Women who are addicted to power, men who are dependent on their slaves

Sunday, April 2, 2006

The Turkish press has been full recently of news about famous women who return to the husbands/lovers that beat them. These are not women who have no other place to go. On the contrary, they are not hungry nor have they ever been. Their incomes are good, their social circles protected; they could, if they wanted to, choose other roads in life.

  The Turkish press has been full recently of news about "famous women who return to the husbands/lovers that beat them." These are not women who have no other place to go. On the contrary, they are not hungry nor have they ever been. Their incomes are good, their social circles protected; they could, if they wanted to, choose other roads in life. They are in possession of the means to reconstruct their lives from zero, they are women who could do anything they wanted. But still, they return to the husbands and mates who have beaten or betrayed them. They say things to the press like, "It is not the fact that my husband beats me but the statements that came afterwards which hurt." Or: "We only argued. These bruises won t even last a couple of days. Let s not exaggerate this."

  The Turkish gossip press takes lots of photographs of these women, exclaiming: "So-and-so returns to her betraying lover! Such-and-such a person forgives the beating husband!"  

  The number and frequency of cases like this in Turkey must have attracted enough attention that even now, research reports are being prepared on this phenomenon. Experts turned to for opinions on the matter, some psychiatrists, some psychologists, say things like, "Well, all women do have forgiving sides to them." I read these explanations, the hairs on my arms standing up on end, and think to myself, "Well, I guess that means I m not a woman." Another one of these experts says, "If men exhibit physical violence, women exhibit emotional violence." Now, if such an “expert” came forward with this explanation in America, either his or her personality or expertise would be seriously doubted. Here, though, believers can always be found for this kind of "ersatz-professional" opinion. "Well, when you say woman, what you re talking about is someone who carries maternal feelings from birth, someone who is forgiving, someone who will cover her bruises with her hair, who will willingly take the arm of the spouse who beat her. Afraid of being abandoned, she will forgive!" The very style used by the Turkish press in discussing these matters manages to normalize the violence towards women and the violence within families. It somehow prettifies it.  

  With time, just as Spinoza once pointed out, love can take "extraordinary forms." A person may hurt the one they love the most or may in turn be hurt by that one. Love can be trodden upon, torn apart and can then rebalance itself. It may bring out the deepest, darkest most suppressed and animalistic sides to us. I can understand all of this. However I, as a woman who was raised closed and in the oppressive middle class of Ankara in the 1970s by a woman who got no support, a divorced woman who never again remarried, I will continue never to understand the roles played by these "famous and rich women who return to the men who beat them."

  In Hegel s dialectic on the master-slave phenomenon, the power mechanism he examines has a two-way flow. In the hierarchy of the master, he is dependent on the existence of the slave under him. He is actually tied to the person over whom he wields his power because in the eyes of the slave, he is an unparalleled power. For this reason, males who have set out to prove their power choose women who are weak.

  The man who beats goes tears dripping, bearing roses, to apologize to the woman he has beaten. He cannot make it without it, no matter how unlikely that appears. The master wants, needs his slave. Without her, he is nothing.

  And just as much as we need to ask why it is that women return to the men who beat them, we also need to discuss the weak, foible-filled tyranny of these powerful men.