11. The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rules
the World.
The ‘legitimate’ abuse that has a thousand
names, punishment, correction, discipline, consequences, training, spanking,
timeouts, quiet time, penance, detention, etc., this practice is done by nearly
everyone. People of many races, religions, nationalities, creeds, sexualities,
income levels, education levels, and both genders, most people hold with
punishment’s basic, unquestioned, unacknowledged premise, that you can improve
people, their behaviour, their development, their character – by hurting them.
By somehow making life less pleasant for them when they stray from the
caregivers’ idea of what is done and what is not.
Now, for me, this seems to contradict a
great deal of psychological science, which developed, to some degree, by tracing
suffering people’s lives to the unpleasantness that damaged them to the point
of seeking a doctor’s help, in the early days, damaged them to the point of
being committed to a sanatorium. For a dysfunctional patient, often after other
causes had been explored, physical ailments, etc., often the next, or maybe
last logical step might be the psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysis has had some
success, making connections between mental trauma and social dysfunction.
Of these two apparently opposing ideas, the
latter seems the more logical, dare I say, scientific. So with this argument,
and the ones in the preceding chapters, I’m going to push on, taking as a
given, at least as my premise, that unpleasantness, only different from trauma
by a matter of degree, damages people rather than improving them.
OK, the use of punishment has looked like
it works, you punish someone and the unwanted behaviour appears to stop – but does
it? Do we think a punished child becomes a model citizen forever afterwards? Do
we think a punished adult ceases his criminal behaviour and goes on as a saint?
I don’t think even the most energetic of my unconvinced audience thinks that,
do they? So again, unpleasantness makes people worse, less functional, rather
than improving them. Having said that, I want to extrapolate that whomsoever
punishes a person the most, does the most damage.
If
one’s parents are active participants in the practice, the culture of
punishment, then I feel I must say, that
the parent who does the more parenting, very often the most punishing, must be
the parent causing the most unpleasantness, the most trauma, the most damage.
And, sorry to say, in my world, probably in most of the world, it’s Mom doing most
of the parenting. Certainly many fathers are responsible for horrible trauma,
perhaps the more serious punishments are administered by the father in some
families, but basically, day-to-day parenting and punishing, falls to mothers. This
is especially trus during the earliest years of the child’s life. Uninvolved
fathers are bad in many ways, of course. Neglect is a form of abuse, there is
the lack of male modelling, but there is the other side too: if parenting means
punishing to the mother, and if she overdoes it, then Dad’s neglect is downright
dangerous, he can be rightly accused of not protecting his kids from some
hands-on abuse. Also, if he’s not helping, then the mother can become stressed
out, also not a good thing for a parent who already thinks punishing kids, that
is, hurting kids, is good for them. So yes, that is what I’m saying: in the
culture of punishment, your mother is probably doing you more harm than your
father. Dad’s no saint, don’t get me wrong, he’s letting her do it, often
participating . . . but the myth that needs busting here, is Mom’s sainthood. Having
said THAT, the other ramifications of this are the more important thing. Blame
is even, one does it, one allows it, and sometimes they trade off. I don’t make
this point to place blame; this isn’t about the trauma of children.
This principle, that mothers raise the
children, that mothers punish the children, this is the root of misogyny, the
root of violence against women. We love our mothers, we love our system of
punishment, we all hold the family unit as a sacred, ancient tradition, but
that is the surface of it all. That is only what we say, what we think we feel,
but the dark side is this:
We all know who punished us, we know who
damaged us. Violence against women is a trend, a tendency, it is far more
prevalent than the incidence of extreme abuse would indicate, the expression of
infantile rage against the one who hurt us, that is the great secret. This is
another piece of the great puzzle of life that falls into place when you work
from the premise that punishment is violence.
The culture of punishment in which we live
has turned the most natural, organic beautiful thing in the world, mother love,
into a violent act, and one which brings a terrible vengeance to the half of
humanity we should all hold sacred, our mothers. Now to blame. Women, putting the
blame for misogynist violence on men isn’t working; stop spanking your sons.
Men, you’re not fixing it either. Stop making your women “correct” your sons.
This is the issue. Violence breeds
violence.
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the
world. Women, your safety, the safety of your daughters and grand-daughters is
in your hands. Hurting kids, dishing out unpleasantnesses, damages them, it
doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help women. Help your kids, help yourselves,
give up your punishing ways. Love looks like love, and it doesn’t invite
revenge.
