These two globe-shattering memoirs are difficult reads about how women suffer for enabling men.
They are memoirs of the woman I never wanted to become, and haven’t (I’m pretty sure), thanks to my mother telling me her stories growing up as a girl child in patriarchal Latin America, a 1970s feminist and a 1980s divorcee. If it were not for my mother, and her mother, I could be Gisele or Belle. I have much to be thankful for. What I find so difficult, so frustrating, is that fifty years later we are still learning these lessons.
One woman came from poverty, the other from extreme privilege, cultural capital, and (somewhat diminished) wealth. Both are cautionary tales about giving up our agency to the myth of romantic love as all-powerful and all-saving. Where have I heard this before?
Women have been socialized and infantilized to give up their power to men. Men have been socialized to take what they want. Mme. Pelicot was “insubmissive” sexually, according to her husband, who could not keep a remunerative job, so he drugged her to take what he wanted in order to give it to other men, the people he actually wanted to impress, the substitutes for his vicious father he could never impress. Ms. Burden was submissive, so her husband simply took what she let him get away with because he, too, wanted to impress other men–New York hedge funders and oligarchs–the successful fathers he wishes he’d had. The wives were merely ancillary to the homosocial desires of their husbands, who were themselves damaged, traumatized products of violently patriarchal societies. The wives thought they were loved. I find that difficult to believe, psychoanalytic theories of splitting notwithstanding. This is not how I define love.
In both cases, the women believed their marriages would save them from their own childhood traumas and believed they were saving their husbands from the same. But all looked away from their traumas instead of confronting them, understanding them, and acknowledging them. They thought that pushing the trauma away, under the current of everyday life, it would dissolve into the joy of everyday table settings and beach picnics, as if morning baguettes and china and pool noodles and keys to private beaches would miraculously exorcise memories of loss and rape and pedophilia and psychological abuse and misogyny. Or, for the husbands apparently, the mechanisms for miraculous exorcism were pornography and money. Both women thought they knew their husbands; instead, they knew only what they wanted to see.
Worse yet–and this is the admirable, the horrifying, the key, of their memoirs–they see now what they refused to see.
It may sound like victim-blaming to say they could have seen the signs. This is not to say that, even with foresight, they could have anticipated the depths of the depravity to which their husbands would go. And it is not victim-blaming. They are taking responsibility for their part. That’s what’s admirable. Ms. Pelicot and Ms. Burden are not responsible for their husbands’ abuse: “Shame has to change sides.” But they might have saved themselves, sooner, if they had been paying attention to the signs they belatedly examine in the aftershock. Both admit that they refused to see the signs. They refused to have a healthy skepticism. They rejected the good counsel of their women friends and attorneys who tried to warn them. They were all-in. They were true believers. They had the faith. Their gods had feet of clay.
The message of both books is that women should stop enabling their men. Ms. Pelicot reports that none of the women attached to her fifty rapists refused to admit that her man–husband, boyfriend, son–was capable of what he was caught doing on video. They were wrong. They are in denial. Shame cannot change sides if women refuse to see reality and continue to collude with the abusers.
The lesson should be extended further–we should all look to ourselves with clear eyes to see how we create the so-called monsters we deny.
Jana Giles 