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Rite of Recall

in the fairy grove my hand is warmed
by Martyn’s   we’re always
meeting at a conference on vampires
where emergency fire doors hold in coffee’s
bitter scent, tea steam, and a very nice bean salad

we’re always walking
through Central Park at dusk
smelling roses & pansies
of the Shakespeare Garden
we didn’t find that time

and I bring him to the top of Fuji
where we shiver into each other until light
and I bring him to the top of Tai Shan
to show him that red sky I remember
deserving its reputation and its hundreds
who climb or take the ropeway

his hand like crinkling leaves
filters out the horrors, yes horrors
there’s nothing else to call it
when a man you loved has raped you
when strangers hold a knife
against your soft belly for cash

under the hawthorn we’re building
words for Francis Bacon & Edward Hopper
we’re building a home on the edge of loneliness
left since we’re together
to the ashy snow

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It is bad enough when an article on domestic violence ignores the victim, treating her as if she were nothing but the receptacle of a man’s unfortunate acting out, but this CNN story is far worse in that it sets the murderer up as a sympathetic figure. The headline itself, “Man goes from heroic husband to hammer-wielding wife killer”, sets Michael Ratley up as a tragic hero, a good guy brought down by a single flaw, an image supported by the defense referring to the murder as a “single, horrible snapshot” in a well-lived life. There is little mention of what that “snapshot” meant to the woman who was killed.

The heroism described in the headline refers to Ratley carrying his wife and child out of a burning trailer in December 2006, a little over a year before he would murder his wife. After describing this, the article asks “What changed a heroic husband into a hammer-wielding wife killer?” Notice that the structure of this question suggests that he was passive: something acted upon him to create a change. In fact, there didn’t even have to be a change. An abusive man desiring control might well save his wife from a fire. If you need to be in control, you certainly don’t want people around you dying randomly. (Then again, do we know how that fire started? The reporter didn’t bother to say.)

After relating his “heroism” and “fall”, the bulk of the article goes on to describing the feelings of the murderer’s family and how they came out to support him. The conclusion even uses his response to his family’s emotions as a way to illustrate his empathy:

His grandmother began sobbing. Family members comforted her until Cindy Ratley sat down next to her. The two cried and embraced for a couple of minutes. Michael Ratley looked over, saw his grandmother upset, and he, too, began to cry.

Somehow I doubt the empathy of a man capable of beating a woman to death. Was he crying because he saw his grandmother’s pain or merely because he knew he was going to be punished by losing all control over his life? The reporter’s opinion is problematically clear.

A lot of the recent Feministing-comment-thread bathroom panic comes from the same source as victim blame and life-coachy advice about not thinking like a victim. People want desperately to believe that by wearing the right clothes, making the right choices in relationships, having the right laws behind bathroom signs, or just plain old-fashioned magical thinking they can protect themselves from violence.

The stigma attached to being a victim along with the genuine horror experienced by those upon whom violence is inflicted lead to such fears that when people (irrationally) believe they see a way to avoid that experience, they stop caring about whether their ineffective efforts at self-protection will actually increase the odds of other people being attacked. It doesn’t matter to some cisgendered women that transgendered people face actual threats of violence in public bathrooms.

And of course they can’t admit that laws and attitudes which endanger trans people are not really protecting them because that would be a step towards admitting that they cannot protect themselves 100%, which may be the scariest thing of all.

In a New York Times op-ed, James E. McWilliams, a history professor at Texas State University at San Marcos, notes that a 2008 study found that free-range pork is more likely than the factory-farm abused variety to carry pathogens:

as yet another reminder that culinary wisdom is never conventional, scientists have found that free-range pork can be more likely than caged pork to carry dangerous bacteria and parasites. It’s not only pistachios and 50-pound tubs of peanut paste that have been infected with salmonella but also 500-pound pigs allowed to root and to roam pastures happily before butting heads with a bolt gun.

The parasites include trichina which had been assumed to be a thing of the past.

McWilliams goes on to argue that free-range is defined as “an arbitrary point between the wild and the domesticated”. (Indeed, I would add that unless you have actually visited the farm in question you can’t be quite certain what that point is.) He concludes

if we genuinely hope to produce pork that’s safe and tasty — instead of setting the animal world partly free, we might have to take greater control of it. Do not underestimate the importance of this challenge. After all, if clean and humane methods of production cannot be developed, there’s only one ethical choice left for the conscientious consumer: a pork-free diet.

Certainly, I agree that a pork-free diet is the only ethical choice, but I question that final conditional. No method of raising a living creature for slaughter can ultimately be compassionate and benevolent. To reduce the term “humane” to mean causing an (arbitrarily defined) low level of suffering in a being that is exploited for our consumption, our enjoyment rather than our survival, reduces too the value of the etymological root of the word. That is, it sets a low standard for the ideal of being human.

Perhaps it is a more realistic ideal, given our wars, given that teenagers can brutally and randomly kill a musician who brought joy to passersby. If we want to change all that, however, it can only help to aim high.

The next time you find yourself wondering why a woman doesn’t leave an abusive relationship (as many people seem to be doing in the comments to this What About Our Daughters post), remember this tragic story from Pierce County, Washington: a man murdered his five children and, police believe, intended to kill their mother as well, when he found out she was leaving him. Anyone who would act in such a way is clearly controlling on a level that implies emotional abuse (and the words of the woman’s aunt confirm this). [EDIT: Moreover, DSHS received reports of child abuse.]

It is when a woman leaves an abusive man that he is most likely to kill her, her children, or her animal companions.

So instead of wondering why a woman doesn’t leave an abusive relationship, try asking what you can do to make sure that she and her loved ones are safe when she makes the decision to leave.

ETA: Over at Shakesville, Kathy from Birmingham Blues calls out the media for victim-blaming in this case. Erica C. Barnett follows suit at Slog.

ETA2: Another case that proves the point has occurred in Alabama with the media spin being generally very similar.