Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

I will admit it: I occasionally read the gossip column, and I peruse gossip magazines at the supermarket and any waiting room that I am, well, waiting in. If it’s about people’s lives, then I’m interested. Which brings me to today’s reading of the “Names and Faces” section of the Washington Post, (which is how it terms the quarter-page devoted to, you know, the lives of people you see acting in movies and television, and playing sports, and, since this is Washington, politicians with their occasional lapses in moral fiber) which mentioned that Hayden Panettiere’s parents had a “domestic argument” that resulted in her father being arrested. (I don’t know who she is or what she is in, but she’s made it to the gossip page of the Post, something that I have not done—in better circumstances, of course.)

The paper noted that her father was “arrested early yesterday in Los Angeles on suspicion of hitting his wife.” According to the sheriff, he punched his wife a couple of times in the face during a “domestic argument.” I have had a “domestic argument” that required the police being called in and I can tell you that it is not an argument in the sense that you are thinking of an argument. It is not a scene where you have a man and a woman talking, discussing, disagreeing, raising their voices, getting frustrated that their spouse doesn’t get what they are saying. And then, maybe, someone pours more wine or coffee, or someone goes to the bathroom, or someone finally stops talking and listens to what the other person is saying, and they get back to taking turns talking and listening, or at the very worst, one storms out of the house and they just might (horror of horrors) go to bed angry at each other.

No, it is not like that. It is one spouse yelling with spittle flying from his mouth and the veins of his neck popping out, and it is the other spouse trying to get away from the monster in her midst. If at first she was answering him angry word for angry word, by this time she would have stopped, realizing that it is not helping, realizing that there is no talking to him when he is like this. That is not an argument, that is a fight. That is what Russia is doing to the Georgians. If they just took out the word “domestic” it would no longer be called an argument, it would be called what it is: violence.

The paper goes on to quote someone from the sheriff’s office: “At the party, Paniettiere ‘apparently felt disrespected by his wife.’” Ah yes, the "honor" defense. If I recall correctly, men in supposedly less developed countries than ours commit “honor killings” where the honor of the family is at stake if a girl or woman “disrespects” the family. Yes, we abhor that, it is so crude, so uncivilized. We don’t have that here. No. No, of course not. We have domestic arguments where a man punches his wife in the face because he feels that she has disrespected him. Well, then, that’s okay. He is, after all, the king of the castle and his word needs to be foremost and, any way, she must be a bitch, so she probably deserved it. Oh, it’s too draining even to recount those explanations and the subsequent reasoning. No, they just never do what they are caught having done; and it’s never their fault. There’s no honor here, it’s a lame excuse that is used to cover up the banality of the act: a man bullying a woman and hitting her.

Maybe if we call things what they are we can take off our rose-colored glasses and start to understand what honor and respect really mean in a relationship.

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