Oh heaven’s, not again. “Wife Was Leaving Man Who Killed 5 Children,” the headline says. Yes, yes, that’s what it always says. The woman, after years of abuse, decides to get the hell out. And then the man shoots her (usually) and/or their children. This time, this week, in Graham, Washington, it was the man’s children and himself.
Your culture talks endlessly about how much men love women, how much they need women. And so when a man kills a woman (and it’s almost always when she threatens to leave,or does leave him), your response is too often, “Oh, he just loved her so. He couldn’t stand the idea that she might not be with him anymore. ” You even go so far as to blame her a bit, for deciding to leave–as if her departure justifies his murderous rage. We’ve seen the story so often now that it has become….no big deal. As the detective in the Washington case, speaking to The New York Times, recounted the last meeting Mr. Harrison had with his wife, Angela: “She said she wasn’t coming home and that that was her new boyfriend. Everything went downhill from there.”
No big deal. And a neighbor of the Harrisons asked her son, who played with one of the Harrison children, how he felt about the boy of his young friend. “I’m mad at his dad,” the boy said.
“Downhill?” ” Mad?”
How about “Horrified,” “Outraged,” “Will devote my time to helping stop this insanity.”
We must stop thinking of the murder of a woman or of children as somehow connected to a man’s love. This is anything but love. It’s that Mr. Harrison couldn’t CONTROL his wife anymore. She had had enough of their violent relationship, and Mr. Harrison was outraged that she was now out of his control; furious that she had autonomy; and raging with psychotic vengeance that she was free to do with her life as she wished.
How can I convince you women down there not to see jealousy as a part and parcel of love? When will you understand that the marriage vow, “To Have and to Hold”, means, to some men, that they may have and hold you or else kill you and yours? When will you stop defending what I call The Othello Defense–the pervasive notion that a man who kills his wife out of pathological jealousy (in the real Othello’s case, of course, wrongly imagining Desdemona’s infidelity) is simply loving “not wisely but too well”? When will we stop being so insanely sympathetic toward the men whose imaginations are so poisoned by jealousy that they would torture, punish and murder their families?
And when will we stop wondering what these wives did to deserve what they got–which is, implicitly, part of our thinking?
Ladies, do your Love Goddess the biggest favor in the universe: Never feel flattered by a man who shows signs of weird possessiveness and over-the-top jealousy; who has retro ideas about “his woman” and how she “should” behave. Be alert to men who talk about “real” women and “real” men. Know the signs of abuse–which begin with questioning you about your activities and your friends and your clothes and your behavior. Never, ever, think this bedrock misogyny is about love. Or that it’s cute, old-fashioned, charming or in any way manly. It’s not. It’s deadly.
