In response to my Slate essay "Crazy Choices, Crazy Love,"
Hilary Bok, a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins (hilzoy to bloggers), generated
many words on why
women stay with abusers and why
I should not have even asked the question. Less
articulate opponents invoke her posts as evidence of the error of my ways. Instead,
she demonstrates how important it is to ask the question and how easily the
discussion becomes derailed.As to why women stay, Bok offered 1) the story of her own
abuse and 2) her experience working in a shelter. Individual stories eventually
add up to evidence, true, but a personal, revelatory anecdote tends to abort what
is supposed to be a political conversation. If we are to discuss the politics of abuse, we
need to resist this rhetorical move. It
would be churlish of me to downplay the suffering of this well-known
intellectual with many friends in the blogosphere. How can I say, he never laid
a hand on you, what are you talking about? But other than evoking sympathy, her
story actually makes my point perfectly.
He screamed at her once; the second time, she packed her bags. In
explaining why she left, she says, among other things, "I'm a feminist."
Mining her shelter years for more data, Bok suggests that
being attacked by a lover is so shocking it deprives you of your capacity for
judgment. Utterly unexpected and incomprehensible, it's like having the car
turn into an elephant, she explains. The imagery is compelling, until one remembers
that from the Farah Fawcett movie, The
Burning Bed ,to Rihanna's swollen face on the internet, everyone on this
planet has been exposed to evidence that "lovers" can attack. The many comments
about my essay also reflect how much warning attackers often give and how many
victims come from backgrounds of abuse. Why, of all human experience, can women
not learn of the reality of domestic violence from what they see, read and
sometimes live through?
Bok also tries to explain why I should not be asking (and
implying) that women should leave their abusers.
Philosophers usually don't argue against asking questions,
so, Bok argues instead that I didn't ask the question right. I implied that women
are natural victims, and I was just using battered women as a battering ram against
"choice" feminism. If there's one take-away message in my piece, it's that women are not natural victims. Which means there
must be a way to reduce or arrest battering. Silent sheltering and waiting isn't
enough—that leaves between 600,000 and 2,000,000 women battered right now. If that prescription is all
feminism has to offer, I am certainly blaming . . . us. But it's not. As Debra
Dickerson brilliantly put it in her
piece at Mother Jones, asking is
in the long tradition of feminist awareness. "Have we forgotten how many millennia of consciousness-raising it's taken to
acknowledge the domestic violence, first, exists and second, is wrong? Feminism
is a roadmap . . .[It's] leaving a man who makes you weak in the knees. When he
isn't hitting you."