This is a good question. We often forget that in abusive relationships between adults there’s never only a sadist. There’s always also a masochist. Some relationships bring out the best in people but others bring out the worst. Abuse is a result of the dynamic that exists between two people, and for both of them it fulfills a necessary function.
In long-term abusive relationships between adults, the masochist will go out of her way to provoke the sadist into beating her. She’ll press every button to collapse his efforts at self-control methodically and doggedly.
This does not excuse the abuser. Nothing excuses a person who beats another outside of the situations of physical self-defense. But these abusive situations can’t be resolved from one side. Two people engineer, maintain, and enjoy them. These are usually relationships where you can’t pry the participants apart under any circumstances. They fulfill each other’s neurotic need, and that binds them together like Krazy Glue.
The problem is that there’s a big taboo on what I’m saying right now. We have painted ourselves into a corner by imagining this S&M dynamic as an interaction between an angelic victim (who of course is always desperate to leave the abuser but doesn’t because she fears for her life) and a demonic abuser. People literally freak out if one tries to talk about this in a more nuanced way. It’s the same as “rape is not about sex but about power” which has now acquired the status of religious dogma in spite of being utterly dumb.
We won’t solve anything until we learn to live with the ambiguity. Unfortunately, this necessitates brains that are capable of more complex operations and are not dumbed down by staring at screens and catering to one’s worst instincts.
Love, as I keep saying, is only true if it tolerates ambiguity. If you only care about the victim if she’s a perfect angel but not if she’s a complicated, messed-up, often very annoying human, you don’t care at all.
Clarissa's Blog 
A wise, much more experienced judge (as one of the few “lady lawyers” of the ’60s, her firm automaticallly relegated all family law matters to her), in response to my plaintive query, while presenting my daily ex parte request for a domestic abuse restraining order, as a new and very naive Legal Aid lawyer, as to why so many women remain in such awful relationships, responded: “At least he cares enough to beat her.”
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I’ve known a few such couples, and you are so right: in nearly every case, the woman was a deeply, repulsively irritating person. Intellectually, I want a way to help you out of this situation before he kills you, but… I don’t even know how to talk to such people. It is a profound failure of my own capacity for Christian love: were I a saint (and I’m definitely not), there’d be some way to look straight through and see the image of God in there. But here we are: primary response still disgust. I don’t know how to talk to people who have ditched all their personal agency and don’t seem to want it back. In this and other respects, my mother is a better person than I. She helps these ladies get GEDs and job training and stuff. I have no idea how.
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methylethyl
The horror is that is not just the mutual domestic abusive relationships is that the female body is not designed to handle it; not just the size and strength difference, their bones are more light, gracile, easily broken. My wife could sometimes talk to abusive families breaking up, I was always too angry to be effective.
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I see the neggies are coming out in support of abusive relationships 😉
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methylethyl
LOL, beats me, maybe it is somehow personal ;-D
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As long as they hide behind anonymity and fail to clarify what they object to, it is completely safe to assume the worst. I always do 😀
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“beats me”
I doubt it.
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“the masochist will go out of her way to provoke the sadist into beating her”
Some decades ago I was listening to a BBC radio report on abuse and one woman who had managed to break out of that system said that the reason she had stayed in the relationship so long was that after the beating when her husband would apologize (often in tears) she would feel like ‘the queen of the world’…. IIRC the hosts changed the subject as quickly as they could to return to the ‘mean man bad, poor woman good’ narrative. I was impressed by her self-knowledge and courage to explain it in public.
I wonder if simply consciously realizing that that was what was going on helped her get out of it.
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Hmmm, sometimes wonder if domestic abuse might not sometimes be the human sexual dominance/submissive dance carried to disgusting excess. Some were startled when so many women were enthralled by “Fifty Shades Of Grey”, but truthfully, women have always talked endlessly about sexual power dynamics in love and sex. T’was always thus, from Jane Austin to Diana Galbaldon and through forty eleven bodice rippers, the basic story is a “strong-willed” heroine taken by a mysterious powerful male that is somehow totally carried away by her attractiveness. C’mon, guys measure, we’re designed to do it ;-D
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“domestic abuse might not sometimes be the human sexual dominance/submissive dance carried to disgusting excess”
How many women fantasize about a man who asks for explicit consent at every point in a romantic encounter: “May I kiss you?” “May I kiss you with your mouth open?” “May I use tongue” etc…. I’m sure some do, but…. bodice rippers have always been popular for a reason. Supposedly, in more hung up times, women fantasized about dominant men who incited passion without asking as a way of excusing themselves for having lustful thoughts….
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the closest that most women can find are emotionally dysregulated losers and things go south in a hurry. A news story several years ago (IIRC about domestic abuse calls and what a nightmare they are for police) had a quote woman who had been with an unstable, dangerous jerk (paraphrasing): “Being with him was like riding in a really fast car, I just never thought that it could crash.”
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I think effective contraception has a lot to do with it. Biology demands women have babies. Doesn’t matter if it’s not smart to have a baby right now, if you’ve thought it through and you don’t think you’ll be a good parent, whatever: biology wants what it wants, and if you’re using contraception, you’re fighting biology, your body knows it, and you have to constantly subvert it, work around it, negotiate with it. It never sleeps.
IMO in our current age, that women’s fantasy basically amounts to “I want to get pregnant, but without being personally responsible for getting pregnant.” Fighting biology is a drag, and carrying a truckload of social expectations into the bedroom is a huge turn off.
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cliff arroyo
Even back in the “more hung up times”, women did not tolerate any “may I…’s” and most, if not all, of them in this blog today also seem to totally detest wusses. Domestic abuse calls both then and now are nightmares for the police because much of the abuse is not only mutual, but too often can lead to an attack upon the cops by the “victim”. They and the paramedics can develop some truly dark humour, one of my friends tells of handling a horrific killing where the drunken wife was insisting that, “It was justifiable defence, because he called me ugly”…what can you say ;-D
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