Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (25 page)

Most pornographic images regrettably fit well with the abusive mind-set. The woman is available and submissive. Reduced to a body, and usually further reduced to just her sexual organs, she is depersonalized. The man owns her, literally, because he owns the video or magazine or computer image. The woman is sometimes even depicted as being sexually excited by verbal abuse, roughness, violence, or even torture. Cartoons and jokes in pornography often insult or degrade women and their anatomy, or even make rape appear funny, feeding anti-female ways of thinking.

For many abusive men, pornography has shaped their sexuality since they were teenagers or even younger. It has helped to form their view of what women are like and what they ought to be. When a graduate of what I call “The Pornography School of Sexuality” discovers, for example, that his partner does not find a slap in the face arousing, he thinks that’s evidence of something wrong with
her
sexually, not him. His mind-set is: The women in the magazines and videos all like it, so why don’t you? A large percentage of abused women report that they have been pressured one or more times to behave like the women in pornography, often to the point of acting out a specific scenario that the man finds enticing but that she experiences as repulsive, frightening, or violent. Abusers thus sometimes directly model their sexual interests on stories or images from pornography.

Partners of my clients report to me on their efforts to set limits regarding the presence of pornography in the house, especially where children might get access to it. These women have good instincts. Abusive men absolutely need to be kept away from pornography, as it feeds the precise thinking that drives their abusiveness. Women who like to use pornography themselves should try to avoid doing so with an abusive partner.

I have received numerous reports over the years from women who have told me that they were being pressured or required by their abusive partners to watch pornography. This seems largely to be a strategy to break down the woman’s resistance to performing certain sexual acts the man wants, although the actual effect is often to increase her repulsion rather than to create desire. Pornography tends to be filled with abuse of women, so his drive to make her watch it can also come from wanting to prove to her that his degrading treatment is normal.

W
HAT
A
BOUT
S
EX
T
HAT
I
NVOLVES
G
AMES
OF
F
ORCE OR
V
IOLENCE?

Is all sex play that involves adopting roles of domination or force abusive, even if it’s consensual? This is a highly controversial question among heterosexuals as well as lesbians and gay men. My opinion is that the answer is no. The key words, however, are
consensual
and
play.
For example, couples who play sex games involving force need to have a mutually established signal that means “I want you to stop for real,” and that signal must be respected. If one partner gives the “stop” signal and the force doesn’t immediately cease, what is occurring is sexual assault, not lovemaking.

Here is another critical point:
The meaning of what happens during sexual play is determined by the context of the relationship.
If partners are consistently kind to and respectful of each other in daily life, they can probably share kinky lovemaking without making either person feel unsafe or degraded. But in an abusive relationship these lines are too blurry. It’s a stretch to call
any
sexual contact fully consensual when it takes place in an atmosphere of abuse; the woman is always having to gauge whether her partner will react abusively if she says no to a particular sex act, so her choices rarely feel truly free. Many abusers get a thrill out of taking sex play too far, to where it isn’t play any more and causes genuine pain or fear. When the woman tells him later that she felt assaulted or raped, he may respond disparagingly, “We always play games like that. Come off it.” When she tries to explain why the sex felt so bad, he isn’t willing to listen, mostly because he
knows
it was not consensual this time, and he got a charge out of that.

When you are being mistreated in a relationship, stay away from force scenarios during lovemaking, even if the times when your partner does stay within appropriate limits are fun. Other times it isn’t going to be fun at all. If you can say no to those games without running the risk of being attacked, do so. These kinds of games can only be played safely in a nonabusive relationship.

S
EX AND
D
OUBLE
S
TANDARDS

The double standards that are endemic to abusers can stand out sharply in the sexual arena. The most obvious one involves outside relationships. The abuser who has frequent affairs is often the same one who interrogates his partner about her movements and social contacts and goes ballistic when he has the slightest suspicion that she is developing any kind of connection—sexual or otherwise—to another man. He may enjoy looking over other women from head to toe as he and his partner walk down the street, but if she gives so much as a sidelong glance at a male, he screams at her and calls her a “slut.”

A popular justification for this double standard is that men have an inherent need to be with many different women, whereas women want to be monogamous. Over the years I have had many clients use such sociobiological arguments with me, saying that from a genetics standpoint males have reason to desire sex with as many different females as possible, while females succeed best—in evolutionary terms—if they choose their partners carefully. You might call this the “human beings are basically baboons” argument. In reality, there are plenty of examples of stable monogamy in nature. But these arguments are ultimately beside the point; there is simply no excuse for double standards or for any other aspect of abuse. (I sometimes ask my clients, when they attempt to lead me into this theoretical quagmire, “Do you cook your meat before you eat it?” When they answer that of course they do, I say, “Isn’t that awfully unnatural? I’ve never seen any other animal doing such a peculiar thing.” Human behavior can only be measured by human standards.)

My clients sometimes pressure their partners with the myth that men can suffer physical pain or damage if they become sexually aroused and are not satisfied. Of course, I have never heard them claim that this risk applies to unsatisfied women.

A fair number of my clients have imposed an additional double standard, according to which the woman is expected to consent to sex any time the man is in the mood, but she is never supposed to initiate sex herself. As one partner of a client said to me: “If I’m in the mood, I have to make sure not to let it show too much, because he shuts it off real fast if it’s coming from me.” Nothing could better illustrate the way in which an abuser’s approach to sex reflects his overall orientation toward power and control. He wants to run the couple’s sex life, and he doesn’t want her needs interfering with his fantasy in any way. He prefers the two-dimensional women in the magazines, who never come to him asking for anything.

S
EX AND
V
ULNERABILITY

For most women (and perhaps for most nonabusive men as well) sex is an area of emotional vulnerability. An abuser’s charm during the better periods of a relationship can lead his partner to open up to him about deeply personal and potentially painful issues. Sexual relations then add an additional layer of vulnerability, as the abuser learns about the woman’s sexual likes and dislikes and about her previous sexual experiences. She may confide in him about some sexual victimization she suffered earlier in life, or about a period of promiscuity she went through, or about “hang-ups” or sexual difficulties that she has. The abusive man tends to make mental note of the highly personal knowledge he gains. At another phase in the relationship, when things turn ugly, his partner may find that her vulnerabilities are being thrown back on her. If she revealed to him earlier that she sometimes has difficulty reaching orgasm, he now may be throwing words like
frigid
and
cold fish
in her face. If she shared any discomfort regarding sex, he now will call her
uptight
and
repressed,
especially when she doesn’t happen to like what
he
likes. (To the abuser,
sexual liberation
means the freedom to do whatever
he
wants.) If she told him about suffering child sexual abuse or previous experiences of rape, he now will characterize her as being permanently damaged by those violations or use her past to discredit her current grievances: “That’s why you think I don’t treat you well, because you were abused before. It’s not me.” In some of my cases the abuser has even spread private sexual information about his partner in public, including her sources of shame, thereby humiliating her and making it difficult for her to continue being around other people. Other clients of mine have been careless or insensitive regarding the risk of pregnancy or of communicating sexually transmitted diseases, increasing the woman’s sense of violation.

The shock to a woman of having her deepest vulnerabilities thrown back in her face by someone she has loved and trusted can cause a burning pain unlike any other. This is intimate psychological cruelty in one of its worst forms.

S
EXUAL
A
SSAULT
I
S
V
IOLENCE

Over the years I occasionally have had clients who do not punch, slap, or physically hurt their partners but have repeatedly forced them to have sex through threats, intimidation, or physical force, including holding the woman down. The partner of this style of abuser sometimes says, “He was never violent to me,” despite describing a degrading and debilitating history of coerced sex. But sexual assault
is
violence. An abuser who forces his partner to have any form of sexual relations against her will is physically battering her. There is a societal tendency not to recognize the violence present in sexual assault, which can make it more difficult for a woman to understand her own reactions and reach out for help. If you feel like you have been sexually violated by your abusive partner, trust your own perceptions and call an abuse or rape hotline (see “Resources”).

Repeated studies have demonstrated that men who embrace certain key myths about rape are more likely to carry out a sexual assault. The misconceptions include the belief that women find rape arousing, that they provoke sexual assault with their style of dress or behavior, and that rapists lose control of themselves. These myths are easy for many abusive men to accept, because they are consistent with the other characteristics of an abusive outlook on female partners. It is not surprising, then, that the risk to an abused woman of being sexually assaulted by her partner is high. I also have had clients who use sexual assault to
punish
their partners, sometimes because of anger directly related to sex and sometimes not, including some who have raped their ex-partners for leaving them. The impact of such assaults can be devastating.

S
EXUALITY IS
a central arena in which the abuser’s relationship to power is played out, including power over his partner’s reproductive process. Although he may appear to keep his abusiveness separate from your sex life, closer examination of the dynamics of his conduct may persuade you that he carries his core attitude problems right into the bedroom with him. The subtle undercurrent of “sexualization of subordination” can take some time to identify. It is rare, unfortunately, for any aspect of an abuser’s relationship with his partner to remain untouched by his entitlement and disrespect.

• The abuser often believes that the ultimate decision-making authority regarding sex rests with him. He may see his partner as his sexual possession.
  
• Sex with an abuser can be especially good, but it can also be a horror show. The two extremes actually result from similar attitudes in the abuser’s mind-set regarding sex.
  
• The majority of abusers sexualize power, including some who find violence sexually exciting.
  
• Since sexuality is an area of particular vulnerability for most women, an abuser may use any of your sensitivities against you.
  
• If you feel uncomfortable about sexual interactions with your partner, listen carefully to your inner voice regarding what is good for you. An abusive man will try to tell you that your discomfort is your own problem rather than a product of his coercive, disrespectful, or humiliating sexual behavior.
  
• Women (and men) can heal from injurious sexual experiences, but healing is not likely to happen while abuse continues in the present. Attaining an abuse-free life is thus the first step to sexual wellness.
  

T
HE ROLE THAT ALCOHOL
, drugs, and other addictions play in abusiveness has been greatly misunderstood. A majority of abusers are not addicts, and even those who do abuse substances mistreat their partners even when they are not under the influence. Abusive men who succeed in recovering from an addiction continue to abuse their partners, although sometimes there is a short break in their worst behaviors. Physically violent abusers sometimes refrain from violence for a substantial period of time when they get sober, but their psychologically abusive treatment continues or even worsens.
Addiction does not cause partner abuse, and recovery from addiction does not “cure” partner abuse.

At the same time, a man’s addictions can contribute in important ways to his cruelty or volatility. A drunk or drugged abuser tends to make his partner’s life even more miserable than a sober one does. The trick is to separate fact from fiction, including the myths perpetrated by abusers themselves, regarding how addiction affects the abusive man and his partner.

N
OT
A
LL
S
UBSTANCE
A
BUSERS
A
RE
A
BUSIVE
P
ARTNERS

Part of how we know that partner abuse is not caused by substances is that many alcoholics and drug addicts are neither mean to nor controlling of their partners. Some alcoholics drink only late at night, or they drink away from home and return only to pass out. Some become passive and pathetic, not belligerent or domineering. A certain number even provide fairly responsibly for their families and take good care of their children, at least during the early years of their addiction. In such cases the man’s substance abuse certainly causes serious problems for his partner and children, but the atmosphere differs sharply from that of a home where a partner abuser lives. And while substance abusers can be male or female, abusive partners are overwhelmingly male.

N
OT
A
LL
A
BUSIVE
P
ARTNERS
A
RE
S
UBSTANCE
A
BUSERS

We can further uncouple addiction from partner abuse by observing that a clear majority of partner abusers do not abuse alcohol or drugs or show other signs of addiction. Even if we restrict our discussion to physically violent abusers, I still find addiction present less than half of the time, and most researchers report similar observations.

In short, partner abuse and substance abuse are two separate problems. Both are rampant in the world today, so it is no surprise that they often turn up in the same person, along with dandruff, acne, college degrees, and various other noncausal factors.

I
SN’T
P
ARTNER
A
BUSE
I
TSELF A
T
YPE OF
A
DDICTION?

No. Partner abuse has its own causes and dynamics that are unrelated to addiction, although it also shares some features. In recent years some counseling programs have sprung up that claim to address substance addiction and partner abuse at the same time, but they are selling false hopes. A doctor theoretically may be able to develop specialties in both brain surgery and pelvic reconstruction—although it would be very difficult, given the complexities involved—but if he or she claims to perform
one
procedure that can solve a problem in
both
areas, you shouldn’t buy it. The differences between abusing women and abusing substances are great enough that they have to be addressed in separate ways.

H
OW
P
ARTNER
A
BUSE AND
A
DDICTION
A
RE
S
IMILAR

The ways in which partner abuse resembles addiction include the following:

•
Escalation

Alcoholics tend to find that they are drinking increasing amounts, or with increasing frequency, or both. This escalation is caused partly by
tolerance,
which means that the body adapts to the substance, so that more is required to have the same effect. “I can handle my alcohol” is essentially a short form for saying, “I have been drinking too much for a long time now, so it takes a lot to get me drunk.” (Some addicts experience the opposite effect, so that smaller and smaller amounts can intoxicate them over time.) Substance abuse also escalates for other reasons, including the addict’s increasing fear of facing reality the more time he or she has spent escaping it, and the mounting life problems that the addiction itself is creating, which gives the addict more things to need to escape
from.

Partner abuse also tends to escalate, at least for the first few years of a relationship. One of the causes of mounting abuse is that the abuser gets frustrated by the effects of his own abusiveness, which he then uses as an excuse for more abuse. For example, you as the partner of an abuser may have become increasingly depressed over time (because chronic mistreatment is depressing), and now he gets angry about the ways in which your decreased energy make you cater to him less enthusiastically. Similarly, abuse may diminish your drive for sex, and then he is hurt and enraged about your lack of desire for him.

The concept of tolerance can also be applied to partner abuse, but with different implications. As an abusive man adapts to a certain degree of mistreatment of his partner, his feelings of guilt nag at him less and less, so he is then able to graduate to more serious acts. He becomes accustomed to a level of cruelty or aggression that would have been out of the question for him a few years earlier. In some cases the concept of tolerance also applies to the abused woman, when she becomes inured to his abusiveness and starts to stand up to him more. He then increases his abusiveness because he sees that it takes more to frighten or control her than it used to. This escalation is similar to the style of crowd control used by a military dictatorship, which shoots rubber bullets as long as they are adequate to disperse protestors but switches to live ammunition when the crowds stop running away from the rubber bullets.

However, many women (and their children) respond to the trauma of abuse by becoming easier to frighten rather than harder. A recent study of physical batterers found, for example, that about one-third of the men decreased their violence over time, because the women had become so frightened that the men could control them with scary words and glances, making actual assaults unnecessary.

•
Denial, minimization, and blaming

Addicts and partner abusers share a capacity for convincing themselves that they don’t have any problem and for hotly denying the problem to other people. An alcoholic may say that he drank “a couple of frosties” on a night when he had three forty-ounce beers and two shots, or insist that alcohol is not a problem for him because he never drinks liquor, although he throws back two cases of beer each weekend. The addict also follows the partner abuser’s pattern in externalizing responsibility. In the world of substance abuse treatment, the expression
people, places, and things
is used to describe the addict’s way of always finding someone or something to blame for drinking or drugging.

•
Choosing approving peers

Substance abusers prefer to spend their time with other people who abuse substances or with those who at least accept the addiction without making an issue of it, and who will listen sympathetically to the addict’s excuses for his behavior. Partner abusers make similar choices regarding their social circle. Their male friends tend to either abuse their own wives or girlfriends or else make comments about abuse that buy into excuse making and victim blaming. (In research terminology this is called
providing informational support for abuse.
) Their female friends may be mostly people who will accept their poor-me stories about being the victims of hysterical or mentally ill women.

•
Lying and manipulating

Both partner abusers and addicts can have chronic problems with lying to cover up their problem, escape accountability, and get other people to clean up the messes they make. Partner abusers, however, use dishonesty and manipulation for the additional purpose of gaining power and control over their partners, which is a separate dynamic.

•
Lack of predictability

Both partner abusers and substance abusers tend to keep their partners and children walking on eggshells, never knowing what is going to happen next. This dynamic helps to hook family members into hoping that he will change.

•
Defining roles for family members

Both abusive men and addicts can set up family members to be cast in roles that serve the abuse scenario. One person may become the confronter, another the protector, and another the family scapegoat, whom the abuser uses as a place to lay all the blame for the problems that he himself is actually causing in the family.

•
High rates of returning to abuse after periods of apparent change

Both groups have rampant problems with dropping out of treatment programs or with continuing to abuse even after “successful” completion of a program. Deep and lasting change comes only through an extended and painstaking series of steps, although the process of change for substance abusers is quite different from that for partner abusers.

H
OW
P
ARTNER
A
BUSE AND
A
DDICTION ARE
D
IFFERENT

The ways in which partner abuse
differs from
addiction include the following:

•
Partner abusers don’t “hit bottom.”

Substance abuse is self-destructive. Over time, the addict’s life becomes increasingly unmanageable. He tends to have difficulty keeping jobs; his finances slide into disarray (partly due to the expense of his habit); his friendships decline. He may alienate himself from his relatives unless they are substance abusers themselves. This downward spiral can lead the addict to reach a nadir where his life is finally such a mess that he can no longer deny his problem. Alcoholics commonly attribute their entrance into recovery to such an experience of “hitting bottom.”

Partner abuse, on the other hand, is not especially self-destructive, although it is profoundly destructive to
others.
A man can abuse women for twenty or thirty years and still have a stable job or professional career, keep his finances in good order, and remain popular with his friends and relatives. His self-esteem, his ability to sleep at night, his self-confidence, his physical health, all tend to hold just as steady as they would for a nonabusive man. One of the great sources of pain in the life of an abused woman is her sense of isolation and frustration because no one else seems to notice that anything is awry in her partner.
Her
life and her freedom may slide down the tubes because of what he is doing to her mind, but
his
life usually doesn’t.

It is true that partner abusers lose intimacy because of their abuse, since true closeness and abuse are mutually exclusive. However, they rarely experience this as much of a loss. Either they find their intimacy through close emotional connections with friends or relatives, as many of my clients do, or they are people for whom intimacy is neither a goal nor a value (as is also true of many nonabusers). You can’t miss something that you aren’t interested in having.

In recent years, physically assaultive abusers are for the first time hitting bottom in one sense: They are occasionally experiencing unpleasant legal consequences for their actions. Unfortunately, most court systems still treat domestic abusers with special leniency (see Chapter 12), so the bottom seems to be a long way down.

•
Short-term versus long-term rewards

Substance abuse can be highly rewarding. It brings quick, easy pleasure and relief from emotional distresses. It often provides camaraderie through entrance to a circle of friends whose social life revolves around seeking and enjoying intoxication. However, these rewards are usually short-lived. Over time, substance abuse causes the addict emotional distresses that are as great as the ones he or she was attempting to escape in the first place. Friendships based on substance abuse are shallow and are prone to tensions and ruptures due to financial resentments, paranoia, mutual irresponsibility, and many other factors. An alcoholic tends to drink more and more, not because of how well it is working but because of how poorly.

Partner abuse, on the other hand, can be rewarding to the abuser for many years, and potentially for a lifetime. In Chapter 6, we examined the multiple benefits that abusers gain through their behavior, none of which necessarily decreases over time. It is impossible to get partner abusers to change by trying to persuade them to look at the damage they are doing to their own lives (as I tried to do in my early years as an abuse counselor) because they perceive the gains as vastly outweighing the losses. Change in an abuser is primarily brought about when society succeeds in pressuring him into caring about the damage he is doing to
others.

•
Societal approval for partner abuse is greater.

Social supports for both substance abuse and partner abuse are regrettably high, but they are even stronger for the latter, as discussed in Chapter 13. Substance abuse receives the active promotion of alcohol advertising, which domestic abuse does not. But there is an array of writers and organizations that actively opposes improvements in legal and institutional responses to domestic abuse, whereas there are no parallel organized efforts to defend substance abuse. Television, movies, music videos, and other cultural outlets are replete with messages condoning partner abuse.

Because of these critical distinctions between partner abuse and addiction, programs and books that have attempted to address abusiveness based on an addiction model have failed badly. Batterers Anonymous groups, for example, are notorious for acting as support circles for abusers’ excuses and justifications rather than as launching pads for change. Recovery programs generally address few or none of the central attitudes and habits that cause partner abuse.