joreth, posts by tag: abuse - LiveJournal

A comment in a thread that I ought to archive somewhere. I know I've told this story before, but fuck if I can remember where it is now.

This is in response to Person A who is interested in Person B, but Person B is partnered and the partner pre-vetoes Person A. There is this idea that the person who just got vetoed should not have any bad feelings about it because they were never a partner to begin with, and any pre-existing partners should always get priority over people who aren't even partners yet at all.

I've heard this story a hundred times, and, as far as I'm concerned, all it does is serve to train people that their wants and needs are not important, so that when they do finally get into relationships, they are already accustomed to being doormats and can accept second-class citizenship in little bite-sized pieces until they are completely subsumed by an abusive relationship.

First, your wants don't matter because you're not even a partner. Next, your wants don't matter because you just barely started dating (the old "of course a new partner isn't equal to a spouse! You wouldn't sign over the mortgage to someone on a first date, would you?!" response). Then, your wants don't matter because, although you've been dating a while, you're still the "newer" partner. And, of course, your wants don't matter later because you signed up to be a "secondary", so even if you end up dating for a decade, you're still never as important as the "primary", who may actually be "newer" than you.

It's a slippery slope that is not a logical fallacy in this case because it's actually how this mindset plays out. So here is my commentary to that:

---

That whole "I'm not yet a partner, so it should be OK to prioritize an existing partner over someone who isn't a partner at all" can muddy the waters pretty well.  That's why I take it out of the immediate situation and look more at the patterns and the philosophy.  It's not about how he's treating me, it's about what he thinks is acceptable and what isn't.  He's not just putting *me* on hold in favor of an existing partner, he's putting *himself* on hold in favor of someone else.  He's voluntarily giving someone power over his autonomy *and he thinks that's OK*.

In addition, I have a bias that this particular method is not actually a successful one in terms of building security.  So he'd be doing all this agency-denying crap for no reason, because it doesn't solve whatever problem it's being used to solve.

To give an extreme example, take my abusive ex:

He had such massive insecurity that even the mere thought of his wife being interested in someone else would literally send him into a catatonic panic.  His method of dealing with this insecurity was to infringe on his wife's agency by not allowing her to do specific sexual acts until he desensitized himself to the idea.  He actually used PTSD treatment language, as if him self-diagnosing as PTSD justified this.

So, his wife started dating someone but she couldn't kiss this new boyfriend until her husband (my abusive ex) first visualized it without going catatonic.  Then she could kiss the new guy but only when her husband was present, until he could watch them kiss without going catatonic.  Finally, she was allowed to kiss her own boyfriend without an audience.

Then, he had to visualize her open-mouth kissing ... and go through the whole process again.  Then he had to visualize the new bf touching his wife's breasts over the clothing ... etc. etc.  They literally built an excel spreadsheet and ranked every single sexual act and sexual position to keep track of what she was allowed to do with her bf and whether she could do it without an audience or not.

The thing is that my abusive ex *did*, over time, get accustomed to each specific act.  So over time, the wife racked up a whole list of specific sex acts that she could do with her bf that didn't send her husband into a catatonic tailspin.

They saw this as "growth" and "improvement".

What they never understood is that the *process itself* was harmful because he *never* reached the point where he recognized that he was denying her agency or imposing on her autonomy.  They both just saw a growing list of specific things that didn't freak him out and said "see? It works? He's getting better! He's becoming more secure!"

But he *wasn't* because *every new thing* still freaked him out and he still had to go through the process every single time.  He never learned security. He learned that infringing on his wife's autonomy was justifiable.

I didn't see this pattern at the beginning because 1) he deliberately kept the details of this method from me when we started dating, and 2) I didn't want that kind of power over anyone and said so, and he insisted that our relationship would be different from the one he had with his wife, and it was ... until it wasn't.

Just by coincidence and the way my own libido works, I happened to not be interested in a new person for the next couple of years, so his wife's relationship with her boyfriend kept "growing", and I didn't have my own new partner to challenge him.  When I finally did develop an interest in someone new, he fell back on old patterns, as one tends to do when one is mired deep in fear.  He tried to insist that, not only he but our *entire network* needed to give approval to any new partner I had before I became sexual with that new partner.  Because the underlying premise never changed - that anyone should have the power to infringe on another person's agency.

That does *not* work for me.

So I resisted. In the ensuing argument, he revealed to me that he had grown interested in this other woman, let's call her Chloe.  Years ago, I had a partner who had tried dating Chloe.  It was a disaster.  She has some of the worst communication skills of anyone I've ever met.

In the early days of our relationship, when we were still getting to know each other and exploring and explaining how we each do things, I had mentioned that I cannot be metamours with her.  I would not tell anyone that they couldn't date her, but if someone that I was dating *did* date her, I could not date them anymore.

So, later, when he became interested in dating her, he chose not to date her in deference to me. He *used* this in our later arguments to convince me that I should defer to him with my new partner.  He insisted that, because he gave up a relationship for me, I should be willing to do the same thing.

I was *horrified* that he would have passed up a relationship that *he wanted*, without even talking to me about it, just because he thought I would say no.

He also brought up another partner that he *did* end up dating, whom I'll call Sierra, pointing out how he waited until he had my approval before dating her.  I told him at the time that I was not giving "approval", that he was free to date or or not as he saw fit.  I thought he understood that he could still choose to date her or not, and that just because I liked Sierra and had no problem with them dating, this was not my "approval", nor my "permission".  But he didn't understand that, because he brought up Sierra, and the fact that he only started dating her because I said it was OK, in this later argument.

So, during this argument, I got mad at him for giving me this power when I explicitly told him that I didn't want it. But especially now because he did this whole self-sacrifice thing without even telling me about it and expected his sacrifice to persuade me to make the same sacrifice in his favor.

Very little infuriates me in a relationship more than "I did this thing for you that you didn't know about and you don't want, so now you have to do the same thing for me!"

So, not only did this whole "put someone else off until security magically appears" not work, it was a sign of a pattern that wove itself very deep into how his relationships work.  The act of denying someone their agency to assuage one's own fears reinforces itself when the fears are temporarily relieved.  All this method does is teach people that denying one's agency is justifiable.  

And it doesn't just teach the people doing the agency-denying either.  It teaches us to accept it from others with small, incremental steps.  Kind of like how abuse works.

I've said this before, but I just woke up and I have to get ready for work, so I don't feel like taking the time to find the post about it.

Reminder:  Not all gaslighters are cardboard, black-hatted villains, twirling their mustachios and stroking their white cats in their uncomfortable looking armchair, plotting the deliberate crazy-making of their intended victims.  I'd even venture to say that *none* of them are.

We are taught that gaslighting is an appropriate method for dealing with intimate connections who do not behave as we wish.  This is not limited to romantic partners either.  The example I use is that of a tired and harried parent trying desperately to get their child to eat their vegetables.  The toddler says "I don't like broccoli!" and the parent says "yes you do, now eat it!"

That's gaslighting.  That parent is attempting to overwrite the child's feelings by telling the child what they feel.  In the grand scheme of things, this one specific example is minor - I wouldn't call the parent "abusive" over this.  But we learn from a very early age that we can tell other people what they feel, and we can insist that we know them better than they know themselves.

We also all have shitty memories.  Yes, even you with the really good memory, you have a shitty memory too.  Our brains suck.  They do not record reality like a video recorder.  They record *feelings* and *impressions* and general concepts.  And then, when you re-tell something later, that re-telling overwrites the original memory and you remember the event as you just re-told it instead of as it was.

If a person has a shitty memory (which we all do) and also has confidence in their memories, a person without malicious intent can be very likely to insist that an event happened in a way that it did not, in fact, happen.  Combine this with an ingrained acceptance of gaslighting as a cultural practice, and I guaran-fucking-tee that every single one of you has gaslighted people before.  Only I would bet that you don't even remember doing it.

My point is that there are some people who are actually abusive with their gaslighting.  They do it habitually, they do it with malice, they do it with forethought.  But the vast majority of people are somewhere between the occasional, minor gaslighting of the parent just trying to get their kid to eat healthy and the dude deliberately trying to send his wife to the asylum to get her money (the movie where the name came from).

I fully believe that my abusive ex, whom I use as a teaching tool frequently, who had me convinced that his victim was the real abuser, genuinely, sincerely feels that he was the victim in the whole scenario and thinks I'm the evil one for accusing him of abuse.  I believe that he, to this day, does not think his demands to control his partners' behaviour with their other partners to manage his own insecurities, was "abuse", or even "controlling".  I believe that, when he had hours-long arguments with his victim that resulted in her recanting her pain and comforting him instead, I believe that he fully believes that he did not change her reality so that she became so twisted up inside that she couldn't tell what reality was.

So, when I talk about master gaslighters, I'm not trying to guess their motivations or turn them into said cardboard, black-hatted, mustachioed villains.  They are still people with complexity, and I'm quite sure they do not view themselves as the bad guys in the situations I comment on.  It doesn't change the fact that they are saying things that are not true, though, and what they say is turning people against those they are telling the not-truth about.

How or why they do what they do is not my point.  Sometimes, I may believe that I have some kind of insider information that allows me to comment on the how or why, but mostly, I'm just commenting on the what.  And people, especially those with exposure to the SJW communities, are getting REALLY GOOD at some really shitty things.

[This is a post I made on FB on May 6, 2018]

Y'all, I'm watching a master gaslighter at work.  I thought my ex, who had me convinced that his victim was the real problem, was good.

Amateur. 

I then thought that this Missing Stair, who has left a trail of broken victims throughout her city and somehow managed to stage a coup against me which I caught wind of and yet she still convinced half the online poly community that I was unreasonable and on a power trip because I put a stop to the coup, was good.

Hobbyist.

It's truly impressive to watch a real pro categorically deny ever having done or said things when there exists actual print evidence that they did, and to see people fall one by one, like dominoes, into the pro's camp.  And there's nothing that can be done.  To speak up after the smear campaign has started is to create "drama".  And Hades forbid we have "drama" in our communities!  To keep quiet to avoid "drama" is to allow the accusations to go unchallenged, which makes them believable.

Any attempt at a defense is met with hostility by people who heard the first accusations and have chosen to "believe the victim" rather than look into the situation.  Remember, abusers often use our sympathy and empathy against ourselves.  In our current subculture climate, they can cry "victim" first, and be automatically believed, setting up their victims for a no-win situation and further traumatizing them. 

As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the difference between a true victim bravely stepping forward to share their story and prevent future abuse, from an abuser crying "victim" first to win over public approval and support and further traumatize their victim, without a thorough, deep dive into the situation, which most bystanders are not in a position to do. 

And the more gaslighters I have the misfortune to meet, the more and more difficulty I have in telling the difference because I keep meeting better and better gaslighters.  They just keep upping their game. 

This one is fucking *good*. 

PSA: When your friends are going through a breakup, if you are particularly close with them and have previously been in the role of support for them with their relationship stuff (or they have for you), and your friend reaches out to you for support during a breakup, you may choose to be there for them, or you may choose not to take on that particular role for yourself at this time.

But if you have not already established this kind of supportive role with your friend who is going through a breakup, try to resist the call to suddenly be their sounding board.  Even if you think you can handle it.  Even if you think that you truly have the purest of intentions.

Some people want to manipulate social circles with sordid stories of the breakup or the ex.  Some people want to gossip.  Some people want to elicit a more active role from you in revenge, punitive action, or other things.  Abusers, in particular, are *very* good at convincing others that they have been harmed and making it look like they're just "reaching out" for support when they're actually undermining the other person's ability to find their support.

Some people just don't have very good boundaries and don't recognize what is appropriate and what isn't in terms of sharing private and personal details of a relationship and a breakup.  There are tons of reasons - both benign and harmful in *intent* - for someone coming to you with the story of their breakup.  But there are very few times in which accepting that role is actually *helpful*, either for your friend, for you as the support, or for the community everyone is all a part of.

So if you don't already have that kind of relationship with someone and they contact you from seemingly out of nowhere wanting to connect or looking for support for a breakup, and *especially* if you *do* have a connection to the ex, it's probably best to clearly state your own boundaries that this is not a role you feel suited for at this time.

If *you* are going through a breakup and you have somehow managed to lose or avoid building your own support group with a very small number of people who can handle being in the role of "I will listen to you trash talk your ex so you can vent" buddy, you may find yourself now needing to reach out to people you haven't before.

Some advice:

Breaking up is hard. It's where your ethics meet the road.  And we ALL fuck up here.  This is how to fuck up a little bit less.

I'm starting to think that when men go through a breakup, there should be, like, this mandatory "rehab" building where they get put, where they don't have any contact with any people for a few days, they get fed, get comfy accommodations, and are only given squishy things or non-breakable things. They have to go there and just feel like shit for a while, all by themselves.

Only after a couple of days when the most acute pain has faded, then they get to talk to counselors who are especially trained in anger management and loss processing. The counselors can make a judgement call about when to let them out, whether to allow contact with loved ones and when, and whatever else needs to be decided for their recovery.

Only when they're deemed to have processed their anger and grief in healthy ways are they allowed back into society. They may still be going through the process of loss, because some breakups take time, but its that initial destructive period of anger and hurt that is the most threatening.

And if men can't figure out how to feel angry and hurt without property destruction, revenge, control, or making a "statement", then they ought to be put in isolation until they can get a handle on it.

Women too, because I've seen some really fucked up shit from women going through a breakup, but men have the power of society behind them and much fewer resources for helping them process difficult emotions.

Sometimes I see men going through breakups and I just want to lock them in their rooms for a while and take away their phones and internet until they calm the fuck down and stop trying to *make* their exes do whatever it is they feel entitled to making them do ("pay for it", "come back", whatever).

I recently had a friend who, until their breakup we all called *his girlfriend* the problem child (and she really was - manipulative, controlling, the whole 9 yards), ended up getting Baker Acted by his ex-girlfriend because he used a suicide threat to get her attention. He was held for several days with minimal contact outside.

I think that was probably the best thing she ever did for him. When he got out, we still had to metaphorically spank him occasionally to get him to stop fucking calling her and trying to "win her back", but it was *much* less destructive than before.

The longer it takes me to finish this breaking up book, and the more breakups I witness because of how many people now come to me with their breakup stories, the less lenient and lovey-dovey I become over how people should breakup. Now I just want to lock everyone in padded rooms until they come to their fucking senses and stop being jackasses.

Maybe we should pipe in some pro-agency inspirational messages to the rooms like 24-hours a day for some cultural reprogramming or something. Apparently it's going to take some sci-fi Russian super-soldier training methods to make people just STOP FUCKING TRYING TO CONTROL YOUR ROMANTIC PARTNERS, INTERESTS, AND EXES AND DEAL WITH YOUR OWN GODDAMN EMOTIONS

what she says: "Oh I don't mind, we can eat anywhere. I'm not picky."

what she means: "For my entire life, I've been called bossy/picky/selfish/arrogant/bitchy for voicing my opinions and making my views known, so now when someone I care about asks me about what I want, my immediate gut reaction is to defer to the other person's preference. it's less of a hassle to capitulate to someone else's desires than to risk having someone verbally berate me for being truthful about what I want." ~GALLICINVASION

I was part of a 6-person web for a while. "What do you want to eat" was the biggest fucking chore. One time, that question literally resulted in 3 days worth of panicky, tearful emails and emotional processing. To this day, I still have no idea how.

Even when we instituted the rule "whoever vetoes the most recent food suggestion has to come up with a new suggestion, or else we default to the last unchallenged food suggestion", we still took ALL DAY to decide what to go eat for dinner as a group. And I mean, we would start discussing it when the last person woke up that morning and keep discussing it right up until one of them yelled that we needed to make a decision or else she was going to pass out.

So I had to hone the skills that I had begun practicing years before, where I literally did not allow myself to have a preference, and to just learn to find something I liked no matter the menu. Because at least then there were only 5 people arguing about food instead of 6.

For the last several years, to avoid the stress of choosing food, I have started simply packing my freezer with premade meals (which I was already mostly doing for other reasons that I don't want to get into here) and then just eating what was on top. That way I didn't have to choose. The amount of freedom that not having to choose food has given my emotional stress and decision making process is shocking.

BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE MADE CHOOSING FOOD SO STRESSFUL THAT I WOULD RATHER LITERALLY PICK WHATEVER THE FUCK IS ON TOP THAN MAKE A DECISION ABOUT FOOD

No fucking wonder I became anorexic. In a world where I have no control over anything, including food, I can at least control whether or not I eat by not eating anything at all.

The thing about new partners, is that I end up revisiting a lot of memories of old partners. When I'm in a new relationship, we talk about ourselves, and part of ourselves is our past that made us who we are today. So I end up going over a lot of old stories, partly as illustrations for how I want to be treated or want not to be treated, and partly because I'm just sharing stories of my experiences and who I am.

I don't know if "ironic" is the right word, but what got me on this tangent tonight is not a "new" partner, exactly, but talking with my most recent ex-FWB during our breakup, rather than as part of the "get to know each other" stage in the beginning. Perhaps because our relationship was less than a month, and the breakup came suddenly, and he's actually doing his part of the breakup well, some things that I associate with a "beginning" didn't happen until the end. This isn't really relevant, I'm musing tonight.

Anyway, during one of our breakup talks (because a good, compassionate breakup where both people are being kind and considerate of each other often takes several discussions and check-ins to make sure everyone is OK), I got to talking about some of my abusive exes.

Here's the thing... when I was growing up, all of our "afternoon specials" about abusive relationships were about domestic physical violence. I knew all the warning signs for a physically *violent* partner, but I knew absolutely nothing about an emotionally abusive or psychologically controlling partner.

Over the years, I've told a lot of stories about a lot of exes. In the last decade or so, as I've had the opportunity to meet and know some truly amazing people, when I've told these stories, I've been met with horrified reactions. I was not prepared for the strength of the horror in these reactions. To me, these stories were about jerks, sure, but "horror"? I mean, they weren't great stories, but I also thought they were run-of-the-mill "bad", not "abusive-bad".

Now, with a lot more education on what abuse is, I can look back over my relationship history and see that I've actually been involved with a whole bunch of abusive men. Remember, when I started telling these stories, I was not aware that they were tales of abuse. So I'm not retconning my memories, which can happen pretty easily. I can look back over the time I told one particular story, and at the time I thought it was normal-bad, but now I can see that *the story I told at that time* was actually abusive-bad.

So I've been in a lot of abusive relationships. But what I always had going for me is a strong sense of self. You can ask my mother about this. She and I have been locked in conflict over my agency for literally my entire life. She describes me as "headstrong" and "independent". From day 1. What would happen is that I would get into a relationship with someone who I saw as confident and "strong", and because I was excited to be in that relationship, he would treat me well.

But eventually NRE would wear off, and I would start showing more enthusiasm for my own life than for his. And, being an abuser (which means he believed he was justified in controlling his partners behaviour to match what *he* thought they ought to do), he would employ various psychological tactics to bring me back in line and to behave more like I did in the beginning of the relationship when I was drugged out on NRE.

But my strong sense of self would kick in and I would always resist. And he would escalate, and I would resist harder. In a very short span of time, one of us would get pissed off enough at the other to break up. So I didn't recognize these relationships as abusive because the conflict would be relatively short-lived and always resulted in a breakup, usually with me angry rather than sad over it.

Over the years, I have been faced with some form of the question "how would your exes describe you?" from a variety of sources - Cosmo quizzes, new partners, friends, etc. One of the things I pride myself is on being honest about my "flaws". So I would usually answer these questions with something along the lines of "cold-hearted bitch". That was, I believe, the most common parting shot I would get from exes.

I have always been described as "cold", as "unfeeling", even been accused of sociopathy on more than one occasion. Some days I would agree with those descriptions. Other days I'm baffled how anyone could think that of me. You see, one of the reasons why I'm polyamorous is because I feel. so. much. I have so many feelings that I'm often overwhelmed by them. I sometimes feel like River Tam from Firefly, when her brother finally starts to make progress in diagnosing what her captors did to her when they experimented on her brain - "She feels everything; she can't not."

I went out with a guy not too long ago who is way into the woo. I find his beliefs to be completely absurd, but I do find some of the language he used to be useful as metaphor. When we first started talking, he described me as "empty". He said that he "looked into me" and found just this empty space where he expected to find ... I dunno, "me", I guess. Later, as I began to trust him and to develop feelings for him, I let my guard down and he noticed. He discovered what all that "empty space" was for. Whatever emotion I was feeling at the moment floods into all that space. He said he had never met anyone who felt so much at one time. He said he couldn't even see how he once thought I was "empty" before. I said that I was never "empty", I just had walls up and was only letting him see me controlled.

I feel a lot. I feel so much that it's just too much to keep up continuously. I have to shut down every so often, just to stay sane. In fact, one of the primary symptoms of my depression is apathy. When all the bad shit gets too overwhelming and sends me into suicidal ideation, I just stop feeling anything. I think this is the main reason why I haven't managed to kill myself yet - I want to be dead but I don't feel strongly enough about anything to go through with it.

Back to my long history with abusive men. Gendered abuse has some particular traits. Women are socialized to be nurturers, caregivers, to be polite, to consider other people, to do emotional labor. Men who want to control women can use this as a form of control.

"Why would you hurt me like that? You don't want to hurt me, do you? You should stop what you're doing so that I don't feel hurt by it."

"Now, now, be a good girl..."

"Stop being so hysterical..."

"Pull yourself together, you don't want to make other people uncomfortable, do you?"

When my former metamour was being abused by our mutual partner, he accused her of hurting him for wanting to be with her other partner. She wanted to do a thing, he would get upset by it, she would try to understand why he was upset, he would accuse her of hurting him. This would immediately stop her in her tracks, as she spent the next several days wracking her brain to understand *why she was hurting him* so that she could stop.

Not me.

I moved in with my abusive fiance, against everyone's advice. Almost immediately after moving in together, he began trying to control me. He wanted to change my clothing, change my career, force me into a homemaker role. I even asked him several times why he said he loved me, since he didn't seem to like me very much.

One of the many things that he would do was coerce me into sex. He would try to initiate sex very late at night when I had to wake up early the next morning. I would reject him, so he would wait until he thought I was asleep, and put his hands between my legs and try to take my underwear off without waking me. Most of the time I had not fallen asleep yet, but I would pretend to stay asleep, hoping to discourage him but it never did. Every single night I would "wake up" to him molesting me and I would yell at him to leave me alone, and he would start an argument that would keep me awake for *hours*, trying to talk me into having sex.

After a few weeks of this nightly molestation and some chronic sleep deprivation, I started trying to leave the argument. I would get up to go sleep on the couch. As I reached the door, he would threaten to break my prized figurine collection unless I remained in the room. So I would grab my pillow and sleep on the bathroom floor, which was *technically* still in the room.

When you're in a relationship with someone, you typically work under the assumption that both of you are operating in good faith. At least, people with reasonably healthy views on relationships do. Sure, there may be conflict, but we assume that we are both on the same team and that we both want to resolve the conflict, and that we both care about each other so nobody would want a resolution that actually compromised the other person's integrity or sense of self or value system.  We might be *angry*, but we don't feel that our partners are out to get us deliberately.

This is how abusers get their foot in the door. They are not operating in good faith. So I spent those weeks arguing with him because I earnestly believed I just had to make him see why this was hurting me and he would stop because he didn't *really* want to hurt me.

But by the time I was willing to sleep on the tile floor with my head next to a toilet? I no longer believed he was operating in good faith. I was not able to leave right away, but with all my big emotions and the constant attempt to wear me down, I had to find some way to live there until I could leave.

Enter the coldness.

Once I started to believe that he really did not have my best interests at heart, I went cold. I shut down. We weren't simply not seeing eye-to-eye, he fundamentally did not see me as a whole person. He saw me only in terms of how I could support his story arc. So I stopped caring about him in return.

One of the things I had suspected him of, was being a pathological liar. At first, his lies were ridiculous but, again with the good faith thing, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Looking back on them now, I can't understand how I ever thought they could even possibly be true. But I was young and naive and in love. He made up all kinds of outrageous stories, which I will save for another time because this is already very long. Now that I had lost the rose colored glasses and I could finally see the flags were red, I decided not to believe anything he said and to start calling him on his shit.

One day, we were driving home from my parents house (where I did my laundry) and we got into one of our repetitive arguments in the car. We lived in an apartment complex with a carport underneath the apartment units. I pulled into our slot, got out of the car, got my laundry basket from the back, and started walking across the low-ceilinged carport towards the stairs to our unit, all with him still arguing about whatever.

I had gone cold. I was simply refusing to argue any further. I just couldn't expend any more energy or emotion on this same fucking argument one more time.  I said what I had to say and that was the end of it, as far as I was concerned. He did not like that, and kept arguing at my retreating back. He hated it when I went cold.

Suddenly, he stopped talking, mid-sentence. I heard a rustling, and when I looked back, he was lying on the ground, seemingly unconscious. I assumed he was faking. I stood there for a moment, watching him to see if he would get up. Then I adjusted my grip on the laundry basket, turned on my heel, and walked up to our apartment, leaving him lying on the oil-soaked concrete.

I went upstairs and started putting the clothes away. Eventually he came into our bedroom, holding his hand to his head and walking unsteadily. Slurring his words, he said that while we were arguing, he somehow managed to walk into one of the low pipes in the carport and knock himself unconscious (he was 6'4" and the carport ceiling was about 6'6" high so he had to duck under the plumbing pipes).

And THEN, while he was unconscious, a mugger came and stole his wallet. He woke up just as the mugger grabbed it and ran away. Most of his fabrications were stories intended to illicit sympathy from me, so that I would stop being mad at him and start feeling worry and concern instead. This was the most transparent lie he had ever told (and he had told some whoppers!).

So I said "oh my god! A mugger! We better call the police right away!" He immediately tried to talk me out of it, while I "argued" how important it was that we file a police report. I mean, what if the mugger came back? What if he tried to rob *me* while I'm down there alone, at night? He doesn't want anything bad to happen to me, did he? I picked up the phone and actually hit 9-1 before he finally came clean.

He made the whole thing up because I was so mad at him and he just wanted me to stop being mad at him. So I dropped the act and the phone, said "no shit", and gave him the silent treatment for the rest of the night.

This story, and several others, have been running around my mind for the last week or so. Particularly the part about being "cold". It used to bother me. At least, when I wasn't actively in one of my defensive modes where all my emotions shut down, it did. But this week I realized something. I frequently go "cold" at the end of a relationship, but talking with my ex-FWB about some of my experiences with abuse, I noticed the pattern. I go "cold" as a response to abuse.

This abusive fiance was deliberately trying to manipulate my emotions to control my behaviour. In this particular story, I finally got him to admit it. He didn't want me mad at him, so rather than address the thing I was mad about, he tried to make me feel sorry for him and to feel concern for him. Because he was trying to manipulate me into *feeling* what he wanted me to feel, my response was to stop feeling entirely.

Well, not "entirely". Like Hulk in one of the Avengers movies, I still always feel rage. That's always bubbling beneath the surface, all the time. But it gets compartmentalized, and in these situations, I just stop feeling.

Abusers are not evil super-villains twirling their mustachios and consciously plotting the manipulation of their partners. They are quite often people in pain. They are people who feel fear, as we all do. It's just that their reaction to fear is to hold a metaphorical gun to someone else's head and make them do things to prevent themselves from feeling fear. They are calculating to a certain extent, but mostly they just feel fear and they feel *justified* in reaching for tools of control to address their fears.

My abusive fiance abused me because he was afraid. He was afraid to lose me. So he tried to direct my feelings towards those that would tie me to him. So when I stopped having feelings, he was terrified. Apparently it's very scary to have someone you love go cold on you. I wouldn't know. If any of my exes ever went cold on me, it was towards the end of a relationship where I was probably sliding into apathy myself.

But as I looked back over my history, at all the people who accused me of being "cold", these were also all the same people who, when I tell stories about them to relatively healthy, non-manipulative people, are the ones that my friends recoil in horror about and tell me that they were abusive. Apparently this is my last defense mechanism for abuse. You can't manipulate my emotions to control my behaviour if I don't feel any emotions.

I'm kind of surprised at the realization that all those accusations of being "cold" were A) probably all true, but because B) were in response to abuse. When I think of abuse victims, I see mostly afternoon special TV characters and my former metamour who was an emotional wreck at the end of her last abusive relationship. I see people who are beaten down, dejected, shells of their former selves, but most of all, *emotional*.

But when *I* face abuse, I get hard. I get cold. I get sharp. There may be a reason why I like knives so much.

I'm not saying that being in abusive relationships doesn't leave long-term damage on me. It usually takes me a while to trust people again. And I'm very cynical. I don't like to open up to people. It seems like I'm very open because I talk about so many personal things in very public spaces. But I can talk about things while being guarded. I'm not really sharing any intimacy, even though I'm sharing a lot of details.

Apathy and coldness and hardness are my defense mechanisms. It's when you know I've reached the end. These are what come out in response to abuse, control, manipulation. I can only extend my compassion so far. When I feel like the other person is not meeting me in the middle, when they're not operating in good faith, when they're trying to control me, I take away those parts of me that make me vulnerable to harm and control - my emotions.

Becoming a knife edge is my response to abuse.

Writer: [writes scathing review of 50 Shades and its abuse apologism]

Man: Nice review, but too many cuss words. Your emotions betray you. You should be able to discuss this topic calmly, or else people won't listen to you. You clearly have your own issues, so I can't take what you say too seriously. I identify with the main character, so he obviously can't be too bad, you just don't understand him.

Me: ♫ Fuck the motherfucker
Fuck the motherfucker
Fuck the motherfucker
He's a fucking motherfucker...
If you don't like the swearing that this motherfucker forced from me
And reckon it shows moral or intellectual paucity
Then fuck you motherfucker
This is language one employs
When one is fucking cross about
Fuckers fucking abusing women and then making fucking money off the story by convincing everyone it's fucking "romance erotica" ...
And if you look into your motherfucking heart and tell me true
If this motherfucking stupid fucking song offended you
With it's filthy fucking language and it's fucking disrespect
If it made you feel angry go ahead and write a letter
But if you find me more offensive than the fucking abuse apologism
embedded in every word of this fucking story THEN YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM♫


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-…

Everyone: please learn that you are lovable *to someone* and worthy of love and that anyone who thinks you are "too" something or "not enough" whatever IS NOT THE RIGHT PERSON FOR YOU.

If people don't like something important about you, you are not going to "scare off" potential partners, you are dodging bullets.

Gaslighters and manipulators will take advantage of the cultural trope (overwhelmingly applied to women) that you have no value without a romantic partner and you must change yourself to find a partner, to keep a partner, and to make your partner happy. This is bullshit. This is how they deflect and get you to accept toxic behaviour, abuse, and general shittiness.

Not everyone HAS to like you. Not everyone WILL like you. That's OK. Don't let that fact become a weapon to manipulate you.

Not only is it OK if people don't like you for a thing, it's what you want. It's how you tell who is compatible with you and who will love you for who you are, your core self. It's a valuable screening tool. Use it to your advantage, don't let it get used against you.

---

Brought to you by the boring response of men telling me that I'm "too intense" or "too aggressive" to "attract a man". The appropriate response to that is not to tone myself down. It's this:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[deep breath]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Dude. No, srsly, dude. Anyone who is intimidated by me or thinks I'm too much is not man enough to be worthy of being my partner.

I eat the weak.

Alright, let's get this down on "paper", so to speak, so that I don't have to keep retyping it several times every December.  It's the time of year for That Song.  You know the one.  The creepy date rape song.  "But it's not rapey!   It's about feminine empowerment!  Historical context!  It gave women an excuse in a time when they couldn't be openly sexual and needed an excuse to do what they wanted to do!"

Bullshit.

Basically all these "but historical context!" defenses are not exactly true.  They're a retcon justification because people feel guilty about liking a holiday song about date rape (and one that actually has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with Christmas).

ret·con
/ˈretkän/
noun
1. (in a film, television series, or other fictional work) a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events, typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an inconsistency.

verb
1. revise (an aspect of a fictional work) retrospectively, typically by introducing a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events.

Let's talk context then if you want to talk context.

Sure, in the 1940s, women did not have the freedom to openly desire sex and (I'm told - I did not verify it but I will concede that this is probably true because it doesn't matter for my point) some people used to use the line "hey, what's in this drink?" wink wink nudge nudge know-what-I-mean? to absolve themselves of responsibility or accountability for the sex that they were about to have.  That was a thing.

But that was not a thing *in this song*.

Let's start with the background.  The song was co-written by a husband and wife team, Frank Loesser and Lynn Garland.  In their social set, in the '40s in Hollywood, there was, apparently, very stiff competition for who could throw the best parties.  Hosts were expected to, not only provide the location and refreshments for said party, but actually *be* the entertainment, with singing, dancing, performing, whatever.  Whoever was the best entertainment got invited to all the other best parties.  And in Hollywood, who you knew was of paramount importance.  It not only determined your spot in the social scene, but also got you employment, which affected your livelihood.  So this was a Big Fucking Deal.

So the husband and wife duo wrote the song as the climax to their party, hoping it would make them popular.  And it did.  They literally moved up in social class because of that song.  "It was their ticket to caviar and truffles", Garland once said.  It made them so popular that MGM offered to buy the rights to it 4 years later and Loesser went on to write several other popular songs for movies and this one in particular even won an Academy Award.

The song is a call-and-response type song, with the characters in the song being named Wolf and Mouse, i.e. Predator and Prey.  Loesser even introduced himself as "the evil of two Loessers" BECAUSE OF THE ROLE HE PLAYED IN THE SONG.   Loesser would probably defend his line about "evil of two Loessers" as being witty, a play on words.  Shakespeare played with words all the time!   He certainly didn't *mean* that he was really evil, right?  It's just a joke!  Don't take everything so seriously!

Except that Schrodinger's Douchebag says that too.  Schrodinger's Douchebag is the guy who makes assholey statements, and only after his comments are not received well, tries to excuse them as "just a joke".  You don't know if he's seriously a rapist / racist / bigot / other asshole or just a dude with a bad sense of "humor" - he's both! - until you call him on it.

So, OK, that's a little ... weird, but a bad "joke" is just one thing, right?  Well, the next thing that happened was Garland did not want to sell the song.  She thought of it as "their" song.  But Loesser sold it out from under her anyway.  Garland felt so betrayed by this, she describes the betrayal as akin to being cheated on.  I believe the specific quote was something about her feeling as though she had actually walked in on her husband having sex with another woman.

This led to a huge fight which, by some accounts, contributed to the downfall of their marriage and they eventually divorced.  So here we have a man who puts his own wants above his wife's needs (or strongly felt wants).  Why is it so difficult to believe that he would write a song about pressuring a woman and not even understand that it was bad or why?  It shouldn't be so difficult to accept that a man who would do this to his own wife probably has no problem with "wearing her down" and doesn't think his song represents straight up assault.  

We have here a pattern where a man just, like many straight men, didn't think about what he was saying or how it would affect women, particularly the women in his life, and he, like everyone else that year, was merely a product of his time and not able to foresee 70 years later where we now recognize the deeply disturbing "boys will be boys" patriarchal reinforcement of the "what's in this drink wink wink" joke.

Frankly, I don't think he thought about his lyrics all that much at all, let alone tried to write some weird, backwards, 1940s female "empowerment" anthem.   I don't think he deliberately set out to be an evil villain writing an ode to date rape either, I think he just flat out didn't consider all the implications of a bubbly song where one person keeps pushing for sex and the other keeps rejecting but eventually capitulates.  Y'know, like the Blurred Lines song - it's bubbly, it's cute, it's got a catchy hook, but ultimately it's about street harassment, like, he literally said that he wrote the song by imagining a dirty old man yelling things out to hot chicks as they passed by on the street.  But people love it because it's bubble-gum pop.  Same as this song.

Only with this one, we're *defending* it as a "joke" people used to use because women couldn't be openly sexual.  THAT'S PART OF THE PROBLEM.  Women needed that kind of excuse because they were not allowed to have their own agency.  So romanticizing this song only reinforces the message that a woman's "no" is really just her needing a better excuse, so if you keep "offering" her excuses (i.e. pushing her), eventually she'll find one she can use and give in.  Keep pressuring her!  She wants it!  It's for her own good!  It's empowering!

That's some fucked up shit.

But back in the '40s, they didn't really know better, apparently.   Women used what avenues they had for expressing their sexuality, and at the time, "what's in this drink?" was what they had.  They, and Frank Loesser, were not thinking how, in the next century, women who had taken back some of their agency would be constantly fighting to keep what we have managed to wrestle back precisely because of this line of reasoning - that "no" doesn't mean "no", it means "try harder" because we just need to be given the right push in the right direction.

But as the saying goes, when we know better, we do better.  Not knowing any better back then isn't a good enough excuse to keep it around now.  It may have been considered "innocent" in the '40s or even "necessary" because of the restrictions that women had, but now we know better.  We know both the legitimately terrifying implications of the lyrics in this song as sung straight and we know the patriarchal implications of the lyrics in this song as sung "flirty".  He didn't know any better back then, but we know better now.

So now let's get to the context of the song itself.

When Loesser and Garland were performing this song at parties, it was a huge hit ... but only within their social circle.  It didn't reach mainstream attention until it appeared in the movie Neptune's Daughter, which is a really odd movie for this song, only partly because the movie takes place in the summer, not the winter.   The movie is about an "aquatic ballet dancer" and swim suit designer who mistakenly believes that a South American polo team captain is pursuing her sister but who really wants to date her, and who accepts a date with the team captain just to keep him from dating her sister.

Got that?  Swimmer lady thinks polo captain is putting the moves on her sister.  Polo captain is not, and wants to date swimmer lady.  So polo captain asks swimmer lady out on a date.  Swimmer lady agrees to a date with polo captain in order to keep a guy she thinks is a predator away from her sister, but she doesn't like him.  She ends up liking him later though, because it's a rom-com musical from the '40s.

Actually, I could have just said "because it's a rom-com" and stopped there, because "two people who don't like each other and don't communicate with each other end up married and we're supposed to think this is a good thing" is basically the entire motivation for the rom-com genre.

Meanwhile, her sister is pursuing some other guy who she mistakes for this polo team captain, and since he usually has poor luck with women, he lets her believe in his mistaken identity.   What follows is a comedy of errors and mistaken identity that somehow manages to go from two women who go on a date with two men, get mad at them for things they did not do, learn the truth eventually, and go from being mad at them to marrying them.  After one date.   Because the movie was written by men in the '40s who followed formulaic story-writing to sell more movie tickets.

This film clearly does not show a woman looking for an excuse to stay.  The scene is played as a woman legitimately trying to leave.  So, on this date where the swimmer is grudgingly spending time with the polo captain, he puts the moves on her.  But she still thinks he's a disreputable jerk who is courting her sister and she is only out with him to protect her sister from him.  She is NOT into him (yet).

She grimaces when she tastes the drink ("what's in this drink?") and it's NOT storming outside - the Wolf is lying to her about the weather to get her to stay.  It's summer in California, the entire premise of the song is a manipulation to get someone to stay against their will.  She is playing the character as annoyed and legitimately trying to leave.

The Mouse is not trying to save her reputation, she is trying to give him a soft rejection, as women were (and still are) trained to do, to avoid punishment for rejection by passing the responsibility onto someone the aggressor would have more respect for (her parents, the neighbors, etc.).  It's just another variation on "I have a boyfriend" - she is trying to give excuses that he will find valid without saying she's not interested and risking making him feel rejected and hurt by her disinterest.

The reverse gender scene in the same movie is even worse.  Later, the sister is on the date with the pretend polo captain and she is obviously, aggressively, and annoyingly pursuing him.  The man is visibly angry at her and trying to leave, and she is physically forceful with him to get him to stay.  Apparently, because it's a woman assaulting a man, that makes it funny.  But it's not any less rapey when a woman does it to a man, and sometimes it's worse because patriarchy.

Very shortly afterwards, each of the couples apparently gets over all of this harassment and mistaken assumptions and they get married.   Which is exactly the sort of narrative that "what's in this drink wink wink" promotes.  So even if it *was* the joke-excuse, it's *still* harmful to idolize it *today* because the lesson is that when a woman says "no", she means "keep trying until we find a loophole" and that eventually the man will wear her down and win the girl for himself.

Sure, maybe some women did have to find some kind of "excuse" to save her reputation because she didn't have the freedom to say yes back then.  BUT THAT'S ALSO PART OF THE PROBLEM, and also not the point. 1) That merely perpetuates the myth today that a woman's "no" can't be trusted because men just need to give her an "excuse" to say yes; and 2) that is clearly not the context *of this song*.

That is retconning the song to assuage our modern consciences for liking it.

The writer here is not a man concerned with either protecting a woman's virtue or subverting sexual mores for women's freedom.  He did not write some female empowerment anthem in which a sexually active woman gets to have the sex she wants by justifying it with the right excuse.

He is just what the Wolf appears to be - a selfish, egotistical man more interested in what he gets out of things than in how it affects the women around him, and fully believing he is entitled to whatever he wants at the expense of what the women around him, particularly his own wife, want.  Which was absolutely status quo then and still is today.

And the producers who bought the song and the director who directed the scenes did not feel that the message was "no, really, I want to have sex, just give me an excuse".  They very clearly saw the song as someone legitimately rejecting another person because that's how they directed the actors to play the scene.

AND THAT'S HOW THE REST OF THE WORLD SAW AND HEARD THIS SONG FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME

How's that for context?

Just admit you like the song even though it's problematic.  Own that shit!  Have y'all heard the music I listen to?  I listen to pop country for fuck's sake!  You like that song, the lyrics are disturbing but the tune is catchy. Just accept it.