From the original article on March 9, 2009. Author: Chateau Heartiste.
Like a dispatched army of obfuscators and purveyors of palatable lies, the fembot foot soldiers were marching in locktstep after news broke of Rihanna’s return to the violently abusive man she deeply loves. The lies, pop culture psychoanalysis and threadbare excuses were flying left and right.
“It’s really hard for a woman to leave an abuser. Where will she go? How will she survive?”
“He’s controlling/manipulative. She was too weak to resist that.”
“He wears down her self-esteem. Eventually, she depends on the beatings to feel loved, and the cycle continues.”
Grade A bullshit. How do I know this? Easy. A simple thought experiment will suffice to aid understanding.
When a woman wants to leave a beta boyfriend/husband who makes her life a misery, is it:
a. hard for her to leave him?
b. impossible because she won’t be able to survive on her own/find a place to live?
c. difficult because she can’t resist his mind control?
d. not going to happen because she depends on his beta behavior to validate her self-esteem? or
e. pretty fucking easy for her to walk out the door/sign the divorce papers?
It’s amazing the verbal calisthenics humans will go through to avoid facing up to a disconcerting truth. Fembots especially; they’ve got so much invested in the prevailing shibboleths that to turn their backs on them now in this crucial matter of why women return to abusers would amount to a repudiation of the holy foundation of dyke dogma — that women are not responsible for their choices, and that a woman’s sexual nature is a moral paragon to ceaselessly celebrate. Rihanna, like so many women, runs back into the arms of her beatdown boyfriend because...
wait for it...
she loves him.
And she loves him more because he hits her. This explains why, despite immense family and social pressure (really, an entire country’s worth of social pressure) to leave Chris Brown, and despite the likelihood of future painful beatings at his hands, Rihanna could not ignore the pull of her heart. Love is too powerful an emotion to be swayed by the blunt tools of shame, reason, or even fear.
Superficially, the red-faced excusers may be describing some element of psychological reality that happens in the heads of women like Rihanna. But they are only teasing around the edges. Full understanding eludes them because they miss the core motivation — the emotional juggernaut — that animates the woman who willingly makes herself vulnerable to a physically abusive lover. They refuse to acknowledge this because in their minds it says something unflattering about women they’d rather not know.
On a related note, I am not surprised that the usual suspects who comment on this blog haven’t come out and condemned Rihanna for rushing back into the arms of Brown. The sound of silence is deafening...
In other news, a British model spoke about a two-year relationship with a man who put her in the hospital for a week.
The Liverpudlian beauty was a teenage model when she started dating her abusive ex, who she has declined to name.
She’s still protective of him. Love will do that to a girl.
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