Chump Nation Is in the New York Times Today

Not a total hatchet job like the last reviews from the Times and New Yorker but I have the sense the author was constrained by editorial bias.

Determining the Times’ bias on this score is a simple matter of using Noam Chomsky’s “column inch” measure. For instance, compare the number of times the Times has plugged Esther Perel (https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=Esther+Perel) against any article or editorial which explores an association between cheating with coercive control (goose egg) or, for that matter, which even discusses coercive control (scant).

Anyway, the author writes “Many are hesitant to label cheating abuse for fear of diluting a term usually reserved for more direct forms of physical or emotional harm.”

At least this paragraph concludes with a link to CL’s recent call for “infidelity as abuse” narratives (Your Experience of Infidelity As Abuse) which encourages readers to check out the “horse’s mouth” perspective of survivors to counter the views of these mysterious “many.” But that’s also what bothers me about it.

For the moment, never mind how incredibly vague the statement is regarding what constitutes emotional harm or the fact that many of the behaviors commonly used to facilitate cheating precisely fit most definitions of emotional and psychological abuse, including those mentioned in a NY Times’ tweet intro to one of the scarce articles on coercive control from 2021 (“The term “coercive control” is used by some researchers to describe abuse that encompasses acts like creeping isolation, entrapment, denigration, financial restrictions and threats of emotional and physical harm that are used to strip victims of power.” https://x.com/nytimes/status/1352718977349394432?lang=gu). Also never mind that marital infidelity is factually one of the major drivers of new HIV infections around the world and how this and the standard financial abuse involved with infidelity are explicit examples of direct physical and emotional harm. Never mind that the enforcement of unilateral infidelity has been has been identified by social science researchers as a statistical driver in domestic violence and represents elevated risk (Testing the evolutionary hypotheses of marital conflict https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583221/“A husband’s infidelity is associated with a significantly greater likelihood of wife abuse in the past year controlling for other factors (table 5). Adjusted odds of wife abuse are over five times greater if a husband had an affair.”). Instead I just want to point out a common tactic used by news publications that are biased towards a particular position or view, which is to present the favored view as “expert” (often including quotes from said experts) and then feigning a balanced approach by sourcing the less favored view only to non-expert plebians (you know, addled little regular Joes with their “anecdotal” ravings) despite the fact that experts representing the less favored view exist, may have heavier certifications than experts representing the favored view and are either available for comment or left a ton of readily mineable quotes in their wakes.

This is one of the ways biased publications cast less favored views as “fringe”– pitting lofty experts against lowly plebes. It’s done pretty subtly here because the mysterious “many” who apparently fear diluting concepts of domestic abuse by including infidelity are never named or quoted. “Many” implies majority opinion and also automatically implies experts or at least veteran victims’ advocates because… this is the NY Times. Whether this is true or not, we have been led to assume Times’ reporters don’t simply cite their gym buddies, random cab drivers or anonymous commenters on social media but have access to expert opinion.

In a perfect world, a journalist would flesh out these “many” who apparently feel that including infidelity under the banner of domestic abuse “dilutes” the concept and then quote other experts who hold the opposing view. But I think in this case the “many” is just the Times’ usual echo chamber– Perel and other shills cashing in on the media’s wag-the-dog cheater apologism bandwagon.

It might even have been an expression of sympathy on the part of this reporter towards the “cheating as abuse” concept not to plug and give clicks to the naysayers. Or it may simply be that the “many” naysayers were just a bunch of random trolls in faux feminist drag who attacked Tracy and Sarah Manguso on The Cut by muddling “sex positivity” with infidelity, dismissing the “cheating as abuse” concept as the whinings of sheltered, sex-neggy “white, middle-class elitists” and erecting a kind of moldy “pain Olympics” argument from the dark ages of domestic abuse policy that presenting psychological torture and coercion as abuse detracts from attention to overtly violent forms.

It generally strikes me that the Times seems to believe that the movement to legislate against coercive control and give attention to subviolent forms of domestic abuse died along with its most prominent veteran spearhead, forensic psychologist Evan Stark so that coercive controllers around the world can all breath a sigh of relief that the clock may shift back fifty years to a time when domestic abuse was viewed as only that which involved fists and tire irons and those pesky criminal laws in the UK may be overturned. So I’m going to end this with a palate cleanser excerpt from a paper by the late, great Stark:

https://www.ncdsv.org/uploads/1/4/2/2/142238266/fipvq_dangers-of-dangerousness-assessment_11-20-2013.pdf

There is another paradoxical outcome of focusing on severe and fatal
violence that has been less often noticed, that the declines in these forms of
abuse have been matched or even surpassed by sharp increases in the inci-
dence of so-called “minor” violence against women: slaps, punches, kicks,
and other abusive assaults that rarely cause injury. The substitution of minor
for severe violence would be a welcome change were it not for the fact that
the rise in low-level violence signals the replacement of traditional forms of
domestic violence with coercive control, the most devastating form of part-
ner abuse. Coercive control is a strategic course of oppressive conduct that is
typically characterized by frequent, but low-level physical abuse and sexual
coercion in combination with tactics to intimidate, degrade, isolate, and con-
trol victims. As we have come to appreciate what victimized women meant
when they insisted “violence wasn’t the worst part,” it has become clear that
an estimated 60% to 80% of those who seek outside assistance are experiencing this pattern of abuse rather than the types of physical and psychological
abuse to which most interventions respond. Injury, sexual violence, and
fatality remain important consequences of coercive control. But they typically
play a secondary role in eliciting its major consequences, hostage-like levels
of fear combined with a state of entrapment and subordination that is al-
most always grounded in material exploitation, deprivation, and regulation,
i.e., “control.” In coercive control, a victim’s vulnerability to severe or fatal
violence has less to do with the level of violence used than her incapacity to
effectively resist or escape abuse due to structural dependence, isolation, and
control. As importantly, in as many as one case of coercive control in four,
paralyzing fear, subjugation, and dependence, are elicited with little or no
physical abuse.
If the emphasis on severe violence has afforded limited protection to
abused women, it may also be responsible, at least in part, for the sharp rise
and even the normalization of low-level violence in abusive relationships.
This possibility was anticipated by British feminist Francis Power Cobbe over
a century ago. Cobbe (1878) argued that if laws targeted only the most severe
violence against women, they would raise the level of violence considered
“acceptable,” causing “minor” acts of violence to rise.12 This appears to be exactly what has happened. Indeed, men arrested but not sanctioned for multiple
acts of abusive violence commonly report that abuse has no consequences.

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