So this week is the Pusan International Film Festival, which is, in the words of everyone's favorite Anchorman, "kind of a big deal." The city is flooded with even more twenty-something American "waegu" than are normally here, although the really cool thing is that I know more about Korea than all of them put together!
I saw the only movie I could get a ticket to today, a Canadian film called "Twice a Woman," about a woman who attempts to reinvent herself and recover from the trauma of an abusive husband. It was actually not bad, although I'm sure I'm far from the target demographic and there's a reason why it's the only one that didn't sell out completely.
The one thing that I wished this movie gave me (and I've noticed this from other movies about abusive men) is more of an insight into the mind of the abuser. In popular culture, the narrative of an abusive relationship seems to invariably center itself on the victim, her helplessness, her recovery, her growing confidence, etc. But that's really only half the story, isn't it? I mean, does a guy just wake up one morning and declare, "Today, I'm going to send my wife to the hospital!" I mean, what's going on inside his head? I'm genuinely curious, because there must be some sort of internal progression from "I'm a guy" to "I'm a guy who abuses his wife/girlfriend." What factors turn a person into an abuser? Can ANYONE be transformed into one, given the right circumstances? (Probably more people than you'd think, anyway.) Who, or what, CREATES an abuser? And, if I may ask a more dangerous question: What narratives do abusers craft to justify their behavior?
And to become still more dangerous: Do these narratives have any legitimacy?
Also, I read a study that actually claimed that women are actually MORE LIKELY to abuse their domestic partners than men are. Obviously, less men are going to report it when their wife beats them up, because of the shame involved. Also, consider how little social support there is for abused men? For men, few people will even admit it's a problem. When I was at Sarah Lawrence, a couple of women came from an organization to talk to the RA Staff (including me) about services for abused women, and how to deal with situations where we suspected abuse, etc. When I questioned their insistence on using the female pronoun for the abused and the male pronoun for the abuser, they dismissed my objections on the basis that the "overwhelming majority of abusers were men." EVEN IF this is true, wouldn't insitence on those gender-based pronouns only serve to reinforce the social frameworks that prevent abused men from seeking help? Just sayin'...
Speaking of ABUSE, someone stole my bicycle. It wasn't a super-expensive bike, but come on. It was locked up right outside of my academy and when I got out of work at 10pm, it was gone. And it was raining. Hard. So I had a long and angry walk home to my apartment, where I promptly mixed myself a drink and fantasized about what I wanted to do to the person who so flagrantly violated my property right.
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