Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (41 page)

The messages to young men, intentional or not, are that coercion and even a degree of physical violence and intimidation are compatible with deep love and that a man can know better than a woman what is good for her. The attitudes that drive the behavior of many of my clients were woven throughout this play. And if a young boy doesn’t see this play—most of the audience was adult—he nonetheless is influenced by the attitudes that his parents bring home with them from the theater.

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A boy’s early training about sex roles and about relationships can feed abuse.

At least until quite recently, a boy has tended to learn from the most tender age that when he reaches young adulthood he will have a wife or girlfriend who will do
everything
for him and make him a happy man. His partner will belong to him. Her top responsibility will be to provide love and nurturing, while his key contribution will be to fill the role of “the brains of the operation,” using his wisdom and strength to guide the family. Tightly interwoven with these expectations are other messages he is likely to receive about females. He may learn that boys are superior to girls, particularly if he grows up around men who exhibit that attitude. (In many families, there is no worse insult you can give to a boy than to say, “You’re acting like a girl.”) When he is old enough to know about sex, he may learn that the most valuable thing about females is their capacity to give sexual pleasure to males. Depending on what his father or stepfather is like, what kinds of peers he chooses in his teen years, or what kinds of music he listens to, he may learn that, when a female partner does not defer to him, he can use verbal degradation or even physical intimidation to punish her and ensure better cooperation in the future.

Studies have found that nearly half of abusive men grow up in homes where their father or stepfather is an abuser. Home is a critical learning ground for values and sex-role expectations. Boys are at risk to absorb the abuser’s attitude through his words and actions (see Chapter 10). Even if the dad never explicitly says that females are inferior, for example, or that the man should have the last word in an argument, his behavior can get the message across.

The sex-role expectations to which boys and men have historically been subjected are captured powerfully by an article called “The Good Wife’s Guide,” from a 1955 issue of
Housekeeping Monthly
that includes such instructions as “Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness,” and “Don’t complain if he’s late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.” The wife is further encouraged to make sure the children are quiet when he gets home, to keep the house perfectly orderly and clean, and not to complain if her husband goes out for evening entertainment without her, because she needs to “understand his world of strain and pressure.” Our society’s sex-role attitudes have certainly progressed greatly over the past fifty years, yet the expectations laid out in this article are precisely the ones I find in many of my abusive clients to this day; cultural values that run this deep take generations to unearth and dispose of.

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Some messages in media oriented toward children and teens support abuse by men.

In a book in the popular Berenstain Bears series for children called
Trouble with Homework,
both the mother and the children cower when Father becomes angry. (It’s on the cover.) At one point he knocks over a chair and clenches his fists above his head. At the end of the story, the children have pleased Dad by doing what he wanted, and Mom smiles happily to see them cuddled up with Dad on the couch. In
Bedtime for Francis,
by Russel Hoban, the father threatens Francis that he will spank her if she does not stop asking for help with her fear of the dark, and she falls asleep alone with the fear of how the spanking would hurt.

Fairy tales also sometimes support the abusive mentality. In
Beauty and the Beast,
for example, the beast is cruel to the woman and isolates her from the world, but she loves him anyhow, and her love ultimately transforms him into a good man—the precise myth that keeps some women entrapped in their abusive relationships. In
The Little Mermaid,
Ariel chooses to
give up
her voice
—literally—in order to live on land so that she can marry the man she loves. A woman with no voice is the dream girl of many abusive men.

Even movies that are aimed at children and teens commonly include messages that condone abuse of females. In a recent Jim Carrey film, for example, a man sits down in a park next to a strange woman who is nursing her baby and then suddenly pushes the baby away from the woman and begins to suck her breast himself. This sexual assault is presented as humorous.

Music videos and computer games have become the predominant sources of cultural training for children and teenagers. In the world of MTV and VH1, many of the sex-role messages are worse than ever, with males aggressive and in control and the value of females restricted to their sexual allure. As was exposed in a recent documentary broadcast on MTV, pornographers are frequently being hired to make music videos, which predictably leads to portrayals of women that make them look like they exist for men to use.

Some music videos show abuse explicitly. In one, for example, a man stalks a woman throughout the song as she repeatedly tries to escape him, including one part in which she dives into a car to get away and he pulls open another door and jumps in after her. At the end of the video, she gives up and
falls in love
with him. The message thus is not only that stalking proves how much he loves her but also that the stalker was actually doing
what was best
for her. Women in music videos never mean “no” when they say it, and when they run away, they really want to be chased and caught. What could more perfectly capture the abusive mentality?

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Pornographic videos, magazines, and web sites are learning grounds.

As a boy enters his teen years, he is likely to encounter another powerful shaper of his outlook on females and how to treat them: pornography. Most pornographic movies, magazines, and web sites can function as training manuals for abusers, whether they intend to or not, teaching that women are unworthy of respect and valuable only as sex objects for men. The Internet has made access to pornography much easier—and free—for teenage boys; a recent study found, for example, that one in four teenage boys has experienced exposure to unwanted sexual material, most commonly through Internet solicitations. A great deal of mainstream pornographic material—not just so-called “hard core”—contains stories and images showing the abuse of both women and children as sexy, sometimes including presentations of rape as erotic. The harm to teens from looking at pornography has little to do with its sexual explicitness and everything to do with the
attitudes
it teaches toward women, relationships, sexual assault, and abuse. Spend some time looking at pornography yourself—if you can stand it—and think about the messages it is sending to young people and especially to boys.

I learned of a recent case in an upper-class suburb involving a group of middle school–aged boys who were in the habit of spending hours each day after school watching pornography on their computers. One day they went from this activity to a party where they succeeded in pressuring several girls—with an average age of twelve—into performing group oral sex on them, inspired by something they had watched at a web site. Parents found out about what happened and a scandal ensued, but the community still did not seem to recognize the critical influence of the images to which the boys were being exposed.

Boys often learn that they are not responsible for their actions.

Boys’ aggressiveness is increasingly being treated as a
medical
problem, particularly in schools, a trend that has led to the diagnosing and medicating of boys whose problem may really be that they have been traumatized and influenced by exposure to violence and abuse at home. Treating these boys as though they have a chemical problem not only overlooks the distress they are in but also reinforces their belief that they are “out of control” or “sick,” rather than helping them to recognize that they are making bad choices based on destructive values. I have sometimes heard adults telling girls that they should be flattered by boys’ invasive or aggressive behavior “because it means they really like you,” an approach that prepares both boys and girls to confuse love with abuse and socializes girls to feel helpless.

In most media coverage of bullying and school violence, including highly publicized school murders such as Columbine, reporters have overlooked the gender issues. Headlines have described these events as “kids killing kids,” when close to 100 percent of them have involved
boys
killing kids. In some cases it has been revealed that the killings were related to boys’ hostility toward females, including one case in which the two boys who went on a murderous rampage said afterward that they had done it because they were angry that their girlfriends had broken up with them. But the urgent need to confront the anti-female attitudes among these boys was never mentioned as a strategy for preventing future school violence.

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When culture and home experience dovetail, each reinforces the other.

If a boy grows up in a home where his mother is abused, hearing a song like Eminem’s “Kim” could leave a deep imprint on him. He may well feel that society is giving its public stamp of approval to the mistreatment of women he has witnessed at home. The likelihood that he will blame his mother for what happens to her and begin to copy the abuser’s behavior increases with each pro-abuse message he absorbs from his surroundings. My counseling experience persuades me that the men who are most likely to grow up to abuse women are probably those who grow up with an abuser as an important role model and who
also
get especially heavy doses of destructive cultural training. But also be aware: Half or more of my clients do
not
come from homes in which a man modeled abuse of women. The cultural influences I have discussed above are sufficient
in themselves
to prepare a boy to become an abusive man. It is therefore essential to teach boys to respect women and think critically about the societal messages to which they are exposed.

Many sons of abused women whom I have known, including police officers, writers, therapists, and activists, have dedicated their lives to
opposing
the abuse of women. The example set by these men shows that a boy’s family influences are only the beginning of the story and that he can make the choice to channel his childhood distress into constructive action—if he learns about alternative ways of thinking and acting.

L
ET’S RETURN NOW
to our growing boy. From a combination of different cultural influences, he develops an image of his future, which he carries within him. He pictures a woman who is beautiful, alluring, and focused entirely on meeting his needs—one who has no needs of her own that might require sacrifice or effort on his part. She will belong to him and cater to him, and he will be free to disrespect her when he sees fit. In his mind this picture may illustrate the word
partner,
but a more accurate word for the image he is developing might be
servant.

When this boy gets involved in actual—as opposed to imagined—dating, especially as he reaches an age where his relationships become more serious, his childhood fantasy life collides with the real-life young woman he is seeing. She defies him on occasion. She has other people in her life who are important to her rather than making him her exclusive focus. She demands from time to time that he take an interest in her as a person. She doesn’t always accept his opinions as accurate and superior to hers. She may even attempt at some point to break up with him, as if she were not his personal possession. The boy doesn’t believe that he is demanding anything unreasonable; he seeks only what he considers his due. In fact, our young man feels like he gives his girlfriend more freedom than a lot of other guys do, just as the boy in our opening story felt generous for providing a public picnic area on “his” land. And, like that boy’s reaction to the “trespassers,” he becomes increasingly frustrated, erratic, and coercive as he tries to regain control over his partner. His first sexual experiences are likely to be a result of his pressuring a girl steadily until she gives in, so that sexual coercion becomes one of his earliest relationship habits. He may even start to appear mentally ill, as did the young man who began firing at hikers, but in fact his behavior is largely logical and rational, given what his key social influences have led him to believe. Above all, he feels that
his
rights are the ones being denied—which is precisely the attitude of almost all of my clients when they begin my program. The abusive man feels cheated, ripped off, and wronged, because his sense of entitlement is so badly distorting his perceptions of right and wrong.

In sum, an abuser can be thought of not as a man who is a “deviant,” but rather as one who learned his society’s lessons
too
well, swallowing them whole. He followed too carefully the signposts his culture put out for him marking the path to manhood—at least with respect to relationships with women.

T
HE
C
ULTURAL
E
XCUSE

My abusive clients sometimes become aware of these ways in which society has shaped their values and, sticking closely to their long-standing abusive habits, seize this insight as a new excuse. Instead of saying “I was drunk “or “I was abused as a child,” they rise to a new level of sophistication in escaping responsibility, declaring, “I did it because I learned entitled expectations and the devaluing of females.” I respond by telling the client that he is putting old wine in a new bottle. “The number-one lesson you seem to have learned,” I say, “is how to make excuses for abusing women. And I see that you’re still practicing it.” Abusive men do need to learn about social influences, but not in a way that gives them yet another means of letting themselves off the hook.