Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (24 page)

B
ACK TO
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ISTER
A
MAZING

Having laid out the worst aspects of the sexual mind-set of many abusive men, we now can go back to reexamine Arnaldo, the sexually exciting and engaging abuser. Ironically, part of why he is so sexually dynamic is that he is profoundly self-involved. He can create a vibrantly sensual lovemaking experience because of how engrossed he is in seeing himself as an awe-inspiring person. (This is connected to why severely self-centered people in general, not just abusive men, can often be charismatic and seductive.) When Mr. Amazing is lighting the candles, choosing the music, and using his soft, smooth voice to conjure the sexual mood, you may be thinking, “Wow, this is so amazingly deep, and here we are going through this together.” But in reality the abuser is secretly off in a world by himself, engaged more with his fantasy than with you.

Mr. Amazing is enraptured for another reason: He finds possession enthralling. He feels like he is entering a magical realm where you belong to him totally, where he can be the ultimate master and you his unquestioning and contented slave. He craves, in short, a sexual partner with no mind or will of her own.

Finally, on some level he hopes that his ability to transport you sexually will tie you to him, so that he can have power over you in other, nonsexual ways. And, in some relationships, the abuser’s belief in the power of his sexuality is self-fulfilling: if much of the rest of the time he acts cold or mean, the episodes of lovemaking can become the only experience you have of loving attention from him, and their addictive pull thus becomes greater. In this way he can draw you into being as dependent on sex as he is, although for a very different reason.

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NTERESTED
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NYMORE)

Not every abusive man is pressuring or demanding with respect to sex. In fact, a substantial number of the partners of my clients complain of the opposite problem: The man has lost sexual interest almost completely, and the woman is feeling rejected and hungry for sex and affection. His drop in sexual energy can be propelled by several forces, including:

• A substantial proportion of abusive men are sexually shallow and so are only attracted to women with whom they have not had sex or to those they have been with only a few times. Your partner may not be interested in the kind of deep connection needed to sustain a lively sexual relationship over time and instead is off pursuing his latest fantasy of a great sexual relationship. His body may not be cheating yet, but his mind is.
  
• Similarly, he may be incapable of sustained sexual attraction to any woman who doesn’t meet his exaggerated ideal. He may want a woman with perfect features and a flawless body, like the airbrushed models in magazines. He may lose interest rapidly in a real-life woman whose body changes over time (from childbearing, for example, or simply from age) or one who, on close examination, is revealed to have blemishes or imperfections, as any real human being does. He’ll never find his dream girl because she doesn’t exist, but he may pour a lot of his time and mental energy into the search—and into punishing you for not being her.
  
• He may be attracted primarily to sex involving domination, referred to by some researchers as
  the sexualization of subordination.
  As your relationship progresses, he may feel disappointed to discover that you don’t fit his fantasy of a concubine—submissive and servile. There may be ways in which you stand up to him, refusing to relinquish certain aspects of your life or thoughts to his control. Some abusive men unfortunately have difficulty in achieving sexual arousal once they discover that a woman is determined to be her own person.
  
• He may be punishing you for some way you have challenged him, or for times when you have not felt like having sex with him. It is common for abusive men to withhold sex as a control tactic.
  
• If he is indeed having an affair, his energy for sex at home is bound to be siphoned off some. The chances that he is carrying a dangerous infection are also rising. If you have any concerns that your partner may be cheating on you, be sure to insist on safer sex practices. If requiring him to use safe sex feels dangerous to you because of how he may react, call a hotline for help right away.
  
• He may be addicted to drugs or alcohol. Some substance abusers lose their sex drive.
  
• He may be gay. A small number of my clients have eventually admitted to their partners, or to me, that they are primarily attracted to men. In a slightly larger but still small number of cases, the man never admits that he is gay, but the woman either catches him with a man or realizes that he spends most of his time at gay hangouts or with gay friends. Just because a man is gay doesn’t mean that he can’t be abusive to women. He may, for example, use a female partner as a window dressing to give him social respectability, diverting attention from his homosexuality. This is simply another example of how abusive men, straight or gay, tend to use women for selfish purposes.
  
• He may ration out sex as a way to gain power, sensing that you will try extra hard to keep him happy in hopes of getting him interested in lovemaking.
  

As I have discussed, abusive men tend to move between extremes, from loving and attentive to hateful and intimidating, from being overly involved in the minute details of your life to expressing no interest, from showing exclusive concern with what is good for you to being unboundedly selfish. The swing from electric sexual charge to loss of all sexual desire can increase his power just as the other highs and lows do.

S
EX AS A
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URE-ALL

A baffling question arises over and over again among the female partners of my clients: “Why does he want to have sex right after an incident in which he has been horrible to me? Sex is the
last
thing on my mind at that moment.”

Contrary to what some abusive men seem to believe, women do not find abuse sexy. When a woman’s partner calls her “bitch” or “whore,” mocks her, or physically intimidates her, the image of entwining herself intimately with him recedes far from her mind. How can you “make love” after someone has just treated you in a way that feels more like hatred? Abusive men do not grasp how ugly they appear when acting cruel.

So why are
his
feelings so different? Does abuse turn him on? Perhaps. Some men do appear to find abuse arousing, probably because they associate sexuality with domination. But other reasons why he might want sex after mistreating you are more common, including:

• He is seeking a quick-fix for his abusive behavior. He feels that if you have sex together, it proves that his verbal degradation or his violence is not that serious, that you aren’t hurt by what he did, and that everything is forgiven and forgotten.
  
• He wants to reassure himself that his abuse isn’t going to cause you to pull away from him emotionally or sexually. In fact, pursuing sex after abuse can be an expression of the man’s entitlement, as if to say, “Even if I’m mean to you, I should still get to have sexual access.”
  

An incident of abuse leaves the abusive man with a bad taste in his mouth, which he wants to chase away quickly, and sex helps him do that. But the woman can’t drive
her
anguish off so easily, as it runs much too deep. Unfortunately, the abuser’s self-focus makes him unwilling to understand that difference.

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EX AS A
W
AY TO
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EEP
W
OMEN
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IVIDED

Some of my clients are the focal points of swirling wars among females who hate each other passionately. The man creates and feeds these battles by being sexually unfaithful, making promises to various women that he’s going to pursue a long-term relationship with each one of them, bad-mouthing women to each other, getting women pregnant, and making them feel sorry for him. (See “The Player” in Chapter 4.) By getting women to channel their energy into fighting with each other, he escapes confrontation or accountability for his own actions and gets women to focus on meeting his needs and keeping him happy. Here are a couple of the approaches that clients of mine have used:

Chris and Donna

Chris makes his partner, Donna, insecure by frequently looking hard at other women or speaking flirtatiously with them and by spending a lot of time on phone calls for which he has odd explanations. He likes Donna to be aware that a lot of women are interested in him, so he drops suggestive comments from time to time. He pretends that he feels hostile toward these women, whom he accuses of “trying to tear us apart because they want to be with me.” When Donna starts to hear rumors that he is sleeping around, and when one woman finally tells her outright that she has been having an affair with Chris, he tells Donna that these are lies designed to drive wedges between them. Donna spends a lot of time wondering whether Chris is really telling the truth and hating the women who are trying to take her man away from her.

Sam and Nancy

A few years into his relationship with Nancy, Sam has a secret affair for a couple of months with a woman named Zoe. He finally cuts off the affair and confesses to Nancy. He claims that Zoe seduced him and that he knew all along they shouldn’t have been seeing each other, but he was afraid of hurting her because she seemed deeply depressed, so he kept postponing the decision to end it. “Zoe kept saying that she and I are right for each other, but I always knew it was just a fling and that I belong with you. She just wouldn’t listen, though.” He says that what finally prompted him to break things off with Zoe was her unkind comments about Nancy, which he quotes to her. Nancy becomes furious at Zoe upon hearing about her insults.

A year or so later, Nancy senses that Sam is drifting from her, including losing interest in sex. She snoops around a little and discovers that he is involved with Zoe again. She demands that Sam stop seeing her and he reluctantly agrees, but two months later he is involved with her again. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Sam says, “because I don’t have feelings for her like I have for you. She just has some hold over me. It’s a sexual thing I guess. I just can’t seem to say no.” Nancy comes increasingly to hate Zoe for ruining her relationship.

Meanwhile, Sam uses his tortured feelings about being “caught between two women” as an excuse for mounting abuse. For example, Nancy confronts him one day about lying to her and stealing her money. Sam responds by apologizing and explaining that he feels guilty and torn about his relationship with Zoe. He says that he stole the money to buy something for Zoe because she was so depressed that he was afraid she might try to hurt herself. Years go by, and he is still putting off making a clear choice between the two women, so their mutual bitterness is deep.

Over this period Sam’s treatment of Nancy gets progressively worse, including one incident in which he knocks a table over onto her leg. He doesn’t show any signs of using his abusive behaviors with Zoe, which makes Nancy hate her all the more. Zoe, meanwhile, goes around telling people: “Nancy treats Sam so badly; he is so hurt by her. He’s told me all about how mean she is to him, and that’s why he wants to be with me. The reason he has trouble divorcing her is that they go back a lot of years together and their families are friends of each other, but he’s almost ready.”

Both of the above scenarios involve an abusive man who keeps getting women to focus on each other’s behavior rather than his. He relies partly on popular negative stereotypes of women, from which women themselves are not immune. Women are conditioned, for example, to see one another as catty, conniving, and eager to steal men from other women. Meanwhile he gets to remain a player, which is what he wants. On a couple of occasions, my colleagues and I have overheard clients in the waiting area joking and laughing about ways in which women fall for these machinations, as if their ability to get away with it reinforced their masculinity.

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HIS
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OUTINE

Women can interfere with these manipulations if they keep the following principles in mind:

1. An abusive man lies a lot. Don’t believe what he tells you about what is happening in his relationships with other women, including what those women have supposedly said about you.
   
2. Communicate directly with other women as much as possible to compare stories about what he is saying and doing, so that he can’t play you off against each other.
   
3. If a man cheats, that is 100 percent his own responsibility. Don’t let him channel your anger toward the other woman as if he were the helpless victim of a seduction. Abusive men love to portray themselves as unable to control their hormonal urges, which is nonsense.
   
4. Apply the principle of “no third chances.” When a man, especially an abusive one, cheats for the second time, that means that more affairs will follow, no matter what promises he may make.
   
5. Many women want to have a sexually intense partner, which is fine; men don’t have to cheat to be sexy. Abusive men love to create the impression that their sexual wandering is a product of how passionate they are. But the reality is that sexual passion and faithfulness are entirely compatible. The reason he cheats is because he is a manipulator, not because he’s sexy.
   

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OLE OF
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ORNOGRAPHY

In pornography that is geared toward heterosexual men, women are portrayed as very simple. They are always in the mood for sex, and they never say no. They have no sexual needs—or needs of any kind—of their own; all they seem to care about is the man’s pleasure. They require no commitment, no sacrifice, and little money. When a man is finished with them, he turns off the video or closes the magazine, and they’re gone. What could be easier?