When She Was Bad by Patricia Pearson

Author:Patricia Pearson [Pearson, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36383-1
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 1998-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

If severe male violence is physical, bringing women like Hedda Nussbaum to the brink of death, it might be said that the most extreme form of female-perpetrated abuse is situational. Women can operate the system to their advantage. Donning the feminine mask, they can manipulate the biases of family and community, much as Marybeth Tinning did, in order to set men up. If he tries to leave, or fight back, a fateful moment comes when she reaches for the phone, dials 911, and has him arrested on the strength of her word: “Officer, he hit me.” The tactic is reminiscent of well-to-do late-nineteenth-century American men having their wives committed to insane asylums—for a week or forever—solely on the basis of their say-so. Since women had been stereotyped as fragile and prone to hysteria, it was possible to persuade authorities of their insanity. A century later, a confluence of social forces has created a parallel opportunity, but with the sexes reversed: Men can be committed to prison on the strength of stereotypes about them.

With mounting pressure on North American police forces to disavow misogynistic attitudes and take the word of a woman over a man, female psychopaths and other hard-core female abusers have an extremely effective means to up the ante and win the game. It isn’t what abusive men do, the robbing of breath, but it is as surely the ruin of a life. The most common theme among abused men is their tales not of physical anguish but of dispossession—losing custody of children due to accusations of physical and sexual abuse, and having criminal records that permanently shatter their integrity as loving men and decent human beings.

Andrea, the woman who never thought of her mother as an abuser, just a drunk, remembers when her mother flew into a tantrum because her exhausted husband refused to go out and buy her a bottle of gin. She called the police and claimed that he’d pushed her down the stairs. The investigating officer, a woman, saw the situation for what it was and declined to press charges. In the 1990s, that officer’s response would be held up as evidence of indifference to women, which is why several North American jurisdictions have now implemented mandatory arrest policies in domestic violence cases, overriding individual police discretion. Prosecutors may now also override the discretion of the complainant, ignoring her desire to recant or drop charges.

“I got arrested twice,” says Peter Swann, pacing his boardinghouse room and completing his tale of how Dana undid him. “I did sixty days and two years’ probation. It was very unpleasant and scary, and I was wondering, what the hell did I do, what did I do to deserve this? The first time it happened, I spent one night in jail. Then I went to stay at a co-worker’s. Dana found out where I was, she called around, and she asked me to come home. Well, she had my daughter, so, yeah, I went back. The second time she got me arrested, I was still on probation.

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