Journal bethanie's Journal: On coercion 26

1. Sitting down for homeschooling lesson with Kiddo. She decides, for whatever reason, she's not in the mood to read any more. Now, what can I do about this? I can gently urge, I can cajole, I can bribe, I can encourage... and I can intimidate, I can threaten, I can punish.
   
   But if she's dead set against reading, there's not a damn thing I can do about it if she's willing to withstand whatever it is I can come up with to lord over her. It may *look* like I'm in the position of power -- but I'm not.
   
   She's the one in the catbird seat, and I'm at her mercy. I can't force her eyes to look at the words, her brain to process the sounds, or her mouth to pronounce them. Just can't do it. She wins.
2. There was an instance that is *very* clear in my memory of one evening during my adolescence. It may even have been after I had gone away to college and was back home for the summer. In any case, I was not a "child" per se. My father had called me down to do the dishes, which was my chore. I didn't want to do them then -- I preferred to wait until after the family was asleep. I don't know why this was the case, but that's beside the point.
   
   So I pushed back against my dad's wish that the dishes be done NOW, and he got very upset and called me a bitch. I was fairly used to that sort of language -- I grew up with him calling my mother a bitch all the time. But something that night snapped in me. I looked him square in the eye and said in a low voice, barely containing my contempt, "I am not a bitch. My mother is not a bitch. No member of my family in any way resembles a female dog."
   
   Well, that did it for him. He backed me into a corner of the kitchen, towered more than a foot over me, and slapped me in the face as hard as he could. Said something more about my being a bitch. And I repeated myself.
   
   And he slapped again.
   
   And this was repeated three or four more times.
   
   I was NOT going to back down. I was NOT going to break. And fortunately for my father, my mother was there to call him off so that he could manage to get out of it without completely losing face or having to knock me unconscious. Because that's what he would have had to do. I was NOT backing down. I was NOT going to be the loser -- at least, not the *only* loser. :-)

These are power struggles, and they're something I encounter (although not at that level of physical violence) so many times a day I couldn't begin to count.

My reactions in such situations takes me by surprise. I am shocked at how easy it is to slip into the intimidate/threaten/punish mode. A scared kid is a well-behaved kid, after all.

But that's not what I want. That's not the parent I want to be. I think there's a better way. It's a constant struggle, and it demands the most of me every single day to try to find it. Some days I do better than others. But every morning I wake up and try to do better.

Having experienced both sides of the power struggle dilemma, it's really interesting to find myself on the other side again. I find myself in a situation where someone wants something from me that I have decided not to give them. And apparently, this is making the other person pretty upset.

One of the most interesting elements of the situation is the way gender figures into it.

You see, as a woman, it is pretty easy for me to be physically overpowered. I'm short in stature, and I'm not in terribly great physical shape -- certainly not in any shape to take on even an average sized man. (Although I would do so to the death if my children were in danger of being harmed!) Women are often physically bullied and intimidated -- it's become almost second nature in our society, and it's certainly a basic biological assumption that women are the "weaker sex."

Hand-in-hand with overweaning physical domination comes sexual intimidation. The prospect that a man would use his physical size and strength to force a woman to perform a demeaning sexual act so that he could feel more powerful. How else would you explain the implication of having anal sex with someone that you claim to feel no sexual attraction toward, and where the attraction is most *certainly* not mutual? That's a threat of anal rape. It's not a threat of a sexual act. It's a threat of violence. And it's sociopathic.

If you don't think that it has anything to do with men overpowering women, ask yourself for a moment how many assrape trolls you've seen baiting the men around here.

Now, in our virtual world, this threat is not really likely to be carried out. But the threat, however veiled, however "unintentional," is still there. This medium is FAR from anonymous, and someone who truly intended anyone of us harm could easily make it happen. It is a convenant of this community that we don't make those kinds of threats against one another.

Someone in this community has broken that covenant.

I'm not going to name names, because that would continue to feed his desire for attention and his unjustifiably overblown sense of self-importance. At this point, I am not afraid (although I am disturbed enough that thinking about this has kept me up until 5 in the morning). But I'm not going to keep it a secret, either. If you care about our community and keeping the people in it safe, feel free to email me (bethaniebIAM@NOTAGODDAMNVICTIMgmail.com) and I'll be happy to let you know who the violater is (if you are unable or unwilling to deduce that on your own). You can feel free to take whatever action your own conscience dictates.