Murder, Mayhem About Possession

27, Sep 1999
The question... really is about the irrationality of property relations and its egotistical trappings often triggered by the madness of passion.

"I couldn't leave him because of the children" may really be a reflection of ...a [Cinderella] complex, and if the vacillation continues, we see clearly that it can lead to death today. In death no woman can be of any use to her children.

We said in this space sometime ago that "love affairs can easily become horror stories of murder and mayhem when parties deem themselves to be virtual owners of each other and for whatever reason that bond becomes broken.

When time, energy and resources are expended in a relationship, or better yet, when men, in particular, feel they have put out, which to most of them is how they say "I love you", and the person who was showered with all these "blessings" suddenly finds another or wishes to end the relationship due to lack of purpose or whatever, then all hell breaks loose. It is their deflated egos, coupled with their sense of rights of ownership that deter them from merely walking away and trigger the learned behaviour of violence.

What these men have never been made to understand is that the party in a relationship who resorts to violence in a quest to solve personal problems is in fact the weaker and the more insecure of the two people concerned. That is why in so many instances the violence involves murder and suicide, because the perpetrator throws in the sponge, has given up and sees no reason to continue existing.

But how come a mere failed relationship can result in such drastic and Draconian action? Isn't it a fact that throughout life, from the very tender ages, people are forced to face failure with the dawn of almost every single day? A most significant part of growing up involves coping with failures and coping with "losing out".

We often talk about sport and the importance of sport in building character and discipline.

Well, a great deal of sportsmanship has to do with moulding us to accept defeat gracefully, every failure is supposed to teach us something more about life, to strength us to the point where every experience, bad or good, is deemed a crossroad on the way to us becoming bigger and better citizens of this world.

Every aspect of our education at elementary and secondary levels is supposed to prepare us to deal with personal conflicts and problems in an intelligent and rational manner.

How come then so many men yet still prove unable to come to terms with the dissolving of relationships with women whom they love? Truck drivers as well as university professors, though quite rational in their other daily affairs of life, have been known to batter their loved ones. It is only a question of the degree of violence.

If such domestic violence is becoming more and more prevalent, then it behoves us to seriously examine the content of our education system.

It is failing men in their growth potential. The question as we said, above, really is about the irrationality of property relations and its egotistical trappings often triggered by the madness of passion.

A man is no man unless he seduces and possesses a woman according to tradition. But men have always been mortally afraid and jealous of the power of female sexuality. Over the centuries men have sought to impose their control and censure over that sexual power.

The measures such as the chastity-belt and female circumcision were only the physical versions of such attempted control and censure geared merely to aid and abet the more effective and damaging moral and spiritual measures that emanate from religious and social convention.

In this context, men have come to measure their manliness in terms of the extent of control and censure over female sexual power.

Such a manhood finds itself based on "thin ice", a hopeless impossibility, so to speak. To help fulfil this illusion, men have come to project themselves as both the cause and effect of female sexuality and orgasmic power. According to local parlance, it is he who "rings the bell" with his own power to dominate and subdue, he is the hunter that has brought to bay, his prey.

It is all this load of nonsense that increases his fragility, leads more and more to his penile dysfunction and added sexual inadequacies, and eventually may force some men into heinous crimes of passion especially when they come to envision someone other than themselves "ringing the bell". In fact the "bell rings" and this has nothing to do with male domination, subordination or ownership. Men need to be reeducated and more so socially reconditioned in this regard.

A woman's femininity is based on her attractiveness to men and her capacity to reproduce, that is if "she belly good". However women, on the other hand, need to be quite decisive in their relationships with men.

There is need to stop the vacillation between seeking "dependency" on men and challenging the realms of full-fledged "independence". It is what Collette Dowling calls the "Cinderella Complex", that duplicity, the attempt to straddle both worlds, and obtain the best returns from both scenarios.

"I couldn't leave him because of the children" may really be a reflection of such a complex, and if the vacillation continues, we see clearly that it can lead to death today.

In death no woman can be of any use to her children. There can be no reason to accept abuse. None whatsoever. The expedient intervention of the state in this regard is of the utmost importance.

The first task of each woman is to take full responsibility for her body and let no one but herself decide what her body generates or does not generate. Discard all useless sentimentality and the empty, childish sense of romance.

Love, like mathematics, must make sense. In the final analysis, women may have to lead the battle for a completely new sexual morality.

brenco@tstt.net.tt