By Chuck Derry For many years, I facilitated courtmandated groups for men who batter. In the early 1980s we were concentrating on healthy relationship skills building, emotional identification and selfcontrol, and anger management, among other related issues. Then battered women in Duluth, Minnesota, began gathering to discuss the impact of the violence on their lives.… Continue Reading Abusive Men Describe the Benefits of Violence
You raise interesting points! I guess it is crucial to distinguish with what audience in mind the text was written. As you say, it may help abusive people to be empathized with and to get their intentions mirrored back to them in order for them to understand their own intentions better. Just as the men in the text themselves, who apparently had problems identifying their own intentions in the first place.
But I have a few problems with that. First, I don’t think the text does a particularly good job at actually placing these intentions in any meaningful context. As the other commenter said, it is just raw data. Meaning the author just wrote those quotes down but didn’t expand further on it. Stopping at this stage, other men or abusive people in general might stop thinking about their intentions and feel encouraged. Yeah, I want control! Right, I just keep on doing this, because that’s what’s in my best interest. Second, as I said I would be cautious with trying to empathize with abusive people. Too easily you get could up with feeling sorry for them or giving them the opportunity to feel as victims. Because obviously those men are probably not all fine and have their own struggles that they then externalize and make the problem for other people around them. A lot of men-support groups that start out trying to help men get out of toxic masculinity actually just perpetuate its problems because men then will see themselves as victims and feel legitimized in their actions. Patriarchal violence has the idea at its core that men are the only subjects while all others are mere objects. It is really hard to fundamentally challenge this indoctrinated view in men who instinctively see women as inherently inferior from men. If empathizing is your only strategy, this will fail to challenge this underlying imbalance.
Anyways, the article does a bad job in any of this and that’s why I didn’t get why it was posted here in the first place. I have to go now, may expand on this further later.
You raise interesting points! I guess it is crucial to distinguish with what audience in mind the text was written. As you say, it may help abusive people to be empathized with and to get their intentions mirrored back to them in order for them to understand their own intentions better. Just as the men in the text themselves, who apparently had problems identifying their own intentions in the first place.
But I have a few problems with that. First, I don’t think the text does a particularly good job at actually placing these intentions in any meaningful context. As the other commenter said, it is just raw data. Meaning the author just wrote those quotes down but didn’t expand further on it. Stopping at this stage, other men or abusive people in general might stop thinking about their intentions and feel encouraged. Yeah, I want control! Right, I just keep on doing this, because that’s what’s in my best interest. Second, as I said I would be cautious with trying to empathize with abusive people. Too easily you get could up with feeling sorry for them or giving them the opportunity to feel as victims. Because obviously those men are probably not all fine and have their own struggles that they then externalize and make the problem for other people around them. A lot of men-support groups that start out trying to help men get out of toxic masculinity actually just perpetuate its problems because men then will see themselves as victims and feel legitimized in their actions. Patriarchal violence has the idea at its core that men are the only subjects while all others are mere objects. It is really hard to fundamentally challenge this indoctrinated view in men who instinctively see women as inherently inferior from men. If empathizing is your only strategy, this will fail to challenge this underlying imbalance.
Anyways, the article does a bad job in any of this and that’s why I didn’t get why it was posted here in the first place. I have to go now, may expand on this further later.