Ugh. First of all I need people to stop posting the Rice Elevator Video. If we haven’t seen it we’re lucky. If we have seen it we can never un-see it. Let’s not pretend we need to see it to know what domestic abuse looks like or feels like. The Rice family isn’t new. They’re not even new to the NFL. They just got caught on video. The NFL, TMZ and the Ravens didn’t need to see the video to know that when the very strong man knocked out the woman he had to have hit her very frickin hard and if he hadn’t hit her before he’d just become the kind of man who would probably hit her again. They’re just pretending to give a raging rat’s ass about battered women in general and Janay Rice in particular. The NFL cares about ratings. TMZ cares about clicks. The Ravens care about ticket sales. Yesterday some douche sent me Mrs. Rice’s Instagram (why there?) statement commenting that ‘it figures she would be on some stand-by-your-man ish’ and here’s what has been crushing me since then. As a society we have some nerve to judge her over our overpriced coffees and ask why she doesnt leave. Thats so frickin easy for us to say from our vantage points of either having already left or never having had to leave. We forget that part of what all this outing of his attack on her and his possible practice of abuse has done to both of them. It has isolated and embarrassed her and it has cornered him. Shes now in a home/life with a man whose life has been stripped from him. In the best of circumstances that doesnt auger well for either of them. Violent men and men with aggression or anger issues, men who dont know how to reason their emotional responses are dangerous beyond comprehension. She lives with/loves a man who is now potentially dangerous beyond comprehension. She has to figure out how to survive this public humiliation, our relentless commentary and casual ownership of their lives and how to negotiate this new life. She has to do, most likely, all the frickin work. Women who’ve been hit, even once or twice, by a loved one, especially those women who have made a decision to commit to that relationship through building a family have already begun developing a pathological response to violence and their understanding of the world is filtered through that relationship and that violence. Love gets mixed up in the bloodstains on your shirts when the beloved abuser brings your flowers and tells you how sorry he is. Love gets fused into the crushed bones of your face when the beloved abuser caresses the other cheek, effectively turning it for you, and whispers his apology right after he says; look what you made me do. Love wakes up in the morning and climbs into the bed between you and looks at you with his eyes and you learn to cling to love and to the beloved abuser much the same way you clung to the edge of the bed all night in fear. Janay Rice is pretty much clinging to the absolute edge of her imagined life right now. Until Janay Rice or any woman who is still in an abusive relationship can expand her understanding of what is possible in her life, what she needs is support in the life she has chosen. She needs people, society even, to show up for her, acknowledge that even when she makes the wrong choice, it is her life/choice, give her permission, show her horizons, and be patient with her /for her. Instead were judging her expression of what is a culturally ingrained abused pathology. We’re giving the beloved abuser an incredible out too. He doesn’t have to work or change or go. She does. She’s got to do all the frickin work. She looks out at us and all she sees is a world full of people who are standing against him, her beloved abuser, and by extension against her family and her. She needs to see a world that holds her with love and patience and without judgment. But that’s not likely to come while feminists are raging against her staying, misogynists are raging against her existence and assholes are clicking on what must be the most horrific exposure of her private pain.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 19:05:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015