Love and Violence by Lea Melandri

Author:Lea Melandri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

THE ARMED DEFENSELESSNESS OF THE MAN-SON

The domination of women by men is distinguished from all other historical relations of power by its profound and contradictory implications: first, the confusion of love with violence. We encounter here a domination that arises out of the intimate relations of sex and motherhood. Many prefer not to recognize the most ancient and enduring relation between love and hate, tenderness and rage, life and death—a relation expressed in the claims that one must destroy in order to preserve, that one kills out of excessive love, that one’s group, nation, or culture is superior to, even the enemy of, another’s.

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Freud, having identified eros and thanatos, love and death, as originary drives, was compelled to admit that they are less polarized than it might initially seem. The intersection between them is particularly surprising in the relation between a person and his or her love object.

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.3

Rather than demanding harsher penalties for aggressors or better safeguards for victims, it might make more sense to examine those areas of personal life that have to do with our most intimate feelings and all that is most familiar to us—those areas in which we would most like to eradicate violence. The murder, rape, and physical and psychological abuse of women are widely documented and discussed in the daily newspapers; these horrific acts, especially when particularly cruel or spectacular, are featured on their front pages. The violation, abuse, and killing of women are largely carried out by husbands, sons, fathers, and lovers who are incapable of tolerating the walls of domestic life, walls that excessively, or in some cases do not, protect women. Equally intolerable is the embrace and/or abandonment that exposes unexpected male fragility.

Few seem to be troubled by the fact that the body most persecuted by men is the same body that gave them life, the body that first provided them with nourishment and sexual stimulation—a body that men find again in their adult lives and through which they dream of reliving the intimate and originary experience of belonging to another. This body, which could bestow life or death, love or abandonment, cared for the male when he was most dependent and helpless. Confining women to the role of mother—caretaker of the home, children, and sex—men have positioned themselves

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