The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (18 page)

In a large study of more than 8,000 participants, Margo Wilson
and Martin Daly of McMaster University identified a clear association between
responses to five questions and a woman’s susceptibility to various forms of
violence from her husband. They were asked if any of the following items
applied to their partner and to answer with a yes or a no.

The more items you affirm as applicable to your partner, the
higher the likelihood that you will be a victim of violence. Here is a sample
of the statistical evidence. For item 1, 39 percent of women who said yes had
experienced serious violence: in contrast only 4 percent of the women who said
no experienced such violence. Forty percent of the women who said that their
husband insisted on knowing their whereabouts were victims of serious violence,
compared with only 7 percent of women whose husbands did not demand knowing
their whereabouts. Forty-eight percent of the women who affirmed that their
husband had called them names to put them down or to make them feel bad had
been beaten by their husbands, compared with only 3 percent of the women who
said that this did not describe their husband. It should be noted that 72
percent of the incidents meeting the “serious violence” criterion required
medical attention, attesting to the severity of the violence.

It is possible, of course, to have a partner who exhibits all of
these possessive behaviors but nonetheless does not use violence. Having a
partner who is extremely possessive, derogating, and autonomy limiting does not
invariably signal violence. But these actions are danger signs that indicate
that anywhere from a third to half of such women may be in jeopardy.

On New Year’s Eve in 1989, the football legend O. J. Simpson was
accused of assaulting his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. His response was
astonishment, for he declared that it was
he
who had been battered,
and he was merely defending himself against Nicole’s attack. He claimed, in
fact, that he was a battered husband! Is this mere self-justification? Or is
there any truth to the idea that women batter men as much as men batter women
in close relationships? This controversy has been raging for more than two
decades among researchers who study spousal violence.

The controversy was initiated in 1978, when Suzanne Steinmetz
published an article entitled “The Battered Husband Syndrome.” The article
reviewed most of the evidence then available, and concluded that there was a
large and mostly hidden side of intimate violence, with women as perpetrators
and men as victims. The article provoked outrage from sociologists,
psychologists, feminists, and some journalists. The controversy was fueled in
part by worries that the conclusion would be used to reduce attention to
battered women, perhaps curtailing funding for shelters. The controversy
ignited as media sources touted headlines such as “Study Backs Up Suspicions That
Husband Is More Battered Spouse” and exaggerated the actual statistics. Whereas
the actual figures for battered husbands were estimated at 4.6 percent (46 men
out of every thousand), or roughly two million men in America, one media
source, the
New York Daily News,
mistakenly quoted a figure of twelve
million battered men!

There are many statistics on the issue, but they must be
examined carefully. In the most extensive American survey of domestic violence,
the sociologists Murray Strauss and Richard Gelles found this extraordinary
result: The frequency of acts of violence in mating relationships is indeed
approximately equal for the two sexes, with half perpetrated by men and half by
women. Some research on date violence suggests that women actually exceed men
in some particular acts of violence. Women more than men report pushing or
shoving their partner (38 percent for women and 15 percent for men), slapping
their partner (22 percent versus 6 percent), kicking or biting their partner
(20 percent versus 1 percent), and hitting their partner with an object (16
percent versus 1 percent). In this study, men exceeded women in only two acts
of violence, both severe. Men more than women threw or smashed more objects (47
percent for men versus 40 percent for women) and forced sex on their partners
(6 percent versus 1 percent). From these studies and others, it is reasonable
to conclude that women are as capable of acts of violence as men are, and
perform some of them with at least the frequency shown by men.

Some of these acts are clearly cases of women acting in
self-defense, however, either against a specific attack or to combat a repeated
history of abuse, as the following cases illustrate. The first involves a woman
named Sally, age 44 and married for 25 years: “When he hits me, I retaliate.
Maybe I don’t have the same strength as he does, but I know how to hold my own.
I could get hurt, but I am going to go down trying. You know, it’s not like
there is anyone else here who is going to help me. So . . . I hit him back . .
. I pick up something and I hit him.”

In another case, a woman used violence as an anticipatory
defense strategy developed after a long history of experiencing her husband’s
wrath: “I know that look he gets when he gets ready to hit me. We’ve been
married for ten years, and I’ve seen that look of his. So he gets that look,
and I get something to hit him with. Once I hit him with a lamp. Another time I
stabbed him. Usually I don’t get so bad, but I was real fearful that time.”

A third case involved Francine Hughes from Dansville, Michigan,
who suffered years of beatings by her alcoholic and jealous husband, James
Hughes. One evening, she poured a can of gasoline on Hughes while he slept
after a night of drinking. She backed out of the room, lit a match, and fled
with her children as her husband was engulfed in flames. She drove straight to
the Ingham County sheriff’s office, where she confessed to the crime. The jury
eventually acquitted her, declaring that she had been temporarily insane while
in the act of incinerating her husband.

Although studies show that women assault their spouses as much
as men, there are two critical differences. First, women’s violence is
typically prompted by self-defense against a husband who is about to beat them,
who is in the process of beating them, or who has had a long history of beating
them. Women rarely initiate the battering, but do defend themselves when
attacked. Most women are not passive victims of violence. They fight back when
they can. Second, the cases above notwithstanding, women
on average
do
far less damage than men when they enter the fray. There are no shelters for
battered husbands, nor do hospitals house many men whose bones have been broken
by an assaultive wife. True, men may be embarrassed by being beaten by a woman
and show reluctance to bring such cases to light. Documented cases may
underestimate the actual damage that women do. Even allowing for some
underreporting, however, it’s clear that men do more bodily damage than women.

Much intimate violence by both sexes ultimately can be traced
back to sexual jealousy. Men assault their partners out of jealousy, and
although women sometimes attack out of jealousy, more often it is in defense
against a husband who is attacking them out of jealousy. In both cases,
jealousy lies at the core of the conflict.

How can we understand the brutality unleashed by the emotion of
jealousy? What sort of explanation could account for the paradox that we hurt
most the ones we love? According to sociologist R. N. Whitehurst, who studied
100 court cases involving husbands and wives in litigation over physical
cruelty within their marriages, “At the core of nearly all the cases involving
physical violence, the husband responded out of frustration at being unable to
control the wife, often accusing her of being a whore or of having an affair
with another man.” Whitehurst explains the violence by attributing it to two
factors. The first is “socialization,” whereby men beat their wives because
parents, teachers, and television teach them to do so. A second explanation
invokes “male norms of aggressiveness,” whereby men explode on their wives
because American society views it as the normal and manly thing to do.

A third popular explanation for intimate violence proposes that
patriarchy in Western culture is primarily responsible. As Neil Jacobson and
John Gottman argue, “Our culture has been patriarchal as far back as we can
trace it . . . patriarchy has sanctioned battering historically and continues
to operate to perpetuate battering today; the continued oppression of women
provides a context that makes efforts to end violence against women difficult
if not impossible . . . In short, battering occurs within a patriarchal
culture, and is made possible because such a culture dominates American
society.” As a result of patriarchy, they continue, “Many men still see it as
their right to batter women who oppose their authority . . . marriage as an
institution is still structured in such a way as to institutionalize male
dominance, and such dominance makes high rates of battering inevitable . . .
battering is simply an exaggerated version of the power and control that remain
the norm in American marriages.”

These explanations, although no doubt partially correct, run
into trouble as complete explanations when we consider several facts about
intimate violence. First, jealous violence is not merely an American
phenomenon, nor can it be attributed to Western culture, media images, or
capitalism. Spousal battering occurs in every culture for which we have
relevant data. In the Ache tribe, a group residing in Paraguay, violence
against mates is relatively common. Here is one report of an Ache child,
translated into English:

“Dad could get really mad. He hit Mom in the forest when she had
sex with another. Mom used to have sex with another (or several others). He hit
Mom. They would have a fight. They would scratch faces. He would really scratch
Mom’s face. Dad was really strong. Mom was weak. Mom used to hit Dad in the
face. Then he would scratch up her face in revenge (to defend himself ). Then
Mom would cry.”

Napoleon Chagnon reports similar instances of violence among the
Yanomamö. According to Chagnon, Yanomamö men beat their wives with sticks for a
variety of reasons, ranging from consorting with another man to a violation as
trivial as serving tea too slowly! Among the Yanomamö, as in the United States,
jealous violence is also directed toward same-sex rivals: “Most duels start
between two men, usually after one of them has been accused or caught
en
flagrante
trysting with the other’s wife. The enraged husband challenges
his opponent to strike him on the head with a club. He holds his own club
vertically, leans against it, and exposes his head for his opponent to strike.
After he has sustained a blow on the head, he can then deliver one on the
culprit’s skull. But as soon as blood starts to flow, almost everybody rips a
pole out of the house frame and joins in the fighting, supporting one or the
other of the contestants.”

Not surprisingly, as the men age, the tops of their heads become
covered with scars, which the men proudly display. Some shave the tops of their
heads and rub red pigment on the skin to draw attention to them and to
demonstrate their toughness. All this florid violence—against a partner,
against a rival, and sometimes involving the whole group—is triggered by
jealousy over a real or suspected sexual infidelity.

Thousands of miles away from the Yanomamö resides the Tiwi
tribe, located on Melville and Bathhurst Islands off the northern coast of
Australia. Because of their relative isolation, the Tiwi tribe retained many of
their customs at the time they were studied by anthropologists. They are
described as a gerontocracy, which means that the older men tend to hold most
of the power, while the young must wait their turn, sometimes for decades. The
Tiwi are polygynous, with the powerful men taking as many as 29 wives, many of
whom are younger by decades. Young men remain mateless. According to Tiwi law
and custom, all women must be married, but the same obviously does not apply to
men.

Given this mating system, it is not surprising that young wives
sometimes have sexual affairs with the young men. When discovered, the husband
usually beats his wife and then publicly accuses the young man of violation.
Ritual requires that the accused young man stand in the village center,
surrounded by all the other men in the village, while the offended husband
throws spears at him. Being more athletic and agile, the young man can
sometimes dodge the spears to avoid injury. But if he does, the other old men,
allies of the offended husband, pick up spears and hurl them at the interloper.
The most effective strategy is to attempt to receive a nonlethal spear, say in
the upper thigh, which will draw a lot of blood, thereby assuaging the honor of
the offended older man and preventing the young man from being killed.

As we’ve seen, jealous violence resides not only in North
America, or in Western culture, or in cultures bombarded with media images.
Neither the Tiwi nor the Yanomamö have electricity, much less television.
Explanations limited to American culture, local socialization practices, or
Western patriarchy fail to explain the universality of jealous violence. A deeper
explanation is needed, one that traces violence back over human evolutionary
history.