"... she only got flowers once ..." (Domestic violence)
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Artist:
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Track:He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)
The other day, i was coming out of a restaurant and i looked up and saw a billboard produced by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. (This pic is the print-ad version.)
Well she finally got the nerve to file for divorce
She let the law take it from there
But Earl walked right through that restraining order
And put her in intensive care
And i got to thinking of the way in which domestic violence is accepted as a part of our culture. And how little people understand it from the outside.
"Well, if he was beatin' on her, howcum she didn't leave 'im?"
Because she was sure he didn't really mean it.
Because she was protecting the children.
Because he really loved her but he got a little mad.
Because it was her own fault, because she did wrong stuff that made him mad.
One of the scariest comic stories i've ever read, Mad Love, the origin story of the Joker's henchgrrl, Harley Quinn, makes clear that Joker and Harley have this sort of relationship.
Setting the scene: Harley has apparently managed to make one of Joker's failed deathtraps for the Batman workable, as a gift to Joker. In a rage at her misunderstanding of an important principle of comedy ("If you have to explain it, it isn't funny!") and humiliation that she may be succeeding where he's failed, he throws her out of an upper-story window.
On the last page, as she arrives at Arkham Asylum (where she was once Dr Harleen Quinzel, and where Joker first suborned her love, and where Joker is, once again, in his escape-proof isolation cell) on a stretcher, swearing that she's through with Joker, that she fianlly realises what he is... one of her former colleagues asks her what she thinks about himnow.
And Harley's last line is from the Goffin and King song that they wrote after Little Eva came in one day with a black eye from her boyfriend tuning her up, and when they asked her why she stayed with him if he beat her, she said that the fact that he could get so mad at her that he'd hit her proved that he really loved her.
(Mad Love is copyright, DC Comics)
Comments (4)
BTW - i did an earlier post about the song and MAD Love, which includes a bit more of the comic - it's at http://mog.com/fairportfan/blog/106117
Men get in the same predicament as well, though usually not so physically violent. Listen to Bill Withers' song "Use Me."
Oh, certainly.
Abuse is abuse, and it doesn't matter who the abuser or the victim are.
But the huge majority of it id men abusing women.
As the ad says:>/p>
Also, a woman is less likely than a man to be believed or to receive effective help if she does go to the law - experienced cops will tell you that the most useful aspect of a restraining is that it gives the homicide cops a good first lead.
A friend of mine (almost twenty years ago - geeze) left her asshole boyfriend after he broke a couple of her ribs, tossed her down the stairs and blacked both her eyes and fractured her cheekbone.
She'd been unfaithful to him, you see - she'd been raped at knife point.
He'd tuned her up before, but that was the worst yet.
She left him, and crashed for a week or two with her ex-husband and his girlfriend.
For the first several nights, she couldn't sleep without the shotgun next to the living room couch where she was crashing, just in case.
A year later, she went back to him...
It's like alcoholism - you can't help them until they want to be helped - and you better hope it's not too late when they finally realise.
How'd you like to be the one, that the comic "Mad Love" was written about, and yet NO ONE would help me get out of the horrid situation? It sucked; I lost nearly all my friends, because the abuser cut my friends all out, and they didn't comprehend it wasn't me. To this day, I'm angry that someone who was purportedly 'my friend' could write a story about my abuse, and PROFIT from it, when I had to not only escape, lose everything I owned, but had to live in my car - then the writer, my 'friend' said he didn't know me anymore, and refused to help.
THAT is one of the many reasons it's so hard to get out of an abusive relationship - I got out, but it sucks that the writer ABUSED me further that way, but counted the money all the way to the bank, while I had no place to live!
At least I know who my friends are these days.