Infidelity Is a Consent Issue

When I did advocacy, “coercive control” didn’t really exist as a concept in human victimology but it sort of did in primatology– Richard Wrangham’s studies in Gombe of ape violence in service of sexual control.

Wrangham’s argument is that males will target particular females for assault or intimidation in a way that almost shows planning because of the way this instills “now and later” control of victims. This is how males could preemptively squeeze a lot of future compliance out of only one or a few violent displays towards females– get a lot of bang for their buck in other words. Wrangham talks about the overlap between human domestic violence and preemptive ape violence in an interview starting at around 3:05: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj5QAIjDulQ:

The “now and later” theory was later mirrored in Evan Stark’s work on coercive control. One memorable vignette from his book by that name describes how a woman was pitching a winning game for her office softball team when her husband walked onto the field to offer her a sweater. From that moment on, the woman seemed to fall apart and could only lob wild pitches. This is because the “sweater” had a specific meaning: whenever her husband would violently batter her, he’d insist she wear a sweater to cover up the bruises on her arms. Apparently he was enraged by the positive attention she was getting during the game and the sweater was a warning of what was to come once they got home. Of course onlookers would not understand this so it just seemed she fell apart for no reason or “overreacted” to a mere sweater.

Years before Stark coined and defined coercive control and campaigned to criminalize it, we somehow limped along promoting emotional support and consensus between survivors using a grab bag of data and theories and ideas. Like when survivors would describe similar dynamics to the one you did– where they felt somehow complicit or “masochistic” for sometimes offering sex or not objecting to it even in the face of abuse and betrayal, we’d talk about Wrangham’s “protracted low maintenance rape” theories.

That usually caused a big “Aha!” for a lot of people. One survivor who later became a kickass advocate in Alaska absolutely refused to be ashamed about it and was very frank in explaining why “volunteering” made sense for her in terms of sheer survival. For one, victims are frog-boiled over time to understand that either refusing sex or not being “game” will unleash all sorts of punishments– either in the immediate moment or at some seemingly unrelated later time. And because if a woman isn’t “willing” and isn’t “into it,” sex can cause all sorts of internal damage– from bruising and contusions to life-threatening, fertility-killing uterine prolapse, etc. So the solution is for the subconscious to make victims “into it.”

Except the woman from Alaska was no longer “subconscious” about it and had developed the “double mindedness” of many long term captives. She was even funny about it. That idea really caught fire among other survivors and people even became giddy as the burden of false onus melted away.

The way you know that social science is mired in the dark ages due to gender politics is when victims themselves with no scientific training cobble together astounding theories that won’t be “discovered” by science for decades. We ended up realizing that basic avoidance of sexual injury from involuntary sex is probably one of the reasons Stockholm syndrome evolved in our ape ancestors and continued through human evolution.

These days, Dr. Emma Katz’s work seems to be a continuation of evolutionary research whether because it advanced in a direct line or because truly valid theories are like unkillable weeds and will grow through concrete. If you don’t have a subscription, here’s a cut and paste from one of her articles on Substack:

Domestically Violent Men Describe the Benefits of Abusing Women and ChildrenThis is how abusers describe the advantages they get, in their own wordsDr Emma Katz
Jul 11, 2023

Victims and survivors of domestic violence and abuse – and anyone who cares about them or works with them – often wonder why the abuser did what they did.
They wonder if the abuser’s abuse was:

• (a) conscious and intentional, or
• (b) an accidental (and therefore perhaps excusable) ‘mistake’.

This blog explores this question and ultimately suggests the following…
Answer: (a)
What they were doing was not accidental; it was highly purposeful.
Here is the key point.
Men usually use violence and abuse against women and children because it is FUNCTIONAL for them to do so.
It serves many functions in their lives and it brings them many benefits, benefits which, as we will see in this post, they can name and describe in depth.
Bringing these strategies to light helps to raise awareness and understanding of the harms that these abusers cause. Please read more on coercive control on this site, and also follow me on my social media channels.
Below, I tell a story about what might happen when a well-meaning sympathizer tries to understand domestically-abusive men. The remainder of the post explores:

• … a court’s failed experiment based on a misconception that abusers lack communication skills
• … how abusers were benefiting from abuse — I divide these benefits into 3 ‘dimensions’ and itemize each dimension in turn
• … the link between abusers’ perceptions of their actions and our ‘ordinary’ assumptions about how relationships between men and women should work

Helping wife-beating men to ‘express their emotions’: a court’s failed experimentChuck Derry, an American anti-domestic violence campaigner based in Minnesota, ran court-mandated groups for men who beat their wives.
Derry was trying to help these abusive men to ‘express their emotions’, thinking that it would make them better husbands. However, this was a failed experiment.
What happened?
These abusive men revealed something eye-opening to Derry about their motivations for violence — and it completely changed Derry’s understanding of what needed to be done with these men.
The court’s idea at the time of Derry’s experience (Derry did this work from the early 1980s to the early 1990s) was to teach the men how to express their emotions and be more appropriately assertive. The court believed that if the men had better interpersonal skills, they could communicate more effectively with their wives — and their wife-beating would reduce.
Every week, Derry taught the men interpersonal skills and sent them home to practice on their wives.
The next week, the men came back to class to report on their progress.
Week after week, however, they told Derry it wasn’t working.

• They had tried to use their newly-improved interpersonal skills to get their wives to do exactly what they wanted them to do — to do housework in a certain way, to treat the children a certain way, not to see their friends and family members, and so forth.
• However, they told Derry, their attempts to communicate effectively with their wives in this way had failed: the wives had not complied fully enough, and so in the end they had still felt it necessary to beat them.

Derry soon realised that these men did not have a problem with communicating. What the men had a problem with was that they wanted extreme levels of control over their wives and families.
Derry wrote an article about his experiences. In that article, he explains how eye-opening this realization was for him:

I began then to slowly understand that I was teaching men multiple personal life skills and they were simply using those skills in attempts to control women even more effectively.

The batterers’ programme was therefore targeting the wrong issue — and, in doing so, putting women and children in danger. No amount of helping these men to communicate better in their ‘relationships’ was ever going to help. Instead, the issue was that these husbands were determined to subject their wives and children to very high levels of control, and were willing to beat them to reinforce their control.
The men admitted that they felt they benefited from the abuse, and from an abuser’s point of view they REALLY DID benefitOnce Derry had realised what was really going on, he thought it would be a good idea to get the men talking about why they were abusing their wives.
At this point, the sympathetic observer – the person who would answer (b) to the original question above and see domestic abuse as a mistake on the part of the perpetrator – might be hoping that once they got talking, the men would have started to re-think their wife-beating and begin to reform themselves into better husbands.
It did not end up that way.
When Derry first had a go at asking the men to talk about the benefits they got from wife-beating, they eventually warmed to the task and discussion flowed.
However, the results were unexpected and not very helpful to Derry.
The discussion did not lead to an exorcism of the inner demons motivating the men to behave badly. Instead, what happened was an avalanche of cold, hard logic.
This was a revelation to Derry. He saw that, while wife-beating was obviously wrong from a moral point of view, seen from the abuser’s purely functional point of view it had a lot of very real benefits:

The first time I did this exercise I looked at the blackboard and I thought, “Oh my God. Why would they give it up?”

Although the men did identify some potential reasons to give it up (e.g. ‘adult kids don’t invite you to their weddings’), the reasons to give it up were far outweighed by the reasons to carry on.
From an abuser’s point of view, they REALLY DID benefit from abusing women.
What did Chuck Derry’s men say were the benefits of abusing women? Emma’s 3D listAt the time, Derry noted down what the men said when they talked. In his article, he re-states it in a quite awesomely long list.
However, rather than just reproduce the list, I have decided to add a unique twist here in this blog by:

• Grouping the list of benefits that the men talked about into 9 POINTS
• Further grouping these nine points within 3 ‘DIMENSIONS’

Roughly speaking, these 3 dimensions are:

1. what the abusive man can do (to the woman)
2. what the abusive man can get (from abusing the woman)
3. how the abusive man can live better (by abusing the woman)

The 1st Dimension: What the Abusive Man Can Do To the WomanPoint 1. Gaslighting and manipulatingThe ability to manipulate women into blaming themselves

• Can convince her she’s screwin’ up
• Convince her she’s nuts
• Convince her she’s unattractive
• Convince her she’s to blame
• Convince her she’s the problem
• Get her to admit it’s her fault
• She’s to blame for the abuse
• She won’t get help because she’s confused by my lies

Point 2. IsolationThe ability to disconnect women from their external support-network, making them less able to resist

• Isolate her so her friends can’t confront me
• She won’t get help against me for past abuse because she has no friends to support her

Point 3. ServitudeThe ability to ‘own’ a woman as a slave-like figure

• She feels less worthy so defers to my needs and wants
• (I get) a robot babysitter, maid, sex, food
• She’s a nurse-maid
• She’s an object
• She comforts me
• Get sex
• Supper on the table
• She works for me
• I can dump on her
• Have someone to unload on
• Have someone to bitch at

The 2nd Dimension: What the Abusive Man Can Get From Abusing the WomanPoint 4. MoneyThe ability of the abusive man to gain financial power over and through women — to make women financially dependent and get money by exploiting them

• She’s scared and won’t go out and spend money
• Get the money
• If she works—get her money
• Get her to quit job so she can take care of house
• Decide how money is spent
• I’m breadwinner
• She has to depend on me if I break her stuff

Point 5. PowerThe ability to be the master of ‘truth’ and decide ‘reality’

• Power
• I’m king of the castle
• I get to know everything
• Feeling superior
• Proves your superiority
• Win all the arguments
• She will look up to me and accept my decisions without an argument
• Bragging rights
• Dictate reality
• Get to ‘rewrite history’
• Get to determine future

Point 6. ‘Respect’The ability to rule by fear, like a terrorist in the home

• Respect
• She tells me I’m great
• Ego booster
• She won’t argue
• Keeps relationship going—she’s too scared to leave
• If she’s late, she won’t be again
• Intimidation
• She’s scared & can’t confront me
• She won’t call police
• Get her to drop charges
• Get her to support me to her family, my family, cops, judge, SCIP, prosecutors, etc.

The 3rd Dimension: How the Abusive Man Can Live Better By Abusing the WomanPoint 7. Freedom from the Relationship as a ‘Partnership’The ability to live life self-centredly, discarding the woman’s and children’s needs

• Get your way: go out (drink, use drugs, spend family money, cheat)
• Use money for drugs
• Don’t have to change for her
• Buy the toys I want
• Take time for myself
• I don’t have to help out
• I don’t have to hang out with her or kids
• Invite friends over without her knowing = more work for her
• Don’t have to listen to her complaints for not letting her know stuff
• No compromise = more freedom
• Don’t have to get up, take out garbage, watch kids, do dishes, get up at night with kids, do laundry, change diapers, clean house, bring kids to appointments or activities, mop floors, clean refrigerator, etc.
• Answer to nobody
• Do what you want, when you want to
• Don’t have to listen to her wishes, complaints, anger, fears, etc.
• Make the rules then break them when you want
• Don’t have to talk to her
• Can make yourself scarce

Point 8. Control over the ‘Relationship’The ability to decide everything in the abusive ‘relationship’, i.e. on whose terms the abusive ‘relationship’ works

• Total control in decision making
• Decide where to go as a couple
• She’s accountable to me in terms of being somewhere on time: I decide
• Who to see
• What to wear
• Decide her social life—what she wears so you can keep your image by how she acts
• I can choose battles & what it will cost her

Point 9. Control over the ChildrenThe ability to gain total control over the children, shaping their identities and weaponizing them in the abusive ‘relationship’

• Control the children
• Determine what values kids have—who they play with, what school they go to or getting to ignore the process—dictating what they “need”, food, clothes, recreation, etc.
• Kids do what I say
• Keeps kids quiet about abuse
• Can use kids to “spy” on mom
• Kids won’t tell mom what I did
• Kids won’t disagree with me
• Tell kids they don’t have to listen to mom
• Kids on my side against her

A List of Functional Violence and Abuse: The list exposes our sympathizing attempts at ‘understanding’ abusive menThis list is very eye opening, isn’t it?
It certainly was for Derry. In his article he notes that:

After that first time asking the men about the benefits of their violence, I began to be much more effective in my work. It was astounding how dramatically the groups changed once I acknowledged and remembered that the violence was functional— and that was why they used it.

This basic truth that the violence was functional goes against a lot of common ‘understandings’ of domestic violence.
People often attempt to ‘understand’ the male abuser by ‘revealing’ that he is not intentionally abusive, but instead:

• is under the sway of a childhood trauma that haunts him
• has problems controlling his anger and temper
• is being provoked by a bad girlfriend or wife into ‘snapping’ or ‘seeing red’
• can be a good father despite being an abusive husband

None of these sympathizing (or himpathizing) excuses for domestic violence and abuse stands up in relation to what Derry’s abusive men described. As we see in this article, the abuse was not a ‘mistake’ from the abuser — it was a clear and strategic intention.
What the list suggests is how coercive control is at the heart of ‘ordinary’ abusive men’s behaviourIt is particularly interesting that these were men on a court-mandated batterers’ program.
They were not men who had been specifically identified as coercive control perpetrators. They were a standard group of violent men whose behaviour had led to the attention of law enforcement.
Yet, coercive control is absolutely at the heart of these men’s descriptions of their behaviour.
These men wanted:

• to have power, control and domination over their families;
• to dictate ‘reality’;
• to put their wives and children in highly weakened and vulnerable positions so that they could systematically exploit and manipulate them.

They wanted it all: they demanded their family live by their oppressive rules, yet they ensured that they had zero responsibilities or commitments to their family.
What this list tells YOU

• If you had to live by many rules while he did as he pleased: that was conscious and intentional on his part.
• If you were left feeling worthless, feeling very confused about what was happening, or feeling like it was all your fault: he consciously and intentionally made you feel like this to keep control over you.
• If you dropped charges or defended him to family and friends: he was setting you up to do that via his conscious and intentional manipulation. Yes, you were making choices, but they were not free choices. He had deliberately taken so much of your freedom away by that point.
• If your kids were harmed by his behaviour, that was conscious and intentional too. He saw the kids as targets just like he saw you as a target, and was very willing to harm them to maintain his dominance and power. That is a really tough thing for many people to think about, I know.

A Special Note on Control over the ChildrenA notable inclusion in the above list is point 9, control over the children. Being able to control, scare and manipulate their children was a specific feature of these abusive men’s descriptions of the benefits of being abusive.
These domestically abusive fathers valued being able to ‘dictate’ what their children did or did not ‘need’. They were not interested in finding out what their children actually needed. They wanted to impose their own self-serving ideas about what their children needed and turn these ideas into the reality that the family had to live by no matter the harm to the children.
These abusive fathers benefitted from being able to:

• scare the children into keeping quiet about their abuse
• prevent children from disclosing anything they might know or feel about the father’s abuse to mothers or to other adults
• weaponize the children to spy on the mother
• make the children disrespect the mother and to side with them over the mother

What Chuck Derry realised, therefore, was that these men had many incentives to keep abusing their wives and children, and very few disincentives. They simply weren’t going to stop abusing, given that the benefits of abusing were great and the negative consequences relatively small.
The lesson is this: If we want these men to stop, we need to make them pay a much higher price for their abuse.
Finally… the normality of the listWere these men deviant monsters? Were their attitudes very different from mainstream social attitudes? No.
In 2017, a multi-country, representative survey of 4,000 ordinary young men aged 18-30 found that not-dissimilar attitudes are widely held.
This 2017 survey with young men in the US, the UK and Mexico found that:

1. 46% of US men, 37% of UK men and 26% of men in Mexico agreed that: ‘if a guy has a girlfriend or wife, he deserves to know where she is all the time.’
2. 34% of US men, 33% of UK men and 21% of men in Mexico agreed that: ‘a man should always have the final say about decisions in his relationship or marriage.’
3. 23% of US men, 25% of UK men and 10% of men in Mexico agreed that: ‘men should use violence to get respect, if necessary.’
4. 22% of US men, 27% of UK men and 11% of men in Mexico agreed that: ‘a husband shouldn’t have to do household chores.’

So, both Derry’s batterers and these ordinary male survey respondents think that:

• men are entitled to have a high level of control and surveillance over women whom they happen to be in a ‘relationship’ with
• men should be in charge in a ‘relationship’ by default, and that men should have the final say about everything while the woman has the final say about nothing
• men should live in households without having to do any of the chores required for the maintenance of a household
• for men it is acceptable to use violence to get ‘respect’ in cases where the man thinks it is ‘necessary’ to do this

The men in the survey were young: not men from our parents’ or our grandparents’ generation — the new husbands and new fathers of the 2020s and beyond. What we are seeing here is an indication of a pretty strong overlap between the way battering men think and the way that a large percentage of the male population actually thinks (and some of the female population too, I’m sure).
Is it any wonder, then, that many people in our societies (including law-enforcers and people who write news stories):

• are unsure where ‘reasonable’ male demands in a relationship stop and abuse starts?
• have a great deal of difficulty in seeing men’s abuse of women and children as a serious crime that should carry heavy consequences?

One thing is for sure: societies will make little progress tackling men’s abuse of female partners’ and children while sexism still plays such a role in mainstream ideas about what men can expect and demand.