IN HIS 2007 book In Praise of Prejudice, Theodore Dalrymple, who formerly worked as a clinical psychiatrist in Britain, offers a compelling theory for an increase in domestic violence. He attributes the rise to two factors: sexual freedom and the cult of non-judgmentalism. The first makes men insecure about the fidelity of their companions: 

How does a man who lives in a sexual free-for-all, in which any casual encounter between a man and a woman may lead to a sexual liaison, bind a woman to him with hoops of steel, to ensure her fidelity?  This is his problem, because he knows that his intrinsic charms, merits, and attractions are minimal, or at any rate, no greater than those of a thousand other men around him. 

In these circumstances, it is best to fill his beloved’s waking hours with thoughts of himself and with nothing but thoughts of himself. 

The second prevents women from judging the obvious and discriminating accordingly:

They have accepted, perhaps without knowing it, the modern prejudice against prejudice, a prejudice that in their case might have preserved them from beatings and sometimes from death itself.  The argument they have accepted goes something like this: the observation that men who dress and present themselves in a certain fashion and tattoo themselves heavily are bad men is at best a rough generalization, which is itself probably the result of class or ethical bias in the observer.

Dalrymple’s insights, based on encounters with “thousands” of men and women, are excellent and plausible. I highly recommend the book. Here are extensive quotes from Chapter 26, The Dire Social Effects of Abandoning Certain Prejudices.

                                          In Praise of Prejudice By Theodore Dalrymple

Often, as I have mentioned, I was consulted by women who had been abused by men.  I do not mean a few such women, but thousands of them.  I was also consulted by thousands of men who had abused women, and by not a few women who had abused men (by abuse, I mean violence that, committed in public, would, or ought to, result in prosecution and a jail sentence).  I saw women who had been locked in cupboards or dragged down the stairs by their hair, or who had had the bones of their forearm “snapped,” as they put it, or had been suspended by their ankles from tenth floor balconies. …

… The question, however, is not whether a phenomenon, for example burglary or murder, has always existed, but whether, even if it has, it has existed with greater or lesser frequency.  And there is reason to suppose that the kind of violence whose victims and perpetrators I saw had increased, at least in Britain. 

In the first place, the most common motive for it, nowadays at least, was sexual jealousy.  With the breakdown of a socially accepted structure, or script, of relations between the sexes, this jealousy has itself increased very markedly, even dramatically.  The idea, propagated by intellectuals who fretted at the frustrations of their own existence, as if such frustrations could be eliminated entirely from human existence, that, once free of all social obligations, contract, custom, economic considerations, sense of duty, and all the other factors “external” to them, relations between the sexes would be governed solely by mutual affection – which, if the latter waned (or waxed with a different object in view), would simply be amicably and rationally dissolved, without recrimination – was unrealistic, to say the least.  It proved far easier in the event to remove sexual restraint than to overcome each individual’s desire for the exclusive sexual possession of another; and it takes little effort of the imagination, even if we would rather not make it, to understand the result. 

This is not to say that there was ever a time when there were no, or even few, sexual irregularities (our literature would have been very thin indeed without them), only that they had to be undertaken with discretion, with attempts to hide them.  In these circumstances, sudden infatuations or irresistible lusts did not automatically deprive children of one of their parents, and could, when they were over, be allowed to recede into the mists of time.  It was understood that feelings and inclinations were not always in lockstep with moral and social obligations. 

The sexual revolution, after which everyone would supposedly be sexually fulfilled all the time, without a moment’s respite, as it were, deprived people of this instinctive understanding, which had resulted from the operations of social prejudice on their minds in favor of the necessity of restraint. …

… The reality, at least in the area of the city in which I worked, was quite otherwise.  The combination of sexual predation with an insistence on the fidelity of the current sexual partner has led to violence all round.  Since we have a tendency to believe that the people around us are not so very different from ourselves, we are sexually predatory, we believe that such predation is the norm, and we see it practiced in the open; it is hardly surprising that we fall prey to the green-eyed monster, jealousy.  No wonder that when another person happens to glance at our current “beloved” we should feel threatened; since prevention is better than cure, we give him a prophylactic punch in the face. 

The violence is not gratuitous in the sense that it is without function, purpose, or rationale, even if it is not articulated.  Let us leave aside the intrinsic joys and satisfactions of cruelty and brutality, which every boy who has ever plucked the wings from a fly (allegedly to find out something about its physiology) knows only too well; the domestic violence about which I learned in my medical practice had all the characteristics, except conscious thought, of a well-considered policy. 

How does a man who lives in a sexual free-for-all, in which any casual encounter between a man and a woman may lead to a sexual liaison, bind a woman to him with hoops of steel, to ensure her fidelity?  This is his problem, because he knows that his intrinsic charms, merits, and attractions are minimal, or at any rate, no greater than those of a thousand other men around him. 

In these circumstances, it is best to fill his beloved’s waking hours with thoughts of himself and with nothing but thoughts of himself.  If, after all, she is thinking of him, she cannot be thinking of the next door neighbor….

…. For maximum effect, there should be as little pattern to it as possible.  It should be random, spontaneous, and insensate, and anything, even things that are the very opposite of supposed faults, should be capable of provoking it.  In short, it should be arbitrary. …

… One of the interesting things about the perpetrators is that they often do not even try to conceal their character; indeed, they may even advertise it, at the very outset of their relationships.  In many cases, it would be unnecessary for them to do so, for their reputation precedes them.  For example, I was recently asked to prepare a medical report on a jealous man who had stabbed his lover nearly to death.  In her written testimony, the victim said that, before she had ever gone out with him, she had heard bad things about him – namely that he was a violent, drunken, drug-taking criminal, with a history of beating women – but that she had accepted him into her life nonetheless. 

His contrition for what he did, his avowed distress at his own behavior, his repentance after his violent outbursts, his promises not to do it again, his compensatory flowers and chocolates, and his search for medical assistance to “address his violence,” as if he were the real victim, were part of the plan – if something not wholly conscious can be called a plan.  His actions demonstrated to her that, in the inner core of his being, he was a good person, who would never have been a swine if something akin to an evil spirit did not periodically possess him and turn him into an evil bully.  “When he’s nice, doctor, he’s very nice:” how many times I have heard that.  If he were always nice, of course, she would have time to think of something, or worse still somebody, other than him; in the world in which victim and perpetrator live, he or she who commits adultery in his or her heart soon enough commits it in deed. 

Reputation or not, such men do not deign to hide their character.  They dress and comport themselves in an aggressive manner, and they may have themselves tattooed with the iconography of threat.  If you saw them coming towards you in the twilight, you would cross to the other side of the street. 

If what they are is written, sometimes literally, all over them, why do women take no notice of the signs?  It is not that they are naïve or inexperienced, for many of them have experienced such men before (a few may think, as a result of their experience, that no other type exists).  Leaving aside the excitement of danger, which at least preserves us from the horror of existential ennui, the answer given by many such women is that it would be wrong to jump to conclusions, to judge adversely, to stigmatize, or to stereotype. 

They have accepted, perhaps without knowing it, the modern prejudice against prejudice, a prejudice that in their case might have preserved them from beatings and sometimes from death itself.  The argument they have accepted goes something like this: the observation that men who dress and present themselves in a certain fashion and tattoo themselves heavily are bad men is at best a rough generalization, which is itself probably the result of class or ethical bias in the observer.  Not all men who drink too much, that is to say, more than the Puritans who cajole and bully us, are bad men; therefore, man x, who drinks too much, is quite possibly not a bad man.  One should not judge a book by its cover, they say (in my experience, not a wise saying even in a bookshop): to do so leads directly, by a short and slippery slope, to Auschwitz.  The only ethical thing to do in such matters, therefore, is for a person to follow his or her own inclinations, that is to say, to have sex the moment it is offered, and not to pass judgment before the decision to live together.  At least then the woman can be assured that she is not acting on a prejudice or being judgmental, even if it means a broken nose and permanently terrified children. (In Praise of Prejudice, pp. 107-113)

                                                                            — Comments —

Justin writes:

This honorable doctor attributes their love of violent men to an ideological bug, the prejudice against prejudice.

I am afraid the truth is darker, that their behaviors are not a bug, they are a feature. I am having a hard time forumating an argument against the idea that women simply prefer to be bossed, criticized, and controlled by their partners. 

From all the thousands of stories like the ones he relates, of women continually seeking violent men, there are also countless stories of the seeming opposite: husbands/fathers who were always gentle and conciliatory, yet are left by their wives. 

I am left with the unescapable conclusion that if the wife is not happy, it’s because she is being treated too well.

Jesse Powell writes:

I do think that the idea of women being with violent men, when the woman has every reason to know before hand that the man is a violent man, simply because she is being true to “non-judgmentalism” is a bit far fetched. Everybody makes many judgments about prospective romantic partners, a woman especially who is likely approached by many different men will distinguish between characteristics in a man she likes versus characteristics in a man she doesn’t like; if she didn’t do this, how could she chose one man over another? 

The woman who repeatedly dates and has relationships with violent men prefers violent men, the question is why. I think what Darlymple said about the man’s motivations is interesting. The man is violent because he wants to bind the woman to him “with hoops of steel” and he wants the woman to be obsessed with him so that the woman will not think about other men. From what I know of women who have been abused by men, often these women will have many different relationships with many different men, but the relationships they had with non-abusive men tended to be short, and their relationships with the abusive men tended to last longer. 

What is interesting about the man’s motives for his violence, to protect the relationship from infidelity or other sources of relationship breakdown, is that these same motives benefit the woman as well. The woman wants to be restrained from engaging in infidelity and prevented from becoming bored with her man and wandering away to somebody else. The man benefits from the restraints he places on the woman, but the woman benefits as well. The man is protected from the woman destroying his relationship with her, and the woman is protected from destroying her own relationship with the man. 

As Theodore Darlymple says, these men advertise who they are, the woman knows what kind of man she is dealing with often, and yet these violent men are not romantically shunned. These men offer a certain kind of service to the type of women who chose to romantically interact with them, the service of being restrained and controlled from engaging in their otherwise self-destructive behavior. A “nice guy” doesn’t offer this kind of woman the restraint on her actions that she desires; therefore she quickly wanders away from the “nice guy.”

So, in response to Justin saying; “I am left with the unescapable conclusion that if the wife is not happy, it’s because she is being treated too well,” I would say the issue is not that the wife is being treated too well; the issue is that the wife is having no discipline imposed upon her and no rules set for her.  A man who imposes no standards on his wife’s behavior is not “treating her well”, he is neglecting her needs as a woman and shirking his responsibilities as a man.  However, a man needs to follow ethical rules in how he behaves towards his wife.  The man needs to impose self-restraint upon himself while he applies external restraints upon his wife. 

Laura writes:

It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a man on his own to impose restraints on a woman. If he lives in a culture which does not condemn infidelity and which even offers rewards for it –  a sympathetic sisterhood, approval by friends and family, custody of the children – there is very little a man can do if a woman is wayward. It was never the case, except in the most primitive societies, that men simply by their behavior ensured fidelity in their mates.  Dalrymple is talking about a primitive society, which is what lower class and even middle class Britain are today. It takes a culture of restraint to ensure fidelity in both men and women, and when that is missing, some men will resort to violence, as Dalrymple is saying. It’s the law of the jungle.

I agree with Dalrymple that many women consider it unfair to judge by the prejudices of yesterday, believing that the inner person is unconnected to the outer reality; a coarse exterior may be a sign of authenticity. Some are drawn to interracial marriage because it’s unfair to not consider it. But I don’t think this refusal to judge by the standards of yesterday is the only reason women end up with violent men. I think it is too much to say, as Jesse does, that a woman “wants to be restrained.” She benefits from strength and masculinity. She is drawn to strength for a number of reasons.  Women don’t just leave nice men, as Justin says. They leave abusive men too. The majority of women don’t leave at all, but the threat and possibility of abandonment is there for both men and women, made ever present by sexual freedom and divorce.

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