Surviving the Agent

To survive men, women have learned to navigate male moods and to do this, they have learned to empathize with a capital “E”. Women empathize with men to such a degree that they take on male pain as if it were there own. Women for the most part aren’t aware that this is hard wired into them. If I hadn’t read, “Loving to Survive” by Dee L. Graham, I too would not have been aware that I was doing this myself. I’ve always wondered why when I see a man, even a complete stranger cry, I feel like crying too. It tugs on my heart strings and I feel responsible for making him feel better. I realize now what this means. The very idea that I feel responsible for male pain and worse, that I do not feel this at all when I see a woman cry, makes perfect sense now. Knowing this however doesn’t feel very good. It makes me cringe inside. But there it is, patriarchal survival 101, and even I, a radical feminist, can’t escape it.

Because I am a woman, who must survive in a male dominated world, I have an investment in making sure men are less violent. The need to decipher the male mood and work towards keeping them less violent is what women have done and continue to do because they believe that they can make a difference, that if they do everything right, if they are subservient enough, kind enough, loving enough, selfless enough, they can change him into a better human being. This belief is what keeps women from going off the deep end; regardless of whether or not it is true. Women need to feel safe, to have some sense of security even if this safety and security is an illusion. Women need to understand this phenomenon. Women need to understand why they behave the way they do. Why they ring their hands and feel responsible for men’s feelings and behaviors and why they stay with abusive men. It is all connected and if women understood this, they could take steps towards realizing that they too are sick with this disorder and would feel less compassion for men and more compassion for themselves and other women. Ignorance in this case is only bliss for men, not women. Ignorance also makes women less compassionate for other women who we see catering to their men.

Before coming across this knowledge, when I saw women doing this, walking on eggshells, catering to men, I would cringe because (or so I thought) it rubbed my radical feminist sensibility the wrong way; however, now even though subtle, I realize that I do the same thing when I interact with men. I also realized that it wasn’t about me being a radical feminist, but instead, me judging other women was a projection of my own self loathing. On the surface, it looks like women are needy and need male attention and approval. It may even look like compassion, but if you look deeper, you will find that this behavior comes from the need to survive male violence. To survive, women must take on their abusers perception, get inside their heads in an effort to control their abuse, in order to feel safer, they ultimately lose their own perspective and begin seeing themselves through men’s perspective.

“Captor Sees the World from the Captor’s Perspective. She or He May not Have Her or His Own Perspective. Captive Experiences Own Sense of Self through the Captor’s Eyes.”

Women believe that their best chance of survival, although brutal and painful, is to stay with the men they know (literally). Knowing their men then replaces their own sense of safety, their fight or flight instincts. Women then believe that men’s behaviors including abuse is their fault. If men lash out at women ( non persons) women are at fault because they are seeing themselves through their abusers eyes and instead of it being their abusers fault, she takes responsibility for it because she must have done something wrong to make him act that way. She wasn’t timid enough, nice enough or what have you; therefore, it was her fault. Women blame themselves because they failed at doing the one thing they have learned to do for survival and that is to keep their men less violent.

Women also feel that it would be more dangerous to leave the male batterer that they know, then to be out in the world without protection from other men. She chooses instead to stay with him, wanting to believe that even though he is violent and even though he hurts her emotionally and physically, amongst a sea of male violence, he is her life preserver. She probably also knows that when she leaves him, he could hunt her down and kill her, which is quite common due to the lack of protection provided to women in our society. Ironically, men created the nuclear family to isolate women to ensure female subservience and complicity, and this arrangement has benefited men in many ways. What men did not bargain on was the female tenacity to survive and what these survival tactics would look like.

Women have had to become invisible to survive for thousands of years and taking that first step out of bondage, by letting go of what they believe is their life preserver (men) is frightening. So with this mentality, most women don’t rock the boat. Most women don’t name the perpetrator and men continue to get away with violating women. In this insane world, women try to work on the problem that is male violence while at the same time hanging on to their life preserver for dear life. I’ve always argued that women temper male violence. That in places where there are no women such as male prisons and where women have no rights or power, where they are disenfranchised the most such as the Taliban in the Middle East, men are the most violent. When men are left to their own devices, they tend to transgress into barbarians. And although my argument is true, my reasoning on why women are able to temper male violence was incomplete, because I didn’t have all of the information needed to really understand why. The reason of course is because in places where women are allowed even the minimum of rights, such as domestic rights and the right to emotionally support their husbands, women go to extremes to make men less violent.

If women stop believing in the illusion that they can control male violence and that it is their fault if they can’t, they can begin to get out from under their denial, out from under the male perspective, their captors perspective and into their own perspective, ultimately seeing the epidemic of male violence against women for what it is, a serious threat. Then women can take steps towards protecting themselves and other women from that threat. Whether they purchase guns, learn how to use them and carry them on their person, or whether they choose other ways to defend themselves, the important thing is that women choose to protect their lives instead of continuing to protect men.

By Michele Braa-Heidner

I strongly suggest reading this entire essay - only a small portion of which I have shared here.
http://shehasthepower.wordpress.com