The excellent Hilzoy has a post on why women stay with their abusers that is worth everyone’s time. What she doesn’t do is give a direct response to Linda Hirshman*, who is here making a claim in her usual manner: say something indefensible wrapped up in a misty old-school feminism that is just near enough to a defensible position to give plausible cover.** Here the claim is that unlike those other feminists who say “don’t ask an abused woman why she didn’t leave”, Hirshman knows that one must ask why she didn’t choose to leave, in order to respect women’s agency.
Sounds sensible, until you understand exactly what she means. From the post describing the book:
The somewhat fictionalized memoir (Steiner says she changed some identifying details and combined some characters) follows earlier essays in which she chronicled her anorexia and financial dependence. In this latest episode of bad choices, her future husband gave her clear warning.
It seems that anorexia is being counted as a bad choice. This is a particularly telling turn of phrase, and one that should strike us as odd; someone who said “I think we need to ask that anorexic girl right there why she just doesn’t eat, to respect her agency” or “This is just her choice not to eat” would at best be someone who profoundly misunderstood anorexia nervosa, at worst someone who is callously cruel.
And a similar problem arises for Hirshman’s position. She’s not the first to consider this question (not at all), so she can’t be taken as calling for study of a neglected phenomenon, and the research has been done has said that it’s hard for someone to leave an abusive relationship because of any number of psychological and cultural factors. And — it doesn’t require a full-blown battered woman syndrome. The abuser is nice and completely normal the rest of the time. The abuse happened in the middle of a nasty fight; he must have been pushed to it. The abuser is nice and completely normal to everyone else. He might actually need help. It’s hard to admit to oneself that one is that woman. (And that’s leaving aside financial or other reasons, like past abuse.)
And in both anorexia and abuse, there’s a sense in which the solution is simple, and in which the solution isn’t. Start eating again! Leave the abuser! But one would have to be exceedingly poorly informed or unbearably smug to think that that’s all that has to happen.
*Because Hilzoy is always even-tempered.
**I suppose the charitable explanation is that she doesn’t know how to manipulate tone. But there’s a clear pattern, whether she’s pointing out that the abused woman’s husband left her (so she didn’t even leave), or calling upper-class stay-at-home-moms low-caste.
24 comments
April 11, 2009 at 11:08 am
Bitchphd
Yes, Hilzoy’s piece was awesome. And Hirshman was failing to attend appropriately to tone: usually (as in her own essay) “why didn’t she leave?” is an accusation rather than a genuine inquiry.
April 11, 2009 at 11:12 am
ac
The problem with Hirshman’s invocation of old school feminism is that old school feminism would in fact, contrary to her gloss, be just as interested in the psychology of the abuser as that of the abused. She is, as usual, all about the critique of femininity without much in the way of the critique of masculinity utterly central to any 70s-era discussion of feminism.
I can sort of understand the reasons for this lopsidedness (I have theorized about it here before). There’s probably some feeling that we as a society have had the discussion about men already, and it’s time to focus more intently on women’s complicity in these systems, but, you know, there’s a difference between doing that and discussing women’s problems as though they are happening in a vacuum—and if you are venturing into vacuum territory, you shouldn’t be congratulating yourself on your terrific grasp of old school feminism.
April 11, 2009 at 12:06 pm
dana
Right. And there’s a difference between asking about women’s complicity in these systems, broadly construed, and asking a specific woman why she made that bad choice to stay.
April 12, 2009 at 8:43 am
Michael Turner
I got about halfway through the comment thread at Obsidian Wings, and had to stop reading at a certain point. The part of me that tries to be numbly rational, or rationally numbing, when it comes to this sort of thing is now posing questions like the following:
Did humans evolve a kind of petit mal Stockholm Syndrome, to keep them in practice for when they’d be true captives of true (genocidal) tribal enemies?
Working it from the other direction: Perhaps some selfish gene persistently mistranslates the combination of smotheringly protective love with survived beatings into the message: “this person didn’t quite kill you, and almost certainly would try very hard to kill your mutual enemy, because that enemy wouldn’t have the benefit of love staying his hand in the end. This violent tendency seems bad — but look how it comes in handy sometimes, when it’s directed outward!”
Evolution chisels and carves with no moral sense. Nothing is more selfish than a gene.
While there might be much that is ethnographically suspect about Peter Mathiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age, several episodes of life among the Dani stick with me as stories nobody could make up, or even embroider much, not even a novelist of Mathiessen’s caliber. One of them involves a woman from an enemy tribe showing up unannounced, surrendering herself.
The issue gets debated: do we kill her? Or does one of us marry her?
Those were the choices. There were no others. And she showed up knowing it.
We ask about an abused wife or girlfriend, “Why didn’t she just leave?” In Dani society then, the burning question was: “Why did she just leave?” A credible answer had to be forthcoming, it was important, because it could literally be a matter of life or death for the tribe adjudicating this emergency application for membership. Might you not be clasping a spy to your bosom? Or perhaps this was an outcast refugee of abuse, one who would be undyingly grateful to be taken in?
A few hundred thousand years of behavioral evolution under circumstances during which we were our own worst enemy–and look at what it has made of us. You fear the moment of decision, the moment when you have to leave. You’ll have to show up somewhere else, eventually, among strangers — enemies, even. When you do, it will be as a weakened creature, disconnected from your own, under suspicion, defenseless. You’ll have only the hope that something in your eyes will tell these people — people you don’t know, whose language you might not even speak very well — that you left only because of what you need: a little more love, a little less cruelty. Or death. That would be fine, too. Because you can’t take it anymore anyway. You can’t go back.
If that’s the behavioral programming, is it really surprising that people just opt to keep taking it, up to, and even beyond, the point of shattered cheekbones?
April 12, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Vance
Indeed that was a scary comment, Michael, but I kept on reading. And what blows me away is that after such a strong and valuable post, in a comments thread where not only pseudonymous survivors but Hirshman herself, and Katha Pollitt (!) show up to engage the issue, the discussion should be derailed into “But what about the men?” (NSFW)
April 12, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Prodigal
Do the comments posted by myself and other male survivors of abuse not count, then, Vance?
April 12, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Vance
Huh? Of course they count. It’s the wrangling over gender balance, abstracted from the issues Hilzoy and Hirshman and the survivors are discussing, that distracts.
April 12, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Prodigal
Are you referring to the comments about the relative percentages of male vs female abuse, then?
April 12, 2009 at 9:13 pm
dana
Turner, I don’t know if you have to postulate the evolutionary just-so story. It seems to me that it suffices to explain why some people don’t leave given that it is often the case that the abuse does seemingly come out of nowhere in a relationship that is
otherwise superficially healthy,that our culture values forgiveness, and that sometimes, the abuser is genuinely in need of assistance.
April 13, 2009 at 4:30 am
ac
It probably is useful to think of it as a case of Stockholm syndrome (separate from the evolutionary just-so story). Domestic violence counsellors seem to. You can even abstract it from gender a bit in that way, since that’s a recognized phenomenon that can affect anyone in a prolonged scenario of victimization. Usually the prolonged part is key – something about the time together resets and distorts the desire for survival so that it becomes about not angering the captor rather than getting away. The victim’s notion of what’s best for her just gets rewired the wrong way. And of course Stockholm syndrome has been observed in hostage/captor situations where the people involved had no prior relationship; it could easily be more likely scenarios in which the emotional relationship precedes the violence.
Our ordinary notions about psychological independence and survival could be a little too optimistic anyway. Think of cults, and people’s susceptibility to sleep deprivation, love-bombing, &c.
April 13, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Michael Turner
Dana, wouldn’t the abuse coming out of nowhere in an “otherwise seemingly healthy relationship” be much more of a red flag, a clearer warning that leaving would be best, than violence sparked by some more understandable provocation? Also, one can forgive but also leave; you can also recommend help to the abuser, and be a party to efforts to help the abuser, but still leave. Your explanation leaves me unsatisfied.
My proposed view of the problem is probably not easily falsifiable, I’ll give you that. And if it can’t be falsified, it deserves to be called a “just-so” story. However, can somebody please explain Stockholm Syndrome to me with something other than an evolutionary psych “just-so” story?
Stockholm Syndrome isn’t a tendency for captives to feign sympathy for their captors — a rational-enough response. No, it goes well beyond that: it’s actual sympathy! Why? Well, from an evolutionary psych point of view, it’s not hard to understand. For one thing, actual sympathy would tend to elicit far more effective involuntary reactions than fake sympathy, for any captive who might need to turn against his fellow captives and side with his captors, in a split-second decision, just to survive. And I’m sure that’s only one of many advantages that “feeling the part” of an enemy sympathizer confers on a captive.
Captivity has a long history, and if Stone Age societies studied in historical times are any indication, it has had a much longer pre-history. Captivity is, among other things, forced separation at a distance from one’s origins. For human beings to remain one species even when spread across several continents, traits had to travel relatively fast. Human beings held captive long enough to reproduce with their captors — this seems to be one way traits could have spread with the required speed. Those traits might include the ones that made people so warlike in the first place, leading to propagation of both war and captivity — a vicious circle. Stockholm Syndrome might have been a useful adaptation in more ways than one. Whether there might be genetic predispositions toward being a chronic abuser — people who are born Prisoner-Breakers, if you will — hardly bears thinking about, however.
April 14, 2009 at 12:02 am
Vance
However, can somebody please explain [a pattern of behavior] to me with something other than an evolutionary psych “just-so” story?
Is there any other form of explanation you accept? Or, what counts as an explanation, in the psychological realm, for you?
April 14, 2009 at 3:01 am
Michael Turner
Is there any other form of explanation you accept?
Of course there is, Vance.
You can, for example, explain it as a straightforward emotional reaction to, or as a rational decision about, the circumstances. (Or, more likely, a combination; most decisions involve combinations of motives.) However, the decision (if that’s what it is) of the victim of (sometimes extreme) violence to continue to live with the perpetrator doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in such terms. Hence the question.
Surely, you’re not going to hold that there’s nothing counterintuitive going on here. If there wasn’t, why does anybody consider it remarkable in the first place?
I can fully appreciate that there’s a way to ask “Why didn’t she leave?” that’s tantamount to perpetuating the abuse. That doesn’t mean there’s no way to ask the question (and maybe to answer it coherently) that can be enlightening. Besides, I’m not asking it of the survivors. I’m asking it of myself.
I’d like to understand for my own reasons. I left America and took up life in Japan in part as a refugee from the violence of American society generally, but to the extent that escaping violence was a motivation, I was also driven by the horror of particular events. Among these, a year of living in fear of a man who had done a stretch in prison on charges of attempted murder of the woman I was living with, after reports that he was no longer showing up for his appointments with his parole officer.
Of course, I suppose it’s always possible that one could come home and find someone you love bleeding or dead on the floor, but in certain circumstances it becomes dramatically more probable, it can come to dominate your thoughts, it can start to drive you crazy, and it might even eventually contribute to the decision to take up an existence that sometimes feels like exile.
I need to be able to live with the enormity of certain memories, not least of which was finding my partner crying on the steps of our apartment one afternoon, and being told, when I naturally enough asked what it was about, that she still loved him — the man who had beaten her so badly she was hospitalized for weeks. One thing that helps me cope with it is to imagine how evolution has worked on us in some horrible (but, in some weird sense, necessary ways), after thousands of generations of scrambling hard to survive both the environment and each other, and not always succeeding.
If this sort of thinking doesn’t work for you, then it doesn’t work for you. If you think it’s some gambit of mine to blame the victim, I can assure you it’s not. If my personal assurances that it’s no such thing don’t fly with you, well . . . go ahead, keep skewering me about my incorrect thought processes. Really grind it in. Think of it as a way to punish me for thinking this way — me, not a victim of anything, no; never in fear of random, disproportionate violence, never reduced to depression and passivity by a constant threat, or driven to map out intricate revenge fantasies against the man who did that to her; not affected by any such thing at all, ever. It’s not as if, by sardonically questioning my need to theorize this way, you’d be perpetuating any unjust suffering from anything I’d been through, would it? No, there’s never a wrong way to ask these sorts of questions.
April 14, 2009 at 4:47 am
kid bitzer
that’s an extraordinary story, mt.
i don’t think vance can be blamed for not having known it, or so much as suspected it.
your search for an explanation is far from idle, but then your motivations are far from common. idle curiosity is by far the more common phenomenon on the interwebs, and accordingly it’s a fair default assumption for vance (or anyone else) to employ, that one’s interlocutors on the web are merely shooting the breeze, speculating to speculate, or to pass the time, or to entertain themselves and others.
clearly that assumption fails in this case.
at the same time, an explanation developed out of an urgent, non-idle need to find peace is no more likely to be right than explanations developed from other motivations.
i want to say something respectful about your experience and your suffering. in part because i myself enjoyed a miniature version of the same dynamic decades and decades ago. (the only sincere sympathy is the sympathy of a fellow sufferer).
but i can’t say that i find your proposal, or even that line of investigation, very plausible. finding out your reasons for pursuing it helps to put your proposal in context, and should forestall certain criticisms of you as a person. but i take it you are not offering this personal context in order to cut off criticisms of your explanation as an explanation, are you?
April 14, 2009 at 6:44 am
dana
Dana, wouldn’t the abuse coming out of nowhere in an “otherwise seemingly healthy relationship” be much more of a red flag, a clearer warning that leaving would be best, than violence sparked by some more understandable provocation? Also, one can forgive but also leave; you can also recommend help to the abuser, and be a party to efforts to help the abuser, but still leave. Your explanation leaves me unsatisfied.
Read the linked post; my explanation seems to map onto reality. That the abuse comes out of nowhere (and may not return for months) means that the person loses confidence is in his or her judgment just as they need to trust it to leave, judgment that might be undermined by family (“but he seems so nice!”) and religion (“you should forgive him and if you were a better wife he’d be a better man.”). And because it’s a rare incident, they have the problem of no one else believing them and the problem of being able to rationalize the abuse away.
And if it can’t be falsified, it deserves to be called a “just-so” story.
What makes it a just-so story is that you’re not actually doing evolutionary research, or studying the habits of primitive peoples, or postulating a falsifiable theory. You’re taking a contemporary phenomenon and inventing (quite literally) a story about social norms, where a woman wandering into an enemy tribe and the men deciding whether to marry her or kill her. (And presumably, this happened often enough that women selected for wanting to marry their abusers?) That’s not even an explanation at this point, let alone an evolutionary one, and it’s not automatically about selfish genes even if you say “evolution is selfish,” because you’re postulating a macrobehavior to explain a macrobehavior. It’s the same kind of reasoning that gets us the claim that the Pleistocene era looked rather like modern conservative conceptions of the 1950s.
To be very clear, I’m not sure what your explanation adds. Let’s presume we agree on the facts as hilzoy relates them. You find my explanation unsatisfying. What does “…and this is the result of caveman rape” add that “this seems to be a peculiar feature of human psychology concerning trust, forgiveness, and self-confidence, whatever its ultimate source” does not?
April 14, 2009 at 7:20 am
Michael Turner
After a long walk, I came back determined to frame some sort of apology to Vance, because (as kb points out), there’s not much basis for him to have suspected what I’ve been through. Then again, I haven’t given Vance much basis for snidely worded rhetorical questions embodying assumptions about how I think. Maybe we could make it mutual.
No, I don’t want to cut off criticisms of my theories, because I really do want better theories.
Seeking such, I went back and re-read the Obsidian Wings post, and finished reading the comments. Although I’m still sympathetic to much of Hilzoy’s argument, and find much that’s repugnant in Hirsch’s attitude, I find I have even more problems with Hilzoy’s argument now. I respect her experience of working in a shelter, and her own experience of abuse. But the whole story has to be more than just a beginning (such as she experienced it) and an all-too-typical end (which is where they walk in the door at the shelter she worked at). Also, explanations for how chronic abuse self-perpetuates don’t explain how the abuse becomes chronic in the first place. And that’s where I think her case is a little weak.
To start with, I think Hilzoy might be confused about how people get confused.
Wait a minute: people with a fifth of vodka poured down their throats trust their judgment all the time, unfortunately– they even drive. And the “moment” Hilzoy is talking about here is one she earlier compares to seeing a car turn into an elephant in front of your eyes — which is to say, a hallucination. We’ve got references to two different kinds of substance abuse (one allusive, one direct), neither of which involve physical pain or fear for one’s own life, probably the most basic motivators for escape we can imagine.
I think Hilzoy is groping here — in the right direction, perhaps, toward something like inebriation, but not connecting. If there’s anything like a drug in this picture, I think it’s love. (Trying to suppress the sudden image of Bryan Ferry punching a girlfriend; not succeeding, as he suddenly seems the classic type.) Perhaps more accurately: it’s that state of being “in love.” Both of which would be sharply heightened during a honeymoon or shortly after a (desired) conception. If the abuser actually calculated those moments as ideal opportunities for introducing the abuser-abused dynamic, he’s very canny and cunning indeed. But if he genuinely feels he only spins out of control sometimes, and can’t understand why he did what he did, you’ve got to go to other explanations.
Then there’s what Hilzoy says about self-respect. It’s true, of course, that abuse very often erodes self-respect, but there’s some question-begging here. Why does it do that? Why doesn’t abuse, when it tops a certain egregious threshold, invariably trigger an equal and opposite reaction: “I may not be much, but nobody deserves to be treated this way!” As others point out on that thread, childhood abuse actually predisposes people to accept abuse as adults. (Not pointed out, but lending symmetry to the argument: this is probably about equally true of abusers. As it is, Hilzoy mentions that her abuser had been tortured, and finds it potentially relevant.) I agree there’s that pattern, but what is the mechanism? When behavior seems self-destructive, is it unfair to look for reasons why it might have been self-preserving (or altruistically kin-preserving) under conditions that don’t apply now, conditions that persisted so long that the coping strategies got hard-coded into the genome?
Finally, Hilzoy goes most of the distance in talking about the Jekyll/Hyde metaphor, with this:
But she doesn’t take it the logical step further, that it might not be a metaphor: maybe many chronic abusers actually are two different people, in some psychiatrically verifiable MPD sense. In any case, you don’t need the psychiatric diagnosis to think about it that way. When you’ve seen one human body exhibit two wildly different personalities, a few times, it should compel a conclusion: the warm and lovely person in that body would probably escape the darker self if he could, but he can’t — the two are both in the same body, til death do they part (or dissolve, depending whether you believe there’s an afterlife or not.) Mr. Hyde might not be around very often, but when he is, in a way you could think of him as having two captives: Dr. Jekyll and his wife. This might go a long way toward explaining why people who have been abused as children get hitched to abusers too often. Perhaps they feel bound by something like sibling solidarity with their kind and nurturing Dr. Jekylls. For a woman who feels put down, who “married up”, it might be almost like being made an equal. If only that Mr. Hyde abusive-parent-figure would stop showing up . . . .
I can think of evolutionary psych “reasons” why childhood abuse would predispose one to accept an abusive partner. Likewise for Stockholm Syndrome. And I have a lot of trouble buying therapeutic narratives like “the victim feels she/he doesn’t deserve any better, after all, they’ve never known better” and “the victim feels more comfortable in abusive relationships, after all, they are familiar.” There’s still the question of why those statements are true, if indeed they are true. And if I have to choose between an evolutionary psych “just-so” story, and a “just-because” non-story, I’ll go with the account with some actual explanatory power. I can always hope that evolutionary psych accounts will eventually become falsifiable, even if they are effectively unfalsifiable now, because of ethics about human experimentation or a lack of current understanding of the mechanism, where the purely neural meets the plausibility cognitive. In any case, I don’t have to accept those accounts as the sole explanation in the meantime. Nor would I ask anyone else to accept anyone evolutionary-psych single-bullet theories as such.
. . . an explanation developed out of an urgent, non-idle need to find peace is no more likely to be right than explanations developed from other motivations
True enough. For me to find peace, one thing I had to do was figure out how to forgive the abuser in this case. I just couldn’t spend the rest of my life wanting to kill somebody. I really did want to kill him. And that desire hurt in ways that are not easy to describe.
I decided to accept some scraps of information at face value. At his trial, he apparently got some clemency because there was some evidence that he was severely abused as a child. As a black man who’d been severely abused while young, he’d somehow gotten himself a mechanical engineering degree, and had aspirations to be an inventor. Most of us are not that strong — so I could sort of understand his deluded belief that he was essentially OK, better than OK, in fact; I could understand his need to deny to himself what was apparently a pattern of severe violence with women, among other flaws. My girlfriend met him in a bodybuilding context, and was drawn to him not only by his shy and gentle demeanor, but by his self-discipline: he was willing to work twice as hard for the same results as others were getting by resorting to steroids. She admired that. I think I would, too.
I was finally able to envision his Mr. Hyde as a small child overflowing with a desire for vengeance at the rejection and humiliation experienced at very vulnerable and powerless age — vengefulness (and childlike immaturity) flowing out into a body whose arms could snap my own arms like twigs; vengeance directed at somebody who had rejected his affections as perhaps his own love of his parents had been painfully scorned.
I now wish only that men like him could be identified early on, before they’ve hurt anybody seriously, and be given a separate place for life where they couldn’t harm others or themselves, a place where they could perhaps make something of themselves, with no onus of blame for what they are. However, our system of justice is naturally geared toward the one-body-one-mind model of individual responsibility, and that’s an injustice I can’t really do anything about.
A rationalization? Maybe. But that’s my peace-of-mind story, and I’m sticking with it.
April 14, 2009 at 7:49 am
dana
In any case, I don’t have to accept those accounts as the sole explanation in the meantime.
Of course not; my claim isn’t that there is no reason to investigate further, or that searching for a mechanism isn’t a good idea, just that I don’t find a story-explanation with no basis in fact more compelling (and that we don’t get there by sniffing imperiously at the victim Hirshman-style).
And scientists who study the evolution of human psychology generally aren’t inventing stories about cavemen, but doing very tedious work trying to get (e.g.) chimps and bonobos to share marshmallows, light-years away from being able to say “this is why abuse victims stay.” (And knowing the source of course doesn’t provide a solution to the problem.)
April 14, 2009 at 8:16 am
Vance
Sorry for the snideness, Michael.
April 14, 2009 at 8:34 am
Michael Turner
You’re taking a contemporary phenomenon and inventing (quite literally) a story about social norms, where a woman wandering into an enemy tribe and the men deciding whether to marry her or kill her.
Whoa. I literally invented that story? I made it clear the story was from Peter Mathiessen’s account of life among some Papuans.
Me @ Apr 13 8:43AM (first post on this thread):
Admittedly, it’s all from my memory of his story and it’s been over 25 years since I read the book. Of course, my memory might be wrong (as it certainly is in details; above I say he spent time among the Dani people, but checking reveals it was the Kurelu people, who speak Dani), and for that matter, his story might be wrong. I no longer own the book; searches on Amazon (limited view) are not the easiest way to identify the passage, if it can even be read at that site; and Google Books offers only snippet view.
Would I have to identify chapter and verse in order to clear myself of the charge of confabulation? Or do I have the charge wrong?
(Or did you simply express yourself confusingly? After all, the sentence doesn’t even parse. Oh, but then we get “inventing stories about cavemen,” in the next post. Well, I’m not. At worst, I’m getting someone else’s story wrong, from a source who might himself have gotten the original event wrong.)
April 14, 2009 at 9:00 am
dana
I think it counts as an invention to take a story about a novelist’s account of his time with a group of people as evidence about the evolutionary history of social norms in contemporary America, yes. We’re not talking about abuse among the Papua, after all, and the analogy between “what our ancestors must have been like” and a contemporary so-called primitive group is not particularly tight.
Maybe it’s not your invention; I’m not familiar with the guy’s work.
April 14, 2009 at 9:19 am
Michael Turner
What does “…and this is the result of caveman rape” add
It adds a pointedly crude oversimplification of what I said, for starters. Coming on top of what appears to a claim (based, I hope, on no worse than sloppy reading) that I’ve simply made up a story about some people in New Guinea, it’s also something like adding insult to injury.
As for what you’d apparently prefer to add: if it were merely “peculiar”, I suppose one wouldn’t need to add anything at all. But it isn’t merely peculiar. It’s self-evidently tragic. We wouldn’t be at this point in the discussion otherwise.
At the very least, if a model of the problem’s genesis could help indicate how some relevant genes might be narrowly distributed in the male population, it could lend itself to earlier intervention in the lives of potentially problematic males, and to more scrutiny of (and where indicated, longer retention of) known offenders carrying any established genetic markers. I’m very, very uncomfortable with the echoes of eugenics in this view, but I’m much more uncomfortable with the problem itself. If it turns out that any genetic tendency is so evenly distributed that it essentially applies to almost all human males, then I might be prepared to admit that adding the evolutionary psych explanation added nothing. Some straws are worth grasping at, however; though perhaps it is only my peculiar (as it were) personal circumstances that have persuaded me that this is might be one of those cases.
April 14, 2009 at 9:45 am
Michael Turner
As of that last comment from dana (which arrived as I was writing my last), I think I’m done here.
I don’t understand how anyone could conclude, even tentatively, that one consequence of the theory I have here is “that women selected for wanting to marry their abusers”. What I thought I was trying to help explain was why women who chose men who seemed OK might still stay with them (1) after they turn out to be volatile and violent, and (2) when they feel they have nobody else to turn to. How does this become me implying that women want to marry abusers?
Has dana simply decided that what I have to say isn’t really worth working through, but is nevertheless (somehow) worth commenting on? Now that’s something I wouldn’t even try to explain, with or without evolutionary psych.
April 14, 2009 at 10:32 am
Barbar
When behavior seems self-destructive, is it unfair to look for reasons why it might have been self-preserving (or altruistically kin-preserving) under conditions that don’t apply now, conditions that persisted so long that the coping strategies got hard-coded into the genome?
Basically, this is the standard case of looking to explain “irrational” pathological behavior by positing that such behavior would have been “rational” in our ancestral environment. After all, just calling the behavior “irrational” isn’t much of an explanation, is it? And evolution is blind, natural selection isn’t moral, etc etc etc.
However, I’m highly skeptical of the desire to use evolutionary biology and psychology to neatly separate the pathological case from the “normal” case.
What percentage of the population has been in a controlling relationship in which one party is emotionally manipulative? (I don’t just mean sexual relationships; a lot of parent-child and other family relationships also fall in this category.) The idea that the exercise of power in human relationships is inherently pathological, something to be explained with some holdover non-normal genes that contributed to reproductive success in another era, seems fundamentally mistaken to me.
Why doesn’t abuse, when it tops a certain egregious threshold, invariably trigger an equal and opposite reaction: “I may not be much, but nobody deserves to be treated this way!”
Probably because that “certain egregious threshold” cannot be specified objectively, but has to be calculated by a human brain embedded in a particular social context?
And if I have to choose between an evolutionary psych “just-so” story, and a “just-because” non-story, I’ll go with the account with some actual explanatory power. I can always hope that evolutionary psych accounts will eventually become falsifiable, even if they are effectively unfalsifiable now
This echoes Gary Becker’s strong distaste for the “ad hoc” explanations provided by sociologists, anthropologists, and so on. I don’t think the economic approach has radically reduced the number of competing theories of human behavior, however.
April 14, 2009 at 10:48 am
dana
How does this become me implying that women want to marry abusers?
Your example is about marriage, for one. So either your example is irrelevant (because you don’t think there’s any connection), or you need that connection (between being willing to marry to avoid being killed and why women don’t leave) to explain why women stay with abusers. That’s one reason why I originally suggested that this particular story wasn’t particularly helpful in understanding abuse (aside from the fact that tribes in Papua New Guinea *are* modern humans, which means at most they’re another data point about how human societies are constructed, not data about our ancestors any more than I’m doing evolutionary biology if I go to New York and observe the crowds in Times Square); there’s too many huge assumptions.
It’s not that I don’t think that there’s interesting work to be done in understanding human origins or social behavior. It’s just that I believe, from talking to anthropologists and primate biologists that what we know now is nowhere near “we’ve discovered the abuse gene” and “we think that may be there’s a correlation between altruism and cooperation but we’re really not sure how it works.”