One of every 50 murders is a parricide according to a US study, usually a son killing his mother, pops sometimes gets it at the same time too. Daughters never kill their parents.
After staying up all night reading Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator, I have really got to wonder why they don’t. Trollope’s novel is a reminder of how tragic the life of daughters in a patriarchal family is. While sons get some measure of independence (not a huge one, but still, that’s better than nothing), daughters are perennially victimized by their patriarchal families. In Trollope’s novel, there is one heart-wrenching scene after another where a mother practically grinds her miserable daughter into the ground to take vengeance for her own stunted existence.
I watched this documentary once that kept harping on how Lizzy Borden’s case was such a huge mystery. Idiots. The real mystery is why more of those downtrodden, pushed around, persecuted daughters did (do) not explode.
And it isn’t just a XIXth century phenomenon either. I know several women of different ages who are being eaten alive by their families. These are adult women, not kids. All of them are highly educated and financially independent, too. But they are constantly sacrificing their lives to the needs of their harpies of mothers. (I don’t personally know any woman downtrodden by a father, although I know they exist.)
Of course, the ones who realize that they are being victimized at least have some hope. The saddest cases are the poor victims who say, “Oh, my mother is amazing. She is my best friend! It is not her fault that I have no personal life and have been on anti-depressants for a decade!”
Who could have known that Trollope wrote such feminist texts? I always considered him a hopeless Victorian fogey.
Clarissa's Blog 
Nearly all the adult women I know who are suffering psychologically as a result of their childhoods or ongoing family issues it’s their father’s fault, rather than their mother’s. Most typically it’s because of the father’s abandonment, but sadly I know several women who suffered physical, verbal, or even sexual abuse at the hands of their fathers. Are there some mothers who abandon or abuse their children, causing lasting psychological trauma? Unfortunately so, but it doesn’t happen at remotely the same frequency as it does with fathers.
Getting back to the patriarchy issue, I do think child abuse is more frequent in families where the father is seen as having absolute authority. It’s the “dirty little secret” that many Christian denominations who preach patriarchy ignore, to the detriment of their female members. It’s all “submit to your husbands and fathers” with little to no discussion of the responsibility of those husbands and fathers to treat their families with love, kindness, and respect.
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I’m not disagreeing with your experiences, but you need to remember that I’m from a different culture. We are a culture of domineering abusive mothers.
The abuse I’m talking about here is not the result of abandonment. It is just the opposite. There are mothers who eat their children alive and don’t allow them to have lives of their own even when those children reach retirement age. Although, of course, abandonment also exists and it’s a huge issue.
Off-topic: would you like me to hide your email address from your comment? You might get tons of junk mail otherwise.
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Quick Google search had bring below information.
This is bit off topic but I felt I need do correct this mislaying comment.
According to statistics you experience it is far detached from reality, notice links below in the regard of abuse ratio between fathers and mother against children:
http://www.auau.com.au/Statistics%20on%20Child%20Abuse%202001-02%5B1%5D.htm
http://faq.acf.hhs.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/70/~/who-typically-abuses-children%3F
http://blog.chron.com/momhouston/2011/04/moms-killing-their-children-more-common-than-you-think/
“In analyzing the victim data by relationship to the perpetrator, the 2010 data found that approximately one-half (53.6%) of child abuse and neglect perpetrators were women and slightly more than 45 percent (45.2%) were men. An estimated 84% (84.2) of unique perpetrators were between the ages of 20 and 49 years”
“According to a 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, that year 27.3 percent of child deaths resulting from abuse were perpetrated by the mother, compared to only 14.8 percent of fathers. Mothers and fathers acting together accounted for 22.5 percent of child deaths. According to these same statistics only 2.3 percent of fatalities were committed by a parent’s male partner.”
Clearly you can see that having father lowers the risk of child death.
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I’m not at all surprised by this statistic. It’s exactly as I thought.
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>”The saddest cases are the poor victims who say, “Oh, my mother is amazing. She is my best friend! It is not her fault that I have no personal life and have been on anti-depressants for a decade!”
So true, but I never thought about it. I have a deeply psychologically damaged ‘friend’ who is best friends with her highly critical and overbearing mother. Even sadder is that she will never learn from her mother’s mistakes and will surely beat her own children into misery.
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Yes, that’s the thing, one can only start working with a problem after one actually starts seeing it as a problem.
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Our “Patriarchal” society has countless ways for girls and women to escape abusive home lives and almost none for boys (above a certain age) and men … Society tells these boys that their pain is meaningless, and that they should “suck-up” decades of violent, sexual and emotional abuse heaped on them by their parents and guardians, but (some how) you think these boys are better off than girls.
Maybe if we lived in a society where the focus was on helping the abused rather than only helping abused women and girls less boys would feel that their only way out was to kill their parents.
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” Society tells these boys that their pain is meaningless, and that they should “suck-up” decades of violent, sexual and emotional abuse heaped on them by their parents and guardians, but (some how) you think these boys are better off than girls.”
– I said specifically that I was not talking about child abuse. In this post, I specifically discuss adult people. Why did you decide to take the conversation in the direction of girls and boys?
I dislike these “society tells” memes. Who is society, exactly?
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It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about child abuse or not …
A woman who complains about a narcissistic mother who is controlling her life can get support from family, friends, and institutions. A man who complains about a narcissistic mother is told to “Man-up” in a variety of ways.
Brian Blackwell is a famous murderer of his parents. His mother was so controlling of him that late into his teens he was still being bathed and dressed by his mother. If he was to have reached out for help how much do you think he would have gotten? If it was a 17 year old girl being bathed by her father how much help would she have gotten?
You can’t use terms like “patriarchy” and then forbid “society says” because “patriarchy” is essentially a collection of things society supposedly is telling/forcing upon us.
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“It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about child abuse or not ”
– To me it matters. In this specific post I wanted to discuss a certain issue. I have many posts on child abuse, so issues pertaining to that sad topic can be discussed there.
“A woman who complains about a narcissistic mother who is controlling her life can get support from family, friends, and institutions.”
– I’m sorry, have you read my post? I said that the really sad cases are precisely the ones where a woman not only fails to complain, but she actually considers herself to be lucky. I also wonder which institutions you mean as providing support in dealing with narcissistic mothers.
“A man who complains about a narcissistic mother is told to “Man-up” in a variety of ways.”
– Please avoid the passive voice. Told by whom? The mysterious “institutions”? Or friends? Since everybody chooses their own friends, I don;t feel a lot of compassion for people who have sucky friends.
“You can’t use terms like “patriarchy” and then forbid “society says” because “patriarchy” is essentially a collection of things society supposedly is telling/forcing upon us.”
– My definition of the patriarchy is different. I have to say that I find your definition to be bizarre. never encountered it anywhere in literature, either.
“Brian Blackwell is a famous murderer of his parents. His mother was so controlling of him that late into his teens he was still being bathed and dressed by his mother.”
– That mother was a criminal, for sure. But, once again, I’m not talking about children here. For once, I’m talking about the relationship between adults and their parents.
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So let me clarify: children of both genders get abused equally. However, ADULT women find it harder to escape from their patriarchal families than ADULT men.
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Testify! I recognized the problem and it was still hard to get loose, and I am much happier since my mother died. And to be fair, she was great when I was little; the problem was that she didn’t want to let me grow up (unless I would be her “best friend,” which wasn’t going to happen).
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Finally somebody knows what I’m talking about! Thank you!
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Maybe its just late but it seems you are going from pointing out that sons kill their parents much more often than than daughters do to asking why daughters have such a hard time escaping from their downtrodden lives.
I think this might be a clue.
I watched this documentary once that kept harping on how Lizzy Borden’s case was such a huge mystery. Idiots. The real mystery is why more of those downtrodden, pushed around, persecuted daughters did (do) not explode.
I think more of them didn’t explode because unlike sons, daughters are not taught to embrace violence as a defining part of their respective adult identities. Hell there are people today that can’t handle the fact that women actually do commit violence. I’d wager that there are plenty of women who got a away with gruesome acts of violence simply because people refused to even consider them as suspects.
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Maybe its just late but it seems you are going from pointing out that sons kill their parents much more often than than daughters do to asking why daughters have such a hard time escaping from their downtrodden lives.
I thought there was an assumption there that for those sons who kill parents, the violence is a form of escape. With that as read, then asking why daughters are so much less likely to take the violent separation route is a reasonable question.
I think more of them didn’t explode because unlike sons, daughters are not taught to embrace violence as a defining part of their respective adult identities.
Agreed. Another piece of the puzzle is that sons are generally (in western cultures) expected and required to emotionally separate more (with the attendant damage that does), which would make violence against family members easier, and probably also that men get a toxic mix of messages about entitlement to and ownership of female members of their family which again would operate to enable violence via de-personalization of the female family members. The latter aspect is the more likely one to be operating across cultural boundaries, I think. For daughters, I suspect it’s therefore harder to access the rage necessary to kill if they have not been raised to see themselves completely as a person, with boundaries that they are allowed to enforce.
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I think FD is on to something very important here: the absence of personal boundaries for daughters of patriarchal families. For example, their underwear, their menstruations, virginity,etc are always a subject of discussion and control by the patriarchal family. I don’t think the boundaries are as eroded in case of sons in patriarchal families.
The movements of such women are also a lot more policed. To give just one example, a friend of mine couldn’t stir out of the house without reporting in detail to her mother where she was going. This lasted until she got married at the age of 28. In the meanwhile, her brother stayed out with friends and girlfriends all the time and nobody forced him to render accounts.
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I thought there was an assumption there that for those sons who kill parents, the violence is a form of escape. With that as read, then asking why daughters are so much less likely to take the violent separation route is a reasonable question.
Like I said it was late so I wasn’t full aware.
The latter aspect is the more likely one to be operating across cultural boundaries, I think.
Between the two pieces you mention I would agree. But I think that the embrace of violence is a piece that is more cross cultural. It’s not even, “It’s okay if he does that.” (although some would like for it to be that), its “If you don’t do that then you are not a man!”
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You might enjoy this theoretical analysis of patriarchal families:
http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Freudian_Mystique.html?id=0hKiupyxnSEC&redir_esc=y
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Here’s my autobiographical reflection on this and other issues:
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/issues-of-patriarchal-power-structures.html
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Oh of course women of patriarchal families dont kill their parents. They wait until they are older and bigger and then they either beat or kill their own kids. At least that is what the stats show. 😉
You know, what goes around comes around especially for all those poor victim girls.
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You put a smiley face but what you say is true and not funny at all. It’s a tragic cycle that continues from generation to generation. And being the first generation in one’s family to leave the patriarchal model is very very hard work.
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Its not a smiley face, its a sarcastic wink. As far as your Patriarchal idea goes. 😉
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Talking about tactlessness. Do you normally react with sarcastic winks when people try to share deeply traumatic personal experiences?
Say, have you been married off against your will by your patriarchal family? If not, then maybe you should just sit there quietly and listen, eh?
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Clarissa
Maybe you should just acknowledge it is a Shitty Fucking asshole family that does that kind of stuff instead of suggesting its a Patriarchal family. Words mean something, regardless of how you choose to rearrange the term, PATRIARCHY implies male dominated. I(and many others) do not appreciate the slight. If it is your intention to say that males dominate females then just fucking say so.
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“Maybe you should just acknowledge it is a Shitty Fucking asshole family that does that kind of stuff instead of suggesting its a Patriarchal family.”
– I’m capable of a more profound analysis than shitty and fucking. You can say shitty and fucking a million times in a row but that will not help to explain this reality.
“Words mean something”
– I already explained what this one means to me. Are you trying to dispute my right to use my terminology on my blog?
” I(and many others) do not appreciate the slight.”
– How is MY family being what it is a slight to YOU?
“If it is your intention to say that males dominate females then just fucking say so.”
– I always say exactly what I mean. There is no need to assign your own beliefs to me.
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No and No and it is your right. It is my right also to address the fact that you continue to use a gendered term to describe your experience. If you do not like the fact that your gendered term is insulting to a certain demographic of your readership, well, oh well. 🙂
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If I took into account everything somebody finds unreasonably offensive, I’d never write a word. If people are incapable of seeing the original and new approaches that I offer, that is hardly my fault.
Instead of quarreling about the terminology, you could make it truly irrelevant by denouncing the barbaric practice of putting women and children under a Father’s Name as if they were things he owned. Where is your outrage about that? Where is your support for me in the topics where that was discussed?
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I will support you when you when you take the gendered term out of it. Until then, I will be who I am. We are on the same team, you just choose to see the team from a slightly different view than I do, wrong, maybe, but that is your choice as it is mine.
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Oh and by the way, if that is the case that we men control you women then why dont you grow a spine and stop it. Without the help of the PATRIARCHAL men.
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“Oh and by the way, if that is the case that we men control you women then why dont you grow a spine and stop it. Without the help of the PATRIARCHAL men.”
– Are you not feeling well?
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– Are you not feeling well?(Clarissa)
Nope, pissed actually.
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