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Trauma is commonly portrayed in the
literature as an issue particularly affecting women through their experience of
sexual abuse. To the extent that men are
recognized as trauma victims and survivors, it is typically localized to male
experience as soldiers and to the issue of combat shock.1 In the trauma literature, and I believe in
the popular conception of the issue of trauma, men appear primarily as
perpetrators and women primarily as victims. Feminist analysis offers a comparable
dichotomy, framed in political terms:
patriarchy is a system of male domination and the oppression of
women. This broad perspective
encompasses power relations at many different levels and subsumes a vast range
of political, economic, and social issues, of which trauma is only one. It does however offer a focused lens for
understanding male sexual violence against girls and women, and male battering,
as specific manifestations of patriarchy.2 The uncovering of male violence against
girls and women over the last 30 years has been of enormous social and
political significance, as has feminist analysis of patriarchy. But I believe that there is a more complex
reality to the intersection of trauma and gender - a reality which includes
boys and men as trauma victims on a scale which goes far beyond military
experience, and a reality which under certain circumstances includes girls and
women as perpetrators as well as victims.
In political terms, this means that men as well as women are oppressed
by patriarchy, and that women as well as men have the capacity to act as
oppressors - a capacity which is particularly driven by the experience of
trauma. My purpose in this chapter is to
flush out this more complex account of how trauma affects both genders. In the process, I will use trauma as a focal
point for developing a more textured picture of how sexism operates and how
power relations play out in a patriarchal society. The analysis of
trauma and gender which I develop in this chapter has distinct and practical
implications for building social change movements. Naming the ways in which men are traumatized
by patriarchy creates new possibilities for building a pro-feminist men's
movement, and for building awareness that gender equality serves men's
interests as well as women's. An
understanding that patriarchy creates conditions in which men are both
oppressed and oppressors, and in which women under certain circumstances act as
oppressors as well as suffering oppression, also creates the basis for a new
kind of dialogue between women and men who are committed to gender
equality. By this I mean a dialogue in
which we maintain full awareness of systemic male dominance, but in which we
recognize and explore commonalties of experience and interests between men and
women which have typically been overlooked.
Finally, an analysis which humanizes the oppressor, and which narrows
the gap between victim and perpetrator, lays the groundwork for a process of
social change that can yield humane results and can produce a political and
social restructuring that humanizes power relations at all levels. Nevertheless, there are three very
significant dangers to the argument that men and women are both oppressed and
oppressors. The first is that by
focusing on ways in which boys and men are victims, the onslaught of male
violence against girls and women will be minimized, or worse that it will be
implied that trauma is of true or heightened significance because it affects
males. The second and even greater danger
is that the identification of men as victims and women as perpetrators could
serve as the basis for contentions of "reverse sexism" which would
totally distort reality and could only serve the perpetuation of patriarchy. The third danger is that the notion that men
as well as women are oppressed by patriarchy could obscure the real nature of
sexist power relations, collapsing feminist analysis into the vague and
probably useless notion that "we're all oppressed by patriarchy." Naming these pitfalls is important but is
not by itself enough to avoid them.
There are specific, key aspects to the analysis I develop in this
chapter which I want to emphasize at the outset, because I believe that they
are pivotal to an understanding of trauma and gender which holds in view both the reality of male domination and
the reality of male victimization: ·
Males are oppressed, victimized, and traumatized
primarily during childhood. Feminism correctly identifies boyhood as a
period of training and socialization into the role of dominant and into
predatory behavior. But childhood is
also a period of immense vulnerability during which boys are oppressed and
traumatized in ways and to an extent that is typically ignored across the spectrum
of political and social analysis. While
I will argue that some types of traumatization also
occur during adulthood for men, childhood is the primary arena in which males
are oppressed and traumatized by patriarchy.
The victimization of boys stands alongside -
and in many ways is critical for understanding - the dominant roles of men. ·
Childhood trauma endures into adulthood. Almost 20
years ago I wrote, "A man who oppresses women may well have been oppressed
as a child (an instance of ageism) in
ways which have blocked his ability to relate emotionally and have set him up
to compulsively dominate…But none of this means that as a man he is oppressed by sexism."3 My assumption at the time was that the
oppression of boys has nothing to do with sexism, and that childhood experience
has nothing to do with adulthood that is of significance for understanding
oppression dynamics. I now believe that
both of those assumptions are wrong. One of the important things we can learn from the
study of trauma is that childhood traumatic experience can and often does have
lifelong effects, and this is as true for men as for women. The reality of embedded male trauma during
adulthood as a legacy of childhood experience - typically unarticulated and
unrecognized - stands alongside the reality of male domination. ·
Subjective experience does not necessarily match
objective power relations. I have argued for this point at some length
in Chapter Two - and even more specifically for the possibility that trauma
survivors can be subjectively powerless but objectively dominant in the
present, a combination which I have described as lethal. The juxtaposition of subjective powerlessness
and objective dominance is of particular relevance to the situation of men; it
is also relevant to women to the extent that they occupy dominant roles, such
as the role of parent. The power-under
paradigm is a tool for making sense of the dual realities of victim and
perpetrator, or oppressed and oppressor, which I believe patriarchy creates for
men and, to some degree, also for women - and to do so without obscuring or
collapsing our understanding of sexist power relations between men and women. I will develop an
analysis of trauma and gender by systematically considering girls and boys,
women and men in turn as victims and as perpetrators. Some of this material is repetitive of ground
covered previously (particularly in the section on prevalence of trauma in
Chapter One); and all of the essential points dealing with girls and women as
victims of male domination reiterate well-established feminist
understandings. I include this material
in order to place my discussion of boys and men as victims, and of girls and
women as perpetrators, into an accurate and balanced context. My aim is to chart how patriarchy in its
totality traumatizes both genders, as well as how it spawns perpetrators - and
to do so without distorting or skewing the basic reality that men hold far more
power than women in society. Reality is always more complex than an
analysis of broad social and political patterns can convey. Assertions that girls are socialized to
submission or that boys are socialized to predatory sexual behavior cannot
possibly capture all of the individual circumstances of every child, including
circumstances (such as anti-sexist families and sub-cultures) which may
mitigate these broad social forces. Nor
can a discussion of gender as an isolated issue capture what Aurora Levins Morales calls the "interpenetration" of
different systems of oppression.4 But broad
social forces involving trauma and gender do exist and do have a massive
influence on individual lives, and it is these forces which I try to depict. The world of trauma is populated by
perpetrators and victims; the world of patriarchy by oppressors and
oppressed. But there is a larger universe
of possibilities, including recovery from trauma and the capacity of people to
share power and act as equals. When I
categorize girls and boys, women and men as victims and perpetrators, my
intention is not to reduce all experience to these categories, but rather to
try to show how patriarchy shoves people in these directions. The entire point is to develop a map which
not only charts the patterns of abuse and victimization created by patriarchy,
but which also points toward the paths out of these patterns. Girls as Victims
An accurate charting of trauma and gender
must start with the staggering prevalence of sexual violence against
girls. I have previously cited studies
finding that between 27% and 38% of women interviewed report having been sexually
abused during childhood, with the figure climbing above 50% when broader
criteria for sexual abuse are used.5 The experience of violation, profound
powerlessness, devaluation and worthlessness related to being used as the means
to the perpetrator's pleasure - all directly related to trauma - is thus a
cultural norm for girls in the U.S. It is a norm which also surely affects
girls who are not themselves sexually abused, but who witness or hear accounts
of sexual violence, or who in any number of other ways may become aware of the
banality of predatory male behavior, and who therefore grow up in an atmosphere
of insecurity and fear which in itself can be traumatizing. The personal, social and political significance
of the enormity of sexual violence against girls cannot be overstated. Girls also grow up subject to physical
violence. The use of corporal punishment
by parents on all young children - girls as well as boys - is nearly universal.6 Murray Straus in his analysis of National
Family Violence surveys reports that parents are only slightly more likely to
hit boys than girls; he notes that "the unexpectedly small size of
difference between boys and girls suggests that the principle of hitting
children 'when necessary' is so firmly established that it largely overrides
the principle of bringing up boys to be real men and girls to be ladies."7 In addition, given the prevalence of
battering,8 many girls witness or in other ways become
aware of male violence against women, most poignantly when their mothers are
battered by their fathers, step-fathers, and boyfriends. I am not aware of any studies which explore
the psychological effects on girls of witnessing violence against their mothers
and other women, but common sense suggests that this can be seriously
traumatizing. Witnessing the ways in which their mothers
and other women are subjected to male brutality and dominance is also part of
an overarching social reality which continues to socialize girls to
submission. Despite real gains won by
the women's movement, girls grow up in a society in which the political and
economic elites are still overwhelmingly male; in which vast economic
disparities between men and women remain; in which the media and popular
culture are saturated with images and depictions of the sexual objectification
of women; in which violence against women remains a cultural norm; and in which
domestic power relations continue to display myriad acts of male domination to
girls in the course of daily family life.
Patriarchy is in the air that girls
breathe, creating countless concrete experiences by which they are demeaned and
devalued in relation to their capacity to act powerfully in the world. It is true that feminism has to some extent
created a social counterforce, present to varying degrees in the lives of
girls, which gives them a message of equality and personal power. But for most girls the rhetoric of gender
equality is contradicted by the continuing realities of male dominance and of
socialization to stereotyped feminine roles.
As Meda Chesney-Lind observes, "gender-specific socialization
patterns have not changed very much, and this is especially true for parents'
relationships with their daughters."9 The result is a classic set of mixed
messages: be equal, but learn to submit;
be peaceful, but expect to be the object of violence; be powerful, but expect
the most important leadership positions to go to men; prepare for a career, and
prepare to be the primary parent; be assertive, but be silent when you are
sexually abused by your father or uncle or neighbor. Rachel Simmons notes that "[o]ur culture [is] telling girls to be bold and timid,
voracious and slight, sexual and demure";10 Simmons' recent book Odd Girl Out chronicles
the ways in which the impact of this mixed message both harms girls and leads
them to behave destructively by distorting their expressions of anger and
aggression. I believe that the experience of growing
up as a second class citizen in itself can be traumatizing. It is immeasurably more traumatizing in
conjunction with the onslaught of sexual and physical violence that girls experience. The
sexual objectification of women in popular culture not only socializes girls
for adult gender roles but also, in the case of girls who have been sexually abused,
mirrors and reinforces their actual traumatic experience. Contrived images of female beauty not only
teach girls that their bodies cannot possibly measure up, but also reinforce
the worthlessness, self-hatred, and dissociation from one's body which are
common symptoms or results of trauma. The constriction of girls' capacity to
express or even consciously experience anger, one of the cornerstones of female
socialization,11 reinforces the splitting off of traumatic
rage, leading to physical illness, depression, substance abuse, and the type of
chronic subjective powerlessness which I have described as power-under in
Chapter Two. Societal messages that
girls cannot act powerfully in the world reinforce the powerlessness which
stands at the core of traumatic experience. Boys as Victims
Boys are sexually abused in such large
numbers that, if the problem were acknowledged and the
public health implications were recognized, it could easily be called an
epidemic. A national telephone survey of
1,145 men conducted in 1985 found that 16% stated that they had been sexually
abused as boys.12 William Holmes and Gail Slap, in a 1998
review of 166 studies conducted between 1985 and 1997, state that "[t]he sexual
abuse of boys is common, underreported, underrecognized,
and undertreated."13 While there were wide variations in
the rates of abuse reported in the studies, presumably resulting from
differences in definitions and methodology, the Boston Globe reports that
"Holmes said a review of the studies leads him to believe that 10 to 20 percent
of all boys are sexually abused in some way."14
There is reason to believe that the actual
incidence of sexual abuse of boys may be even higher, given vast societal
pressures on boys and men to deny that they are victims,15 and given that sexual touching short of
intercourse which would be considered abuse if done to girls often is not
identified as sexual abuse when done to boys.16
There is in addition the uncharted terrain of covert sexual abuse, a
term which Judith Herman uses regarding father-daughter relationships,17 but which I believe is applicable to
emotionally exploitive and sexually charged parental relationships with boys as
well. Regardless of findings in studies and
periodic media reports of the sexual abuse of boys, the ideology and core
social myths of patriarchy forge widespread denial and resistance to the
recognition of boys as victims. Of
course there are also social forces which lead to denial - historically massive
denial - of girls as victims of sexual abuse; but with the breaking of that
silence over the last 30 years, the notion of girls as sexual victims can fit
into the popular conception and stereotype of girls and women as passive sexual
objects. Not so with boys. The concept of victim casts boys into a
starkly feminine role, and the role of sexual
victim associates them with both femininity and homosexuality.18 The social forces leading boys not to
report sexual abuse are compounded and reinforced by pervasive unwillingness in
our society to see it. The sexual abuse of boys, despite (and in
many ways because of) its invisibility, is as damaging as the sexual abuse of
girls, with the same range and severity of traumatic symptoms. Neal King describes the effects of boyhood
sexual abuse as "paralyzing confusion, lonely rage (often directed at
one's self), suffocating shame and deep, unspeakable, private, seemingly
unshakable pain…[T]he survivor can feel sentenced to a
private nether world of secrecy, isolation, and powerlessness."19 Mike Lew lists
over 60 psychological harms experienced by male survivors of childhood sexual
abuse, including nightmares, flashbacks, fear, shame, anger, guilt,
helplessness, sexual dysfunction, self-abuse, frozen emotions, addiction,
feelings of unreality, and wanting to die.20 Boys are almost universally the objects of
physical violence. As previously noted,
more than 90% of all pre-school children are hit by their parents, and for most
children corporal punishment continues at least until adolescence.21 While Straus, in his otherwise
comprehensive account of corporal punishment in Beating The Devil out of Them, notes that boys are only slightly
more likely than girls to be hit, he unfortunately gives no data on the
severity of corporal punishment by gender.
However, it seems likely that on average boys are beaten more severely
than girls. Dan Kindlon
and Michael Thompson observe anecdotally that "[m]any parents acknowledge
that they use a more severe disciplinary style with their sons than with their
daughters…Harsh discipline is presumed to help make a man out of a boy: he needs tough treatment to whip him into
shape."22 It
is also common for boys to be subjected to physical violence from older and
stronger boys. In addition to concrete acts of sexual and
physical violence, boys are also traumatized by what William Pollack calls the
"gender straightjacket" which, from infancy and throughout childhood,
teaches them to deny their vulnerability and to mask the full range of
emotional experience associated with vulnerability behind the stereotyped
persona of the strong, self-sufficient male.23
This is the flip side of the same overarching social reality that
socializes girls to submission and sexual objectification; and it is here,
perhaps most poignantly, that patriarchy in the same stroke oppresses boys as
well as girls. It is a largely
unexamined fact of patriarchy, perhaps even more invisible than the sexual
abuse of boys, that boys are traumatized by the very process that socializes
them to dominance and to predatory behavior.
The expectation of aggressive male
strength and aversion to "feminine" emotions is conveyed in the
posturing and pronouncements of male leaders, in the images of men in all
aspects of popular culture and the media, in the homophobia which continues to
pervade our society, in the behavior and demeanor of fathers and other men in
boys' lives, and in the explicit and implicit messages boys receive from
parents, teachers, and other significant adults. The same message is also assimilated early
and fiercely into boys' peer culture, in which boys routinely deride and shame
each other for any vulnerable emotional expression which is construed as weak,
girl-like, or gay. This is what Kindlon
and Thompson describe as a culture of cruelty:
"Among themselves boys engage in continuous psychological
warfare. Older boys pick on younger boys
- dominating them by virtue of their greater size - and younger boys mimic
them, creating an environment that pits the strong against the weak, the
popular against the unpopular, the power brokers against the powerless, and the
conformity driven 'boy pack' against the boy who fails in any way to conform
with pack expectations."24 It is in
the air that boys breathe that weakness, fear, hurt, sadness, the urge to cry,
and the entire array of dependency needs inherent to childhood are unacceptable
- not only to express, but also unacceptable to consciously acknowledge or
experience as internal realities. A vignette in Michael Ryan's memoir Secret Life illustrates both the
communication of male bravado and some of its effects on a young boy who is not
yet "toughened." He describes
the recurring humiliation he suffered when his father would call him over to
where he was sitting and then abruptly grab his wrists and start squeezing
them. "The idea, he said, was to see how
long I could keep standing, to see how tough I was. The first time I lasted about three seconds
and it probably would have been less had I not been so surprised I was being
hurt. I screeched for him to stop, which
he did after I fell at his feet with my face in the rug."25 To the boy this was simply an assault at
the hands of someone with overwhelming power.
But his father presented it as a "lesson" in how to overcome
vulnerability: "I was crying, my face
was hot with tears, but he wasn't about to console me. He said I better get much tougher if I wanted
to be a man, that as I grew up there was going to be
plenty of pain, this was nothing. He
told me how supremely important this was, that he wasn't punishing me but
teaching me to be strong."26 Socialization to what Pollack calls the "mask of
masculinity" traumatizes boys through discrete incidents, such as the one
Michael Ryan describes, in which they are overpowered by sadistic adult behavior
rationalized as "teaching a lesson," or in which they are publicly
shamed and humiliated for failing to adhere to the masculine code. Boys are also cumulatively traumatized by the
constriction of their emotional life.
Boys inherently posses the capacity for a full range of feelings and
have deep emotional needs which are systematically denied and crushed by gender
stereotyping in a sexist society. The
result is a deep and invisible powerlessness which strips boys of the critical
ability to experience and express emotions (other than anger, as I will discuss
later in the section on boys as perpetrators) and strips them of the ability to
develop mutually empathic relationships. Pollack repeatedly uses the term trauma to
describe the impact on boys of emotional straightjacketing
and the "premature separation" which denies their need for emotional
dependence and support.27 Pollack emphasizes the
degree to which boys experience shame for their perceived weaknesses and
unacceptable feelings, in direct proportion to the ridicule, derision and
shaming with which they are assaulted if they display vulnerability or emotion,
or which they see directed at other boys who manifest vulnerabilities that they
must desperately deny in themselves.
Since shame is itself a sign of vulnerability, steeped in feelings of
inadequacy and worthlessness, it must be denied as quickly and thoroughly as
possible, or else (or in addition) projected outward onto others perceived as
weak, inadequate, and worthless. The
masculine code thus creates in boys a vicious circle of powerlessness, denial,
shame, and further denial in which emotional life is literally crushed.28 Just as girls develop shame and hatred for
their bodies when they cannot measure up to a scripted and bogus feminine ideal,
boys develop self-hatred when they inevitably fall short (in their eyes) of the
masculine ideal with its equally bogus depiction of strength and its
hyper-constriction of emotional life.
Pollack catalogs other harms suffered by boys, including disconnection,
intense isolation, depression, acting out, and self-alienation. Running through or related to many of these
harmful effects is what can aptly be called dissociation,
a classic symptom of trauma. Boys
graphically dissociate from their feelings and emotional needs. Emotional numbing becomes a critical survival
skill in typical male development - one which, like virtually all childhood
adaptations to trauma, operates at great cost in the long run. As with girls, male socialization not only
traumatizes boys in its own right, but also severely compounds the effects of
sexual and physical abuse. The shaming
of male vulnerability leaves boys particularly unequipped to cope with or even
acknowledge the powerlessness and extreme vulnerability created by sexual abuse29 and physical brutality, and multiplies the
shame which is commonly experienced by trauma survivors. Dissociation and emotional numbing are
mutually reinforced by the masculine code and by the trauma caused by sexual
and physical assault. Homophobia, which
is central to the masculine code, can cause intolerable shame and self-loathing
for boys who are sexually assaulted by men.
The constriction of emotional expression,
which makes it difficult or impossible for many boys to process even mundane
life events in healthy ways, leaves them helpless to respond to physical and
emotional violation with anything but denial or displaced traumatic rage. The supreme irony is that the gender
straightjacket of scripted masculinity, which above all else prizes strength
and demeans vulnerability, renders boys emotionally helpless and magnifies
their vulnerability to trauma. Girls as Perpetrators
It is relatively rare for girls to engage
in acts of serious violence. In 1994,
3.4% of all girls' arrests were for serious crimes of violence.30 Crime statistics reflect an enormous
disparity in violent behavior between girls and boys. In 1994, the arrest rate per 100,000 for
murder and nonnegligent manslaughter was 0.5 for
girls, 8.1 for boys; for forcible rape, 0.3 among girls, 12.7 among boys; for
aggravated assault, 36.2 among girls, 151.0 among boys; for weapons charges,
11.7 among girls, 128.5 among boys.31 Adolescent violence that reaches the
level of legally defined delinquency is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is not as rare for girls
in our culture to act as perpetrators as many of us tend to believe. Meda Chesney-Lind observes that "[o] In her research, Chesney-Lind
found that girls' participation in gangs was a strategy for self-protection in
the context of their experiences of victimization, including sexual
violence. "For girls, fighting and
violence is a part of their life in the gang but not something they necessarily
seek out. Instead, protection from
neighborhood and family violence was a consistent and major theme in the girls'
interviews."34 Chesney-Lind
points to the complex interplay of victim and perpetrator roles in these girls'
lives: "Either girls in gangs are
portrayed as victims of injury or they are portrayed as ‘liberated,' degendered gangbangers. The truth is that both perspectives are
partially correct and incomplete without the other."35
There are other instances in which girls are violent
outside of gangs and in ways that aren't necessarily reflected in crime
statistics. Veronica Chambers, in her
memoir about growing up in Rachel Simmons' Odd Girl Out, a
study of girls' aggression, includes a classic example of power-under driving
violent behavior. Bonnie (fictitiously
named), whose mother had "multiple violent relationships with men, including a
husband who beat Bonnie and her sisters," describes herself as fighting
repeatedly during adolescence. She says,
"I was not the aggressor. I
protected myself…" Yet she goes on to
report that she and her sisters "knocked the shit out of these girls."37 Bonnie describes one incident in which she
beat up her best friend because she had "hooked up" with Bonnie's
boyfriend. Simmons quotes Bonnie saying,
"I didn't want to…but people had known that I said that [I would kick her ass],
and I had a reputation to protect. I was
forced to. I had no choice but to put my
hands on her."38 Bonnie,
like many of the male batterers discussed
in Chapter Two, believes that she is a victim acting in self-defense in
the very process of attacking others.
Her perception that she lacks agency - that she does not want to beat up
her friend but has no choice - is a hallmark of traumatic powerlessness. Another way that some girls act as
perpetrators is in their treatment of younger children. There is some evidence of girls committing
acts of sexual abuse when they baby-sit;39 and while this appears to be a rare event, it
is the nature of sexual abuse that it often goes unreported, making the actual
prevalence hard to assess.40 What is probably of
more significance is the situation of teen mothers, among whom Murray Straus reports
the highest rate of corporal punishment of all mothers of young children.41 There is every reason to believe that other
manifestations of parental abuse of power, such as arbitrary use of authority
and verbal abuse, are also commonplace among teen mothers. Finally, Simmons describes a culture of
covert aggression among girls from white middle class backgrounds. Simmons writes that these girls "hurt each
other in secret. They pass covert looks
and notes,…turn their backs, whisper, and smile. These acts, which are intended to escape
detection and punishment, are epidemic in middle-class environments where the
rules of femininity are most rigid."42 Clique behavior, exclusion and scapegoating are commonly used by girls to bolster their
own social standing at the expense of targeted victims. Simmons explicitly identifies girls who
engage in this kind of behavior as perpetrators and offers testimony of lasting
psychological harm experienced by victims. Here too, there are intricate connections
between oppression, trauma, and abusive behavior. As Simmons notes, the ground rules laid out
by patriarchy for girls who identify with feminine stereotypes preclude direct
expressions of anger and create expectations for "niceness" and passive
behavior which are impossible to meet.
Covert aggression serves the dual purpose of maintaining the appearance
of conformity with prescribed feminine behavior and at the same time giving
some form of expression to inevitable feelings of anger, jealousy and
resentment. At another level, Simmons presents story
after story of girls who have been victimized and in turn victimize
others. "I always thought there was
something wrong with me," Simmons quotes one girl saying. "I was either a dork for being the victim or
a mean, horrible bitch for being the bully."43
Another says, "For all the times I'd been excluded and cried, I wanted
her to know what it felt like to cry."44 Simmons observes that girls who were
perpetrators "framed their behavior in terms of avoiding injury and maximizing
security. In other words, they bullied
because they felt threatened, because in their minds they had no other choice."45 Though Simmons does not discuss it in
these terms, in my view trauma screams out from the pages of Odd Girl Out. Simmons says of the girls she interviewed
that "their feelings stew and fester before boiling to the surface and
unleashing torrents of rage."46
She attributes this to the lack of opportunity to develop social
skills for directly expressing anger and other negative feelings, which is
surely one contributing factor. But
"torrents of rage" are also indicative of the traumatic experience of girls
whom we know to be victims of sexual and physical abuse in epidemic numbers, and
who are pervasively traumatized by the systemic effects of patriarchy. The kind of demonization
that takes place when a targeted girl is scapegoated
and excluded by other girls is likewise symptomatic of the need of traumatized people
to identify proximate villains and to split the world into "us" and
"Other." Simmons' pages are filled with
stories of girls who are driven by desperation for social approval, terror of
their own exclusion, and powerless rage. While the ways that girls act as
perpetrators are important and should be taken seriously, there is little
question that there are very significant constraints on girls' violence and
other-destructive behavior. These
constraints include the socialization of girls to submissiveness, along with
the related tendency in traumatized girls to "act in" by expressing
rage through self-destructive behavior (such as eating disorders or
self-injury) rather than through violent behavior.47 Another related factor is the network
of cultural norms, expectations and messages which teach that girls do not
express themselves through violence, do not own or use guns, and so on.48 But it is also critical to look at the
objective power that girls do and do not hold in order to understand both the
limits on their destructive behavior and the ways in which girls do assume
perpetrator roles. To the considerable
extent that girls do not occupy dominant roles, they are simply not in a
position to act as perpetrators, regardless of their socialization and
regardless of the values and norms that they identify with. Abuse requires some degree of power over
someone else. Without that objective
power, girls are precluded from being perpetrators. On the other hand, to the extent that
girls do hold power over others, socialization to submission does not
preclude abusive behavior. By and large
there are two ways that girls assume positions of dominance: over younger children, particularly when
older girls assume socially defined positions of authority as baby-sitters and
teen parents; and over other girls who are physically weaker or socially
vulnerable through scapegoating and exclusion. In some cases girls enact dominance via
physical aggression, in other cases through the power of numbers by acting in
cliques, and in other cases through both violence and numbers by acting in
gangs. When girls occupy dominant positions and
roles, the combination of objective dominance and subjective powerlessness once
again proves lethal. The related themes
of traumatic powerlessness and self-protection run through many of the examples
of girls acting as perpetrators that I have cited. This is the case from girls in gangs who say
that their prime motive is to protect themselves against family and
neighborhood violence to girls in cliques who are desperately striving for
social acceptance. As with many
perpetrators in many contexts, girls are propelled by their own experiences of
victimization and traumatic rage to act abusively toward other, less powerful
children. I think it is reasonable to conclude that
when a girl holds power over another life, and when her socialization and
cultural norms teach her that the exercise of dominance is acceptable and
expected (whether through overt or covert aggression), she is no less
susceptible than anyone else to the social and psychological forces which lead
people to perpetrate abuse. Boys as Perpetrators
None of the factors constraining abusive
behavior in girls applies to boys. Males
are socialized to dominant roles and predatory behavior, and it is no surprise
that this manifests itself in concretely abusive and predatory behavior well
before adulthood. Societal messages at
all levels inform boys that male aggression and violence are expected and, at
least under certain circumstances, acceptable.
It is true that most boys also receive a variety of conflicting messages
about violence and at times are punished for aggressive behavior - but the very
means of their punishments are often violent and model the types of behavior
they are being instructed are wrong.
Homophobia teaches boys to fear, hate and attack "feminine"
traits in themselves and in other males.
Boys are specifically socialized to sexual aggression, objectification
of girls and women, and predatory sexual behavior. Boys also learn, via everything from war toys
and children's television to street behavior and rampant
militarism, that the ownership and use of guns is a male prerogative. The socialization of boys to aggression
and dominant behavior is both paralleled and reinforced by the role of anger as
the one acceptable feeling in the masculine emotional code. William Pollack notes that "studies show
that…boys are pressured to express the one strong feeling allowed them - anger."49 Pollack observes that boys learn to
use anger to "mute…the full range of emotional responsiveness they would
otherwise exhibit" and "use their rage to express the full range of
their emotional experience."50
Anger, as the one outlet for the pressure cooker of all other
unexpressed and unacknowledged feelings, readily becomes linked to aggression and
violence, which are already scripted as expected male behavior. For many boys, it is not simply anger
which is channeled into and expressed through dominant behavior, but traumatic
rage. The very forces specific to
patriarchy that traumatize boys - the shaming of "weakness" and
crushing of emotional life - lead them toward aggressive and predatory
behavior. The unacceptability of normal
feelings which are defined as "weakness" in boys leads them to
project and attack signs of perceived weakness in others; domination becomes a
defense against intolerable internal vulnerability. As Pollack suggests, "it is through
anger…that most boys express their vulnerability and powerlessness."51 Emotional numbing and the loss of capacity
for empathic human relations - both specific aspects of traumatic stress for
many boys - are core psychological ingredients or preconditions for
dehumanizing others. This has been well
understood for a long time by the architects of military training (though
surely not through the conceptual framework or language of trauma), which
routinely uses the brutalization and humiliation of young men as tactics to
prepare them psychologically to vilify, brutalize and kill others defined as
the enemy without regard to their status as human beings. The treatment of boys under patriarchy,
while usually not as extreme as military training, commonly includes brutality
and humiliation of "softness" and vulnerability. This generates traumatic rage, which in turn
is channeled into socially scripted expressions of suitably
"masculine" anger, aggression, and dominant behavior. Traumatic rage and the masculine script
conspire to lead boys to disregard the humanity and core value of others
defined as weak and feminine - girls, women, gays - or who are vilified as
enemies, particularly via racism. Unlike girls, boys do pervasively occupy and identify with socially-defined dominant
roles from early ages. As males in
relation to girls, as older kids in relation to siblings and other younger
children, as straight-identified in relation to gays, and as males relating
competitively to other males, boys emerge into any number of socially
constructed roles from which to exercise power over others perceived or defined
as weak and vulnerable. The social construction of dominance is of
considerable importance for understanding these male roles. While there are many instances in which boys
are able to dominate because they are physically stronger, there are many
others in which physical strength is not the basis for the power imbalance,
such as sexual behavior between boys and girls where the boy may not be
physically dominant, or may be physically less powerful, but there is an
assumption of scripted sex roles which puts the boy in a dominant position. The socialization to dominance thus blends
seamlessly into the social reality of dominant roles for boys. In turn, and critically, it is the existence
of dominant roles which enables boys to channel traumatic rage and the other
traumatizing effects of their socialization into dominating and abusive
behavior. The result of all this is a long list of
ways in which boys act as perpetrators, ranging from date rape, sexual
harassment, and gay bashing to hazings, street
violence, and in extreme cases the mass shootings which have occupied so much
media attention - and which, as Gloria Steinem points out, are exclusively male
phenomena.52 A vignette from Neal King's Speaking Our Truth captures the
viciousness that many boys begin to display (in many forms) from relatively
early ages. A male sexual abuse survivor
recounts an "internecine gang war" in which "my cousins are asserting their
power over me." When he tries to cross
the side yard of the building in which they all live, he is confronted by three
of his cousins, who block his path. "At
the end of this confrontation Jimmy [the oldest cousin] will take me out behind
the neighbor's garage and force me to suck his cock. I am electrified with terror throughout this
episode, one which will be repeated with many variations, over and over…"53 The
expression and assertion of power over others becomes critical to the self-esteem and masculine identity of most
boys. In the above example it is
expressed through sexual assault; in other extreme cases it is expressed through
shooting and other life-threatening violence.
But the most extreme instances of sexual and physical violence, which themselves are far from rare, stand at one end of a
continuum of behavior in which others are used as means to the boy's ends. Daily life is saturated with more mundane
instances of boys exhibiting aggressive and intimidating behavior. This includes sexual behavior which may not
be defined as rape or assault, but which is coercive or at best inattentive to
the other's wishes and needs; social behavior organized around jockeying for
power and prestige; and countless interactions in which put-down, ridicule, and
other ways of diminishing the other serve as the basis for the boy's sense of
worth and value.54 Kindlon and
Thompson observe that "[a] boy lives in a narrowly defined world of
developing masculinity in which everything he does or thinks is judged on the
basis of the strength or weakness it represents: you are either strong and worthwhile, or weak
and worthless."55
It remains a societal norm for boys to behave in ways which do
not regard others as anything close to fully human, and which to many different
degrees are abusive. What emerges appears to be a dual reality
for boys as both victims and perpetrators - oppressed and oppressors - from
relatively early in childhood. On the
one hand boys are the victims of patriarchy.
They are subjected to domination and brutality in the form of physical
violence and, far more commonly than we recognize,
sexual abuse. Through the mechanisms of
gender straightjacketing and scripted masculinity,
their emotional life is decimated and they are stripped of their capacity for
emotional connection. In all of these
ways boys are traumatized by power relations that are specific to patriarchy. On the other hand, boys learn to identify
with the aggressor and, long before adulthood, they assume dominant roles and
act as perpetrators through the scripted, predatory male behavior to which they
are socialized. Powerless before the
specific adults and older boys who wield power in their lives, and powerless
before the systemic sexism which imposes the masculine code upon them, they in
turn wield power over anyone who is weaker and more vulnerable. But in my view these two faces of male
development - boy as victim and boy as perpetrator - are interrelated pieces of
a single reality: the traumatization of boys is an integral part of their
socialization to dominance. It is
impossible to understand the dominant behavior of boys without also
understanding how fragile boys are psychologically, and the extent to which
aggression serves to mask intolerable feelings, to deny and project
vulnerability, and to express powerless rage.
What looks from the outside like hyper-powerful behavior is internally a
desperate effort to maintain equilibrium and precarious self-esteem which is
built on a house of cards. William Pollack notes the intense
loneliness and alienation of boys whose true feelings and internal experience
must at all costs be shielded from exposure to anyone.56 What must be shielded is the fractured
true self57 of a little boy, wounded beyond recognition by
baffling and overpowering social forces which do not allow him to cry or give
any other authentic expression to his pain, but which permit and often
encourage him to channel his rage into destructive and dehumanizing behavior. It is the availability of dominant roles
and the objective capacity to exercise power over others which enables boys to
act as perpetrators, and the social scripting of masculinity which molds
distinct types of aggressive and predatory behavior. But it is the internal reality of
unarticulated and unresolved trauma which is the driving force that compels
boys to act as perpetrators, and which so distorts their emotional life that
they seek to meet their needs at the expense and through the abuse of others. Women as Victims
Women are susceptible to the role of
victim by history and by their current circumstances. Women who have histories of childhood trauma
are vulnerable to the lifelong effects of that experience, which can include
physical illness, depression, substance abuse, self-injury, eating disorders, dissociative disorders, other types of mental illness,
traumatic rage, and chronic subjective powerlessness. For women who suffer these long term effects,
I think it is accurate and valid to say that they are on-going victims of the
trauma that they suffered as children. As adults, women continue to be the
objects of male violence and to be affected by cultural, institutional, and
structural sexism. Rape, sexual
harassment, and battering remain common events; the banality of violence
against women creates a threatening social environment for all women, whether
or not they are directly affected. The
objectification of women in popular culture goes on unabated. Men's participation in child rearing and
domestic tasks remains minimal. Male
domination is a continuing reality at every level of social, economic, and
political life. The gains of the women's movement have
been in the arena of awareness and in the forging of new opportunities and new
privileges for some women (particularly white middle- to upper class women),
but they have not made much of a dent in the old threats from male behavior or
in the stranglehold of patriarchy as a social system. Women are still at risk, on a daily basis, of
being the victims of discrete acts of male violence or domination, and are
still exposed to the systemic insults of second class citizenship imposed by
patriarchy. The historical and present-time aspects of
victimization of women merge into a single, textured reality. There is a continuity and consonance of
childhood and adult experience - a chronicity of
being devalued and overpowered. For a
woman who was sexually assaulted as a child by her father or uncle or neighbor,
the catcalls of a man on the street are not a new or isolated event; they
recapitulate and expand a lifelong experience of being treated as the vehicle
for male gratification, and they are one of many factors which can make the
historical trauma a living reality in the present. For a woman who was not assaulted as a child
and is raped or battered as an adult, there has been a lifetime of preparation
for this event; there have been years of exposure to the objectification of
women and to violence against women as cultural norms which have already left
some kind of mark - a mark which is now gouged into an open wound. In the face of the massive social forces
that place women in victim roles, feminism is a counterforce which creates
possibilities for recovery, resistance, self-protection, and safety. At the individual level, this is the agenda
of feminist therapy, survivors' support groups, and battered women's shelters. At the cultural level, feminism has
influenced the way a segment of the It is therefore important to say
explicitly that women are not automatically or universally victims,
and that victimhood does not have to be a life
sentence. In any case victimhood, whether transcended or not, does not describe a
whole person, but only one aspect of an always larger and more complex personal
reality. It is possible and common for
the same person to be both victim and perpetrator, as I argue repeatedly in
this chapter and throughout this book.
It is also possible to maintain pockets of psychological victimhood and to function in many aspects of one's life as
an equal. There is a dual reality of oppression and resistance, both sides of
which need to be named. Men As Victims
The legacies of childhood trauma persist
into adulthood for men no less than for women.
While there are sources of trauma in men's lives - such as racism and
class oppression - that are not gender-specific, on a broad scale it is the
enduring effects of childhood experience which in my view make men victims of
patriarchy. The crushing of emotional life that takes
place for boys has lasting effects. As
adults, men do not somehow jettison their childhood socialization and gain
access to a full range of emotional experience.
All of the aspects of childhood that make boys victims of the male code
- the constriction of emotional life, shaming and humiliation for any signs of
weakness or vulnerability, alienation from and hiding of the true self,
emotional disconnection and deep loneliness, and powerless rage - persist into
adulthood on their own momentum. Nothing
happens when a boy turns 18 or 21 or any age associated with maturity to
reverse any of these aspects of male socialization. To the contrary, the masculine code
remains in full force. The same societal
messages and expectations - from popular culture, from economic and political
life, from other men, and from one's own internalized reality and
identifications - reinforce for men all of the boyhood lessons about weakness
and strength, about acceptable expressions of emotions, and about definitions
of self-worth organized around scripted masculinity. It is true that men have options, which
most boys do not have, to step outside of the male code; and there are
subcultures in which men, influenced by feminism and by gay liberation, have
done so. But no man can opt out of his
own history. Even men who consciously
reject scripted male roles have to struggle with the emotional and
psychological wounds that we carry from childhood - wounds inflicted by a
social system that taught us not to cry, not to show any feeling but anger, not
to connect, not to experience compassion for others, and not to acknowledge or
embrace our own deepest selves. For men who do not think critically about
scripted male roles, there is simply a continuity and
deepening of destructive experience from childhood into adulthood. This means a deepening of every contour of
unnamed and unarticulated childhood traumas.
It particularly means a deepening of the intolerable dichotomy between
forbidden internal weaknesses and impossible expectations for strength and
masculine performance. Men, who as boys have been acted upon to
the core of their beings, who have had their emotional capacities devastated by
forces beyond their control, who have had their true selves shamed and rendered
helpless by the very code that teaches them that shame and helplessness are
forbidden - the same men are expected and expect themselves to be actors in the
world, to be in charge, to be tough and impenetrable. The only way to try to meet these impossible
expectations is to bury the true self even further, to evade and deny all
feelings associated with weakness and vulnerability, to attack what is
construed as weakness in others - and thus to re-enact and reinforce the
historical traumas. Men who do so remain
the victims of their childhoods, and victims of patriarchy. They are quite literally at the mercy of
forces beyond their control. For men who were sexually abused as boys -
perhaps as much as 20% of the adult male population - the enduring effects of
childhood trauma are predictably exacerbated.
Other particulars of some men's histories - severe beatings, sibling
abuse, extreme emotional cruelty, covert incest, gay
bashing, and so on - each add their own layer of unresolved wounding to the
traumas imposed almost universally by the male code. Men who are in the military, in prison, are
gay-bashed, or are subjected to other aspects of male-on-male violence, are
also traumatized in the present by various tendrils of patriarchy. Superman
as a Story of Unresolved Childhood Trauma
Superman is an enduring icon of popular
culture, and the character stands as an idealized representation of the
masculine code. He has superpowers,
superhuman strength, is incorruptible and impenetrable (bullets bounce off his
body), and uses his manly power for the common good: the Man of Steel who stands for truth,
justice and the The story line plays on themes of weakness
and strength, vulnerability and invulnerability in ways clearly designed to
capture the imagination of boys yearning to achieve the masculine script. Superman's secret identity as a wimpy
reporter inverts the reality of male experience so as to offer the ideal
solution to the problem of hidden, intolerable weakness and vulnerability: weakness is the facade in the persona of
Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter; massive, unconquerable strength is the
internal reality, the Superman insignia beneath the reporter's drab
clothes. Little wonder that successive
generations of boys have grown up identifying with this fantasy figure. It is therefore interesting - and I
believe of some cultural significance - that embedded in the Superman script
there is also an uncanny depiction of childhood trauma. Superman was born on Krypton, a distant
planet literally about to explode. Only
his parents, insightful scientists, were able to face the reality of the
impending apocalypse. Determined that
their child (still a baby) will survive, they build a rocket ship, aim it
(somehow) toward the distant planet Earth, and as the rumblings signaling the
death of Krypton begin, they launch the rocket with the baby bundled safely
inside. Krypton explodes, shattering into zillions
of tiny fragments, as the rocket hurls through space and brings the baby as
planned to Earth, where it lands in a remote field and is stumbled upon by the Kents, who find the baby and take him in to raise as their foster son.
Because of differences between the two planets and the characteristics
of their inhabitants, the child, who would have been normal on Krypton, has
superpowers on earth - normal flesh on Krypton becomes steel on Earth, and so
on - and grows to become Superboy and then Superman. This twist of the plot is needed to
explain the hero's superpowers - but it is also a story of childhood
annihilation. The baby's world literally
explodes. His loss is total, a loss of
parents, family, place, culture, identity, and any semblance of rootedness. His loss
is also absolute, with no possibility of return to a place of origin which no
longer exists. Beneath the superhuman
strength which the Earth grants him, there is a hole in the center of his life,
a history of unspeakable loss and total devastation. Beneath the "internal" reality of
invulnerability, there is an even deeper internal reality of primal trauma and
terror. Not only trauma, but
unresolved trauma. Superman lives a life of supreme
isolation. The splitting off of a secret
identity means that he lives a divided, fragmented life, cutting him off from
intimacy and any kind of meaningful human connection. He compulsively guards his true identity,
fears exposure, and retreats for solace to his Fortress of Solitude somewhere
near the North Pole.59
These are scripted male defenses against suffering and loss. But there is another twist to the plot, a
force against which Superman's defenses are useless. Of the zillions of fragments of the planet
Krypton, a small number manage to make their way to Earth and land as
meteorites. These rocks, called
Kryptonite, are harmless to Earthlings, but to Superman they are lethal. When exposed to even the tiniest sliver of
Kryptonite (which happens every so often when a piece falls into a villain's
hands), the hero's superpowers completely unravel; he becomes weak, disoriented,
and - at least momentarily - helpless; he is overpowered, at risk of being
killed by this toxic fragment of his history.
It is the chink in the armor, the moment of poignant vulnerability for
the Man of Steel. With extraordinary precision, the
Kryptonite twist in the script portrays the drama of unresolved childhood
trauma. The annihilation of Superman's
early childhood, represented and embodied in a piece of rock, is
unbearable. He can't afford to touch it,
look at it, approach it, or face it in any way.
If it is forced upon him it strips him of all powers, all strength, all
of his idealized masculinity; the man of supreme invulnerability is revealed as
supremely vulnerable at his core. A
fragment of his place of origin brings the devastation of his childhood into
the present, threatening to devastate him with his history of intolerable pain
and loss. Kryptonite reveals Superman's
childhood trauma, which has never gone away but has only been split off, and
makes it a living reality in the moment.
Superman, a survivor of childhood trauma, has been triggered, rendered
powerless in the blink of an eye by the unbearable truth of his childhood. This reading of the Superman script was
surely not the conscious intention of the writers who developed the story
line. I presume that the intention behind
the Kryptonite twist was to add dramatic tension to the plot (and of course
Superman always somehow manages to get away from the
Kryptonite and to prevail against the crooks).
But whatever the intention of its creators, the trauma subtext is there,
only a fraction of an inch below the surface.
I'm sure that too much could be made of
this, and it is not my purpose to veer off into notions of a collective
unconscious. What I think is important
about the trauma theme in Superman is simply that it is so transparently
there. It reflects and echoes the
transparency of male vulnerability and the legacies of boyhood trauma,
fractions of inches below the masculine surface of strength and dominance,
which are visible everywhere in the real lives of men if you have the eyes to
see them. Which
happens if you have the language, conceptual framework, emotional capacity and
compassion to recognize the suffering of men. Male trauma is not a hidden reality in the
sense that it is subtle or difficult to understand; it is hidden because
powerful political, social, cultural and psychological forces conspire to deny
and obscure something which is actually quite obvious. As a little boy, Superman was my favorite TV show, and while I understood the irony
when I heard that George Reeves, the actor who played Superman, in real life
committed suicide, I certainly didn't make any connections about male
vulnerability. I read Superboy and Superman comics avidly and uncritically until
I reached adolescence. As an adult I watched
boys I worked with play at being Superman, and I simply saw it as a normal part
of boyhood that I could identify with.
As a pro-feminist man, for many years I could have ticked off an
analysis of Superman as an emblem of sexism.
It was only in the course of writing this book that the
"obvious" subtext of childhood trauma in the Superman story came into
focus for me. I think there is something
instructive and hopeful in this: that
the language and politics of trauma create a lens through which realities of
male experience, at once obvious and hidden, become visible. Trauma
as a Path to a New Men's Politics For most men there is not yet a social or
political context which would allow or support the naming of the traumas in
their lives, or which could nourish recovery and resistance. Aurora Levins
Morales writes, "Only when there is adequate political support can we
create a context in which we are able to hold the reality of oppression and a
sense of our own power to oppose it.
When that support doesn't exist, we avoid whatever events - in our own
lives, in the lives of others or in our history - would lead us to intolerable
truths."60 To the extent that feminism has touched
men's lives in useful ways - and there are many men for whom this has not been
the case - it has by and large moved men to think of ourselves as pro-feminist
allies and rejecters of male privilege, but not to think of ourselves as having
been deeply wounded by patriarchy. The
concept of men as victims is taboo among men and women: for women, understandably, because men are
the aggressors; for men, understandably, because the acknowledgment and display
of vulnerability is above all else forbidden by the male code. We are just beginning to see the breaking
of that taboo in the emergence of literature by and about male survivors of
sexual abuse,61 and
literature portraying boys as psychological victims of the male code.62 The more we are able to talk publicly about
trauma as a men's issue, the more it becomes possible that we could see the
emergence of a radical men's movement rooted in both self-interest and principled opposition to male
privilege. Such a movement could support
the flourishing of men's consciousness raising groups and male survivors'
groups. It could support the development
of the functional and political equivalent of feminist therapy for men - one
that would address the ways men are wounded by patriarchy and proclaim values
of social equality. A men's movement
which would name patriarchy as a force that traumatizes boys and men, and in
the same breath fully recognize the privilege granted to men by patriarchy and
the roles played by men as perpetrators and oppressors, could for both reasons
nurture a culture and a politics of men's resistance to patriarchy. Women as Perpetrators
Patriarchy assigns child rearing to women,
and not much has changed in this regard in the last 30 years. The primary roles of parent and teacher are
still overwhelmingly assumed by women, and these are roles which in our culture
contain very significant elements of dominance.
Levins Morales describes children as a
"constituency of the oppressed";63 if children are an oppressed group, then their
caretakers (women and men) form a constituency of oppressors. (I say this as a parent, and in the same
spirit in which I recognize myself to be a member of other oppressor
constituencies based on my race, gender, sexual orientation, and class
background.) With dominance comes the
capacity to perpetrate abuse, though it does not automatically mean that
parents use their power abusively. Up to a certain point in a child's
development, adult power over the child is inherent in differences in size,
strength, and physical and psychological capacities. But to a much greater extent, adult dominance
is a function of the social construction of childhood and cultural norms for
power relations between adults and kids.
In a society organized around values and principles of inequality, those
values are inevitably expressed and reflected in how we treat our children.64 Society assigns women (and men in different
ways) the task of dominating children, no matter how much this is couched in
the rhetoric of love and nurture.65 This is
the case despite the genuine love and good intentions that I believe virtually
all mothers feel toward their children, and despite the subjective
powerlessness that parents may experience in the very moment of abuse. The clearest and most pervasive way that
women act as perpetrators is by hitting their children. Murray Straus, in his review of a multitude
of data on parental attitudes and behavior, reports that "[s]tudy after study shows that almost all Americans approve
hitting children…[T]he General Social Survey of 1,470
adults found that 84 percent agree that 'It is sometimes necessary to
discipline a child with a good hard spanking.'"66 Though not broken down by gender, the
84% total necessarily includes a large majority of women. Three decades of national surveys have
found that parents report the actual practice of hitting toddlers to be
"just about universal,"67 with
corporal punishment common for all ages of children. The virtually universal practice of corporal
punishment again means that it is mothers as well as fathers who hit their
children on a routine basis. In fact,
Straus found that slightly more mothers than fathers hit their children, though
he hastens to add that "if fathers had as much responsibility as mothers
for the care of children, the rate of hitting by fathers would be vastly
higher."68 The
point is not that mothers as a group
are more abusive than fathers, but that most mothers take for granted their
prerogative to physically attack their children in the name of proper child
rearing. Not only do almost all mothers hit their
children; most mothers also hit their young children frequently. Straus reports that in the
National Longitudinal Study of Youth, for which researchers interviewed mothers
in their homes, "more than 7% of the mothers of children under six hit their
child right in front of the interviewer." In addition, when asked if they had spanked
their children during the last week, "[t]wo-thirds of
mothers of children under age six said they had found it necessary that week,
and they did so an average of three times.
If that week is typical, it means that these children were hit an
average of more than 150 times during the year…"69 This is a staggering volume of
violence against children, perpetrated by women. There are many other aspects of what Alice
Miller calls "the power game of child-rearing"70 - verbal abuse, derogation, humiliation,
arbitrary use of authority, and so on - for which no statistics are
available as far as I am aware. But
common sense and even the most casual observation suggests that these, like
corporal punishment, are virtually universal parenting practices in our
culture. There is almost no social or
cultural context which equips parents to distinguish legitimate from
illegitimate authority. Levins Morales notes that children experience
"systematic subjugation, humiliation and control - even those who were not
treated with cruelty as children, who had loving parents with good parenting
skills, still experienced arbitrary decisions, disrespect, patronization,
ridicule, control over our eating, involuntary confinement."71 As primary parents, it is women who
routinely exercise arbitrary authority over children as a cultural norm. The incidence of women sexually abusing
children stands at the other end of the spectrum in terms of cultural norms,
and probably in terms of prevalence. But
we know that it does occur, both from the testimony of survivors72 and from somewhat ambiguous survey data. In 1984 David Finkelhor
and Diana Russell estimated that 20% of the sexual abuse of boys and 5% of the
sexual abuse of girls was committed by women.73 Holmes and Slap, in their survey of
166 studies of the sexual abuse of boys from 1985—1997, found that "[l]arge -sample studies reported that 53% to 94% of
perpetrators were men"74 - meaning
that 6% to 47% of the perpetrators were women or teenaged girls. This is an enormous range, suggesting that
our knowledge base regarding women as sexual perpetrators is tenuous at
best. On the other hand, given the enormous
prevalence of child sexual abuse, if even a small percentage of perpetrators
are women, this is still a significant number.75
It is also reasonably likely that sexual abuse by women is
under-reported, given gender-scripted assumptions of women as sexual
objects. As Michelle Elliott argues,
"Previous statistics indicated that child sexual abuse was rare, even by
males. That has since been shown to be
untrue. Statistics are based on what we
are told and may give a false picture if some victims are not talking."76 We know even less about the prevalence of
covert sexual abuse by women. Covert
sexual abuse is a concept which Judith Herman developed to describe adult
behavior toward children which is sexually charged and emotionally invasive and
exploitive, but which does not involve overt sexual contact.77 Herman identifies this as a type of
father-daughter incest, but I believe that the term can apply equally to the
behavior of mothers. I speak from my own
experience, since this was my own deep experience of how my mother treated me. The core of my experience was that my mother
looked to me to meet her needs at the level of a lover relationship, and in
disregard of my needs and of who I was as a separate person. I can at the very least testify as a survivor
that this type of abuse, with a woman as perpetrator, does exist. We have no way of knowing how commonly
mothers look to their children to meet the mother's primary emotional needs at
the child's expense, because (as far as I am aware) there are no studies which
have posed this question. But there is
reason to believe that it is not unusual.78 There is a strong cultural norm and
context for women to emphasize emotional connection, and in an egalitarian society, this would take an
egalitarian form with children. But in a
society organized around inequality, and acting from a position of dominance,
it is all too possible for mothers to seek connection with their children in
ways which deeply disregard the child as a separate person with legitimate and
basic needs for autonomy, self-expression, and a wide range of feelings which
do not center on gratifying the parent. If a mother does not tolerate and affirm
her child's need to cry, to freely explore the environment, to make messes and
cause disorder, to express curiosity, to direct anger and frustration at her,
to display other feelings which are distressing or disruptive - because these
and other expressions of the child's own self do not gratify the mother's
emotional needs - then the relationship becomes abusive. The abuse is compounded if the child's
behavior is shaped around actions and expressions and types of self-control
(such as early toilet training) whose purpose is to gratify the mother's needs. There are numerous other social realities
which lead mothers in a direction which spans from emotional abuse to covert
sexual abuse. The social isolation of
the nuclear family (whether with one or two parents) sets mothers up to look
within their families to meet their deepest emotional needs, and it removes
parents from the regulation and support created when children are raised in
community. When a mother's needs are not
addressed by her partner, and when she herself is the object of domination and
violence from her partner, she can all too easily turn to her children to meet
her primary needs. There are in addition
the deprivations and overloads of parenting, particularly the parenting of
infants and young children, which typically leave parents - meaning primarily
mothers - depleted and in drastic need of solace, soothing, and emotional
caretaking. The dynamic of power-under plays a central
role in the vulnerability of mothers to becoming perpetrators with their
children. I believe it is overwhelmingly
the case that when women act abusively, it is from a position of subjective
powerlessness. As a matter of socialization,
and from lifelong concrete experiences as the objects of domination and sexual
and physical violence, powerlessness remains a core psychological and social
reality for most women. This is compounded by the fact that
parenting is rife with the potential for making the active caretaker feel powerless - particularly in the beginning stages when
the tenor and content of the parent-child relationship take hold. Sleep deprivation, task overload, illness, a
baby who won't stop crying or won't go to sleep - all standard events during
infancy - can leave mothers feeling drastically out of control, acted upon, and
unable to attend to their own basic needs for sleep, relaxation, pleasure, and
love. Social isolation, a partner who is
literally or emotionally not present (or who if present is demanding and
abusive), and the lack of any meaningful recognition or valuing by society -
also standard events for mothers - deepen the experience of powerlessness even
further. As kids gets older, power struggles become
explicit when children test the extent of their autonomy and capacity to
explore the world, and parents inevitably have to set limits. Many parents have a hard time setting limits
in a way that is both caring and effective.
Limit setting is an intrinsically difficult task. It is made immeasurably more difficult by the
fact that for most adults, their primary exposure to parental limit setting -
their own upbringing - was both harsh and ineffective; and most parents have
had little or no opportunity to learn more effective alternatives. The result can be both parent and child
feeling out of control: the parent
because the child tantrums, disobeys, tests annoyingly, and in countless ways
fails to conform to expectations of a "good," compliant child; the
child because s/he is not able to explore, self-direct, and develop a sense of
efficacy within a framework of safety and affirmation. "Parent" once again overwhelmingly
means mother as the primary caretaker; and when the mother is already operating
from a core psychological position of powerlessness, she is immeasurably more
vulnerable to becoming overwhelmed and feeling profoundly helpless and out of
control with her child. In jarring contrast to the subjective
powerlessness which women are so likely to experience, the objective position
of mothers in relation to infants and young children is one of overwhelming,
dominating power. It is true that a
mother may not be able to make her baby go to sleep or stop crying, or to make
a feisty toddler reflexively obey her commands.
But she is in a position to inflict whatever harm on the child she
chooses. Young children are utterly
dependent on their caretaking parent for all basic needs and for their physical
and psychological survival.
Psychologically mothers are in a position to have an enormous impact on
the child by giving or withholding love, affection, approval, affirmation, and
so on.79 Particularly
within the context and cultural tradition of the isolated nuclear family, the
power imbalance between parent and child could hardly be more pronounced. The result is mothers who hit and in other
ways lash out at their children physically; mothers who seek any available
means to control their children; mothers who, in the name of love, seek nurture
from their children in ways which are exploitive and violating; and, at the far
end of the continuum, mothers who overtly sexually abuse their children. All of this is done unwittingly, from the
position of an adult who has been victimized, acted upon, and is struggling
desperately for her own psychological survival and equilibrium - from a state
of traumatic stress. Many mothers
poignantly enact the dual roles of victim and perpetrator. In a society whose values overdetermine
the domination and abuse of children, power-under surely is not the only reason
that women act as perpetrators, but I believe it is one of the most important
ones. Men as Perpetrators
While the arena in which women act as
perpetrators is largely confined to child rearing, the arena in which men act
as perpetrators is as broad as society itself.
This includes epidemic levels of physical and sexual violence against
women and children; other predatory and dominating behavior directed against
women and children; male-on-male violence; and a host of mundane behaviors
organized around the assertion of male privilege and power. FBI crime statistics reflect the fact that
violent behavior is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon in our society. In 1994, men accounted for 89% of arrests for
murder and nonnegligent manslaughter; 99% of arrests
for forcible rape; 91% of arrests for sex offenses other than forcible rape and
prostitution; 84% of arrests for aggravated assault; 92% of weapons charges;
and 86% of arrests in an aggregate category of "violent crime."80 It is true that arrest statistics do
not necessarily reflect the actual rates of violent behavior - because innocent
people are sometimes arrested and particularly because of discriminatory police
practices in the arrests of African American men. But distortions in the FBI statistics are
much more likely to be in the direction of race and class than gender; and even
if the statistics overstated male violence by as much as 5 to 10%, which seems
improbable, this would be more than offset by the vast amount of male predatory
and violent behavior - particularly sexual behavior and domestic violence -
which never results in arrests. Men - overwhelmingly white men - are also
the architects and overseers of every type of structural and institutional oppression
in our society. As politicians,
diplomats, military brass, owners, executives, and holders of vast wealth,
white men continue to constitute the power elite of our society. It is the men at the top who call the shots
that name racism a thing of the past and decimate affirmative action, that
slash welfare and subsidize corporate greed, that set policies which
exponentially shift wealth to the top, that exploit resources and people around
the globe, that destroy the environment, that build and market weapons of every
sort, that tout "military might" and bomb convenient targets at will
- and so on and so on. Each item in that
long list, which could be much longer, sets in motion cascades of concrete activities
by which individual human beings are devalued, exploited, violated, abused, and
killed. The powerful men
who call these shots, from Henry Kissinger to George W. Bush, are perpetrators
writ large. All of these realities about men as
perpetrators are well known. It is
particularly important to state them here in order to place the preceding
discussion of women as perpetrators into perspective. The extent to which women act as perpetrators
constitutes a small fraction of the full volume of abuse, aggression, and
destructive activity in a society built on values of domination and which
assigns dominant roles and privilege in vastly disproportionate numbers to
white men. The ways in which women do
act as perpetrators remain significant, both because each individual act of
abuse is of essential and lifelong importance to its victim, and because the
oppression of children plays a critical role in sustaining and re-creating all
types of oppression.81
But identifying women as perpetrators can only be useful if this
is placed into the much larger context of a total gender system in which
domination is primarily a male prerogative. Of course, there are also enormous
gradations in privilege and power among men, particularly based on race and
class. The white male power elite in
most respects lives in a different world from all other men; the power position
of white professional-managerial men differs in many significant ways from that
of African-American men and white working class men; and so on. But there is
a common denominator, rooted in the historical practices of patriarchy which
named women and children chattel and granted men ownership rights over them82 - a common denominator which cuts across class
and race, and which links Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas, and millions of
ordinary men who commit sexual and physical violence against women and
children. In the face of the overwhelming realities
of male dominance - which mean staggering levels of battering and brutality and
rape and sexual assault committed by men - the notion that men are victims as well
as perpetrators seems intuitively wrong and counter-productive. How could such overwhelming power be rooted
in anything other then dominance? How
could it be understood as anything other than unbridled power-over? And how could it possibly further sexual
equality to portray men as victims, if doing so shifts attention away from the
brutal realities of male domination? In order to hold together the intolerable
reality of men acting as perpetrators and the hidden reality of men as victims,
we need what Aurora Levins Morales calls double
vision83 - the capacity to identify and make sense of
complexity and contradiction. In this
case it is the complex and seemingly contradictory relationship between power and powerlessness
that we need to hold in view. If it were
true that we could recognize men as victims of patriarchy only by losing sight
of men as oppressors, then it would not be worth the cost. But I believe that it is entirely possible to
use a lens which expands the picture to hold both truths in full view - the truth that staggering numbers of men
act as brutal perpetrators, and the truth that staggering numbers of men are
traumatized by patriarchy. This is particularly important because
there is actually one integrated truth, in which the seeming contradiction
between men as perpetrators and men as victims resolves into a single, complex,
textured reality. Understanding the ways
in which men are victims can deepen and amplify our understanding of the ways
in which men act as perpetrators.
"Victim" and "perpetrator" do not represent separate
and unconnected pieces of male experience:
the socialization to dominance requires
the crushing of men's emotional capacities; and the experience of powerlessness
and trauma, together with societal values and structures which place men in
dominant positions, has a direct bearing on male violence, brutality, and
predatory behavior. I have already
argued that the powerlessness and traumatization
experienced by boys are part and parcel of their dominant behavior. This is no less true for men. In order to view men through the single
dimension of power-over, we have to find a way to factor out the truth that all
men were once children, that as children they were helpless and vulnerable and
acted upon, that some were sexually abused and nearly all were physically
abused, that their capacities for empathy and human connection were
systematically uprooted, that they were ridiculed and shamed for any display of
vulnerability and any non-aggressive emotional expression. In order to factor out this truth, either we
need to leave it out of the story, and describe boyhood as a simple path to
power; or else we need to believe that childhood experience has nothing to do
with adult experience, and that the traumas suffered by boys somehow stop at
the door when they reach a certain age or a certain social standing. Either version achieves a simple
understanding of male dominance by distorting reality and by mistaking a part -
men as the holders of privilege and power, as perpetrators and oppressors - for
the whole. If instead we are willing to ask why and
how men become perpetrators and oppressors, we are led back to the fuller
reality which includes their childhoods, the ways in which they were abused and
oppressed, and the deep and enduring traumas they have experienced. This is the type of question which Alice
Miller asks in her extraordinary essay on Hitler's childhood,84 and which Aurora Levins
Morales asks in her extraordinary essay on torturers.85
Both essays trace the roots of the most extreme acts of
dehumanization to the deep suffering of perpetrators. The point of recognizing the victimization
of perpetrators is not to excuse, forgive, or in any way diminish the
destructiveness of their actions, but rather to develop an accurate
understanding of how oppression works and how it is sustained and
re-created. If it is true, as Levins Morales states, that "[t]orturers
are made, not born,"86 then it is of the utmost
importance to identify how they are
made. We are surely in a better position
to try to transform the systematic abuse of power if we have a fuller
understanding of how it works. As long as the recognition of men as
victims is part of a larger description of patriarchy - one that includes the
full reality of men as perpetrators and of sexist power relations - it is an
idea which subverts patriarchy and promotes gender equality. The notion that men are profoundly
vulnerable, that they have deep emotional needs and are susceptible to lifelong
damage when those needs are trampled, flatly contradicts
the scripted male code. If men begin to
become conscious of the ways that sexism has traumatized and oppressed us, and
if we start to seriously believe that we benefit from the expression of a full
range of emotions and from the capacity for empathy and for emotional
connection, we could begin to dismantle some of the lynch pins of male
domination. It is also true that the notion of men as
victims, used uncritically and divorced from a larger understanding of patriarchy,
can be seriously counterproductive.87 When men
portray themselves as victimized by women who take out restraining orders
against them, or believe that they are victims of "reverse discrimination"
because women take jobs previously reserved for men, or feel globally
threatened by feminism, they obviously are attempting to assert (or in their
eyes re-assert) male privilege and dominance.
Men's contentions of victim status can all
too easily blur into misogyny, with women's claims of any type of power
perceived as threatening and oppressive.
The extreme examples of this are the male batters whom Neil Jacobson and
John Gottman describe as "pit bulls"88 - men who feel victimized by women in the very
process of physically attacking them. I
think that there are many other men who are not batterers but who experience
women's power as threatening and who, to the extent that they feel victimized
by women, use this as a rationalization for various types of counter-attacks. Underneath this distorted sense of
victimization sit the real traumas of men's childhoods, typically
unarticulated, unacknowledged, and festering.
In that state, male trauma becomes a bottomless source of rage, with
women and children the all-too-available targets. Misogyny sets women up as proximate villains
for many men; patriarchy creates dominant roles from which men act out their
rage against women and children. In some
cases men consciously assert power-over when they act as perpetrators (Jacobson
and Gottman's "cobras" who, it is worth remembering,
were the men with the most deeply traumatic childhoods in their study89); in many
other cases they identify as victims and act out of subjective powerlessness;
and my guess is that large numbers of men vacillate between the two. We need to identify the links between the
real ways that men have been victimized and crushed during childhood and the
epidemic levels at which men act as perpetrators during adult life. We need to make these connections as vivid
and accessible as possible, and try to engage men in dialogue about their inner
lives and subjective realities. Above
all, we need to develop a political understanding that when men act as
perpetrators, it is part and parcel of our own oppression and traumatization, and that patriarchy as a system in the same breath gives men
inordinate privilege and traumatizes
men through its relentless effects on our emotional lives. This is an understanding which charts a path
toward gender equality for men based not only on response to women's demands or
on conscience and principle - though all of those factors remain important -
but also based on a deep sense of self-interest. Implications for Building Social Change Movements
In this chapter I have developed an
analysis of trauma and gender which describes ways in which women and men are
both victims and perpetrators, in the context of a total system which continues
to place men in dominant roles. This
multidimensional analysis of patriarchy has a number of specific implications
for building social change movements: ·
We should build a men's movement rooted in
understandings of men as both oppressed and oppressors under patriarchy. There have
been many obstacles to the emergence of a robust pro-feminist men's movement in
the An analysis of how boys and men are traumatized by
patriarchy could begin to fill this gap.
There are enormous opportunities for consciousness raising
among men regarding our childhood mistreatment, the trampling of our emotional
lives, our experience of shame and isolation, and the entire range of suffering
which the male code imposes on boys and men.
The links between male privilege and male suffering can serve as an
important organizing tool for dialogues among men about how acting as dominants
and as perpetrators comes at our expense as well as at the expense of women. ·
We should name and oppose child abuse by women as part
of the struggle against patriarchy. While child abuse is an issue of public
concern, it typically resides in the domain of human service professionals and
is raised in a depoliticized context. To
the extent that child abuse had been politicized as a feminist issue, it has
been confined to the sexual abuse of girls by men. In fact, women are set up by patriarchy to
act as perpetrators in the one arena in which they systematically hold
power-over, as the caretakers of children.
We need to look honestly at the reality that the overwhelming majority
of mothers physically attack and in other ways abuse their kids,
and we need to address this as a significant political issue in its own right
and as one of the mechanisms by which patriarchy is sustained. As with men, we need to find ways to
straightforwardly oppose the abuse of power by women while maintaining
compassion for women who act as perpetrators.
In turn, we need to articulate the links between women's subjective
powerlessness and their susceptibility to acting abusively when they
(particularly as mothers) are in positions of dominance. ·
We need a new kind of dialogue between progressive men
and women who are committed to achieving gender equality. I struggled
long and hard with the preceding paragraph, trying to figure out how to
articulate what I believe to be an important issue without seeming to dictate
to women. As a man, I have no business
telling the women's movement to add child abuse by mothers to the feminist agenda. But as a former child and as a trauma
survivor who was abused by my mother, it ought to be possible for me to enter
into dialogue with women about this issue.
I think that dialogue is the key.
If we can develop shared understandings of the ways in
which men as well as women are traumatized and oppressed by patriarchy, and
ways in which women as well as men act as perpetrators, it should become
possible for men and women who are committed to gender equality to openly
explore issues and strategies together as allies and as equals. This needs to be done with full sensitivity
to men's positions as dominants and with vigilance about breaking patterns of
male domination - and at the same time with room for women and men to speak
openly about the truth of our experience, and about the political implications
we draw from our experience. In the very
process of creating this kind of dialogue, we are building part of the
framework for equal power relations between men and women. ·
Treating oppressors as fully human helps to build more
effective social change movements. There is an exceedingly understandable
tendency among trauma victims, and generally among women and men who oppose
patriarchy, to view perpetrators and all men who identify with dominant roles
as Others - as enemies who have nothing in common with
"us." But that kind of view of an
"enemy," no matter how understandable, limits the capacity of any social change
movement to ultimately succeed in creating conditions of equality. Defining the enemy/Other
as less than human, or failing to open ourselves to the full human experience
of perpetrators and oppressors, sets the stage for new cycles of dehumanization
and oppression when movements "succeed" in the sense of achieving political and
social power. As Levins
Morales writes, Either we are committed to making a world in which all
people are of value, everyone redeemable, or we surrender to the idea that some
of us are truly better and more deserving of life than others, and once we open
the door to that possibility, we cannot control it…If we agree to accept limits
on who is included in humanity, then we will become more and more like those we
oppose. Do we really need to name the
list of atrocities committed by people who claimed to act in the name of human
liberation?90 By humanizing oppressors - both men and
women whose abusive behavior has roots in their own traumatic experiences - we
lay the groundwork for social change which can succeed not only in the sense of
a shift in power from one group to another, but also in the sense of humanizing
the ways in which power is organized and people actually treat each other. By narrowing the gap between victim and
perpetrator, between "us" and "them," we enhance our ability to expand the
sphere of political and social relations in which there are neither
perpetrators nor victims. Notes to Chapter Three 1. For example, see Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 2. See for example Judith Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1981);
Louise Armstrong, Rocking The Cradle of
Sexual Politics: What Happened When
Women Said Incest (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1994); Diana Russell, The Secret Trauma: Incest in the
Lives of Girls and Women (New York:
Basic Books, 1986); and Neil Jacobson and John Gottman,
When Men Batter Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). 3. Steven Wineman, The Politics of Human Services (Boston: South End Press, 1984), p. 186. 4.
Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History,
Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), p. 122. 5. See Chapter One, "The Prevalence of
Trauma." The studies cited are Russell, The Secret Trauma, and David Finkelhor, Gerald Hotaling, I. A.
Lewis, and Christine Smith, "Sexual Abuse in a National Survey of Adult Men and
Women: Prevalence, Characteristics, and
Risk Factors," Child Abuse & Neglect 14:
19-28 (1990). 6.
See Barbara Meltz, "Spanking's Punishing
Lessons," 7. Straus, p. 31. 8. See Jacobson and Gottman,
When Men Batter Women. 9.
Meda Chesney-Lind,
The Female Offender: Girls, Women, and Crime (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 24. 10. Rachel
Simmons, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls ( 11. See
Simmons, Odd Girl Out. 12. Finkelhor, Hotaling, Lewis, and
Smith, "Sexual Abuse in a National Survey of Adult Men and Women: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Risk
Factors." 13. William
Holmes and Gail Slap, "Sexual Abuse of Boys:
Definition, Prevalence, Correlates, Sequelae,
and Management," Journal of the American
Medical Association, 14. Tammy
Webber, "Sexual Abuse of Boys Estimated at One in Five," 15. Lois
Shea, "Fewer Males Will Report Sexual
Abuse," 16. See
Holmes and Slap, "Sexual Abuse of Boys:
Definition, Prevalence, Correlates, Sequelae,
and Management." 17. Judith
Herman, Father-Daughter Incest
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1981). I discuss covert sexual
abuse in Chapter One under "The Prevalence of Trauma." 18. Shea, "Fewer Males Will Report Sexual Abuse." 19. King,
Speaking Our Truth, pp. 5-6. 20. Lew, Victims No
Longer, pp. 14-15. 21. See
Meltz, "Spanking's Punishing Lessons," and
Straus, Beating the Devil out of Them. 22. Dan
Kindlon and Michael Thompson, Raising Cain: Protecting the
Emotional Life of Boys (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), p. 53. Kindlon and
Thompson also cite research reported by J. Gregory, "Three Strikes and
They're Out: African-American Boys and
American Schools Response to Misbehavior," International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 7: 25-34 (1997)
finding that boys are much more likely than girls to be hit in school, with
African-American boys the most likely to be hit. 23. William
Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From
the Myths of Boyhood (New York:
Random House, 1998). See also Kindlon and Thompson, Raising
Cain, whose analysis of the emotional damage done to boys by the masculine
code is almost identical to Pollack's. 24. Kindlon and Thompson, Raising
Cain, p. 73. 25. Michael
Ryan, Secret Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 34. 26. Ryan,
Secret Life, p. 34. 27. Pollack,
Real Boys. 28. See
also Kindlon and Thompson, Raising Cain. 29. Andrew
Young, a therapist interviewed by Lois Shea,
"said that because boys are socialized to be tough and strong, they often
feel great shame at not being able to fend off their attackers. 'When a 5-year-old is victimized and he
didn't protect himself, he's feeling, "Gee, I'm not a man,"' Young
said." Shea, "Fewer Males Will Report
Sexual Abuse." 30. Chesney-Lind, The Female Offender,
p. 39. Chesney-Lind
suggests that even this figure may be inflated by trends to re-label
"incorrigible" behavior by teenage girls toward parents as
"assaults," for example in cases of "police officers advising
parents to block the doorways when their children threaten to run away, and then
charging the youth with 'assault' when they shove past their parents." (p.
39) 31. Chesney-Lind, pp. 40-41, citing FBI crime statistics for
1994. 32. Chesney-Lind, p. 10. 33. Chesney-Lind, p. 57. 34. Chesney-Lind, p. 54. 35. Chesney-Lind, p.56. 36. Veronica
Chambers, Mama's Girl (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), p. 78. 37. Rachel
Simmons, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of
Aggression in Girls ( 38. Simmons,
Odd Girl Out, 182. 39. Holmes
and Slap in their survey of research on the sexual abuse of boys state,
"Large-sample studies reported that 53% to 94% of perpetrators were men,
with up to half of female perpetrators being adolescent aged
babysitters." Holmes and Slap,
"Sexual Abuse of Boys," p. 1857. 40. See
Kathryn Jennings, "Female Child Molesters:
A Review of the Literature," in Michelle Elliott, ed., Female Sexual Abuse of Children (New
York: The Guilford Press, 1994), who
notes that girls under 16 "also commit sexual offenses against children
for which they remain undetected. Their
behavior usually occurs while they are trusted to look after a
child." 41. Straus,
Beating the Devil out of Them,
Chapter 4, chart 4-3. 42. Simmons,
Odd Girl Out, p. 22. 43. Simmons,
p. 138. 44. Simmons,
p. 139. 45. Simmons,
p. 139. 46. Simmons,
p. 88. 47. See
Dusty Miller, Women Who Hurt Themselves
(New York: Basic Books, 1994). 48. See
for example Gloria Steinem, "Supremacy Crimes," Ms., 9(5): 44-47 (1999). 49. Pollack,
Real Boys, p. 44 (emphasis
Pollack's). See also Kindlon
and Thompson, Chapter 11, "Anger and Violence." 50. Pollack,
p. 44. 51. Pollack,
p. 44. 52. Steinem,
"Supremacy Crimes." 53. King,
Speaking Our Truth, p. 65. This vignette is one of many testimonies in
King's book contributed by male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. 54. See
Kindlon and Thompson, Raising Cain,
Chapter 10. 55. Kindlon and Thompson, p. 79. 56. Pollack,
Real Boys. 57. Regarding
the concept of a hidden true self, c.f. Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (New
York: Basic Books, 1990) and R.D. Laing, The Divided
Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960). This concept is also consistent with
Pollack's description of male childhood experience in Real Boys. 58. Levins Morales, Medicine
Stories, p. 118. 59. Kindlon and Thompson draw a connection between this aspect
of the Superman story and the intense isolation that is part of male
socialization. See Raising Cain, Chapter 7, "Inside the Fortress of
Solitude." 60. Levins Morales, Medicine
Stories, pp. 45-46. 61. See
for example Richard Hoffman, Half the
House (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1995); Lew, Victims
No Longer; Ryan, Secret Life; and
King, Speaking Our Truth. 62. See
Pollack, Real Boys, and Kindlon and Thompson, Raising
Cain. Neither of these books
explicitly addresses patriarchy as an issue or draws out the political
implications of the psychological effects of the masculine code on boys'
development; but, to me at least, radical implications are jumping off of the
pages. 63. Levins Morales, Medicine
Stories, p. 51. 64. See
David Gil, "Holistic Perspective on Child Abuse and its Prevention," in The Challenge of Social Equality
(Cambridge, MA: Schenkman,
1976). 65. C.F.
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and The Roots
of Violence (New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1984). 66. Straus,
Beating the Devil out of Them, p. 20; Straus also cites Betsy Lehman,
"Spanking Teaches the Wrong Lesson," 67. Straus,
p. 23. See also Barbara Meltz, "Spanking's Punishing Lessons," 68. Straus,
pp. 54-55. 69. Straus,
p. 25. 70. Miller,
For Your Own Good, p. 76. 71. Levins Morales, Medicine
Stories, p. 51. 72. See
King, Speaking Our Truth, and
Elliott, ed., Female Sexual Abuse of
Children. 73. David
Finkelhor and Diana Russell, "Women as
Perpetrators," in Finkelhor, ed., Child Sexual Abuse: New Theory and Practice (New York: Free Press, 1984), cited in Michelle Elliott,
"What Survivors Tell Us - An Overview," in Elliott, ed., Female Sexual Abuse of Children. 74. Holmes
and Slap, "Sexual Abuse of Boys," p. 1857. 75. See
Kathryn Jennings, "Female Child Molesters:
A review of the Literature," in Elliott, ed., Female Sexual Abuse of Children. 76. Eliot,
What Survivors Tell Us - An Overview," in Elliott, ed., Female Sexual Abuse of Children, p. 8. 77. See
Herman, Father-Daughter Incest. 78. Alice
Miller describes this type of mother-child relationship in The Drama of the Gifted Child (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 79. See
Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child and Thou Shalt Not Be
Aware (New York: Penguin Books
U.S.A., 1986). 80. Chesney-Lind, The
Female Offender, p. 102, citing FBI crime statistics for 1994. 81. See
Levins Morales, "The Politics of Childhood"
in Medicine Stories. 82. See
Armstrong, Rocking The Cradle of Sexual
Politics. 83. Levins Morales,
Medicine Stories, p. 79, in her essay "What Race Isn't." 84. Miller,
"Adolf Hitler's Childhood: From Hidden to Manifest Horror," in For Your Own Good pp. 142-197. 85. Levins Morales, "Torturers," in Medicine Stories, pp. 111-114. 86. Levins Morales, p. 111. 87. See Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power: Why Men
Are the Disposable Sex (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1993) for an example of an analysis of men as
victims which, to say the least, is seriously counterproductive; see my
discussion of Farrell's book in the section on "Examples of Power-Under" in
Chapter Two 88. Jacobson
and Gottman, When
Men Batter Women; see my discussion of this material in Chapter Two,
"Examples of Power-Under." 89. See
Chapter Two, "Trauma and Conscious Domination." 90. Levins Morales,
Medicine Stories, p. 113. | |