Showing posts with label victim blaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label victim blaming. Show all posts

9 Feb 2023

Some Do the Deed With Many Tears and Some Without a Sigh: On Matricide

John Singer Sargent: Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1921):
This is what happens when you kill your mum ...
 
 
I. 
 
A recent piece by Yvonne Roberts in The Guardian on the subject of child to parent violence and abuse (CPVA), detailed the dramatic rise in the number of (often elderly) women murdered by their sons since 2016 [1]
 
Rarely spoken about and often misunderstood, matricide, it seems, is the crime du jour ...
 
 
II.
 
Now, whilst I'm no expert in this area and have only the vaguest familarity with the growing body of research, I have been caring full-time for my mother - who is in her 90s and has Alzheimer's - for the past seven years and this gives me, I would argue, a degree of insight into the subject based upon actual experience.      
 
The fact that I can comment upon the subject from a philosophical perspective informed by a reading of Nietzsche, also allows me to bring something different to the discussion - although not necessarily something that people might want to hear ...


III.

For example, I think that rather than view matricide as a gendered crime to be explained in terms of toxic masculinity, we might better understand it as often an ironic consequence of care; this is why Nietzsche warns against pity and describes it as more harmful than any vice. 
 
The fact is, being in the presence of the old, the weak, the sick, the demented and severley disabled for a prolonged period of time when one is still relatively young, healthy and strong, is not advisable; one eventually becomes infected with their misery and is driven towards atrocity. 
 
If this sounds like victim blaming [2], that's because, in some sense, that's precisely what it is. I know I've behaved monstrously towards my own mother at times. But I also know that she (inadvertently) gave birth to this monstrous me, just as she gave birth to a loving son. 
 
Nietzsche says that the only healthy response to the wretched of the earth is nausea (not pity). For nausea is a protective instinct; one that causes us to fear and move away from that which (and those whom) sicken us. Nausea keeps us safe and, also, it protects the one who repulses from our contempt and anger, by ensuring a safe distance between us and them.      
 
 
IV.
 
It has been suggested that one of the reasons that so many elderly women are being abused and killed by their sons is because there's a chronic lack of social care and a shortage of affordable housing; the latter end up living at home and having to provide care for the former, 24/7. 
 
Unable to go anywhere, do anything, see anyone - and unable even to think or breathe at times - is it any wonder violent - even murderous - thoughts arise?
 
Like Paul Morel, I can vouch for the sense of helplessness and horror that one feels when obliged to watch over one's mother, slowly dying (and choking) on a bed [3]. It's not easy, nor is it in any sense edifying; it is, rather, demoralising and distressing and it very often leads to the secret wish that the burden of providing palliative care is lifted sooner rather than later. 
 
Ultimately, says Nietzsche, the first principle of his charity is allowing the terminally sick to die - and assisting them in this [4]. Euthanasia, however, is illegal in the UK and only a very few will have the courage to actually do what needs to be done, thereby risking not only pursuit by the Furies (i.e., a lifetime of grief and guilt), but criminal prosecution for murder.
 
And so, most do nothing - until the crack-up - and then a very small number commit mad and terrible deeds; such as burning the bloody house down with their grey-haired mother locked inside, or frenziedly stabbing the latter over a hundred times with a kitchen knife. 
 
Not that I imagine Nietzsche approving of such actions ... 
 
Indeed, for Nietzsche the only human beings who are of any concern to him are those who manage to endure in the face of terrible hardship and suffering; individuals who learn to overcome perhaps even their own nausea and remain stoical in the face of adversity; individuals whose kindness and compassion is the mark of their own self-conquest.  
 
Ultimately, Nietzsche's is a tragic philosophy - but not a murderous one. And it is because Zarathustra deems his followers capable of committing every evil - including matricide - that he most demands goodness from them ... [5]
 
 
Notes 
 
[1] Yvonne Roberts, '"You had better be careful in your bed tonight": shock rise in women killed by their sons', The Guardian (15 Jan 2023): click here.

[2] Victim blaming is the act of holding the victim of a crime or misdeed either entirely or partially responsible for the harm that befell them. Adorno regarded it as characteristic of the fascist mindset, but I tend to agree with Roy Baumeister that blaming the victim is not necessarily always fallacious and that the fantasy of the wholly innocent victim and entirely malicious evil-doer lacks moral complexity. 
      See Baumeister's Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, (St. Martin's Press, 2000).
 
[3] Paul Morel is the protagonist of D. H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers (1913). His mother is dying of cancer and in great pain. So Paul is overly generous with the amount of morphine he puts in her milk one evening. I have written about this in a post entitled 'Sons and Killers' (17 Sept 2016): click here.
      See also the related post - 'In Praise of Euthanasia as a Practice of Joy before Death' (16 Sept 2016): click here
 
[4] See Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, §2. 
 
[5] See the section entitled 'On Those Who Are Sublime' in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche writes: 
 
"When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible - such descent I call beauty.
      And there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest. 
      Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. 
      Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.
      You shall strive after the virtue of the column: it grows more and more beautiful and gentle, but internally harder and more enduring, as it ascends."
 
This is one of the loveliest - and most crucial - passages in Nietzsche's work, particularly for those who are concerned with his ethical philosophy. 
      I am quoting from Kaufmann's translation of Zarathustra, which can be found in The Portable Nietzsche, (Penguin Books, 1976).
 
 

5 Dec 2019

On Blaming the Victim

Cain and Abel as depicted in the  
Speculum Humanae Salvationis (c. 1360)


Whilst I'm aware of the dangers of victim blaming and of how it can be used to justify, mitigate, or excuse certain forms of discriminatory or criminal behaviour often perpetrated by those who are in a position of power or privilege, I'm afraid I do subscribe to ideas of contributory negligence and unconscious provocation and do think that the victim of a crime is always, in some sense and to some degree, complicit or partially responsible for what happens to them - even when it's a loved one who has just had her i-Phone and purse stolen from her handbag by some charming urban youth from the idyllic borough of Haringey ...

Indeed, I even find the following passage from Women in Love persuasive, if troubling in what it logically entails: 

"'No man,' said Birkin, 'cuts another man's throat unless he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a complete truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee. And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.'" [33]

Gerald dismisses this as pure nonsense - as, I suspect, would the majority of readers keen to secure a clear distinction between guilt and innocence and who regard all victims from Abel onwards - with the exception perhaps of many rape victims and those who lead unconventional or high risk lifestyles - as beyond reproach (whilst, on the other hand, considering the ideal perpetrator of a crime as an entirely unsympathetic character, lacking in virtue, perhaps even a little monstrous or inhuman, carrying as they do the mark of Cain).

There are also - as indicated - political and philosophical reasons for rejecting what Birkin says here. Adorno, for example, identified the phenomenon of victim blaming as one of the most sinister features of the fascist mindset; i.e., the so-called authoritarian personality that holds any sign of weakness as contemptible. Ask any Nazi even now who's to blame for Auschwitz and they'll answer without hesitation: the Jews (The Jews made us racist! The Jews were asking for it!)


See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen ad Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 33. 

See also: T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality, (Harper and Bros., 1950). 


27 Nov 2018

You Can Take the Girl Out of Sodom ... (Notes on the Story of Lot and His Daughters)

Jan Matsys: Lot and His Daughters (1565)


I.

I've said it before and I'll undoubtedly have opportunity to say it again: the Bible is the world's most transgressive work of literature; a mytho-historical novel that contains page after page of terrible events and wtf incidents.

And there are none more shocking than the story of Lot and his daughters ...


II.

Having escaped the destruction of their hometown of Sodom and witnessed their mother turned into a human condiment, the two young women and their elderly father find themselves seeking refuge in a mountain cave.

Here, according to the account in Genesis [19:30-38], they ply their old man with wine and then engage in drunken sex with him over consecutive nights. This is done not only without his consent, but, apparently, without even his knowledge or memory of what occurred. In this manner, each girl conceives a male child as hoped, thereby illicitly preserving patrilineality or their father's seed.       

Now, I'm no prude - but, really, this is a bit much, isn't it?


III.

Having said that, there is something perversely pleasing about the daughters initiating and perpetrating the incestuous rape of their father, after he previously offered them as sexual playthings to the Sodomites if the latter would but agree to leave his angelic guests unmolested. For it hints at the idea of what Baudrillard terms the revenge of the object

However, some commentators prefer to turn the biblical account on its head and insist that women can only ever be victims of patriarchal power. Thus, they argue that it was more likely that Lot raped his daughters and that the narrative we are given in Genesis is a perversion first and foremost of the truth concerning incest and sexual abuse.

Such a cover-up - if that's what it is - may have been done in order to exonerate Lot and preserve the family honour. For whilst he may have been something of a black sheep, Lot was still the nephew of Abraham, father of the Covenant and progenitor of the nation of Israel. It could well be that the familiar practice of victim-blaming and shifting responsibility for sexual abuse away from the male perpetrator is first given religious sanction in this tale.  


Notes 

Readers interested in the idea that it was Lot who raped his daughters rather than vice versa, might like to see the following article by Ilan Kutz: 'Revisiting the lot of the first incestuous family: the biblical origins of shifting the blame on to female family members', in The BMJ, 331 (7531), pp. 1507-1508, (24 Dec 2005). Click here to read online. 

For a sister post to this one on strange flesh and sodomy, please click here.