Trigger-Warnings: Discussion of domestic violence and abuse, mention of incest and child sexual abuse.
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On December 7, 2014, Mike Dawson published a comic titled “Overcompensating” on The Nib. In it, Dawson creates a character, which, for the purposes of this article, will be called The Narrator. The Narrator tells us he has a “bad breakup” with his partner. The Narrator tells us many times he is a man, male, white, and American. He describes how society has framed his demographic as the protagonist, and because of this he feels entitled. We see images of muscular movie stars. The Narrator seeks revenge against his ex-partner, and has a fight with her new love interest.
The beginning image is the waist of a man holding a gun, and the last image is that same waist without a gun. We can surmise there is a penis in those pants. The comic suggests his masculinity, gun = penis, was at stake throughout this scenario. It also claims to critique this belief.
This comic is about retaliation when The Narrator, a man, feels wronged. It is about controlling his ex-partner, a woman. Yet we never see her. This comic is inherently about women, yet it’s as if women do not exist in this world. The Narrator frames this about himself and his masculinity.
The Narrator wants this comic to be about him and his inadequacies, rather than the woman he is perpetuating violence against.
This is a story about an abusive man.
Breaking up with an abuser can be very hard to do. In fact, leaving a nonabusive partner is generally easier, contrary to what many people believe. Few abusers readily allow themselves to be left. When they feel a partner starting to get stronger, beginning to think for herself more, slipping out from under domination, abusers move to their endgame. Some of their more common maneuvers include:
Threatening or assaulting anyone you try to start a new relationship with, or anyone who is helping you.
Stalking you.
This quotation is taken from Lundy Bancroft’s book, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. Published 2003 by Berkley Books, New York. Bancroft has spent over twenty years specializing in domestic abuse and the abusive behavior of men.
In the 1890s Freud wrote a paper titled “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” Due to the large amount of his female patients revealing childhood incest victimization to him, Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women.
His colleagues criticized this paper. No one could believe that men of excellent reputations, as his female clients were daughters of well-to-do families, could be perpetrators of incest.
Freud recanted his conclusions, thus proposing the Oedipus complex, explained by Bancroft:
According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetuated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.
Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied – because they were simply too obvious – could be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.
There is a long history built into psychology that maintains the elimination of survivors from narratives of abuse.
As Dawson’s Narrator expounds in this comic critiquing male privilege, he ignores the existence of people who are not men. There is no vantage point for a woman or non-binary person to enter this narrative, because they do not exist to him, as with many narratives on abuse since the dawn of the Oedipus complex. He is focusing on himself, his masculinity, and his anger.
In this comic, The Narrator is very angry. “Overcompensating” has no other emotion in it than anger. But anger does not make a man abusive. Bancroft explains:
When people conclude that anger causes abuse, they are confusing cause and effect. [My client] was not abusive because he was angry; he was angry because he was abusive. Abusers carry attitudes that produce fury. It would be futile to teach [my client anger management skills], because his thinking process will soon get him enraged again.
Although our feelings can influence how we act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined by our attitudes and our habits.
Abusive men aren’t abusive because of anger; anger is developed because they are abusive. Abusers carry entitled attitudes that make them angry. This entitlement is key to Dawson’s character, and the comic attempts to explain this entitlement through film tropes.
The Narrator fantasizes himself as the hero of his movie. He is big, muscular, in control. However, in the reality of this comic strip, The Narrator is scrawny. The fight he has with his ex-partner’s new love interest is a joke. Contrary to the images of gun toting strong movie stars, the fight scene is drawn in a style that portrays The Narrator and the man he is fighting as childlike.
What does this comic’s climactic fight scene do? Does The Narrator believe he is being self-deprecating? This comic is titled “Overcompensating.” But that’s misguided. The Narrator depicting himself as scrawny is not a self-deprecating joke. It perpetuates the myth that only muscular men can be dangerous. But, as Bancroft says, abusers can be of any demographic, size and shape, and can be just as harmful physically and emotionally. In this comic, Dawson claims that men who do not look like a film star feel the need to “overcompensate.” But Bancroft explains:
My abusive clients sometimes become aware of these ways which society has shaped their values and, sticking closely to their long-standing abusive habits, seize this insight as a new excuse. Instead of saying “I was drunk” or “I was abused as a child,” they rise to a new level of sophistication in escaping responsibility, declaring, “I did it because I learned entitled expectations and the devaluing of females.” I respond by telling the client that he is putting old wine in a new bottle. “The number-one lesson you seem to have learned,” I say, “is how to make excuses for abusing women. And I see that you’re still practicing it.” Abusive men do need to learn about social influences, but not in a way that gives them yet another means of letting themselves off the hook.
Anger is not a reason for abuse. Being socialized a man is not a reason for abuse. The only reason abuse happens is because a person is abusive.
The Narrator is a man who admittedly seeks control over a woman. Is this the only incident of abusive action by The Narrator? We’re never told. But what leads a man to stalking his ex-partner? The feeling of ownership, entitlement, the right to her. This didn’t spring up overnight.
An abuser’s core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong. This comic presents to its audience this distortion under the guise of self-criticism. The story of self-criticism is seductive, sympathetic. Bancroft explains why abusers create these stories:
You may wonder why, if abusive men feel justified in their actions, they distort their stories so much when seeking support. First, an abuser doesn’t want to have to explain his worst behaviors – his outright cruelty, for example, or his violence – to people who might find those acts distasteful… Second, he may carry some guilt or shame about his worst acts, as most abusers do; his desire to escape those feelings is part of why he looks for validation from other people, which relieves any nagging self-doubt.
Through self-centering The Narrator seeks validation for his actions. But to delve further into Bancroft and specifically why this comic is about The Narrator’s masculinity:
The abuser’s dehumanizing view of his partner as a personal possession can grow even uglier as a relationship draws to a close. I sometimes find it extraordinarily difficult to get a client to remember at this point that his partner is a human being with rights and feelings rather than an offending object to destroy. At worst, his efforts to reestablish his ownership may include following her and monitoring her movements, scaring people who try to assist her, threatening men she is interested in dating, kidnapping the children, and physically attacking her or the people close to her. For abused women separation is a time of particularity high risk of homicide or attempted homicide, which can sometimes involve murderous assaults on her new boyfriend, her children, or on other people she cares about.
To repeat:
I sometimes find it extraordinarily difficult to get a client to remember at this point that his partner is a human being with rights and feelings rather than an offending object to destroy.
This comic is only about The Narrator’s masculinity because he has forgotten his partner is a human being. He has minimized her humanity in this event of his life. She exists as a ghost of his past, but The Narrator still keeps tabs on her to the present day, as said at the end of the comic:
Decades later, that couple is still together. They got married, they have kids. How much time do they spend today concerning themselves with questions of my masculinity? How fortunate is it for all of us the answer is likely, none at all?
The Narrator ends this comic by applauding his ex-partner and her husband for not currently concerning themselves with his masculinity. This again casts the point of view completely on The Narrator and his needs. Of course The Narrator’s emotional needs would never cross their minds! At the time, they were focusing on protecting themselves against a violent stalking man. If they do currently think of him, it wouldn’t be to ponder his masculinity; they would be processing this distressing event. This was a moment of extreme violence in their lives.
The danger within this comic is the creation of excuses for abusive behavior. The Narrator never outwardly admits he was abusive. He gives us statistics on domestic violence, but he never once owns his actions as wrong or violent towards his ex-partner. He gives us events and excuses for them. We are meant to read into the story that his actions were possibly abusive, while at the same time casting doubt upon that assumption. This story is a distortion meant to create empathy, a story developed in his point of view and his point of view alone.
“Overcompensating” develops the point-of-view of an abusive man, asking its audience to empathize with its Narrator under the guise of a critique on masculinity. It’s misguided in its critical approach, effectively eliminating a woman’s humanity. We do not get to know if this is a true case of abuse. And even if he were to tell us, The Narrator would not be the proper source to diagnose a problem. Only his partner can tell us if this is a case of abuse. But we do not even get to see her face.
Your point about the woman here not being shown reminds me of Chester Brown’s “Paying For It,” which is intended to be pro-sex worker, but which similarly never shows the faces of the women he claims to be speaking for.
I guess I feel like there is some point in discussing, or thinking about, the way that ideas about masculinity contribute to abusive behavior, or can make it seem okay or natural? The argument that the only reason abusers abuse is because they’re abusers seems like it makes it entirely about individual psychology, rather than having a social or cultural dimension.
Thank you Cathy. This is a great article.
A fascinating article, although I’m not quite sure I read the comic the same way (and of course that would just be due to my perspective.) That said, I had seen it before reading the piece, and I found it awfully confused. I got what the writer wanted to say, but I think he did so poorly. Ie drawing himself (?) as the publisher while saying the last parts of their relationship got ugly and then having a panel with domestic violence accounts?
I also felt a bit confused (I guess less so,) by his previous piece on the same site about how a father should act towards her early boyfriends, so I’m partly willing to trump some of this up to the guy just not being able to get his point across quite in the comic format. And I know that sounds like letting him off the hook of your argument…
It could be argued that it would be unfair to demand of a work of art ( if you are making comics you are engaging with an art form, even if you only apply it to tell a slight anecdote, as mr. Dawson did) that it ‘make a point’ ( as the above comment calls it).
Is that all art should do? Make just that one single point, like a commercial or propaganda, and good riddance to ambiguity? Not that i’m saying that the comic in question is particularly good at navigating its own ambiguities, mind you.
But, hardly any consideration is given to the art work ( where enough gets accomplished to make the interplay with the text worthy of attention: notice the way in which mr. Dawson inflects his line and shade, even his entire visual grammar, in the action movie segments; the character appears to visually change his perception of himself even as he is gradually settling onto a final (verbal) description of his character. So the text gives you one view, the visuals give you at least two other views, and the tension between these three- there’s your narrative).
Reading the story I don’t get the interpretation offered in this article. Of course we don’t have the woman’s view– that’s the whole point — this is a narcissistic, self-obsessed asshole.
In art, empathy (not sympathy) with an objectively terrible person is a valid, if sometimes dangerous, aim. Think of Macbeth, or the SS narrator of Jonathan Littel’s novel The Kindly Ones.
We also should note that the narrator is recalling his state of mind and actions from years before. There is a degree of ‘sociological’ self-justification, true, but this is part of the narrator’s defects and seems to be balanced by a large measure of self-disgust in hindsight.
I think Cathy’s point though is that the erasure of the women’s perspective is consistent with the way abuse works. It’s presented as him realizing he’s awful, but the form of the comic is consistent with the way he’s being awful in the first place.
I think it’s possible to create empathy for a horrible person in art…Lolita’s the obvious example, I guess. Lolita doesn’t erase her perspective though, which I think is important to that book.
But here’s the point. Nowhere in the story is it stated that he abused her. He might be describing a normal bitter breakup in a relationship. The only hint is when he drops that statistic on abuse, which could be an indirect confession of something despicable he can neither admit nor forget…in which case I say the story should be praised for its subtle ambiguity.
‘ It’s presented as him realizing he’s awful, but the form of the comic is consistent with the way he’s being awful in the first place.’
Agreed– which makes it good art.
‘ Lolita doesn’t erase her perspective though, which I think is important to that book.’
I’d contest that; we really only get to know Humbert Humbert’s view of Lolita.
No; making the same moral error you’re criticizing doesn’t necessarily equal “good art.”
Humbert’s view of Lolita is seen as partial and obscured…and I think Lolita’s actions in a lot of ways end up making you see that she’s a person in her own right, and that Humbert’s views are false.
I’d say the fact that you don’t think he abused her is a good sign that the comic is a failure in the way Cathy says it is. Stalking is a form of abuse.
The stalking only starts after the break_up. It therefore has no part whatsoever in any abuse leading to her departure.
I didn’t say that I don’t think he abused her. I am merely noting that nothing in the story indicates that he abused her.For all we know, she was the one who abused him. We know nothing about the course of their relationship.
“No; making the same moral error you’re criticizing doesn’t necessarily equal “good art.”
But the artist hasn”t made the “same moral error”. We are speaking of consistency of form and vision between the character and the final art. I recommend you read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Joyce’s Ulysses to understand what I said.
To sum it up, Cathy’s article falls to pieces because it is predicated on one single “fact” that exists only in her imagination: that the narrator abused the woman.
She made that up. So it doesn’t count. So her entire article is wrong.
Reflecting again upon the article & the comic, i find myself increasingly drawn towards the conclusion that it is rather problematic to apply the literary notion of ‘point of view’ to the comic book medium. The text may have been written from the vantage point of the male protagonist, ‘inside his thoughts’ as it were, but he is depicted visually as well, with no signs suggesting that he is, of those drawings, the author, the ‘voice’ in the same way that he can be thought of as the voice of the verbal narration. Is it third person limited? Omniscient? We can’t say, because we have no words, there. These are drawings, and point of view as applied to a drawing would mean something akin to camera positioning. One simply cannot use drawings the way one uses prose.
( i am hoping that Mrs. Johnson will deign to respond to this, seeing that she is a comics-maker, as am i, and these matters are pertinent to my artistic practice. I offer the above assertions without any quarrelsome or polemic intentions).
Actually, I’d say those panels showing the protagonist as Dirty Harry or the Punisher are clearly meant to reflect self-image in a fantasist vein.
And the fight with the boyfriend presented as a puerile playground tussle between kids reflects the narrator’s contempt for his younger self.
Alex, how can we know what an image is ‘meant’ to do. We can only see what it is, and does. Sophisticated as it is for a writer to give the reader a lot of room for interpretation, it would be a mistake for me as reader to conflate my interpretation with the writer’s intention, wouldn’t it? ( i am asking sincerely.)
I had literally no idea that the fight was being presented as a puerile playground tussle, as you describe it. So to infer contempt from a visual clue that is very open to subjective interpretation- that wouldn’t be reading the comic; it would be reciting your own preconceptions to yourself.
Alex, she didn’t make it up. The piece presents an abusive relationship. Like, I’m sure the creator of the comic would say as much. You don’t have to hit somebody to be in an abusive relationship. Stalking, being a controlling jerk, etc. functions in the same way.
The point of the comic is that the narrator is abusive. People are often abusive after a relationship ends, or escalate after a relationship ends.
I don’t agree that point of view doesn’t apply to comics. Point of view is a metaphor when applied to narrative in books too.
Cathy, great article, very well-researched with all the Lundy Bancroft references. I’ll be showing this to all my comic-reading friends. Would love to see more articles delving in the psychology of toxic masculinity in comics.
Alex, you’re full of shit and you know it.
Okay…so…if we could not descend into just insulting each other here, that would be great.
I’d like to leave the thread open and not delete anyone, because it seems like a good conversation. So…you know, please just take a breath all. Thank you.
“And even if he were to tell us, The Narrator would not be the proper source to diagnose a problem. Only his partner can tell us if this is a case of abuse. But we do not even get to see her face. ”
As confused as I find the comic, as I mention, I admit that in this case I’m not sure I see the problem. *ducks* He’s telling his story of how he did something that, from what I gather, he greatly regrets and how he now sees it was a problem. I’m not saying he should get the readers empathy let alone forgivenes (and I have a problem with the way the comic does seem to want both,) but I also am not sure why he should have put the woman into the comic. I do see that adding universal statistics (which I can only assume are true,) does make this more than some sorta personal monologue only about his experience. But otherwise, I’m not sure if that’s really a fault in the comic (there are other faults, IMHO, certainly.)
This is a terrible analogy, but I’ve read pieces from guys who participated in gay bashing and now feel horrified by what they did. I don’t expect to then see the POV of the gay victims in those pieces (especially as written/assumed/imagined by the perpetrator)
Well, Noah, it is exactly my contention that literary jargon does not carry over to comics very well; that goes for metaphor too. I may write ‘that man is like a dog,’ but if i draw the man as man in one panel and as dog in the next to effect that metaphor visually, i will have shown the man transforming into a dog. Or it may seem to the reader like a sudden interjection of a picture of a dog in the story. Without a referent, it may be hypocatastasis at best. If i show the man as dog all the time, i will have written a parable or fable. Comics are simply too specific. A drawing of a dog in a story is a symbol signifying exactly that precise dog. I suppose according to the Ware/ Brunetti/Spiegelman paradigm of comics-as-sign language this isn’t so, but looking at Dawson’s work, which does seem to suggest specificity, i’d say that to keep comics like these shackled to literary vocabulary does not do either medium justice. In the past, we’ve had to move past the cinematic paradigm ( comics have no camera), nowadays it seems we are fixing our gaze on literature for imagined correspondences.
I have carefully re-read the comic, and this confirmed what I had said before.
There is no mention or evidence of abuse on the narrator’s part in the break-up of his relationship with the (unseen) woman.
You know, this is a fictional character, so one mustn’t go overboard — but imagine applying the article’s attitude to real people.
Would it be correct, or just, to assume, upon hearing of a break-up of a couple, that the man was an abuser — despite zero evidence of this, despite nobody accusing him of it?
That would rightly be seen as ethically toxic.
“as dog in the next to effect that metaphor visually, i will have shown the man transforming into a dog.”
Sure, but metaphors verbally do that too.
James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook actually have people transform into crows as a metaphor in the Last Child. It’s lovely, and not very different from an extended prose metaphor.
Different mediums are somewhat different. But I don’t think they are, or have to be, as radically discontinuous as you’re saying they are.
Alex, he’s stalking her in the comic. That’s abusive.
He went twice to her friend’s house and made no effort to contact her. Come on.
And, once again: the stalking came AFTER the breakup.
There is no indication whatsoever that he abused her before the breakup.
I really don’t see why it matters that it came after the breakup. It’s still part of their relationship.
Ibrahim. Some comics will show matters “through the eyes” of a character. Moore/Campbell’s From Hell does so quite often (though not exclusively). It functions as if a camera were attached to the eyes/head of the character. At other times, we’ll get an “over the shoulder” look. What you’re describing is a case where the verbal/caption narrator is a character, but the visual/picture narrator is external (a “third person” narrator). This is like in a film, where you might get a voice-over in the voice of a character, but the camera is also on that character. So, the visual p-o-v is different from the verbal one. This is not unlike “free indirect discourse” in prose, where the pronouns are “third person”–but the perspective is principally a single character’s. The effect is a blurring of p-o-v, where it is not always clear whose perspective we occupy—or if we are simply straddling two or more perspectives. Comics narrative theorists are interested in this “problem” and it gets discussed from time to time. I agree with you that the exact scenario is more like film (with an auditory and visual track) than it is like prose, but there are somewhat analogous circumstances in prose. The idea that “metaphors” work differently has some truth to it, I think, though I agree with Noah that as soon as you compare a man to a dog in words, it does (potentially) call up the image of a dog (unless the metaphor is so overused that people no longer think of it as a metaphor) momentarily. Perhaps the way in which time works in a comic makes the comparison seem more “permanent” (that is, you can see the dog out of the corner of your eye, even if he has turned back into a man in the following panel), but I’m not sure it functions completely differently. Presumably, you would include some visual cue (maybe they wear the same glasses?) that indicates that the man and the dog are one and the same…alllowing the reader to “close” the gap between panels (a la McCloud) and move on. Anyway, I discuss this problem a bit in a forthcoming article, but I’m definitely not the first. The comparison to free indirect discourse seems the most relevant thing here. (I didn’t read this actual article…but got interested in Ibrahim’s initial comment…carry on.)
Noah:
“I really don’t see why it matters that it came after the breakup. It’s still part of their relationship.”
It matters because he doesn’t contact her. It isn’t part of their relationship. And it matters because Cathy makes so much out of an abuse that simply isn’t there.
And really, you should re-read Cathy’s article. She showers an extraordinary amount of sheer damnation onto the Narrator…and you say this is justified because he drove twice to the friend’s house?
Sorry, but the article is a failure.
Eric, of course i am aware that a dog in writing will conjure up the mental image of a dog; perhaps a dog the reader knows very well, or one he’s just seen in the street, or perhaps merely a general, abstracted, Dog. Chances are, the image will be a conflation of all these, creating a very layered dog, a dog with depth.This process is part of what makes the metaphor such a powerful literary tool, and this process exactly is what comics, i think, can’t replicate very well. Having that particular dog on the page right there flattens the metaphor into a kind of weak simile. Also, comics doesn’t need it. Literature does not have simultaneity, it is linear and therefore hierarchic; to link two images and present them simultaneously you need a Device; a metaphor is such a device. In comics you don’t need to compare images; any intelligent reader will do that automatically because that is how you read comics. You mention Moore and From Hell, and that’s a great example; there, Moore and Campbell create depth not by the strength of their metaphors, but by the layering & the-making-simultaneous- of Time. As in Richard mcGuire’s ‘Here'( both versions), those are the juxtapositions and layerings that create meaning. Another ( relatively unexplored) approach would be Jeff Jones’s I’m Age strips, that allow the text and image to each go their own way and let the reader figure it out by themselves. Comics need wider gutters ( metaphorically speaking), and less mcCloudian closure, i think, to work well. The gap’s the thing.
Well..remember the Narrator isn’t a person.
Following someone around, keeping tabs on them, attacking their boyfriend — that’s scary shit, Alex. If I had an ex that did that, I would be thoroughly horrified and freaked out. I don’t think Cathy is excessive in condemning it.
I agree with that (and it has happened–to a much more heightened degree and for much longer, to my twin sister, so I understand the situation and how terrifying it is.) What I still don’t understand is why this comic owes the nameless, never seen, girlfriend agency in the story. It’s a quick little meditation from the guy about how he behaved in a way he now realizes was horrible. Frankly, I don’t think he’d be equipped to place her in the story–but again, I also don’t think he should be.
If he had made her into more of a character–and tried to see some things from her perspective, I think I would have found that far more troublesome. And yes, he still seems self absorbed (shock, there,) and the final statement about that they likely never think about him and his issues of masculinity is pretty ridiculous, but…
Eric, I agree that adding the ex’s girlfriend into the comic would have only made it worse. The question on my mind is: Should we, as readers, listen to this man’s story at all? To bring the conversation back around to the article, Lundy’s research into abusive men shows how they change their stories to pay lip service to the values of their communities, in this case the idea of remorse. We haven’t seen proof that the narrator has actually stopped being abusive, which again falls in line with Lundy’s research. With that knowledge, I wonder if we don’t have an obligation to stop listening to the stories of abusive men in general?
That is a question I genuinely do share. At the same time–it’s a web comic… There have been self absorbed web comics before that I’ve seen and I choose not to read anything else by them.
I get your overall point, though. My concern is I think there is some worth to guys genuinely telling how they realized what they were doing was wrong and changed (though he doesn’t exactly go over the process of how he realized.) There is worth in that, even if, you’re right, often it is just lip service to garner sympathy.
I quite agree. Bad people can only turn themselves around by honest self-examination.
Wayne, how can the narrator stop being abusive when he hasn’t been abusive to start with?
Alex, you disagree with everyone else about whether the relationship as portrayed is abusive. We’ve established that; at this point we’re just repeating ourselves.
Yes, it’s lonely being right.
BTW, I’ve just learned that that site, the Nib, was set up for Matt Bors to run…non-fiction comics.
So is that a true story from the past of cartoonist Mike Dawson?
If so, then we can ask huim if he was abusive.
I’m not sure why critiquing masculinist themes in popular culture, as this comic does, amounts to blame-shifting. This article rejects any possibility of social influence on the author’s behavior and attributes it all to his irreducible identity as an “abuser”. I seem to remember, around the time of the Elliott Rodger shootings, a fair amount of editorializing against the cultural, pop cultural attitudes that led men like him to believe they were entitled to women. I found that valuable, but according to this logic we should reject all that as blame-shifting and a distraction from the shooter’s intrinsically evil nature. I don’t have a problem with calling that guy evil, but doesn’t dismissing those issues amount to letting ourselves off the hook? Likewise, according to this logic we should dismiss the concept of rape culture because rapists are rapists, who could maybe be weeded out by a blood test someday.
Of course there’s never any telling how truthfully an autobio comic relates to reality. But what the narrator describes is a personal low point in which he stalked his ex and assaulted her boyfriend in the street. He talks about the end of the relationship and pairs that with a reference to domestic violence stats, but also includes stats for gun ownership and that would be a pretty big thing to leave out. People are correct to describe his stalking and his attack on her boyfriend as abusive, but these blanket, categorical references to abuse and the constant titling of him as “the abuser” suggests either that he was physically violent to his girlfriend or that there’s no significant difference between that and what he did. It’s not excusing what he did to point out that there’s a difference.
Regarding who is shown and not shown: I think the narrator himself is not really seen when what we get is an opposition of menacing tough-guy images and cartoonish drawings of himself and the boyfriend. These are representations that both fall far wide of the reality. The Peanuts-like drawing of the actual fight diminishes him but it doesn’t diminish his threat to the other guy, considering they’re drawn the same way.
As for the girlfriend, just because someone is not shown does not mean they’re not a meaningful presence. He doesn’t speak for her, but that’s a legitimate choice in autobio (Lolita is a work of fiction.) What he succeeds in doing, and I think this conversation is testament to that, is putting his reader in the shoes of the woman involved. No, her identity and experience are never discussed, but we feel threatened. We feel on the receiving end of this ominous buildup of violent thoughts.
It seems to me that the narrator places the blame squarely on himself. In talking about how he had all these examples from the media, he doesn’t suggest that he wasn’t responsible for what he did. He’s not saying he was possessed by forces out of his control, he’s not saying he couldn’t have known or done differently, he’s saying *that’s who he was*. Someone who was making excuses or pity-seeking would talk about how much he loved his girlfriend, how painful the breakup was, how intolerable it was thinking about her with another man… if he was encouraging us to participate in his viewpoint as an abuser he would present the incitements to violence in such a way as to lead us to that point, i.e. “wouldn’t you have done the same?” instead of emphasizing the threat and the potential for violence simultaneously with his storytelling. He gives us the rage and the entitlement of the abuser but also places us in the shoes of the victim, the menaced person. I think what’s happened here is that the author succeeded at condemning himself to such a degree that he provoked all these people into joining in.
I think the piece is supposed to be autobio, more or less.
Alex, no, you are not going to make ridiculous legal threats on my site; I deleted that.
Dawson saw the post and expressed interest and sympathy for Catherine’s position. I can’t tell you what to do, but I’d strongly urge you to leave him alone.
Here is Mike Dawson’s response to Cathy’s piece.
I think it’s a mistake to lump everyone who has ever committed an act of stalking or domestic violence together as entitlement-driven, deceptive psychopaths whose perspectives should be ignored. I’m not even convinced that this article’s description of abusive men, who it says “aren’t abusive because of anger; anger is developed because they are abusive,” applies to the comic’s narrator. He’s angry about being left for a new love interest, which would also make plenty of non-abusive men and women angry; there’s less distance between him and the rest of us than the article lets on. Also, Bancroft’s dismissal of “excuses” such as “I was drunk” or “I was abused as a child”; Johnson’s statement, “The only reason abuse happens is because a person is abusive”; and the talk about the dangers of empathy seem to imply that we should never listen to abusers who claim that mental-health issues or trauma have influenced their behavior. But I’m pretty sure that people who were abused as children, are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or have mental disorders like PTSD really are more likely to commit domestic violence. I realize that some people are just plain evil, that some guys (like Pat Conroy’s father, “The Great Santini”) do conform to the profile described in this article, and that it’s hard to draw a line between explaining crimes and excusing them. But it seems like common sense to consider people on a case-by-case basis, rather than automatically define and dismiss them according to their worst moments and a pop psychologist’s theories.
Well said, Jack.
”Legal threats”? Huh?
This article is so off-the-mark it’s laughable and for all its carefully researched references does nothing to illuminate issues of abuse. There is no mention of any abuse toward the ex-girlfriend or any effort to avoid such issues. The ‘stalking’ only occurs twice and only to stalk the new boyfriend. Is it ‘stalking’ if the second incident ends in a confrontation? By definition, no. There is no ‘fantasizing’ here of masculinity as much as what Dawson mentions as the need to feel central, as the star and focus of the show of the show of life. The masculine imagery is not meant to represent control of women (though it does connect in reality, the author does not supply this connection in his case to illustrate his train of thought at the time) but a mastery of life we are fed from the media and television all our lives. Yes this effects non-abusive people too. Yes, even men who respect women and other men don’t like to have the security yanked out of their lives. No I’m not excusing abuse of any kind but anger and stupidity is universal. We’ve all been angry and stupid. The author of this article is simply framing the comic, projecting on it, in a covoluted and irresponsible way.
“The ‘stalking’ only occurs twice and only to stalk the new boyfriend. Is it ‘stalking’ if the second incident ends in a confrontation?”
This is a bizarre question. Why wouldn’t it be?
Following someone twice and attacking their boyfriend is really creepy and scary. Like, I think the comic represents it as really creepy and scary. The comic also is pretty direct about saying that the issue *is* masculinity (it couldn’t be much clearer about that.)
Well… heavens forbid masculinity could ever be a complex issue.
I mean to differentiate stalking from the implied notion that there was an element of voueurism and projection on the part of the spectator of some sort of fantasy. This case was just some guy sitting in his car working up the nerve to confront the man his girlfriend left him for. It’s not an excuse but it’s not the same kind of obsessive behavior found in an abusive relationship. That’s why it wouldn’t be.
I think a lot of the interpretive friction comes out of Dawson’s efforts to link the particulars of his experience to larger, socio-cultural phenomena (gun laws, toxic masculinity, structural oppression, etc.)
If I give the cartoon a generous reading, I come away with the sense that Dawson sees his behavior as part of a broader culture of oppression and abuse. On this reading, whether his behavior itself rises to what a particular reader considers abusive shouldn’t matter, as Dawson seems to see it as part of a continuum of abusive behavior.
With that in mind, I think that Cathy’s reading is a reaction to the work Dawson asks the reader to do: namely, to come to my reading you need to jump from the inner life of a specific man (as conditioned by the media) to statistical abstractions. There’s a lot missing in between, including and especially the lived experience of women.
Whether this makes the cartoon problematic is, to my mind, a difficult question to answer, and one about which people can disagree. Hell, this sort of disagreement would be productive. Splitting hairs about what constitutes abuse is a red herring.
Alex Buchet: This author is totally full of shit. I’m just not going to use the word “shit.” Instead I’ll flatly deny the very premise of this article, as is my wont with women’s work at the Hooded Utilitarian.
Noah:
Someone else: Alex Buchet is full of shit.
Noah: Keep it civil folks, or I’m shutting this down.
For the record, I think Alex Buchet is full of shit, too, always and forever. But you want me to take his “critique” seriously? Fine. Says Cathy in the OP: “We do not get to know if this is a true case of abuse.”
IMO (in Cathy’s o?) the heart of the problem is not about whether or not the ex makes a physical appearance in the comic. It’s that the narrator is presented as reformed/enlightened when he’s just as self-centered as he ever was. Less violent, maybe, but it’s still all about him.
As Cathy explains, in the comic, the “causes” of the narrator’s abusive behavior are all external–the quoted statistics, the pop culture etiology, etc. And then the next-to-last panel: “Decades later, that couple is still together. They got married, they have kids.” To me that phrasing seems more chilling than all the rest.
This comic seems weird and vaguely sociopathic to me. But I think it’s cool that Mike Dawson is grappling with these issues. I think people’s stories–full stop–are valuable, always. To me, this comic doesn’t work b/c the narrator’s “realizations” all come in the form of cold statistics and pop psychology. I hope Dawson revisits this story someday from the inside-out instead of the outside-in.
My, my.
Kim, are you not being slightly unfair when Noah has deleted some of Alex’s comments and has been arguing against Alex’s position throughout the thread?
“Some” may be inaccurate. I should have said “at least one”.
Just the one.
No importance, let’s move on.
Matt H, I can see how it might seem that way. My frustration is coming from not just this comment thread, but many others. I don’t want to hijack the comments on what was a great piece. I’m just sick of HU posts on women’s issues or whatever being trailed by HU regulars who either insult the author outright or, worse, sea lion (or whatever the blogging equivalent of sea lioning is) the author to death and then sputter with false indignation when anyone dares to “take a tone.” It’s trolling, pure and simple, and I for one appreciate when people take the time to call bullshit, as Wayne did above. The fact that elicited a “let’s be civil” from Noah is deeply weird to me, and the timing of his admonition here–and on other posts I’ve seen–perpetuates the problem, IMO.
If you don’t think there’s a problem, take a moment to ponder the fact that I’m the only woman in this comment thread.
I try to keep comments threads from turning into battles as best I can, in various ways. I’ll keep trying to do better.
I don’t doubt that this site is a hostile place for women, and I don’t doubt that it is a problem. I didn’t intend for my comment to contribute to that problem, but maybe it did. I apologize for that, and I take your point about the way our host is managing this thread. Noah tries doggedly to reason with the unreasonable, which is endearing but often counterproductive.
I appreciate Matt and Kim’s criticisms, and as I said, I’ll try to do better in the future. I guess this may not be the right decision either, but…conversation on the original post seems to have ended more or less, so I’m going to close the thread. Thanks for commenting everyone.