House of Eratosthenes

Exhibit A:

If you’ve watched the news at all (I don’t, but I saw the cover of the National Enquirer and other weeklies at the grocery check-out on Sunday), you know that the pop singer Rihanna (featured on this blog in the song Life Your Life) got tuned up by her boyfriend Chris Brown. And by tuned up, I mean her face was severely beaten and she was choked and had to go to the hospital for chronic and persistent head aches (I’m guessing a concussion.)

Now, the reaction by the guys at the counter at H.E.B., one black two white, was this: Rihanna must have done something horrible like give Chris an STD or something because a dude just doesn’t hit the face of a woman because he’s angry.

Exhibit B:

A friend of a friend got tuned up by her husband (who is, by the way, a worthless slug, but that’s another story) because she cheated on him. The person who relayed the story to me defended the husband’s behavior and said that it was understandable that he would beat her like that because of how she disrespected him.

There used to be rules governing this sort of thing. Women stayed virginal and prized that virginity because it gave them great power. Men knew that in order to get nooky from a respectable woman, he’d have to make a commitment and then, once the commitment was made, he received, in return a woman who would more likely be faithful to him and who would be a good mother to his children, etc. She knew that he had self control and respect for her.

Another rule: A man simply would not hit a woman. Period. Ever. These days, though, women are portrayed in movies, on TV, in books, etc. as equal to men in physical strength which is simply not true. So you have guys beating on women and women winning, when, in real life the likelihood of that happening is slim and none. In addition, people possess less conflict-resolution skills and resort to unhelpful behaviors like yelling, screaming, name-calling, physical aggression and sometimes ending in physical violence. This used to be unacceptable. These days, three guys in a grocery store and an acquaintance can spend time arguing to me that it’s acceptable for a guy to beat the heck out of his woman when he’s “disrespected”.

This is what happens when there is no honor and there is no shame and there are no rules for engagement.

I think things are a bit more complicated than this though. I’ll just echo my own words in her comment section…

I suggest this excuse-making be diagnosed as a mental disorder, and then inspected as such. There are many factors going into it.

First off: It would be absurd to argue our society suffers from a shortage of taboos. We’re up to our armpits in taboos. Where to begin…the N word…ridiculing the dialect of any ethnic minority individual or group…emitting carbon. I don’t need to flesh out that list, the point’s made. We certainly understand, and act upon, the concept of social stigma for certain behavior.

It’s the timelessness that is missing. Everything’s gotta be re-invented. If daddy puffed away at cigars and bitched away about the evils of smoking pot, you have to switch ‘em around to show your “independence.”

Second off: As you point out, the flawed fantasy that a woman is likely to hold her own in a physical contest with a man, causes the damage to the taboo against hitting women. Which was invented, eons ago, out of concern that men can bring down far more damage.

Third: Our new library of stigmas — this psychological need to come up with a new library with each generation — is the real root cause. Who, with a voice that many can hear, has been allowed to insinuate that a typical man is more powerful than a typical woman?

Fourth, and this is what you’ve overlooked, I think: Feminism has also inspired a quest of sorts, by faithless women, to acquire a sort of license to cheat on men. I’m pretty sure these yahoos had that in mind when they made their comments, because they were brought up on…

Fifth: Another thing you would have done well to explore. Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, there was a pop-psych movement taking place in which the solution to every problem that came along was a visit to a “psychiatrist.” The psychiatrist would then tell you to go home and do something that had to do with “confronting.” Confront a thing, confront a person. It was presented as a panacea, something that would bring “closure” which was a complete lie — the opposite was true. So everyone knew someone who was in “therapy,” and everyone in therapy was put on this endless-loop of confronting. Unhappily, that tradition has endured to such an extent that “gentlemen” who weren’t even born at the time, now have this woven into their genes. A woman who cheats is no longer some vile beast fit to be cast aside into a ditch, where she can meet the lower life forms that deserve her; she has to be confronted. Back in the olden days, sure some guys hit women who cheated on them, but society didn’t legitimize it because, while fracturing the protocol against hitting females, it was also looked upon as silly. Giving her more credit than she was worth. Like hitting garbage.

Sixth, and this goes with fifth: Sometime after this movement to psychologize every li’l problem, was another movement in which you had to “speak truth to power” anytime someone said something politically incorrect. Rolling your eyes, saying “what a dummy,” and going about your business, was no longer acceptable. You had to get in people’s faces about things — “Excuse me, I don’t think that’s an appropriate expression to use to describe persons of color.” So of course when your woman cheats on you you have to let her know what you think of it. With your fists.

Isn’t it funny? The effort was to make society more civilized. We did every single thing the “progressives” asked us to do. And here we are, at least the “big we”…punching women. Wouldn’t it be great fun, trying to explain that to a Knight from Arthur’s Round Table who’d been frozen for 1,500 years, how this makes us more civilized? Better yet, watching one of the new-agers try to explain it. Fie, fie, forsoothe ye be to blame.

Men and women being different — this is more of a keystone to the structure that is our civilization, than one might initially think. And that isn’t a knock on women, either. Yes, men are stronger, and have traditionally been regarded as such; women are closer to “God.” Glory, if you prefer. The knight cannot be a knight without a lady to defend, and defending her, he invests all of his notions of decency in her. She becomes the embodiment of all the things on this earthly plane that are worthy of defense.

When the handle of the crank is brought in to the center of rotation, the machinery cannot be operated and there is little point in attempting to do so. Our modern feminism movement, consciously or not, has been crusading toward the premise that women are no longer worthy of defense. A man hits a woman in the face, the same way as he’d hit another man just as strong as he — that is a bad thing, but not a new thing. Men have been doing that. What is especially bad, and new, is that other men do not see an urgent need to distance themselves from him, to show, for the sake of their manly honor, why they are different from him.

Nope, the new litmus test is were you willing to vote for an under-qualified Chicago machine-politician for President just because his skin is black. Answer yes to that, and all’s good. You’ve risen to the new cultural expectations of “civilization.”

As for what to tell that thawed-out 1,500-year-old knight, you’re on your own; I can’t help you there. In fact, if you figure that one out, let me know.

Update: Under this general heading of yanking the crank handle in closer to the center-of-rotation and thereby making the machinery inoperable…making men and women the same…deplore l’difference. Thought I’d toss in this entry from Locutisprime at Rick’s Place concerning the boy who became homecoming queen.

This is sick, folks. It’s an unconscionable attack upon, and humiliation of, women. It’s an assault upon civilized society, and it’s high time it was treated as such.

Most of what we’ve built, was built by men. Most of what men built, they did for women…women who were different from them. On a higher level. Worthy of impressing and defending.

It’s not an attack on the talents, capabilities and intelligence of women to point this out: If we started out as a unisex society, with non-existent or negligible differences between the sexes — the handle of the crank close to the center of the shaft — we wouldn’t have squat. We’d be living in caves. Probably wouldn’t have figured out how to cook meat over a flame by this time.

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On Hitting WomenSaturday, February 21st, 2009

On Hitting Women
Saturday, February 21st, 2009