Jesus Cheater Philip Yancey Confesses 8-Year Affair

As I’ve mentioned a few times, when I was doing advocacy for DV survivors I never encountered a survivor who wasn’t cheated on in some way. It often took time for survivors to disclose this because merely mentioning cheating in the context of domestic violence might incite legal authorities and bystanders to accuse victims of fabricating false battery claims “out of jealousy.” I think it’s one of the reasons we don’t see more correlations in clinical literature– because survivors learn to shut up about it “or else.”

But the idea just won’t die and keeps cropping up. More recently, CL interviewed a veteran clinical specialist who reported the same thing– that all abusers cheat. Though again I think the idea was limited to anecdotal observations because there still isn’t yet statistical evidence to back this up (probably because studies like this are not getting institutionally sponsored). In any case, it seemed enough of a “thing” back in the day that we made armchair speculations that it might be the entire name of the game– that DV is fundamentally an attempt to hypocritically enforce one-sided monogamy.

From that perspective, the abuse that comes in tandem with infidelity makes perfect sense since the abuser, by being unfaithful, has withdrawn the main reciprocal agreements in modern relationships ensuring a partner’s sexual fidelity which thereby increases the risk the victim will leave for better (and more faithful) pastures. So it’s coldly logical that the behavior that typically accompanies cheating would be a psychic form of cutting victims’ hamstrings to prevent escape (similarly to how plantation owners would hobble slaves) through a systematic assault on victims’ sense of well being and self esteem in order to terrorize them with the possible dire consequences of escaping (given our species violent roots, withdrawal of empathy alone strongly hints at a capacity to destroy/kill) and/or convince victims that no one else would ever want them and they have no future beyond the current unfair relationship.

Obviously it’s less legally risky to go after victims’ self esteem rather than using demonstrations of violence or overt terrorist threat. Because of this, the late Evan Stark warns that, since the increased legal enforcement against domestic assault, more and more abusers are opting for “subviolent” forms of coercive control which might explain the emergence of manosphere cults like Andrew Tate’s RedPill movement which propose to coach men on ways to psychologically tear down mates via methods like “Dreading” in order to gain total control.

Clearly domestic abuse also hypocritically enforces all sorts of other labors and services and fluffs abusers’ sense of relative dominance and status in dah patriarchy (which, as an artificial hierarchy, the concept of “masculinity” needs constant artificial propping up in the sense that those in power don’t feel in power unless there’s an underclass to grovel and display relative powerlessness). But when searching for deeper motives in human aggression, I’m with the evolutionary scientists who argue that that most human aggression at least cuts its teeth on sexual dominance even if not all aggression appears to be directly aimed at sexual control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj5QAIjDulQ

Around 3:10:
Richard Wrangham: It may seem odd that males should think it a good idea to impose themselves sexually on someone with whom they have a relationship. But what they’re doing is intimidating someone in a relationship in which the relative power in the relationship has continuing significance for a long time. And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual. It’s to do with domestic relationships, it’s to do with the man getting his way all the way.

Lex Fridman: It’s power dynamics and sexual aggression is one of the tools to regain power, gain more power, that kind of thing.

Wrangham: Yeah, exactly, and in that respect, although it’s worth knowing that this wasn’t appreciated for some time, it’s emerging that, in a bunch of primates, you have somewhat similar or somewhat parallel types of sexual intimidation where males will target particular females even in a group where the norm is for females to mate with multiple males. But each male will target a particular female and the more he is aggressive towards her, the more she conforms to his wishes when he wants to mate. So a long term pattern of sexual intimidation. So there’s that aspect. And another aspect I would just note is that males get away with a lot compared to females in any kind of intersexual conflict. So the punishment… here’s one example of this… the punishment for a husband killing a wife has always been much less than for a wife killing a husband. And you see similar sorts of things in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on. I bring this up in the context of males intimidating their partners– be it wives or whoever– because it’s a reminder that it’s a patriarchal world that we have come from in which male alliances tend to support males and take advantage of the fact that they have political power at the expense of females. And I would say that that all goes back to what happened 3 to 400,000 year ago when the beta males took charge and started imposing their own norms on society as a whole and they’ve continued to do so. And we now look at ourselves and… you know ,Jordan Peterson says we are not a patriarchal society. Well, it’s true that the laws try and make it even handed nowadays between males and females. But obviously we are patriarchal de facto because society still in many ways supports men better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts.

Just like we advocates suspected back in the day, Wrangham argues that protracted rape is the ultimate goal of gendered abuse and coercive control– terrorizing victims sufficiently to ensure they’ll have sex on command far down the line, not necessarily right now. And terrorizing them in a way that, in the future, it would take much less effort to reboot the fear program and secure compliance. Though the science still hasn’t really applied this idea to domestic abuse yet, I’ve never seen anything that counters it.

Even the fact that some women engage in coercive control doesn’t necessarily contradict the patriarchal model for abuse, especially in light of studies finding that the women who mostly deeply internalize exaggerated patriarchal gender norms (dominant males and submissive females, etc.) are surprisingly also the women most likely to engage in deception or outright coercion to sexually control men.

I’m not quite sure how that works in the minds of women who invest in “toxic femininity” as researchers are calling it. It’s possible that, since they view men as always wanting sex, they also presume that no man really means “no” when he refuses sex. Or perhaps “toxic feminine” types assume that any man who isn’t sufficiently knuckle-dragging and sexually domineering doesn’t really “count” as a true man, therefore it’s justifiable to mistreat men like this much like a white woman in the old south– despite all the delicate, fluttery Southern Belle posturing– would feel justified in dominating and exploiting a male slave.

There’s also the fact that female chimpanzees may suddenly become lethally violent to humans– including male humans– (like “Peggy,” the female chimp who played Bonzo in Bedtime for Bonzo once tried to strangle Ronald Reagan to death) simply because they’re strong enough to win the encounter whereas they’d never survive a one-on-one fight with an adult male chimp. So there’s the overall argument that, regardless of gender, those who act the most like apes– including playing along with exaggerated gendered norms– will also act like apes in terms of greater aggression.

Last but not least it could also be that those most deeply invested in cartoon patriarchal gender norms are especially intolerant of sexual rejection by the opposite sex since both “toxic feminine” and “toxic masculine” types derive their sense of status from being sexually desirable. In turn this suggests that both are also more prone to cheat since that artificial sense of rank is also derived from the perceived rank (via exaggerated gender traits) of sexual partners. The latter could explain why many male FWs seem to choose cartoon “floozies” as affair partners and why she-cheaters tend to cheat with knuckle-dragging thugs. Each is seeking an exaggerated “Yin” or “Yang” to offset and accentuate their own gender status in a relative sense.

In the end who knows. And the deeper I wade into it, the more nauseated I feel. But in order to once and for all dispel the idea that cheating is not strongly correlated with abuse, I hope research goes further to untangle that noxious skein so we civilians don’t have to.