Chapter 13,
In which we address the ugly problem of violence
Bad men
Male violence against women is an old American tradition that’s never died. A lot of men, even today, see it as a natural part of any relationship, and many more see it as an option to be kept open for difficult circumstances. If you’re interested in using the power of your femininity to sexually enslave a man, a violent response is a possibility you have to consider.
The physical violence that men direct against women takes a number of forms, but for purposes of this discussion we can lump all but one of them together under the name brutality. Brutality includes beating, whether accompanied by rape or not; it includes rape effected by the threat of force; and it includes gang rape even if no other injury is inflicted. Brutality is intended to establish male dominance over a woman by hurting, terrorizing, degrading or humiliating her. For simplicity, we’ll also give a name to the perpetrators of brutality; we’ll call them brutes.
There’s one form of violence that needs to be differentiated from brutality, so I’ll give it another name. The name is an oxymoron that may infuriate you: gentle rape. Hate it? Good! Please bear with me anyway, because that name will help you understand the phenomenon and avoid becoming a victim.
There are three ways in which acts of brutality are triggered. The first and most common is that a brute wants something, sees his partner as an obstacle keeping it from him, and vents his frustration by directing an outburst of violence at her. What he wants could be anything—the use of her body, beer, the silence of a crying baby, even her agreement with the abstract idea that he’s the boss. Often his belief that the desideratum is under her control is incorrect—the product of a sense of reality as poorly developed as his ability to deal with frustration. He can best be understood as an ill-tempered two-year-old—a two-year-old with the body of a grown man and a bad case of testosterone poisoning.
Brutality can also be triggered by the feeling of vulnerability that results from a greater degree of intimacy than the brute can handle. Perhaps he indulged in a momentary urge to open up to his partner as he might if he were emotionally healthy. Perhaps she accidentally discovered something about him he would rather have kept hid. However it came about, he perceives his exposure as a real-world danger and reacts with all the violence that might be appropriate to a physical threat. It’s scary to live with such a man—like making one’s home on the side of a volcano—but no woman has to put herself in that situation. Remember, most men aren’t like that. The average man may become emotionally withdrawn when love is no longer new, but if he finds he’s made an exception and revealed more of himself than usual, or if he’s sexually enslaved and has to change his ways, he’ll handle it well. It’s the man who can’t handle it—the brute—who’s dangerous.
Why distinguish brutality triggered by a sense of vulnerability from that triggered by frustration? Just to be thorough, really. The difference might be of professional interest to a psychologist, but it has no practical value to a victim, and few brutes care to understand their own motivations. Besides, we’re not even discussing two different classes of brutes, just two different ways in which brutality is triggered. The men who get violent when they feel vulnerable also get violent when they’re frustrated.
Brutes can be recognized and, unless you’re already committed to one, avoided. In fact the easiest and most effective way to avoid falling victim to brutality is to avoid brutes. Avoid them even if you have no interest in female domination.
What if you’re married to a brute or strongly attracted to one? What are your chances of sexually enslaving and taming him? Absolutely none. You can’t use my techniques on a man who will respond with violence. You’ll get killed. If you’re involved with a man who has ever, even once, committed an act of brutality, don’t attempt any of the techniques described in this book. If you’re involved with a man who commits acts of brutality with any regularity, get out of the relationship! Leave now! Go to a shelter for battered women if you have to, but get out while you can still walk. You’ve heard this before and it’s starting to seem like a recording, but that’s because it’s the best advice anyone can give you, and everyone who feels qualified to give advice on the subject knows it.
If you’re unattached and looking toward your next relationship, avoid brutes. Don’t imagine that early application of my techniques will protect you from later brutality. It won’t. Avoid brutes.
Brutes are easy to avoid because they’re easy to spot. The signs are many and varied. Some are so reliable that every man who displays one is certain to be a brute, though not every brute will display one of these signs. Others are less reliable. If I give you even a partial list of the more obvious of these, and you apply them rigorously, there’ll be thousands of innocent men you’ll have to reject. I’ll give it to you anyway; you’re better safe than sorry, and besides, I know that, like Denise, you’ll use your own judgment.
Suspect any man who makes disparaging remarks about women in general; who’s often angry; who expresses dissatisfaction through crude, cutting, or sarcastic personal insults; who drives aggressively; who hassles the help in restaurants; who spits in public places (other than wilderness); who pushes to the front of a line; who picks fights; who belongs to a football team, hockey team, street gang, motorcycle gang or fraternity; who is or ever was a police officer; or who punctuates his speech with more profanity than is customary for the circumstances.
If you’re laughing, I’m glad I’m entertaining you. I see a bit of humor in that list myself, but don’t discount its value. Stereotypes based on behavior, unlike other stereotypes, are useful. If part of a man’s behavior conforms to a violent stereotype, it’s a good bet—a safe bet—that the rest of his behavior will also.
Three signs are so reliable that you should apply them rigorously.
Avoid a man who uses the word bitch as a substitute for woman in ordinary conversation. If a man calls a particular woman a bitch because he feels she’s being bitchy, or if he says that a whole class of women are bitches because he’s angry with them, or something of like nature, that doesn’t signify. It’s the unstressed use of the word, without emotion, that spells trouble.
How does the man who refers to women as bitches differ from the man who merely makes disparaging remarks about us? I’ve told you that the one is a brute for sure, while advising you only to suspect the other. Why?
The man who makes disparaging remarks may be joking. He may be baiting the proprietors of political correctitude, thinking they deserve to be baited and that no one else will care. He may be upset from reading a newspaper story about a man jailed for a rape he didn’t commit. He could have any number of reasons for mouthing off, and what he says may have no predictive value with respect to his treatment of an intimate partner. The man who uses bitch in place of woman, though, hates women for sure, and his hatred is integrated into his psyche at a deep level—as deep as his native language.
Some men refer to women as bitches only when talking with other men—some only when talking with men their own age. This makes the sign harder to detect but no less reliable. If you hear it in a man’s speech, whether intended for your ears or not, stay away.
Avoid a man who hates male homosexuals. His homophobia arises out of insecurity about his masculinity, and that insecurity will drive him to brutalize you. Because he’s insecure, he needs to be always proving he’s a man, and his idea of masculinity is badly twisted or he couldn’t be insecure about it. (An emotionally healthy man can’t be insecure about his masculinity because he sees it as a simple fact of life, like the color of his eyes. Even an emotionally healthy homosexual sees it that way.) One of the ways an insecure man will try to prove his masculinity is by dominating a woman. He has to dominate a woman. The world is watching and the woman is watching too, and if he doesn’t dominate her—if he treats women decently—then the world will know he isn’t a real man and she’ll lose respect for him. The best means of domination, of course, is brutality. After all, he’s learned that violent aggression is itself an aspect of masculinity, so each act of brutality that he commits against his partner goes that much further toward proving his manliness.
Before you apply this warning as rigorously as I advise, it’s important that you understand what hatred of homosexuals is and what it isn’t. Hatred is the intense visceral emotion that we all know by that name; nothing less qualifies. A gentle, sensitive, sane and exclusively heterosexual man might be so disgusted by sexual contact between males that if he were to stumble upon two men making love in the woods, he would throw up. Being emotionally healthy though, and not insecure about his masculinity, he doesn’t hate homosexuals—not even the ones he threw up over. His feeling is analogous to that of a woman who’s disgusted by oysters and prefers not to watch people eat them, but still can’t be said to hate those who do.
In some parts of this country—Kentucky, for example—a large segment of the population, including some sixty percent of the men you might meet, subscribe to a conservative religious morality. The prevailing opinion is that homosexuality is a sin, that homosexuals seek to seduce children and heterosexuals into their depraved ways, that toleration of homosexuality promotes evil and will bring down the wrath of God on the commonwealth as a whole, and that homosexual acts must therefore be outlawed and punished. Are sixty percent of the men in Kentucky brutes? Hardly. Conservative religious morality isn’t hatred. Some of the men who subscribe to that morality do hate homosexuals, and they most assuredly are brutes, but most don’t and most aren’t.
Let’s look at another analogy like that of the oysters.
Utah is probably the only state in the Union that, because of its conservative religious morality, will never legalize any form of gambling. A majority of the people there feel that gambling is a sin, that the inexperienced are easily seduced by its availability, that toleration of gambling promotes evil and will bring down the wrath of God on the commonwealth as a whole, and that gambling must therefore be outlawed and punished. Now, how many people in Utah actually hate gamblers? Imagine that a casino executive from Reno decks himself out in casual clothes emblazoned with his employer’s logo, gets in his car with its Nevada plates, and sets out on a two-week auto tour of Utah. Along the way, he tells everyone he meets what he does for a living. How much hostility would he encounter? Would he get beat up? refused service and lodging? Really.
Only hatred is hatred. The man to avoid is the one who gets all agitated and shouts, “Fuckin’ queers! They should all be hung!” He’s dangerous, and he’s more dangerous to the woman who puts herself in his company than he is to some homosexual down the street whom he’d have to go look for. Of course, the man who goes out queer-bashing with a baseball bat, claiming he’s doing God’s work and hates no one, is also to be avoided. Hatred is hatred no matter what it calls itself, and if you spend much time with such a man, he’ll soon be using that baseball bat on you. Men are often what they seem.
After my soapbox speech about war, I feel the need to make one more fine point. A professional politician who doesn’t hate homosexuals himself, but cynically panders to the homophobia of his constituency, is probably not a brute (regardless of what else I might think of him). If you don’t mind his demagoguery, you might want to cultivate a relationship with him; like any man overburdened with power and responsibility, he’s likely to respond well to a woman who undertakes his sexual enslavement, welcoming the relief she offers from the pressures of his work.
The third easily-recognized brute is the man who rages at the sight of a couple consisting of a woman of his own race or ethnicity and a man of some other race or ethnicity.
Why, we might wonder, should this rattle him so?
The enemy! They’re stealing our women!
Oh.
What makes this man dangerous is that he sees women as chattels—something like valuable purebred dogs that might be lured away from their rightful owners with offers of meat. If you get involved with such a man and do something that annoys him (like neglecting to stock enough beer for a three-day binge), he’ll strike out at you much as he would at a misbehaving dog, and without any idea that he’s doing wrong.
Some men who exhibit this sign like to give the impression that they’re fair and consistent about it, so they make a principle of the belief that sex between people of different races or ethnicities is always wrong and profess an equal degree of hostility toward all mixed couples. The underlying psychology is the same though, so you can be sure that if a man denounces even one person for miscegenation, he’s a brute. On the other hand, a man’s acceptance of a mixed couple doesn’t demonstrate the absence of this sign unless the woman is of his own group, and even then it doesn’t prove he isn’t a brute. There are plenty of brutes, including many who see women as chattels, to whom ethnicity just isn’t an issue.
There’s one more warning sign I urge you to watch out for, though it’s far from absolutely reliable. Many readers will find it counterintuitive and I don’t understand it myself, but it’s based on stories collected from a goodly number of women, and the pattern revealed by those stories is unmistakable: Beware a man who courts you with flowers. I’ve heard the tales of a disproportionate number of battered women whose abusers courted them by giving or sending them flowers several times a week. Generally the flowers stopped once the relationship had stabilized, only to reappear again and again as a means of wooing the woman back each time the man got worried that his battering had run her off for good. Better relationships, more consistently free of violence, follow from the more modern approach to courtship in which a couple get to know one another by sharing activities they both enjoy, avoiding extravagant gestures.
No matter how well a man measures up against my little catalog of horrors, never ignore the warnings of your own intuition. When getting acquainted, be alert to hints of violence, duplicity and ulterior purpose. If something feels wrong, something is wrong. Always.
I promised to describe three ways in which acts of brutality are triggered, and I’ve only covered two. The third trigger is the perceived opportunity to engage in that most time-honored of male bonding rituals, massacre. This is why any young college woman runs the risk of being raped by the football team. All she has to do is be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Some women, in fact, are raped by college football teams, but nowhere near as many as we might expect. There are two reasons for the low numbers. One is that most women take care not to be alone with a football team. The other is that usually, when a football team has the opportunity to rape someone, even if every member of the team has such a predisposition, nobody thinks of it. Their attention is focused elsewhere and the impulse to massacre doesn’t spring to the forefront of anyone’s consciousness. A woman who attempts to apply the techniques of female domination, though, is likely to be at substantially greater risk than a random bystander. Let’s see how.
Our heroine is a freshman at a small college in Arkansas. She becomes intimate with a classmate and attempts to sexually enslave him. Puzzled by what’s happening, he asks his big brother for advice. Pig Bruvver, an offensive throwback on the football team, alerts his buddies to the new Menace and they decide to neutralize her. How? Massacre, of course. They’ll hunt her down, or set an ambush, and they’ll rape her and beat her half to death. Once their attention is focused, massacre becomes their whole purpose. Male bonding is what matters now, and male dominance. At this point any excuse would have served, and though our heroine is at greater risk than anyone else on campus, every other woman’s risk increases as well. To a massacre squad, mistaken identity isn’t a tragedy to be avoided, but a convenience that speeds their mission.
Understand your cultural context. Not every college, to continue with the same example, is like the one where Suzi recruited her slaves.
Gentle rape is something else. It’s not motivated by a craving for dominance but by sexual desire. It’s committed by a man, almost always an acquaintance of the victim, who doesn’t understand that no means no. His misapprehension is sincere. He thinks no is an empty gesture required by social convention. So he overcomes it. And he does it gently. He doesn’t want to hurt his victim, and he doesn’t hurt her, at least not very much. He has to avoid hurting her to preserve his perception that he’s engaged in a consensual transaction rather than a rape. He doesn’t hit her. He doesn’t twist her arm. He may hold her arm so she can’t use it to fight him off, but he doesn’t twist it. He may push her knees apart, but he does it with little enough force so he can convince himself that he couldn’t possibly succeed against genuine resistance. He doesn’t know how much stronger than she he is, nor does he appreciate how frightened she is.
Many women who have lived through this wonder whether they were really raped. They ask themselves, over and over, what they did to invite such behavior, how their refusal could have been misunderstood. They ask themselves these questions because there’s no reasonable explanation for what happened except a failure to communicate. Indeed that’s the correct explanation, but the failure doesn’t lie with the victims.
Does it, then, lie with the perpetrators? They’re sure they did nothing wrong, that what happened was consensual. Accused of rape, they assume their accusers are distorting the facts, not that they see the same facts differently. Upon learning that the facts aren’t in dispute, they’re genuinely puzzled.
Though it’s unfashionable to say so, the simple truth is that the perpetrators and the victims were taught different rules of communication—given different maps of reality. Gentle rape happens by mistake.
Because of this, you can’t spot gentle rapists the way you can brutes. You’re sure your new boyfriend is no brute, and you’re right, but how will he respond when you turn him on and then subject him to a high degree of sexual frustration? Will he accept the frustration and pay attention to your demands? Will he angrily but nonviolently reject you? (He has a right to do that, you know.) Or will he use just a little bit of force and overpower you? The only way to get any indication ahead of time is by discussion. Tell him the story of a friend who was the victim of a gentle rape. Make it up if you have to. His response is almost certain to give you some useful information about him.
Countermeasures
There’s one reliable way to protect yourself from violence—whether the perpetrators be brutes, gentle rapists or muggers—and that’s to master the art of self-defense. It’s hard work and it takes time, but the ability to protect yourself is so valuable that I urge you to make the investment. There are several martial arts that are effective, but my own favorite—the one I’ve chosen to study myself and the one I most highly recommend—is aikido. Aikido teaches a set of skills that enable the practitioner to avoid harm without doing harm, and it teaches a moral philosophy to match. Because of this, the study of aikido offers a pleasant fringe benefit—the opportunity to meet some truly excellent people.
In case you have no experience with martial arts but want to learn, I’ll offer four bits of practical advice on selecting a school. The first three are applicable to martial arts generally and the last to aikido specifically. Follow them and you won’t go wrong.
The first thing to do when you visit a school is ask the instructor whether the students compete in tournaments. If the answer is yes, or if the answer is that competition is optional—indeed if the answer is anything other than no—find another school.
If a school competes, it inevitably becomes so focused on competition that it winds up teaching its students nothing but how to win tournaments. This has disadvantages. Tournaments have rules, which brawls don’t. Boxers, wrestlers, and martial arts tournament competitors routinely put themselves in positions where, if it weren’t for the rules, they would get an ear bitten off. Only a school that doesn’t compete can be relied upon to teach you to stay out of such positions.
Technique is another problem. A school that competes may teach, for example, that a crescent kick to the side of an opponent’s head is a practical move. Even if you can execute it, it isn’t something you would want to do in a brawl; it’s too long to be standing on one leg. If you’re forty-five and out of shape, you simply won’t be able to learn to kick a standing opponent in the side of the head. Don’t waste your time with an instructor who’ll insist on making you try. You don’t have to be able to do that even to protect yourself from someone who can.
Avoid any school or class that’s for women only. Such a school can’t teach you how to throw a big man, but it may give you the dangerous delusion that you’re capable of doing it anyway. There’s no way to learn to throw a big man except repeated practice. The schools that hire big men to play the role of bad guys, covered with lots of protective padding, are no good. Real brutes are more cunning tacticians than these hirelings, and all men are more agile without padding. It’s better to practice on fellow students who are big and male—more realistic.
Some of the techniques taught by these schools are effective but too dangerous for use by a dominatrix. You can avoid brutes, so your primary use for martial arts is to convince a gentle rapist that no means no. This can be done without hurting him, and that’s how it should be done. Remember, you didn’t get involved with him because you thought he was the sort of person who should be maimed or killed. You got involved with him because you like him and it was obvious that he likes you. It turned out that the two of you learned different ways of communicating about sexual issues, so now you need a way of showing him what you mean by no. Classes for women only, unfortunately, aren’t real big on this. They tend to be taught by women who see all men as brutes and they concentrate on the most dangerous of techniques, with emphasis on the potentially lethal. Such techniques are good to know, but you need gentler ones too.
When you begin martial arts training, you’ll feel sore. The mornings after the first couple of classes, you may have difficulty moving. For the first six weeks or so, you can expect to feel as though you’d been severely beaten with a heavy pillow. This is normal. Injuries aren’t. Dislocations, pulled shoulder muscles, visible bruises and bloody knuckles are not a necessary part of martial arts training. If your instructor tells you they are, or seems to regard them as commonplace, find another school.
If you decide to take up aikido, you’ll want to study good aikido—the sort that’s most useful. Obviously you’re not going to ask the instructor whether he teaches good aikido; I’m going to give you a way to tell the difference. Observe a class or a demonstration, and notice how the instructor throws his opponents. Pay particular attention to the way he stands when preparing to be attacked. His posture should be natural, as if he were walking—upright, relaxed, hands at sides, knees just slightly bent; there should be no more distance between his feet than you would expect if he were waiting for a bus.
The greater the deviation of the defender’s opening stance from this natural posture, the less useful the aikido will be. If the defender looks like something out of a martial arts movie—feet wide apart, knees severely bent to bring the body low, hands forward as though prepared to deliver a karate chop—the aikido will be almost useless, regardless of how well it may seem to work when demonstrated. It’s intuitively obvious. To be useful, a defensive technique has to be available without adopting an unusual stance. You have to be able to use it from whatever posture you’re in when you’re attacked.
There are two schools of aikido I can recommend by name, and wherever you live in the United States, a dojo of one or the other is probably in the nearest big city. One is Aikido Kokikai and the other is Aikido Shusekai. Both regard competition as contrary to the spirit of aikido, so neither competes; neither segregates its classes by gender; both teach techniques that are practical and useful; and you’re unlikely to get hurt while studying either. According to an apocryphal tale, the founder of Aikido Shusekai once ejected a young man from his dojo when, after a couple of lessons, it became apparent that the student had a subconscious desire to hurt women. Excellent people.
Wearing the black belt
Let’s fantasize a bit. A few years ago you got fed up with brutes, so you studied karate and got a job in construction, and now you’re ready for Pig Bruvver and all his buddies. If they picked you as the victim of one of their massacres, there would be very little left of them at the end. What should you do?
Obviously you’re going to do whatever you want; it would take a SWAT team to stop you. What I would recommend, though, is that you avoid brutes and treat everyone as gently as possible. If you have a lover who needs to be shown that he can’t make you do what you don’t want to, show him without hurting him. Use deadly force only if attacked by someone who means you harm.
But it would be so much fun to get hold of one of those brutes and turn him into my sex slave. Every time he threw one of his ugly little tantrums, I’d…
You could do that, but you shouldn’t. Sexual slavery is a good trip. Every love slave I’ve ever had, every love slave I’ve ever heard of, took great pleasure in the role. Even Tony, who was about as nearly a brute as possible without actually being one, liked what Denise did to him. The reason you shouldn’t use superior strength or skill to sexually enslave a brute is that he doesn’t deserve it. What he does deserve is to be shunned by women, cut off from all sexual pleasure, and denied any opportunity to reproduce his kind. That won’t happen soon—certainly not while brutes are still permitted to raise their daughters to seek relationships with brutes—but we can each do our part and we can each ensure our own safety in the process.
Safety? What safety? I can break him in two with one hand!
Sure you can. But every now and then, you have to sleep. If someone is going to be nearby when you do, make sure it’s someone you can trust.
So much for fantasy. What’s the reality of life after martial arts training? I started studying aikido when I was sixteen, I was reasonably proficient by the time I was nineteen, and I earned a black belt at twenty-two. It’s given me a great deal of confidence, but I’ve never had to use my skills against a lover or a date.
Let’s go back over the situations in which my training might have played a role. When Steve was eating me and lunged forward in an attempt to put his cock in my pussy, I got out of his way. My training helped me move faster and more deliberately than I otherwise could have, and I knew how to help him toward a position of imbalance that increased his disorientation. Did it make any real difference? Of course not. If my evasion had been clumsy, he still would have got my message and he still would have paid attention, especially when I scolded him. For that matter, just shouting no would have been enough, though I would have lost the dramatic effect of implying that my evasion was necessary. Steve wasn’t a rapist, not even a gentle rapist, no matter what I said to him at the time, and I didn’t need my skills to get him under control.
I thought Corbett might attack me when I blackmailed him. I deserved it and he didn’t know I could defend myself, but he didn’t attack me anyway. In that case, what my training gave me was the confidence to do wrong. More loss than gain, considering how I feel about it now, but that’s not the fault of my training and certainly not what my sensei intended.
And that’s it! In all my other relationships, my skills played no role at all. I’ve never even had to resist a gentle rape, perhaps because my penchant for bondage tends to preclude the development of that sort of situation. Not a very impressive collection of stories, is it? In effect, I’ve protected myself all these years by avoiding brutes and projecting confidence. Under most circumstances, that’s enough; but I’m still glad to have my training and I’ve never stopped practicing.