Flirting with Danger [Chapter 6]

Psychology of Women

Rather than looking at women’s individualized flaws, we need to look at their reactions to their environment in the context of the cultural and social challenges that they face. We must recognize their responses as their way of trying to maintain a personal level of control in an uncontrollable world.  Honestly, this isn’t a mental technique unique to women, psychologically speaking we all must be able to determine that we live in a just and ordered universe. Hence the dependence we’ve had as a whole on religions and deities, cultural stories, things to believe in. Things with a beginning, middle, and an end. Causes and effects. Nevertheless, this intrinsic human need for us to make sense of our world is bastardized and denied according to an invisible hierarchy of power through the creation of mental boundaries and definitions which then overflow into the physical world. It as though people of all types are trapped within their own heads – bound by their conscious and subconscious, the unacknowledged and also their personal delusions of reality – all making up the files in the cabinets in our minds. There we keep our personal constitutions, bills of rights, Wikipedia’s, history books, and “What if?” processors. Only through discourse and redefinition, through communication with others, can we access and “Edit” these entries; but even then – for certain articles – we find ourselves forbidden from the data and barred from revision. We are blocked by the combination of our own factors, and the framework within which we are working.

Especially in the 21^st century, women don’t want to see themselves as inherently weak or weaker than men – because they truly aren’t – emotionally, mentally, or physically. So of course in any situation, they will have some, albeit small, sense of agency. That internal spark will then work against them in defining their own abuse later – because if they even had a shred of consciousness during the abuse, then they can’t define themselves as “true victims” (zero-sum guilt). A woman’s inability to basically admit her humanity is then intertwined with the discourses of men’s supposed unaccountability, lower expectations, and fierce sexual nature without punishment. Plus, even if she was able to identify her abuse, there’s the chance no one would believe or support her anyway – because they’re all buying into the discourses that “men are just like that, and women are the ones who must protect themselves”. It is little wonder that a woman would rather attempt to block out what happened to her in silence, rather than open herself up to the various criticisms and opinions of people who have been programmed to believe it was her fault for “just being there”, skimming over the logic that one cannot be physically abused from far away. In the end, the very existence of abuse is denied – and just as Phillips says on page 156, “the ability to name an injustice is an important factor in victims’ ability to perceive a particular incident as unjust.” And as a recent class handout with a comic strip pointed out: if they gave it a name, it means they think it’s real.

Right now, “victim” has a name, but the definition is strict and doesn’t account for the nuances of circumstance. A woman doesn’t want to be a victim, not only because it means giving up her agency, but because “once she is a victim, a woman is always and only a victim, as though other dimensions of her personhood cease to exist” (162). When our soldier’s come home with missing body parts, we don’t say “well, you never should have been over there anyway” – even when we don’t agree with the war, we appreciate and respect their sacrifice. For many women every day is a little war, one they didn’t enlist for but were automatically drafted at birth. Even worst, it is an invisible war with no justifiable explanation, but where the death toll is just as palpable. People only have one life to live, and they have the right to live as fully as they can – no, not as they can – as they want to. What gets complicated are the definitions people give to happiness or fulfillment and how they run parallel more to what we’ve often been told to want rather than what might have been our choices. Nevertheless, no one is going to say that abuse was part of their ideal happiness.

If you push someone down a flight of stairs, you can get them arrested – but as we’ve had laid out for us in this class – the pressure and pushing of social constructs and discourses cannot be so easily bound in handcuffs. Like a transparent shadow, we breathe it in and it manifests within us, but boy and girl alike will earnestly shake their head at having anything to do with their own actions – whether it’s being too accountable or not enough – people always want to believe that they are doing the right thing.

Instead of my sexual relations, I identified most with Diana’s story on page 168 based on my relationship with my school. Having known of it when I first entered your class, your response was that you heard “it was strict”, but it seemed there was more of the general idea that the place is an oasis for poor kids – which it is. But it’s that dualist quality Diana can’t seem to face - half kindness, half trauma - that I myself face about that school.

I do believe that as a 10 year old entering the school in 2000, I was verbally and psychologically abused by my first set of houseparents. Just as the discourses about accountability, risk of not finding support, and love is pain apply to sexual relationships, they applied deeply to my first three years at MHS. Who would really lend a sympathetic ear to a child being given so much in exchange for nothing? Even now, I don’t expect a shred of response to this because I know the benefits of the school far outweigh that relatively temporary time in my life. But when I say that, I think I sound like Diana – I sound and feel like I’m holding back – and that bothers me. The truth is, a situation can be complicated. It can be that, as talked about on page 160, I am unable to entertain the notion that I am simultaneously a subject and someone who got a raw deal.

Even now I can’t label myself a victim – even after all this empowering information and textual evidence that I am kind of one – because part of the houseparents “lessons” was specifically: DON’T BE A VICTIM. It was in the context of not feeling self-pity or being miserable because we’re poor and have been sent away from our trusted families to live under the dictatorship of these people, but the message has stuck. I always try to walk the fine line of telling people about the school without pushing too hard on the poverty factor, and I only go into details with adults and close friends who I think are less likely to see me as only poor, but rather the intellectual being that I am.  

I have repressed so much of the things that have hurt me that it makes explaining just what happened even more difficult. Particularly with psychological torment, it’s a lot harder to define than simply “he beat the shit out of me”, and I think that kind of abuse is taken even less seriously. So much so, that even part of me thinks I’m full of it and need to just suck it up; that I should spare you details and analysis and just simply say that I can relate to Diana’s story. But then that denies my story too, doesn’t it? I have another professor who openly and in a very admirable way talks about her own psychologically abusive experiences, so there’s one model I suppose. If we just have an outline, a shape we can fit into, then that really helps when it comes to these situations. In essence, we need an example of what to do – something to plug into our programming. And isn’t that the whole point of this book, this class even? The real point is that scripts, and guidelines, discourses (and lack thereof) exist and form the context in which we must live. The first step is to expose them, the next is to rewrite them. If there must be scripts, perhaps we can at least control what they say – and therefore – change our programming.