in life and therefore for his rages; that if she will prove that she loves him by treating him nicer and being more docile and obedient, he will change; that if she leaves, he will take the children away from her; that if she leaves, he will kill himself; that if she leaves, he will kill her.</p>
<p>The wife, by this time in men's history having been almost genetically bred to be emotionally and mentally subservient to men, finds this view of herself and of her situation all too reasonable. She has deeply internalized this propaganda, is profoundly brainwashed to believe it all. So she placates, praises, pleads, and grovels. And denies the dangerousness of her situation.</p>
<p>Her husband is cunning enough to intersperse his abuse with a reward or sop just often enough to reinforce her subservient behavior and keep her hopeful that he really <i>can</i>, that he really <i>will</i>, change. Though the reward is minute - he won't beat her tonight though she deserves it for letting the baby keep him awake - in her deprived condition it appears merciful and kind and evidence that she is behaving correctly, that, small reform by small reform, she can ultimately transform the whole relationship. She confides to the woman next door in a guilty moment that she can see some positive changes - after he beat her last time, for instance, he felt so bad that he gave her permission to take the car the next day to go see her mother.</p>
<p>As grim as this is, it is only a surface picture. On a deeper level, her husband's terrorism interspersed with shows of repentance and humanity are forging a truly sinister bond - intense, wildly paradoxical, and adamant. Some understanding of why women under terror merge so completely with their torturers and so strongly resist awareness of men's perfidy and gynecidal intent helps explain why women as a class the world over bond with and support men's woman-hating, woman-destroying governments, institutions, values, ideologies, and cosmologies. Why, in short, we vote, go to church, believe in male gods, follow male gurus and channeled entities, attend and teach at universities, send our children to school, become lawyers and corporation servers, marry, and work for maledefined "women's rights."</p>
<p>I have found particular clarification of our baffling behavior in the ongoing work of Dee L. R. Graham, Edna Rawlings, and Nelly Rimini, faculty in the Psychology Department at the University of Cincinnati. Their thesis is that we can expand our understanding of SHATTER, as well as the psychological reactions of battered women, by looking at a model called the Stockholm Syndrome.</p>
<p>The Stockholm Syndrome is a construct developed to explain the strong emotional bonding of hostages and prisoners of war to their captors, and by feminist extension, of battered
women to their terrorists. In <i>Loving to Survive</i>,<a href="#fn3">[3]</a> the authors cite four conditions necessary for this syndrome to develop: first (in the case of a battered woman), she must perceive the terrorist as having powers of life and death over her; second, she must believe that she cannot escape, that her life therefore depends on her captor; third, she must be isolated from outsiders so that his perspective is the only perspective available; and, fourth, she must feel as if her captor has shown her some kindness."<a href="#fn4">[4]</a></p>
<p>When these conditions are met, she suffers what the authors term "traumatic
psychological infantilism," a condition that "causes the victim to cling to the very person who is endangering her life."<a href="#fn5">[5]</a> In addition, the victim's recognition that her abuser holds the power of life and death over her, coupled with the awareness that he has - magnanimously it seems to her - allowed her to live, causes her to cleave to him in what is known as "traumatic bonding": she begins to view him as a "good guy," denying to herself (and others) how dangerous he is,<a href="#fn6">[6]</a> and opposing rescue.<a href="#fn7">[7]</a> In the Women's Movement, we call this phenomenon "seasoning."</p>
<p>Seasoning, traumatic bonding, is incredibly strong. For it to take place, there must be not only a great imbalance in power but also "intermittent violence alternating with warm, friendly, kind behavior."<a href="#fn8">[8]</a> When this happens, and in the absence of other supportive relationships, the victim bonds to the supportive, positive aspect of her abuser.<a href="#fn9">[9]</a> (This helps explain why children of abusive parents often feel strong loyalties to them and do not wish to be separated.) A significant part of this bond (and of her bondage) is that she internalizes his world view,<a href="#fn10">[10]</a> sides with, and identifies with him - and imitates him.</p>
<p>All women in patriarchy are long-term prisoners of war, perpetual hostages. Though we are no doubt in various stages of recovery, we are held fast in the Stockholm Syndrome. In this country, for instance, we have been more successfully isolated from one another than in any other - one woman to one individual guard and cell in the suburban nuclear family; our access to public space and to the outside world during one half of every day is limited and controlled by threat of rape; we are economically harassed and deprived - kept from getting decent jobs, made to plead for money from our husband the state, forced to accept an allowance from him; we are forced into prostitution and the sex industry, our sexuality used to sell everything under the sun; we are ground to dust by the courts, by religion, by industry, by schools, by art, by the very form and structure of the system, by every nail in its boot. And of course the shock troops daily hunt us down to torture and murder us.</p>
<p>But underlying this picture that feminists have been calling into visibility for about 200 years is the still-hidden and steely bond forged by the system's life-and-death hold over us, by our perceiving no escape from it, our isolation from any alternative perspective or possibility, and our husband the state's maleficent, utterly designed, intermittent shows of "kindness" - <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, for instance.</p>
<p>Women, in our marriage with the patriarchal state, present the classic features of traumatic psychological infantilism and of traumatic bonding. Our basic acceptance of male "reality" and of the necessity of our interacting with it every day is strongest proof that we have incorporated our torturing husband's world view. We believe his lies that we are incompetent and must therefore accept the world pretty much the way he has made it; that we cannot survive economically without him (whereas, in this slave culture, it is <i>he</i> who is economically dependent upon <i>us</i>); that he is basically a "good guy," the best we can get and we are lucky to have him; that he is the only one who can change our status; that we don't need to leave him because if we placate him, are docile, get permission, we can change him, and tiny reform by tiny reform we can build a happy marriage. We have evidence that our way of dealing with him is effective: after all, he's letting a handful of us do some of the high-status, low-integrity jobs men have always done.<a href="#fn11">[11]</a></p>
<p>I have heard women involved in male politics say about our political system almost the same words I have heard battered women use about their abusers: "Of course our government isn't perfect, but where is there a better one? With all its faults, it is still the best system [husband] in the world." Like a battered wife, they never think to ask the really relevant question: who said we needed a husband, or a husband-state, <i>at all</i>?</p>
<p>In terror that our husband the state will kill us or starve us if we try to leave, many feminists are resisting even the possibility of such a divorce and in classic terror-bonded behavior, are attacking those of us who urge it. But it is clear to me that, having bonded with monsters and their monstrous extension the system - ironically, for what we perceived as "safety" - we are clinging to a marriage that is lethal to women and to all life.</p>
<p>Though we have so far followed the same pattern in the macrocosm as in the microcosm of patriarchy, there is great hope. After all, every day women free themselves of terrorist husbands. We understand something of what has to happen for them to be able to do this.</p>
<p>Though every woman's experience is unique in many ways, there is a common
denominator to them all: she changes how she perceives herself, how she feels about herself, in that relationship. She sets about her internal revolution, deprograms herself, and in the process breaks her dependency upon men's kindness. Whereas once she felt worthless and not deserving of better treatment, something spurs her to begin caring about herself and, most significantly of all, to begin putting herself <i>first</i>.</p>
<p>Though that "something" is different with every woman, the results are similar. I remember Helen's story. Helen is a well-educated woman who, in an extremely abusive relationship with Fred for 13 years, displayed all the evidences of terror-bonding. One night she was in the emergency room at the local hospital again. As the doctors were putting her eyeball back into its socket, setting her broken shoulder, and sewing up the knife wounds all over her body, one of them who knew her well by this time said, "You know, Helen, the next time they bring you in here, I'm afraid we'll just have to tell them to wheel you right on through to the morgue."</p>
<p>Suddenly, a crack appeared in the heretofore solid wall of her brainwashing. Through it she saw clearly for the first time that though Fred had always threatened to kill her if she left him, the truth was that he would kill her if she <i>stayed</i>. She awoke to her danger, and whereas before she had been afraid of leaving, now she began to feel far more afraid of <i>not</i> leaving. She realized that she wanted to live, that she wanted to be happy, that she didn't deserve this. She began to value her own life. Once she began to change significantly how she felt about herself everything else followed.</p>
<p>Before her feelings about herself underwent transformation, asking herself "What shall I <i>do</i>?" was a useless exercise. Since she could not imagine herself doing other than she was doing, since she could not extrapolate a new reality in which she felt free as she stood in the middle of the old one in which she felt trapped, she could not imagine what behavior would get her from bondage to liberty. All she could answer when she asked herself "What shall I <i>do</i>?" was the same old conditioned answers: be nicer to him, try harder, show him you love him.</p>
<p>What changed everything is that she saw and felt different, and from these different perceptions and feelings, she <i>became</i> different. From her new feelings -  present even nascently - of worthiness and lovableness began to come behavior she could never have predicted, never have imagined of herself, certainly never could have planned since she had never seen herself act self-respecting, self-loving, or worthy. There is no way she could have known what she would do if she felt that way before she actually watched herself doing it.</p>
<p>An important part of the "everything else" that followed from or accompanied Helen's revolution was that she deprogrammed herself of her husband's lies, particularly those he told her about herself. She began to question all the assumptions that underlay her behavior, realized that they were all bogus, and that she had learned them from him. After his lies about <i>her</i>, for instance, his biggest lies had been about what would make <i>him</i> change and consequently what would change the marriage; she saw that he not only didn't change for the better but actively got worse when she behaved as he told her to. Her growing self-love and trust enabled her to push aside the scrims of deception with which he had shrouded their relationship and to begin to see it for what it really was.</p>
<p>One of Helen's biggest revelations was that she couldn't change Fred, that she couldn't change anyone but herself. As soon as the fact took up firm residence in her emotional repertoire that she had no moral obligation even to <i>try</i> to change him, that she had no moral obligation to him at all, only a deep obligation to herself, she left the marriage.</p>
<p>What happens to women like Helen individually in their marriages is happening globally among women as a group. It is called the Women's Liberation Movement and its enunciation is feminism. But whereas many women have left their microcosmic husbands and all their rules and demands, as a group we have yet to leave the partner of our macrocosmic marriage bed - the patriarchal state - and its imperatives, imperatives that are identical with those of its extensions and servants, the Freds of the world.</p>
<p>What is our primary fear when we entertain the idea of leaving our husband the state? That he will kill us and destroy everything. Though the truth is, as it was with Helen and Fred, that he will kill us and destroy everything <i>if we stay</i>, like the battered women we are, we believe deeply that our presence, our pleading and begging, is what is keeping him from his ultimate destructiveness. Our conviction that if we stop fearing and monitoring him, he will go berserk, is such nonsense that it is clearly a deliberate part of our terror-based programming. He has gone berserk anyway. With our eyes pinned to his lapels day and night for thousands of years he has grown increasingly lunatic. With our eyes riveted upon him he has been killing us and the world around us since the day god became male. The evidence is that our behavior and our emotional and economic support has facilitated our monster husband the patriarchal state in all his manifestations throughout history.</p>
<p>I mention economic support because one of women's most frequent objections to my suggestion that we stop resisting Fred the Fed and divorce him at once is that we must stay in order to stop him from building more, and more lethal, bombs. At this point, I remind my terrified sisters of the United Nations' statistic that confirms our slavery: women do two-thirds of the world's work, make one-tenth of the world's money, and own less than one-hundredth of the world's property. If we are doing most of the work and men are making nine-tenths of the money, it means that women are men's resources, that we are men's wealth - as the slaves' bodies and energy and labor and creativity and loyalty and emotional richness and culture are always the source of the master's wealth. Therefore our presence in patriarchy is absolutely necessary in order for men to have the wherewithal to do their war work, day by day. Our presence in this marriage makes possible men's bombs and tanks and guns and bullets and planes and ships. Our leaving this marriage, taking ourselves and all our abundance away from Fed Fred, is the fastest and surest way to stop his production of death machines.</p>
<p>There are other economic considerations, women remind me. When Helen leaves Fred, chances are pretty good that she will plummet into poverty. This, they say, frightens women most, and I believe them. For this reason, whatever we do now must have as its foremost necessity establishing a firm, independent, economic base for women, and we are beginning to see how this might be done.<a href="#fn12">[12]</a></p>
<p>I also remember that in the midst of terror, battered women cannot see their alternatives, though outsiders can. I think the same is true for women in patriarchy. In the midst of it, we think there are no alternatives. But if we could stand outside it for only a moment, we would see that we have many options. A handy measure in my life is that when I am <i>sure</i> there are no alternatives, I can be absolutely certain that I am listening to my conditioning. Regardless of how circumscribed the situation seems to be, there are <i>always</i> choices.</p>
<p>If we want to know what will happen when women leave our husband the state, all we need to do is look at what happened when Helen left Fred. Nothing burst into flames; there was simply no marriage where one had been before. We can look high and low for Fred's ugly, vicious regime, his unjust, humiliating system of rules for that family, his institutions and traditions, but they are nowhere to be found. It takes two for sadism to exist.<a href="#fn13">[13]</a> Fred's and Helen's marriage required Helen; it simply ceased to exist when she left, and is gone forever.</p>
<p>Andra Medea, internationally known expert on conflict, discovered this phenomenon through her comparative study of street and business fighting. In describing it, she concludes that in "dominance-oriented conflict" - conflict in which the aim of the attacker is to dominate the victim - interaction forms the key link. The attacker <i>must</i> have a response from the victim in order to go on; in fact, the attacker <i>craves</i> a response because the response solidifies his control.<a href="#fn14">[14]</a> A button I bought in the Crazy Ladies Bookstore in Cincinnati sums it up: "Power means not having to respond."<a href="#fn15">[15]</a></p>
<p>"This sort of attacker can put on a tremendous display of power," Medea continues, "which is often no more than a mask for fundamental weakness. We see it all the time with abusive husbands: the awesome show of power hiding a basic fear and weakness... The abusive husband deeply needs the wife, the wife can typically do without the abusive husband."<a href="#fn16">[16]</a></p>
<p>Medea also makes the point strongly that "the very nature of dominance-oriented attacks is to twist reality."<a href="#fn17">[17]</a></p>
<p>When women leave patriarchy - when we untwist reality and realize that we do not have to respond to this system, just as the abused wife one day stops believing she has to work with her batterer or within the parameters he has set down and stops responding - patriarchy will simply cease to exist. It won't go up in smoke; it will disappear. It takes two groups to do tyranny: the tyrants and the slaves. Tyrants never stop doing tyranny until the slaves stop responding in the necessary way for tyranny to be done to them. When they stop, the game is up.</p>
<p>I've been divorced twice in my life: once by a husband and once by a church. Before those divorces, I couldn't imagine what I'd do, how I'd live, without a husband, without a church. I couldn't believe that there were genuine alternatives. I was afraid of such enormous changes, afraid of trying to find a new nonconventional, nontraditional path, afraid of the pain of separation.</p>
<p>But in neither case did the pain last long, and I slipped so easily and with such growing joy into other modes of thinking and being that now I am no longer the least afraid of divorce. This is fortunate since I am well along in my process of divorcing the abusive husband all women have in common, the patriarchal state. Gleefully and gladly I am throwing him out of my home, out of my bed, out of my mind, out of my heart - out of my life. As I deprogram myself of his lies, I see him as the weak fearful drunken blusterer he is, and I am not afraid of him anymore.</p>
<p>Leaving our abusive husband-state seems risky to many women. It is hard to overcome the terror-produced belief that we are responsible for men's behavior and that if we stop being responsible, instant catastrophe will ensue. But since our best efforts to change them have only spurred them on, like Helen and all other battered women we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by simply walking out of this marriage, divorcing Fred the Fed, and with our sisters creating the world we want right now.</p>
<p>I have come to the place in my spiritual development where anything less than this bores me unutterably. Recently a TV reporter asked me on a live news program what I thought of the 1988 Presidential candidates. I answered, "Oh, are they having another election? I don't know who's running but I <i>do</i> know what they're saying. I could write all their speeches myself - if I could keep awake long enough."</p>
<p>"But you can't deny," he protested, "that whoever is elected will have power to affect your life."</p>
<p>"Oh, but you're wrong. I can and do deny that those men have power," I countered. Though I hadn't time to explain it to him then, coming to that point in my thinking was a crucial step for me. It seems to me a step that any woman might take who is intent upon living in a new world now.</p>

<hr>

<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Although some women are in abusive relationships with other women, the model is the male/female relationship.</p>
<p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> From the Power and Control Wheel produced by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, 206 West Fourth Street, Duluth, MN, 55806, (218) 722-4134.</p>
<p><a id="fn3">[3]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, Edna Rawlings, and Nelly Rimini, <i>Loving to Survive: Battered Women. Hostages, and the Stockholm Syndrome</i>, a work in progress, Cincinnati, OH, p. 89. Some of this material has been published in K. Yllo and M. Bograd (Eds.), <i>Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse</i>. Sage: Beverly Hills, CA, 1988.</p>
<p><a id="fn4">[4]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 3.</p>
<p><a id="fn5">[5]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 4.</p>
<p><a id="fn6">[6]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 5.</p>
<p><a id="fn7">[7]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 2.</p>
<p><a id="fn8">[8]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 6.</p>
<p><a id="fn9">[9]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 6.</p>
<p><a id="fn10">[10]</a> Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 4.</p>
<p><a id="fn11">[11]</a> So that we won't ask ourselves such questions as: Do we enjoy these kinds of work? Do these jobs really need doing? Upon what values should we decide what work is necessary and useful? What is the most humane way of approaching any given task?</p>
<p><a id="fn12">[12]</a> This is the subject of the last section of this book.</p>
<p><a id="fn13">[13]</a> Though I acknowledge a Victim mode as one of women's programmed roles, I no longer speak of masochism at all. I am tired of men's self-serving analysis that women are in abusive relationships because we are masochistic by nature and want to be hurt. What they call masochism is a condition that could more accurately be called "frozen fright," "a hysterical, dissociative phenomenon characterized by numbness, or paralysis of affect" caused by perpetual terror (Dee L.R. Graham, et al., <i>Loving to Survive</i>, p. 4.)</p>
<p><a id="fn14">[14]</a> Andra Medea, "Medea's Laws of Conflict," p. 9.</p>
<p><a id="fn15">[15]</a> Ayofemi Stowe, in a performance piece called "Talking About Talking, the Power to Shape the World" that she wrote and performed with Robin Podolsky in 1987, also says something about the necessity of response to power: "When I was in Africa, I learned about the concept of Muntu. It says that every time you call a tree a tree, you reaffirm the power of that tree, the existence of the tree. I wonder if refusing to talk about the tree somehow diminishes the tree" (p. 12A).</p>
<p><a id="fn16">[16]</a> Andra Medea, "Medea's Laws of Conflict," p. 5.</p>
<p><a id="fn17">[17]</a> Andra Medea, "Medea's Laws of Conflict," p. 11.</p>