the boy in the box chapter two
Hey All,
Here is the second chapter of the Boy in the Box. I’ll send some of the chapters to all subscribers, and some only to paid subscribers
I love chapter one. and I think this chapter is almost as strong.
What I’m trying to do with this to start to move the analysis from the personal into the larger social.
I think my favorite bit of this chapter is the start of it.
Thank you,
Derrick
Chapter 2
Saying No
More commonly, repeated abuse is not actively sought but rather is passively
experienced as a dreaded but unavoidable fate and is accepted as the inevitable
price of relationship. Many survivors have such profound deficiencies in self-protection that they can barely imagine themselves in a position of agency or choice. The idea of saying no to the emotional demands of a parent, spouse, lover or authority figure may be practically inconceivable. Thus, it is not uncommon to find adult survivors who continue to minister to the needs of those who once abused them and who continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or limits. Adult survivors may nurse their abusers in illness, defend them in adversity, and even, in extreme cases, continue to submit to their sexual demands.
Judith Lewis Herman[1]
In my early twenties—long before I’d read any feminist analysis—I already knew the first commandment rape culture imprints on the bodies of its victims: “Thou shalt never say no, no matter how much you hate what is asked of you. Thou shalt never deny anyone access to you.”
As a consequence, I was startlingly aware of how grateful I was to be a man, not so much because of the material, social, and psychological privileges this culture grants to men, although I was aware of them as well (and I was at the time getting a degree from a prestigious engineering school that was 83 percent male and where students expected some of the highest salaries in the world on graduation, so of course I’m aware of male privilege); but primarily because had I been a woman I would undoubtedly have acquiesced as a lot of men I didn’t even like fucked me. I was fortunate in that women were slightly less sexually aggressive, slightly more likely to accept whatever whispered no I might be able to muster.
Yet still I learned the dance known so well by so many women, of responding to propositions by pretending not to hear them, by pretending to misunderstand them, by changing the subject.
And when that didn’t work?
I’ve never forgotten what a dear woman friend of mine said of her first sexual experience, “I told him no, and then told him no, and then told him no, but I guess I didn’t say it loud enough.”
I don’t know how she survived it. I don’t know how anyone does.
My trained inability to say no makes a kind-of-interesting case study on at least one of the effects of ongoing childhood sexual abuse, almost like an experiment where we reduce the number of variables as much as possible, to try to see how one specific cause might lead to one specific effect (recognizing that life is never that simple). For the most part I was socialized like many males, in that I was consistently praised for my intelligence, athleticism, ability to assume leadership positions. My worth was never measured, as it is for so many girls and then women, by how cute I was. The only childhood comment about my looks I remember receiving from a stranger happened a few times when I was six or seven, when women in stores commented that my long eyelashes were wasted on a boy.
To put it bluntly, my worth was never measured, as it is for so many girls and then women, by whether or not someone would want to fuck me.
Yet still I’d been inculcated into not being able to say no.
To this day, it’s agonizing for me to say no, including on things that have nothing to do with sex. It infiltrates every aspect of my life. A voice inside tells me I cannot deny people access to me, no matter how little I receive from the interaction, no matter how much I want to be left alone. It is stronger, though, than a voice. It’s a trained response. It’s a compulsion. It sometimes feels as though it’s a part of who I am, or at least whom I’ve become.
All of this is one reason (among many, including the fact that I love it here) I live in a forest: it’s easier to avoid socializing than it is to have to say no.
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If you were attempting to design perfect slaves, you’d want them to seemingly of their own volition never tell you no, want them to respond and conform to your wishes, want them to never deny you access.
This is true for slaves in general.
And it’s certainly true for sex slaves.
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Lundy Bancroft, in his book Why Does He Do That: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, points out the falsity of the notion that abusers simply “lose their temper” and lash out. If they really lost control, he says, they would lose control. They’d beat up bosses, cops, people bigger and meaner than they are: people from whom there would be negative consequences. Bancroft asks, when an abuser “loses control” and destroys someone’s property, does he destroy his own stereo system, or yours? The real questions, Bancroft insists, are always, who gains tangible benefits from his actions, and, what are the net effects of his outbursts?
We need to ask those same questions about rape. Rape is a profoundly political act. It’s simply not true that some men “lose control.” If it were, they’d attempt to rape their bosses, and cops, and people larger than they who have four loyal and mean friends present. If they really “lost control” they’d rape regardless of consequence to themselves.
Men don’t rape because women wear short skirts: this is a variant of the “losing control” argument, but worse, in that it blames the victim for the rapist’s “loss of control.”
Men don’t rape to attain sexual release, which is handily available through masturbation.
The questions to ask about rape are the questions Bancroft asks about battering: Who gains tangible benefits? What are the net effects of the rapes?
This is true not only personally, but especially socially.
#
For several days I was stuck trying to write the phrase that eventually became “had I been a woman I would undoubtedly have acquiesced as a lot of men I didn’t even like fucked me.” At first I wrote, “I would have fucked,” but that felt too active. Then I thought, “I would have allowed myself to be fucked.” But “allowed” is still too active.
For much of my life my response to unwelcome situations—from the mildly annoying to the most violating and abusive—has been to become a mule. For me to remain unmoving, unmovable, unreadable, and unreachable, giving no indication of my own will and no indication of following any other’s.
Oftentimes for me to simply remain unmoving, that is, to not move away, is sufficient to allow others to think I’m eager. Or maybe sometimes acquiescence is all they want.
And when acquiescence hasn’t sufficed—when more has been required of me—my body has sometimes been able to put on a remarkable simulation of enthusiasm that occasionally almost reaches my eyes.
In those cases the mule still remains, yet is inside, hidden, standing still. It could be beaten to death but could never be made to move.
#
Another version of that phrase was, “I was glad I was a man because that means I wasn’t a primary target of patriarchy, or of men, or of male violence.”
The problem with that phrasing is that while in some ways it’s of course true, there are other ways in which it’s not. Oh, sure, women are the main recipients of sex-based violence and abuse. They’re overwhelmingly the victims and not perpetrators of rape; a woman is raped in the U.S. every two minutes. They’re also overwhelmingly the victims of abuse; a woman is beaten in the U.S. every nine seconds; around the world, each year men kill more women in domestic violence than soldiers kill people in all current wars combined. A war is being waged on women, a war that is global and so normalized it’s often barely visible.
That said, a lot of men are beaten or murdered by men, too. Men murder more men than they murder women
And primary not only means ‘of chief importance; principle; or greatest in volume or number or percentage.” It can also mean “earliest in time or development.” And I don’t think women are the first victims. That must be men, because patriarchy requires an army. It requires perpetrators. And these perpetrators must be trained.[2]
#
If you’re reading this book, you probably know that PTSD stands for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. If someone is traumatized, that person might later exhibit predictable responses especially to circumstances resembling the original trauma. For example, in 1985, my mother and I were in a terrible car wreck. It was a rainy night, at the bottom of the canyon of the Salmon River in Idaho. A cliff rose to the right of the road; the Salmon River lay below to the left. I was driving 55. I happened to glance in my rear-view mirror, then look back down just in time to see what seemed like a black tarp across the highway. I didn’t have time to hit the brakes before the car hit an overturned semi-load of plywood. I walked away from the accident with a chipped tooth and a fat lip. My mom shattered her arm, broke several ribs, suffered a hangman’s break, and severe damage to the nerves controlling her eyes. The point is that after that, until her death more than thirty years later, riding through canyons at night, especially in the rain, scared her. Also, certain loud noises took her back to the accident. If I went somewhere requiring I drive through a canyon or heavy rain, my mom wanted me to call her when I made it through.
Likewise I have symptoms from my childhood (far beyond the inability to say no) that in some cases have lasted for decades. Until my mid-thirties when I wrote A Language Older Than Words (telling the story of the abuse helped make many of the symptoms recede or disappear: the story had been told and no longer needed to be enacted) I’d check my closets and under my bed every night, then put a clothes hamper in front of the door so if anyone tried to enter, I wouldn’t be caught unawares. Still I would sleep fitfully at best, mainly just skimming the surface, then jerking awake, terrified, a dozen or more times every night.
One time a friend was crashing on my couch. She evidently wanted more than a friendship, because she came into my room unbeckoned. I awoke instantly, slammed on the light, and saw my friend. Her image transmogrified quickly to that of my father, and then for some reason to that of an evil dwarf, before becoming her once again. And then. . . . And then nothing. I became essentially catatonic, frozen in a state of, to use trauma expert Judith Herman’s perfect description of that feeling so familiar to so many survivors of abuse, “seething watchfulness.” The woman sat on the edge of my bed, and stroked my face. I couldn’t move, not even my eyes. She stayed for what seemed forever, then stood and left the room. In retrospect, this was one of those times I was grateful I was a man. It’s possible that in an analogous situation many men would have put themselves into my bed, and then put themselves into me.
Years ago, I interviewed Judith Herman, who wrote the profound and important book Trauma and Recovery. I asked her about the difference between trauma and captivity. She responded, “Trauma can emerge from a single event like a fire, earthquake, or auto accident, where you’re in the situation, you survive it, and then you get on with your life. You may continue to relive it in fantasy, but it’s not happening over and over. Even if you live in an earthquake or flood zone you still have a choice as to whether to rebuild or move away.
“Based on my work with domestic abuse survivors, as well as victims of political terror, I began to ask, what happens when a person is exposed not to a single terrifying incident, but rather to prolonged, repeated trauma? I came to understand the similarities between concentration or slave labor camps or torture situations on the one hand, and on the other hand, the situation of domestic or sexual violence, where the perpetrator may beat or sexually abuse his wife or children for years on end. We see this also in the sex trade, where there’s a criminally organized traffic in women and kids, and we sometimes see this sort of captivity in some religious cults, where people are not free to leave.
“In situations where the trauma happens over and over, and where it is imposed by human design (as opposed to the effects of weather, or some other nonhuman force), one sees a series of personality changes in addition to simple PTSD.
“People begin to lose their identity, their self-respect. They begin to lose their autonomy and independence.
“Because people in captivity are most often isolated from other relationships—that this is so in normal captivity is obvious and intentional, but it is overwhelmingly the case in domestic violence as well, as perpetrators often demand their victims increasingly cut all other social ties—they are forced to depend for basic survival on the very person who is abusing them. This creates a complicated bond between the two, and it skews the victim’s perception of the nature of human relationships. The situation is even worse for children raised in these circumstances, because their personality is formed in the context of an exploitative relationship, in which the overarching principles are those of coercion and control, of dominance and subordination.”
Nearly all of us are in some way dependent “for basic survival” on the industrial capitalist system, a system that abuses us and is killing the planet. This creates a complex bond between us and the system, and skews our perception of relationships in general, and also our perception of what relationships between individuals and society can be within other, non-abusive societies.
Herman continued, “Whether we are talking about adults or children, it often happens that a kind of sadistic corruption enters into the captive’s emotional life. People lose their sense of faith in themselves, in other people. They come to believe or view all relationships as coercive, and come to feel that the strong rule, the strong do as they please, that the world is divided into victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers. They believe that all human relations are contaminated and corrupted, that sadism is the principle that rules all relationships.”
I said, “Might makes right. Social Darwinism. The selfish gene theory. You’ve just described the principles that undergird our political and economic systems.” I would add social and epistemological systems. From the most intimate to the most global scales, trauma deforms and destroys relationships and the ability to relate. Trauma and responses to trauma form the foundation of this culture. They are this culture.
She continued, “And there are other losses involved. A loss of basic trust. A loss of feeling of mutuality of relatedness. In its stead is emplaced a contempt for self and others. If you’ve been punished for showing autonomy, initiative, or independence, after a while you’re not going to show them. In the aftermath of this kind of brutalization, victims have a great deal of difficulty taking responsibility for their lives. Often, people who try to help get frustrated because we don’t understand why the victims seem so passive, seem so unable to extricate themselves or to advocate on their own behalf. They seem to behave as though they’re still under the perpetrator’s control, even though we think they’re now free. But in some ways the perpetrator has been internalized.
“Captivity also creates disturbances in intimacy, because if you view the world as a place where everyone is either a victim, a perpetrator, an indifferent or helpless bystander, or a rescuer, there’s no room for relationships of mutuality, for cooperation, for responsible choices. There’s no room to follow agreements through to everyone’s mutual satisfaction. The whole range of cooperative relational skills, and all the emotional fulfillment that goes with them, is lost. And that’s a great deal to lose.”[3]
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She calls this Complex PTSD.
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Perpetrators and victims alike must be trained to believe that relationships are hierarchical, and that no matter where you are on the hierarchy, shit flows down. A cop gets to beat on civilians. The cop’s supervisor gets to beat on him. The mayor gets to beat on him. The governor gets to beat on her. The president gets to beat on him. God gets to beat on all of us. Meanwhile the civilian gets to beat on his girlfriend. Both of them get to beat on their kids. And everybody gets to beat on nonhumans.
Future perpetrators must be trained to perceive others as enemies to be defeated; inferiors to be exploited; all-powerful controllers whose victimization of the perpetrators must be stopped or punished; or potential threats to be neutralized. Or preferably all four at the same time.
The training doesn’t have to be so overt as a fist to the face. It doesn’t have to be so obvious as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman abusing recruits in Full Metal Jacket. Or even as clear as the high school football coach in a documentary I just saw, who shouted at his athletes, “The way to win is by destroying your enemy’s will.” Really? I used to be a high jump coach, and had one of my athletes me asked how to win, I would have drily responded, “By jumping higher than everyone else.”
It’s not so important how this training takes place; merely that one be trained into one or more of the proper roles—perpetrator, victim, bystander, rescuer—by which is really meant that one be broken as a fully relational being, and reformed as one who is in some ways disconnected from others and from one’s embodied self.
If you’re dependent for your life upon someone who doesn’t have your best interests at heart, it can make sense to attempt to control what you can. Of course, those raised in captivity often don’t perceive those who raised them as not having had their best interests at heart. Because a child is completely dependent upon the adults in that child’s life, and because parents are by definition and by evolution supposed to have the interests of their children at heart, it is from the child’s perspective literally unthinkable for the parent to be inflicting pain and torment upon the child for no good reason. It’s too terrifying and outlandish to contemplate. It’s unbearable enough that you’re being beaten or raped: how much more unbearable is it to realize that they’re doing this for reasons internal to themselves, for no reasons having to do with you, which means for no reasons you can reasonably affect? No matter how well you wash the dishes, no matter how quiet you are, no matter how much you barricade your door, you’re not in control. The best you can hope is that you’re able to go away before the mule starts to take the pounding.
Far better to pretend you have some control. Far better to pretend that if you’re perfect, the Dreadful will not happen to you. Again.
Add to this that children often are not stupid until made so by this abuse, and you can see why children so quickly and so often end up identifying more closely with the feelings and desires of the perpetrator than they do with their own: after all, my life didn’t depend on anyone making me happy; it depended on someone making my father (some mythical version of) happy.
Perhaps, I thought, I could save myself, if only I could perfectly read and respond to his every wish. Thus I and everyone in the family attended to his every feeling, every slight change of mood. We became proficient at knowing what he wanted before he knew what he wanted. And giving it to him. We became more closely identified with what he wanted than with what we needed.
This is how it must be. This creation of slaves, who identify more with perpetrators than with themselves or their fellow victims, is a central purpose of abuse.
#
Few perpetrators perceive themselves as perpetrators. Everyone has a justification for his or her behavior. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton came up with a phrase to describe this on the largest possible scale. He stated that before any group can commit any mass atrocity, they must have a “claim to virtue,” that is, they must convince themselves and others they’re not in fact committing an atrocity, but rather doing something virtuous. Thus from their own perspective, Nazis weren’t committing mass murder and genocide, but rather “purifying the Aryan race.” They didn’t perceive themselves as waging aggressive war, but gaining Lebensraum. American settlers weren’t committing land theft and genocide, but rather fulfilling their “Manifest Destiny.” Capitalists don’t perceive themselves as killing the planet, but rather as “developing natural resources.”
The same can be said on a personal level. I know that I myself have never once been a jerk. By which I mean that when I have objectively been a jerk, I’ve had it fully rationalized. As most of us do most of the time.
The point is that perpetrators nearly always have their behavior fully rationalized. And the real point is that victims also generally have the perpetrators’ behavior fully rationalized.
So, of course perpetrators don’t generally perceive themselves as trying to control, or even necessarily as being themselves fearful. “Me fearful? I eat fear for lunch. And you think I’m controlling you? I do nothing but lift you up. Everything you have is because of me. You want to see some control? I’ll show you some fucking control.”
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It’s usually more subtle than that.
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I made up something I call The Abuse Game. It’s a horrible but instructive game making clear a pattern often manifested by abusers.. Person A makes either a neutral or complimentary statement to Person B. Person B responds by intentionally finding something in the statement about which to feel insulted, then using that perceived insult to pick a fight.
That’s it. That’s the whole rotten game. It changed forever how I perceive abusers’ behavior.
Person A: You look nice today.
B: Oh, today I look nice? As opposed to every other day, when you think I look like shit? What the fuck is wrong with you that you have to insult me like this?
Let’s try again.
Person A: You’re really smart.
B: Smart? As in an egghead? As in emotionally cold? As in not relational? What the fuck is wrong with you that you have to insult me like this?
I once challenged a friend to come up with a statement to which I couldn’t model an abusive response. She said, “Okay, you’re perfect.”
I was stumped. How do I find an insult or something to pick a fight about in that? Finally a response hit me: “Why do you always put me on a pedestal? Do you realize how much pressure you’re putting on me? What the fuck is wrong with you that you always do this to me?”
Since this was a game, and not real, we both laughed and laughed and laughed.
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What happens to people who are always told they’re wrong? What happens to their ability to take initiative? What happens to their joy? What happens to their confidence?
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I just read an account by someone who supervised domestic violence programs at an agency where she worked. One of those programs was an intervention program for batterers. “One night after the group the facilitator (who was my boss) called me and said he thought I might be interested in the night’s topic. He started by asking the group if, when they got together with a new partner, they started abusing her right away, of if they waited a while. The vote was unanimous: Oh no, if you start being abusive right away, she’ll leave you! You have to get a hook in first, cut off her avenues of escape, get her locked down tight enough that she can’t get away first, before you can start. So then he asked them what was the optimum amount of time to wait. That is when the discussion ensued . . . everyone had a different opinion. So he gave them a task, to come to a unanimous consensus: what is the optimum amount of time to wait after starting to date a new partner before you can start abusing her? And coldly, calculatingly, they spent the rest of the session debating the issue, weighing the pros and cons, to come up with their final answer: ‘if you want to do it right,’ ‘if you really want to lock her down so she can’t get away,’ one to two years. Took my breath away. People say abusers ‘can’t control themselves,’ they are ‘out of control,’ they are drunk and ‘don’t know what they’re doing.’ Bullshit. They know exactly what they are doing to the point those guys could methodically weigh the pros and cons and come up with a calculated strategy that carefully closed off all avenues of escape to their partners before they started their behavior . . . because they know that their partners would leave them unless the stakes were too high first. Changed forever how I think of abusers.”[4]
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My father beat my mother for the first time when she was pregnant with her first child. It happened in front of his approving parents.
[1] Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, Basic Books, New York, 1992, p. 112.
[2] I thank Lierre Keith for this analysis.
[3] Jensen, Derrick, “Out of the Ashes: An Interview with Judith Herman,” originally published in The Sun, May, 1998, https://derrickjensen.org/1998/05/out-of-ashes-interview-judith-herman/
Site accessed 4/19/2023.
[4] https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/relationships/3529031-AIBU-to-think-that-I-must-just-naturally-attract-abusers-Edited-by-MNHQ?page=6&fbclid=IwAR34TwcFFjF-99MFdqTdufGS3AeHJFb9PK5uKaQxqBU7Uqou6vKIXwf5nw8
Site Accessed 4/19/23.