simsa03As a boy my mother beat me with cooking spoons and clogs, forced me to get out of the trash the food I had thrown into, and made me eat it. It was the mothers in my life who for various reasons came up with the very idea of making me responsible for the calamities in their lives.
So people may perhaps excuse me when I don't buy into the attitude of much female writings of today that somehow their experiences of violence is the most exceptional and that because of that they have or earn a privileged status of innocence, authenticity, even truth.
We all know the stories of appalling violence in church-run orphanages by nuns against children. Violence is not a male quality, women are not the "peaceful sex". Violence is a human trait. And as much as humans are capable of grace and forgiveness, so they are of bestiality and sadistic lust.
Female writers should be aware of that, should be in contact with their lust of murder, their sadistic fantasies which they would love to live out if only they could. But right now, what I see in female writings on violence they endure from men, I mostly sense a form of sanctimonious morality.
I'm not sure where this denial of reality comes from. This sanctimoniousness that always already knows who's the perpetrator and who's the victim. A morality that dresses up as piousness and integrity, but mostly serves to project and deflect. In order not to confront one's own bestiality.
Some very disturbing Protestantism, even Puritanism, lingers at the root of much female discourse on violence. Like at the root of capitalism (see Max Weber on that). The concept of twofold-predestination.
That Gd already decided who's going up and who's going down, and that once outer status in this reality (in capitalism: one's economic and material well-being) is a sign of Gd's decision on which which track He presumably has put us on.
There is no Redemption, that is, but self-earned and self-administered self-improvement. There is no Jonah and the Whale, there is the attempt of self-redemption, thereby almost deliberately overlooking that In Christianity the believer is redeemed from guilt, not from pain.
And so people in the world of self-improvement, in the secular spheres of former-Protestantism, get it wrong twice: They strive for self-redemption (although only G*d can redeem), and they aim to self-redeem from pain (instead of guilt).
To me, this is a common feature in much of the humanistic movements since the early 1960s. The shift from sincerity to authenticity (see Lionel Trilling on that), that somehow the open display of one's "inner core" reveals a truth that is endangered by the contact with outer reality.
Which is why the encroaching outer reality needs to be fought, and forced off. It is telling that today's Women's Lib is not about political or economic rights, but authenticity, the right to self-expression, the right to overstep boundaries, to violate others in pursuit of self-realization.
I find it most telling that in the usual talk of "strong women" what is meant is not "strong" but "authoritarian". Because strength is capable of acknowledging differences, perhaps even cherish them, whereas authoritarianism fights them and insists on homogeneous behavior and morality.
Or at least so it has been in my coming to age: When my (second) mother called herself a "strong woman" (she has been a feminist of the second generation), and most she displayed was authoritarian lust to bend people to her will and values.
Anyway, much would be achieved if today's women would accept their own lust for violence, their urge to torture, their own bestiality that comes in so many guises and forms. At least it would change the trite discourse of today.
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