Enough with the slapping already!
Apr. 12th, 2011 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gryphonseggSo there I am, reading an otherwise enjoyable book, and then the narrative metaphorically slaps me in the face by . . . well, by having a male character literally slap the female character he supposedly loves in the face. Oh, it's not really abusive, you see . . . he only did it to calm her down. The situation was very chaotic and upsetting, so she was getting hysterical. He had to slap her to make her act rationally again. He stopped slapping her when she stopped screaming. That was the only sensible course of action. He, of course, maintained enough reason to make decisions about who needs to be slapped and for how long. The text never mentions the incident again, and why should it? That hysterical woman needed a strong, rational man to slap her to keep her quiet. The bad guys might have heard her and found her, if he hadn't done it.
This happens so often in the kind of books I read that I'm getting disturbed by how utterly common and normalized it is. Okay, yeah, a slap or three doesn't seem like much compared to the levels of violence that happen in some of the stories. But most of the violence occurs between enemies. The anti-hysteria face slap occurs between allies, usually allies who are also mutual love interests. Most of the violence inflicted by characters that are meant to be sympathetic and admirable is inflicted with the intent of stopping the other character from hurting someone else. The anti-hysteria face slap is inflicted by a character, usually one intended to be sympathetic and admirable, with the intent of silencing the other character and stopping (usually) her from expressing excessive emotion. In the books I prefer, most of the violence is either gender-segregated (men fight men or, less commonly, women fight women) or non-gendered (sex and gender are irrelevant to who fights, how they fight, and who comes out better in the fight). The anti-hysteria face slap is overwhelmingly gender-scripted: it's nearly always a man hitting a woman, and she doesn't hit back. And she continues to love him or falls in love with him afterward too, without ever saying anything about the fact that he slapped her. I see this even in stories that avoid or subvert other traditional sexist tropes. How is it that this very traditional, very gendered, almost formalized bit of violence remains so popular?
This happens so often in the kind of books I read that I'm getting disturbed by how utterly common and normalized it is. Okay, yeah, a slap or three doesn't seem like much compared to the levels of violence that happen in some of the stories. But most of the violence occurs between enemies. The anti-hysteria face slap occurs between allies, usually allies who are also mutual love interests. Most of the violence inflicted by characters that are meant to be sympathetic and admirable is inflicted with the intent of stopping the other character from hurting someone else. The anti-hysteria face slap is inflicted by a character, usually one intended to be sympathetic and admirable, with the intent of silencing the other character and stopping (usually) her from expressing excessive emotion. In the books I prefer, most of the violence is either gender-segregated (men fight men or, less commonly, women fight women) or non-gendered (sex and gender are irrelevant to who fights, how they fight, and who comes out better in the fight). The anti-hysteria face slap is overwhelmingly gender-scripted: it's nearly always a man hitting a woman, and she doesn't hit back. And she continues to love him or falls in love with him afterward too, without ever saying anything about the fact that he slapped her. I see this even in stories that avoid or subvert other traditional sexist tropes. How is it that this very traditional, very gendered, almost formalized bit of violence remains so popular?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 03:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 06:38 pm (UTC)As I said over on LJ, I think realistically it would just make the slapped person freak out more and/or hit the guy who slapped her (because it's almost always a guy slapping a girl; female characters do slap male characters, but not for the stated reason of calming them down, and same-sex slapping is usually done for different stated reasons too). I would really like to find a scene where it happens that way: male character slaps female character, ostensibly to calm her down, and she responds by getting even worse, slapping him back, or doing something worse than slapping him (because some of these characters do retaliate hard when assaulted in any another context). Or I'd like to see a third character step in to subdue the slapping character, explaining that he's the one who is reacting in a way that jeopardizes the mission and projecting his hysteria (testeria?) onto someone else to give himself a pretext for getting violent toward her.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 06:50 pm (UTC)Oddly, when she walked into my Spanish class and grabbed my glasses off my face, she didn't get in trouble for that, but the whole stalking thing is another story. (I don't feel terribly bad about the slap, given that she had me living in fear for about a year. But I shouldn't have done it.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 07:07 pm (UTC)It's very often either the only situation in the narrative in which it's acceptable for a man to hit a woman or the only situation in the narrative in which it's acceptable for a person of any gender/sex to hit their love interest. It's almost as if this kind of scene gets inserted into certain narratives just to show that a man who might have seemed too soft on "his" woman or on women in general is "man enough" to hit her when she "needs" it.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 07:42 pm (UTC)But yeah, I fucking hate the man-slaps-hysterical-woman trope, for all the reasons you cite.