Battered Women

Chattel? Prey?

During the Middle Ages, husbands were cautioned to stop beating their wives when the wife began to pass gas because, if he beat her until she defecated, she would surely die. In later times, the law specified the size of the stick the husband could use to beat his wife. Since the battered wife syndrome has come to us from antiquity and is still prevalent today, we have to surmise that there are some purely animal/biological characteristics in the practice.

Women, to their detriment, have always enjoyed a special status in human society. They have been placed on pedestals; been given the heavy work; borne the children and reared them; been considered the weaker sex; been deprived of their property; and been courted gallantly until married, at which time, they suddenly were expected to behave as chattel slaves. Times have greatly improved for women in many parts of the world, but they are still subject to substantial abuse from their spouses.

A study reported in USA Today for August 27, 1993 sheds some light on why spouse abuse continues even in a society that is accepting feminist ideas. Professor Neil Jacobson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, tested 57 couples in a laboratory situation where the participants' blood pressure could be monitored. No actual violence was permitted, but in the contentious, situations that resulted, the blood pressure in a little more than 20% of the men actually dropped. Without regard to the response they encountered from the women, the men persisted in their hostility. Translated into actual performance this meant that, no matter what the women did, fight back or remain passive, they would have been beaten had they not been in the inhibiting situation. And the men, it seems, while experiencing lowered blood pressure and lowered heart rate, would have had a good time assaulting their women.

An animal that chills out while abusing another animal is a predator. The cat certainly does not feel threatened by the mouse, and often of toys with of it before the kill. That's why it's called playing and mouse. The squirrel doesn't threaten the dog. The abusing husband with the lowered blood pressure is not threatened by his spouse, and his predatory inclination often leads to abusive behavior. Professor Jacobson suggests that these men should not be subject to therapy but to the criminal justice system.

Women deserve to be freed from their special status. If a husband abuses a spouse—beats her up—he should be subject to the same penalty as if he had beaten up a stranger. Why should women be private punching bags when the identical act would not otherwise be tolerated in the society? Women deserve the same rights everyone else has. Women should enjoy their unalienable rights and should not be subject to some special status with regard to their husbands which entitles them to be abused. More emphatically, they should enjoy the ecological equity that goes with being a woman.

...Ted Sudia...

Free Speech

Buying Conformity

The argument over the content of Federally funded art rages on, only this time Bill Clinton is lined up with the bad guys. The question is can the Federal government specify the content of art, or more specifically can the Federal government certify the content of art funded by Federal funds? We have rules against obscenity in the arts on public display—movies, magazines, TV, etc—and the National Endowment for the Arts has subscribed to the Court's rules for determining obscenity, stating categorically that they will not fund art that is determined to be against the law as defined, by the Supreme Court.

Jesse Helms, the pusher of Federal censorship for the arts, proposes that art which is, "depictions of sado-masochism, homo-eroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts...material which denigrates the objects or beliefs...of a particular religion or non-religion" and "material which denigrates, debases, or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, or, national origin," should not be funded. In some form or another the Clinton Administration now agrees that there should be some content specification for Federally funded art.

The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, were adopted to restrain government, restrain it so that it would not trample the rights of citizens—the citizens sovereign. The particular amendment, the first, guaranteeing the right to free speech, guarantees free speech without modification, that is to say the language is simple, the first amendment places no limitations on free speech. The exact phrase is, "Congress shall make no law...abridging freedom of speech..."

The question with the Helms proposal to limit the free speech of Federally funded artists is whether or not the Federal government can induce citizens, who are supposed to be the beneficiary of the rights of the Constitution, to surrender their rights in order to get Federal funding? Because it is the government's money, can the government impose a regulation that would otherwise be un-constitutional. Can the government, with the inducement of money, ask citizens to voluntarily abrogate their right to free speech? Can the Federal government, with the inducement of money, ask people to be slaves?

The content of art is a question of art, it is not a question of what the Southern Baptists will approve as art, or the Unitarians, or the libertarians, or the compulsory innoculists. The whole enterprise of art and scholarship in general is the search for meaning in our lives and our existence which illuminates our condition.

Pictures from the Nazi death camps are the most horrible images, still and moving, I have ever seen. They disgust, revile, and nauseate me. The whole world needs to shocked, stunned, petrified and frightened by those death camp images. I can find nothing in the current controversy that remotely compares with the death camp images. Mapplethorp, Serrano, and the others are simply describing another set of human conditions. What more can artists do, but paint, photograph, dance, sing, compose what they see and feel? What greater gift can they share with us than their insight?

To have self-appointed censors, Senator Jesse Helms or President William Jefferson Clinton, do two things (1) substitute their judgement for that of the artist and (2) substitute their notion of the Constitution for that of the Founders is an affront to Art and to our form of government. The citizens sovereign, the holders of the sovereign power of the nation, and on whose behalf the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written require better servants than these to work for them.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1993
Institute for domestic Tranquility