This has been perking or a long time.

[frahulettaes]

From the Curvature author Cara:

On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that we want to believe that the people we know, who we love, trust, and/or spend time with, are incapable of violence against women. Not only because it’s our nature to not want to believe that we were wrong about a person, but also, for women, because if they are incapable of violence against women in general, they are incapable of violence against us. Believing that the men we know, no matter how closely or distantly, are not those kinds of men makes us feel safe.


This. I've been turning this idea around for a while and it has to do with something like the amount of reality we can see in our men is inversely proportional to the amount of safety we need from them. Or something. I think Cara does a pretty interesting job at it. I'll have more to say.

Comments

[manic1066.livejournal.com]

Hey - have tried to call you a few times - your phone seems to be acting wonky - have a great place to play MTG - better than Legacy..

[frahulettaes.livejournal.com]

Hi, Sorry I missed your calls. My phone is wonky right now. My hours are 12 to 8:30 for the next few weeks. I'm working for a different department, taking catering orders for the holidays. So we could meet up? Watch tv? Chat?

[pekover.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure where you're going, when you have more to say, but...

I'm always a bit troubled with the language of 'capable of violence.' Because, honestly, I believe that every single human, male or female, is capable of violence in some situation. I'm essentially a pacifist, but I even believe that there are times when violence is, if not quite acceptable, at least the lesser of the evils available. So, I guess it depends on how you define violence, and maybe on how you define capable, but for me...

It would be more useful to look at the people in our lives and assess the likelyhood of them resorting to violence in situations where we would consider it inappropriate. A lot less clear-cut than the simple capable/incapable divide, but to me, much more relevant. Of course, I think people are just as likely to fool themselves in using the more complicated scale, and I agree, the need for a feeling of safety is probably a huge element of this.

I just read the original article (I know, I should have read it first), and I think I'm on-board with almost all of it; it's just the language in the quote that you selected that I'm a bit unsure of.

[frahulettaes.livejournal.com]

I think the language is important and intentional. Statistically, men suffer violence from strangers, women suffer more violence from men they know. That's the facts. And it's very very difficult to talk about rape/sexual assault/sexual harrassment without acknowledging this fact.

There's a lot of emphasis in rape prevention language on what women can do to not get raped which still puts the women at the center, i.e. victim blaming. And, there's a lot of emphasis on being aware of not going some place dangerous alone. These ways of speaking I think serve to keep our attention on what we can control so we don't have to think of how much danger we live in from what we can't control, i.e. those men we know.

This is terrifying.

I have never been sexually assaulted by someone I didn't know. I have only ever been assaulted by men I did know. But no one, no one, ever warned me about them. Only ever about the strangers. I'm not saying we, each of us, needs to be afraid of the men in our lives, I'm saying we need to talk about it in terms of these facts, calling them out when they happen and being honest, socially and personally, about who commits these acts and putting a stop to defending them and excusing them.

Your comment is pretty typical of what that conversation looks like. No one wants to suspect Dad or husband or brother or friend or friend of friend. As she says, we don't want to be such bad judges of character. But we can't just say, violence is inherent to both men and women because that derails the conversation away from the fact that, statistically, this sort of assault is perpetrated by men on women. This whole article isn't a generalized statement about violence.

Most of us are aware enough to judge the risk of any one of our relationships and we do to our own benefit and aren't attacked. But sometimes, we overlook things, behaviors because our guy wouldn't do that, and we want to believe it and then when it does happen, we haven't believed our intuition, we haven't listened to ourselves because we haven't been honest about the conversation about being attacked.

I think the most difficult thing to do in this situation is to know the risk, be aware, and to love anyway. To love them, and ourselves enough to tell the truth and keep ourselves safe.

And each situation and person has to be taken for who and what they are at any given moment. With the knowledge that we can never really know and we must be careful with those we love and who love us so that they, and we, stay safe.

[pekover.livejournal.com]

I think maybe you think I was disagreeing with a different part of the language that I was...

I'm not sure which conversation my comment seemed typical of, but I'm not in any way denying that women are most frequently attacked by people they know. I realize this. I'm just saying that I don't think 'capable of violence' is a useful term to use, as I believe that virtually all humans are capable of violence. So, as you say, I think people need to 'know the risk' - and risk isn't an absolute term, it's an almost infinite spectrum.

I don't know, maybe it's just semantics, or a tiny detail instead of the whole picture. But to me, it seems significant to recognize that virtually EVERYONE is capable of violence. I think then we can more meaningfully explore the question of why some people engage in it and others don't.

I guess maybe my use of gender-neutral language was a red herring, making you think that was the point of my comment. It wasn't. I prefer to use the gender neutral terms in order to catch the exceptions and make it clear that violence, perpetrated by anyone against anyone, is not an acceptable solution, but it's not in any way an attempt to deny that violent crime is most often committed by men. I just think that if we want to get beyond the basics and start looking at what men can do to change this, we need to look at why some men (people) are violent while others aren't. And if we lump all men into the same camp of 'capable of violence,' I think we're losing the opportunity to explore the variations within the gender.

PS - I had to take a pretty deep breath before writing this, 'cause I was initially pretty offended that you seemed to think that my comment was typical of...I don't know, it seemed as if you thought I was 'defending or excusing' people who commit violence. I've re-read my original comment, and I guess you could have gotten that from my idea that in some situations, violence might me the lesser of the evils. So, to clarify, I mean that in terms of self-defense, or defense of others, or similar situations where the violence is the morally questionable means leading to a morally desirable end. I thought it seemed too obvious for me to have to say this the first time, but just in case it wasn't clear, I don't believe there's any time when it's acceptable for someone to use violence to intimidate, injure, or control an innocent.

[cimmerians.livejournal.com]

I would have to walk a long, hard, uphill and spiky road to come to a place where I would believe *any* man *not* capable of this.

[And if you can tell, if knowing is so easy, so obvious, then any woman who gets tangled up with an abuser, or a rapist, really only has herself to blame, now doesn’t she?]

And that, in the proverbial nutshell, is the goddamn problem with the Not My Nigel syndrome.

[frahulettaes.livejournal.com]

This is so insidious that it's nearly impossible to get people to talk about it instead of around it.
I was sitting in the car when the full realization hit me about Not My Nigel and it was such a gut punch that I was left blind dizzy with rage and yet unable to really put into words WHY I was so furious.

[cimmerians.livejournal.com]

This is so insidious that it's nearly impossible to get people to talk about it instead of around it.

Not only am I happy to talk about it, I'm also happy to shriek about it.

This is the one place--the only one I know of--where the presumption of innocence is a key part of enabling the guilty and punishing the victims. Therefore, *nobody* is presumed innocent as far as I'm concerned. The responsibility for rape, abuse and manipulation will always and eternally and wholly rest with the transgressors in my world. Since most often these crimes and acts of domination occur beneath a socially-approved cloak of 'but I'm/he's such a nice guy', I cannot afford to honor the social compact here.

Not that I'm big into social compact honoring anyway... :-)

[frahulettaes.livejournal.com]

And another thing, your nigel isn't yours when he's not with you. bet you'd be damned surprised by what nigel gets up to when you're not around. pretty good camoflage thing they've got going. and that's exactly why moderates are more dangerous than extremists.

[cimmerians.livejournal.com]

Power disparity, size disparity and strength disparity, when combined with human insecurity (because I've never seen any abusive, assaultive or dominating behavior that didn't, at its root, come from there) is a petri dish for this crap. While I fight against oppressive/abusive men, I would not say that I'm in the least surprised that this stuff goes on, all the time and everywhere. Humans are capable of all kinds of evil fuckery, and women, animals and children bear the brunt of that truth. (This is why I get all umbragey when someone says a person or an act is 'inhuman'--dude, this is TOTALLY HUMAN. This is what humans do if they don't make themselves NOT DO IT.)

Also: if you haven't read them yet, I *highly* recommend the books The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, which should be available at your local library.

Much lovins--
Melis

[frahulettaes.livejournal.com]

Yes yes yes and yes. I'm going to answer both your comments here. Thanks for the rec, I'll be going to the library this weekend so I'll add them to my list.