Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (23 page)

In reality, abuse of women—and societal approval of it—is a widespread problem in the great majority of modern cultures. The only places where it has been found not to exist are among some tribal peoples who are highly disapproving of all forms of aggression and who give women and men equal or nearly equal power.

Abusive men from some national backgrounds are very explicit and direct about their cultural or religious rules, which can make their attitudes appear to be unusually bad. A man might say, for example, “God ordained that the man chastise the woman,” or he might say threateningly to this partner, “Part of a wife’s job is to give the man sex when he wants it.” Do white American abusers think in these ways less than abusers of other cultures do? No. They do often hide their beliefs better and, by doing so, can create the impression of being more “enlightened.” But the
directness
of a cultural message is not the same thing as its
strength.
I have worked with hundreds of nonwhite abusers from a spectrum of cultures and religions, with more than twenty different countries of origin among them, and I can assure you that my white, middle-class clients feel every bit as justified as the others and have attitudes toward women that are just as superior and disrespectful. As a product of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, I am familiar with its centuries-old tradition of hiding its abuse of women under pretty packaging. Unwrapped, it doesn’t look very different.

S
OME
S
PECIFIC
C
ULTURAL
E
XCUSES AND
J
USTIFICATIONS

Certain culturally specific rationalizations used by abusive men can be particularly confusing to women. For example, I find it fairly common for an abusive man of color to believe that the racial discrimination he has faced in his life excuses his mistreatment of his partner. If you complain to him that he is abusing you, he may accuse you of betraying him as a man of color, saying that you are siding with the white culture that has already torn him down so much. Because racism does remain a harsh reality, he may succeed in making you feel guilty for criticizing him or for trying to leave him. If your background is the same as his, he applies a double standard of racial solidarity; in his mind he isn’t betraying his racial group even though he is abusing a woman of color, yet he considers
you
disloyal when you complain of his treatment or denounce him. He’s got reality turned around backward: The one who is betraying solidarity is him.

I have also had a few dozen clients over the years who belong to fundamentalist religious groups, usually Christian or Islamic fundamentalist or Orthodox Judaic. Abusive men from these groups tend to openly espouse a system in which women have next to no rights and a man is entitled to be the unquestioned ruler of the home. To make matters worse, these religious sects have greatly increased their political power around the globe over the past two decades. As a case in point, consider the growing influence of Christian fundamentalism in the United States. Women who live within these religious groups may feel especially trapped by abuse, since their resistance to domination is likely to be viewed as
evil
and the surrounding community may support or even revere the abuser. (Christian women living with abuse can find excellent guidance in
Keeping the Faith
by Marie Fortune. See “Resources.”)

Some of my African-American clients claim that black women are too tough to abuse, and they may even claim to be victims of the women’s violence. This claim is sometimes accompanied by descriptions of the black family as “matriarchal” or “female dominated.” These exaggerations of cultural differences serve to cover up the fact that, according to the latest U.S. statistics, African-American woman are abused at roughly the same rate as white women. It is true, in my experience, that black women sometimes fight back more than white women against a physically violent abuser (though many white women fight back also), but they don’t come out any less injured, frightened, or controlled.

Finally, men of some tribal cultures develop abusive behaviors toward women after they have had extensive contact with modern societies for the first time. Tribal women have sometimes reported, for example, that when television came to their geographic areas, domestic violence came with it, as their men began to learn the violent and male-dominant attitudes that characterize so much of modern culture. The tribal man thus may justify his abusiveness in terms of
progress
and
moving into the mainstream,
linking his ridicule of his partner to disparaging the overall tribal way of life, though some do the opposite, falsely claiming that tradition supports their oppressive behaviors.

W
HILE
I
HAVE FOCUSED
here on cultural differences and similarities among abusive men, there is another situation in which race and culture are very important to abuse: when the abuser is white American (or Canadian) but his partner is a woman of color or an immigrant. The abuser in such a relationship tends to use racism as an additional tactic to insult and control his partner. Women of color who have white abusers can face considerable bias from police, courts, or child protective services. Some specific resources for abused women of color—regardless of the race of the abusive man—are listed in the back of this book.

T
HE
S
AME
-S
EX
A
BUSER

Although most abusers are male and most abused partners are female, the reasons for this lopsided picture are social, not biological. Women sometimes abuse their lesbian partners, and men may be abused by their gay partners. The thinking that drives the behavior of lesbian and gay male abusers largely follows the patterns we have been examining. While it is true that some justifications used by heterosexual male abusers are not available to the gay or lesbian abuser—such as “I have the right to rule over you because I’m the man and you’re the woman”—the same-sex abuser replaces these with others that can be as powerful. The abused lesbian or gay man therefore can get as badly ensnarled as the straight woman.

First, let’s look at some of the things the same-sex abuser
can’t
do as easily (I am going to call the abuser “she”):

• She won’t be able to use sex-role expectations that are based on cultural or religious rules as easily as the straight male abuser can.
  
• She doesn’t have as many social power advantages as a man who is involved with a woman does. (The straight male abuser can take advantage in multiple ways of the fact that we still live in “a man’s world,” despite recent societal changes.)
  
• She may not be able to use size and strength to intimidate as easily as most straight male abusers do. In fact, she may be smaller or appear to be less “tough” than her partner.
  

The same-sex abuser compensates for these gaps in several ways. I will offer just a few examples:

1. She may have an even deeper conviction than the straight male abuser that she couldn’t possibly be abusive, no matter how cruel or even violent she gets, because abuse “doesn’t happen” in same-sex relationships. She may sound so sure of herself on this point that she is able to convince her abused partner that what is happening is just normal relationship conflict.
   
2. She uses her partner’s homosexuality against her. When she is angry, she may threaten to tell her partner’s parents about their relationship or to call up her place of employment and “out” her, which could cause her to lose her job. If she is a violent abuser, she may tell her partner: “You think the police or the courts are going to help you when they know you’re lesbian?” The gay male abuser may tell his partner: “The police are just going to laugh at you when you tell them you are afraid. They’ll tell you to act like a man.”
   The lesbian or gay male who is involved with a violent or threatening abuser does genuinely face discrimination from the police and courts, and the abuser knows this. In many states, for example, an abused person cannot obtain a restraining order to keep the abuser away if that person is of the same sex.
   
3. The same-sex abuser may get even more mileage out of playing the victim than the straight male abuser does. When a straight male goes around claiming that a woman is abusing him, he often meets with considerable skepticism—as well he should. But when we look at two people of the same sex, how are we to tell which one is abusing power? A quick glance won’t give us the answer.
   The result is that a same-sex abuser can often convince people around her, and sometimes even her own partner, that
   she
   is the one being abused. When lesbians or gay men go to agencies for help with relationship abuse, it is not unheard of for the abuser to say that she is the victim
   and
   for the victim to say that she is the abuser! Sometimes the abuser succeeds in getting support and sympathy for quite a while before service providers catch on to the fact that they are assisting the wrong person.
   
4. The abuser can sometimes get her wider community to be silent about the abuse, because everyone is already struggling with the negative social image of homosexuality. Many lesbians and gay men feel, quite understandably, that awareness of abuse in same-sex relationships will be used by bigoted people as an excuse for further stereotyping and discrimination. And there’s really no question that bigots will do exactly that. But silence is not the answer either, since it isolates and abandons abused lesbians and gay men and allows the abusers to go steamrolling forward over the lives of their partners.
   

The same-sex abuser may have had an extremely difficult life, and she may feel that anyone who labels her “abusive” is being unfair to her, given what she has gone through. She may have been banished from her family because of her homosexuality, barred from progressing in her career, or filled with secret shame during her adolescence. People in her social circle may have gone through similar trials and thus feel an instant sympathy for her excuses. But nonabusive lesbians and gay men have also endured oppressive experiences because of their sexuality. Same-sex abusers, like straight male abusers, seize any excuse they can to absolve themselves of responsibility for their actions and to elicit sympathy.

Ultimately, the thinking and actions of lesbian and gay male abusers are more similar to than different from those of other abusers. Later on, when we explore the social roots of abusiveness, it will become clear why all abusers follow more or less the same template.

• For the most part, an abusive man uses verbally aggressive tactics in an argument to
  discredit
  your statements and
  silence
  you. In short, he wants to avoid having to deal seriously with
  your perspective
  in the conflict.
  
• Arguments that seem to spin out of control “for no reason” actually are usually being used by the abusive man to achieve certain goals, although he may not always be conscious of his own motives. His actions and statements make far more sense than they appear to.
  
• An abusive man’s good periods are an important and integrated aspect of his abuse, not something separate from it.
  
• Abusive men find abusiveness rewarding. The privileged position they gain is a central reason for their reluctance to change.
  
• Abusive men tend to be happy only when everything in the relationship is proceeding
  on their terms.
  This is a major reason for the severe mood swings that they so often exhibit from day to day.
  
• Violence is not just punches and slaps; it is anything that puts you in physical fear or that uses your body to control you.
  
• The styles of abusers vary by race, nationality, and sexual orientation. However, their commonalities far outweigh their differences.
  
• The turbulence, insecurity, and fear that your partner causes in daily life can make it hard to recognize his pattern of attitudes and behaviors. By taking a mental step back, you may begin to see recurring themes.
  
• Be cautious, and seek out assistance. You don’t deserve to live like this, and you don’t have to. Try to block his words out of your mind and believe in yourself. You can do it.
  

L
IBBY SCOWLED
, the muscles in her face and neck tightening, as she described an abusive boyfriend she had left three years earlier. “Arnaldo never hit me, but he seemed to get a thrill out of being mysterious and terrifying. One day he described in graphic detail how he was going to torture and kill my cat, because he knew how precious my pets are to me. Another time he was giving me a massage, talking in this hypnotic, faraway tone, and he said, ‘When I was in Green Beret training, I learned about a certain spot in a person’s neck where, if you poke them hard and fast, you can paralyze them permanently.’” Libby found out later that Arnaldo had never been in the military. He had told other lies, too, like the one about his terminally ill grandmother who was going to leave him thirty thousand dollars. But his stories had all sounded so convincing. “He got me to support him for a year and to lend him a lot of money besides. I’m out five or six thousand dollars because of him.” Resentment rang through her voice as she gained momentum. “I would be in such a different financial position right now if it hadn’t been for him. And I bought it when he promised to pay me back any day, always saying that the money was just about to arrive. What a con artist!” And she told me how Arnaldo would harangue her about being too skinny, so that she became shameful of her body. I couldn’t tell which was more potent inside of her, rage or grief.

Then, abruptly, Libby’s face softened. A hint of a smile formed at the corners of her mouth, and her eyes shined lightly as she focused on an image inside her mind. “But there was one thing that wasn’t like the rest with Arnaldo. Sex. Lovemaking with him was great. He was so completely
into
it. He would light candles and build the mood for a while. It would last a long time. He was so intense, and passionate. There was this drama around it that was so transporting. I have never experienced anything like it before. Or since, really. I wish I could capture just that one part of the relationship. The rest was awful.”

Libby’s story is not as unusual as you might think. When I interview partners of my clients, I always ask whether there has been any sexual mistreatment. It is not uncommon for me to hear the woman’s voice lose its tension, as Libby’s facial expression had, and hear her say with a certain lilt, “Oh, well, we’ve never had any problem in
that
area,” followed by a contented and slightly embarrassed chuckle. In fact, memories of the better aspects of their sexual relationship can be part of why a woman who has left an abusive partner feels so tempted to give him another chance.

But there is also the other extreme. I have had clients whose only interest in sex was for domination and degradation. For the woman, being in bed with this style of abuser can be a nightmare. He wants sex when he wants it, the way he likes it, and with little attention to how she may feel or what her needs might be. Sexual episodes with him may feel like sexual assaults to her. As the partner of one of my clients said to me, “I don’t even want to go into it. It’s just ugly.”

The sexually abusive man won’t necessarily rape his partner in the literal sense of using physical force or threats of harm—though some do. Instead he may insult her when she declines his advances, call her names like “frigid” or “lesbian,” or snarl accusingly, “You must be getting it somewhere else, since you never want to make it with me anymore.” He may make her feel guilty about his sexual frustration, tell her that he feels like she doesn’t love him anymore, or say that a man must have his needs met. He may threaten infidelity: “Well, if you won’t have sex with me, I can find plenty of women who will.” And he may carry that threat out; many clients of mine have used affairs to punish their partners.

A woman named Cynthia recounted how her partner coerced her by using relentlessness: “If I don’t want to have sex with Ernie, he just goes on and on, and he won’t stop until I change my mind. He’ll beg me, then he’ll get crude and say I’m fucking someone else. Then it’s nonstop insults. If I go to sleep, he wakes me up. Some nights I’m just exhausted after a while. So what do I do? Usually I finally give in. I can’t stand to go through it. It ends up being better to just get it over with, even though it’s awful, because then at least he lets me sleep.”

When people think about forced sex, they picture physical assault. So when an abuser forces sex through pressure or manipulation or sleep deprivation, a woman doesn’t know what to call it and may blame herself. Dozens of partners of my clients, including Cynthia, have said: “It’s my own fault. I shouldn’t give in to him.” A woman can need some time and distance before she can come to realize that she was not responsibile for her partner’s sexual mistreatment of her, before she can even name what he did. An ex-partner of one of my clients said to me, about two years after she and the abuser divorced, “Looking back on it now, I can see that I was raped over and over again for more than ten years.” And she was realizing how destructive his actions had been to her soul. Studies show that
women whose partners abuse them sexually can have some of the greatest emotional difficulties, including depression, of any abused women.

H
OW
M
ANY
A
BUSIVE
M
EN
L
OOK AT
S
EX

Arnaldo, the sexually amazing abuser, and Ernie, the sexually degrading abuser, are not as different as they may seem. Their underlying orientation toward sex is similar. One style of abusive man may behave in a sexually appropriate manner for the early period of a relationship, and then one night from hell he may broadside his partner with aggressive, degrading sex or even force her outright. The woman is left in shock, heartbroken and betrayed, feeling that her life has been turned upside down. A few of the women I’ve worked with have even told me of the anguish of being sexually assaulted on the night of their wedding or within a few days thereafter. With other abusive men the change may be gradual rather than abrupt, the early months of exciting and loving sexuality blending slowly into arm-twisting and ugliness. When we look inside the abuser’s mind, we often find that dazzling lovemaking and spirit-murdering sexual aggression can actually be two aspects of the same mind-set.

Before I take you through the details and subtleties of how abusive men typically approach a range of sexual issues, I want to emphasize the underpinnings of the sexual mentality of many abusers, the foundation that often supports the rest of the structure.

1. I
T’S FOR
HIM

The abuser’s orientation toward sex is likely to be self-involved. Sex to him is primarily about meeting
his
needs. He may put some effort into creating pleasure for his partner, but probably not because her satisfaction, or sharing a mutual experience, is important to him. He is invested in having her reach orgasm so that he can see himself as a great lover. He wants to be erotic because he believes that his sexual prowess will enable him to dominate women. Of course, any lover gets some pride out of bringing pleasure to a partner. But to many abusive men, that’s the
only
reason why the woman’s satisfaction matters. Everything refers back to him.

An abusive man commonly rolls all of his emotional needs into one tremendous bundle, which he expects sex to be able to carry. He tends to have little real heart-to-heart connection with his partner, since a man cannot be truly close to a woman he is abusing. (Although his partner may feel very
attached
to him through traumatic bonding, and he may feel very
attached
to having her meet his various needs, attachment and closeness are two different things.) So he compensates for the lack of genuine intimacy by elevating sex to the highest plane, burdening it with the responsibility of providing for him all the emotional satisfaction that he is not receiving elsewhere in his relationship.

2. S
HE OWES HIM SEX.

My clients commonly believe that a woman gives up her right to decline sex once she becomes seriously involved with a man. It’s her responsibility to have sex with him to make him feel loved, to meet his sexual needs, or simply because that’s her job. The specific point at which she loses her right to say no varies from abuser to abuser. For some, the gateway to sexual domination is the first time they have sex. In other words, she has the right to say no as long as she
always
says no, but the first time they actually make love, she forfeits her option to turn him down from that day forward. I find this particularly true of my younger clients. To other abusers, marriage is the moment when her body is transferred to his ownership. To still others, moving in together is the demarcation line.

A majority of my clients seem to believe that the woman loses her right to refuse him if the man determines that it has been “too long” since they have had sex. The definition of how many days without sex is too many differs for each abuser, but he watches his internal clock and expects access when the alarm goes off. Her decision not to have sex may be respected up to that moment, but then his entitlement tends to take over.

In a typical abusive inversion, my clients often attempt to convince me that they are the sexual victims in their relationships. As one man said: “My partner uses sex to control
me,
that’s how women jerk men around. Women are the ones that really have the power over men because they know they have what we want the most, and they have the power to shut us out. My wife wants me to be her little puppy dog, begging and drooling and wagging my tail, that’s the only way I’ll get sex.” The underlying attitude comes bursting out of his words: He believes his wife is keeping something of
his
away from him when she doesn’t want intimate contact. He sees sexual rights to a woman as akin to mineral rights to land—and he owns them.

3. S
EX IS A WAY TO ESTABLISH POWER AND DOMINANCE.

We have been looking at the abusive attitude that says: “We have sex because I have power over you.” On the flip side of that outlook is an equally prevalent aspect of abusive thinking: “I have power over you because we have sex.” In this respect his sexual actions are like those of a tomcat marking territory. Once he has “gone all the way” with a woman, he feels that he owns her, or at least owns a piece of her. Both the kinder and more cruel aspects of the sexuality of abusive men can spring from the use of sex to establish dominance.

One quarter or more of my clients cheat on their partners repeatedly. These men seem to get excitement from establishing their power over women in general, by demonstrating their ability to get sexual access. An abuser may get all this sex by creating an image of himself as a stupendous lover; by telling woman after woman that he is in love with her and that he is planning to leave his partner for her “as soon as I can break the news to her, but I just need a little time to let her down easy”; by using drugs or alcohol to impair a woman’s ability to resist, or by force and intimidation. This man is heavily focused on “scoring,” and the actual effect he has on the lives of these women, from broken promises to sexually transmitted infections, never seems to hit home for him.

Sexual access to lots of different women may not only make him feel powerful vis-à-vis women but also in relation to other men. If he feels competitive with men, he can demonstrate his superiority by having more notches in his belt, “bagging” women like deer. He may surround himself with men who share his view that high status in the pecking order accrues to those who can control or exploit the most women. (See “The Player” in Chapter 4.)

For those abusers who are not chronically unfaithful to their partners, this competition with men may still exist, perhaps taking the form of desiring to have the most beautiful or sexy partner and wanting other men to see how he owns and controls her. His partner may be flattered by his pride in her at first, but gradually she comes to feel that she is being used as a showpiece, with her humanity ignored.

4. H
E SEES HER AS A SEX OBJECT.

An abuser who exhibits any one of the sexual attitudes described above—or all three—has to distance himself from his partner’s thoughts and feelings in order to avoid guilty feelings about how he is using and wounding her sexually. One way he may do this is by seeing his partner as a sex object, as if she were a pornographic photo rather than a person, devoid of emotions or ambitions, free of any need for personal integrity or safety. This style of abusive man looks at his partner as a machine to be used for his sexual use. This depersonalizing of his partner can, in the long term, be as psychologically injurious to her as any of his other abusive behaviors. Partners of my clients sometimes tell me:

Dehumanization can be a sickening, horrible experience for the person at whom it is directed. If you are involved with a sexually exploitative partner, you may find that sex is sometimes, or perhaps always, a nightmare. Exploitative, rough, coercive, uncaring sex is similar to physical violence in its effects, and can be worse in many ways. And part of why it feels so degrading is that a woman can sense the fact that in her partner’s mind she has ceased to exist as a human being.

Abusive men who have these kinds of attitudes of sexual ownership sometimes refuse to use birth control or to practice safe sex. I have had numerous clients, for example, who have conceived children through sexual assaults on their partners. The implications of these kinds of sexual abuse for a woman—and for her children—are very serious.