See What You Made Me Do

Back in 2009, Ferguson led a community charge for alcohol restrictions, which substantially reduced the severity of violent assaults. He then turned to working with other community members to find a new approach to lowering Bourke’s crime rate – but what? The answer came when Ferguson discovered a program in the United States that was getting remarkable results. Called ‘justice reinvestment’, this prevention model directed funding away from the endless spending on prisons, and towards services that stop crimes from happening in the first place, and prevent people from reoffending. Ironically, this was implemented by Republicans in Texas, a state with the nation’s highest incarceration rate. They shelved plans to spend $523 million on 14,000 new prison beds, and instead invested in substance abuse treatment, mental health programs and support for prisoners after they were released. The results were stunning: parole revocations were cut by 25 per cent, and the prison population growth was 90 per cent below the projected rate. It saved the state hundreds of millions, and five years into the program, Texas closed a prison for the first time in its history.31

As we read in Chapter 5, Nordic countries – world leaders on gender equality – still have shocking rates of domestic abuse. In Iceland – ‘the best place to be a woman’14 – domestic abuse seems to be growing, according to Icelandic feminist and anthropology professor Sigríður Dúna Kristmundsdóttir. ‘Maybe [it’s] the anxiety that men are feeling, which can increase violence in the home.’

As children seek to protect themselves in a violent home, they become behavioural detectives. ‘Children in an abusive environment develop extraordinary abilities to scan for warning signs of attack,’ writes Judith Herman. ‘They become minutely attuned to their abusers’ inner states. They learn to recognize subtle changes in facial expression, voice, and body language as signals of anger, sexual arousal, intoxication, or dissociation.

Men’s violence against women is an epidemic, and its prevalence in private and in public means there is no place where women can be truly safe. But men’s violence against men – predominantly in public – is also perpetrated at staggering levels. When it comes to general violent crime – murder, assault, bullying, bashing – boys and men are the primary victims and the primary perpetrators of these crimes. In this maelstrom of competition and violence, men and boys become keenly aware of their position in the pecking order. Here we have the answer to the Atwood riddle at the end of Chapter 3. The self-consciousness and fear that men feel towards other men is the reason they are so afraid of women laughing at them: being humiliated by a woman means being emasculated, revealed as weak, and made vulnerable to the ridicule, control and violence of other men.

While men are powerful as a group, they do not necessarily feel powerful as individuals. In fact, many individual men feel powerless (whether they actually are or not). The essence of patriarchal masculinity, says Kimmel, is not that individual men feel powerful – it’s that they feel entitled to power.
This one statement, to me, makes sense of men’s violence. When men feel powerless and ashamed, it’s their entitlement to power that fuels their humiliated fury, and drives them to commit twisted, violent acts. That ‘entitlement to power’ is the key to understanding why men and women generally respond so differently to shame and humiliation. ‘Women are humiliated and shamed as well, and they don’t go off on shooting sprees,’ says Kimmel. ‘Why not? Because they don’t feel entitled to be in power. [For men], it’s humiliation plus entitlement. It’s the idea that “I don’t feel empowered, but I should.”’

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm is more direct: ‘The passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being … is [the] transformation of impotence into omnipotence.

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In 2008, a review of the literature on Stockholm syndrome found that most diagnoses were made by the media, not psychologists or psychiatrists; that it was poorly researched, and that the scant academic research on it could not even agree on what the syndrome was, let alone how to diagnose it.20 Allan Wade, who has consulted closely with Enmark, says Stockholm syndrome is ‘a myth invented to discredit women victims of violence’ by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority.21

But Stockholm syndrome – a dubious pathology with no diagnostic criteria – is riddled with misogyny and founded on a lie.16 The psychiatrist who invented it, Nils Bejerot, never spoke to the woman he based it on; never bothered to ask her why she trusted her captors more than the authorities.

For centuries, this was just a basic expectation held by men in patriarchal societies. In 1869, the English philosopher and feminist John Stuart Mill described the despotic mindset. ‘Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments,’ he wrote in The Subjection of Women. ‘All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds.’ Orwell gave this same animating desire to Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us … We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.’

The key to coercive control is to alternate punishments with rewards.