Site Presented By
Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
Is it Spike Gillespie who should be restrained? Plus: Michael Lewis' bogus attack on J-schools; art should be about seeing, not theorizing.
Nov 1, 1999 | Life of restraint
BY SPIKE GILLESPIE
(10/25/99)
My first thought, just skimming her piece, was that Spike Gillespie had escaped from a nunnery, innocent eyes wide shut, and stumbled unarmed into the contemporary sexual battle ground: a whirlwind Internet romance that turned into a nasty marriage. Not so. A full reading showed that she already had one bad marriage behind her, and one can only wonder, given that and her hardscrabble history, how she could marry an alcoholic, addicted, abusive loser who was -- the horror! -- a Republican.
She is careful to tell us, again and again, that she should have known better and has learned from the experience. How so? When she announces her abortion plan, her husband responds, "How would you like it if someone killed Henry?" She interprets this as a threat -- but that sentence strikes me as the only normal, rational utterance she credits her husband with. And one legitimately begins to wonder: Given such a radical misapprehension of language, how much can one credit his other reported behaviors?
There is, of course, a completely different, not nearly so nice, explanation for this piece. Granju's accompanying book review tells us that, despite Gillespie's accumulated troubles, she still drinks, get depressed and occasionally "dates some of the wrong men." One doesn't need training in psychotherapy to diagnose the problem: She loves her misery and is defined by it. I say God help that "one perfect boy" she is raising.
-- Gerald Trett
Hitting below the belt
BY CATHY YOUNG
(10/25/99)
As a woman who has had to get restraining orders (to protect my life and my children's lives), I have found it's a painful and rarely successful process. It is nearly impossible to get a restraining order unless there is blatant physical abuse. (This varies from state to state.) As it turns out, the most toxic abuse is often not physical abuse, but is verbal and psychological.
My experiences with restraining orders have been in Florida and in Texas. Even when my ex threatened to "take a gun and blow my brains out," the judge asked me if I knew if my ex possessed a gun. I had no way of knowing if he had a gun or not. The judge refused my restraining order after the initial 10-day temporary order because I could not prove the existence of a gun.
In fact, getting a restraining order often infuriates an abusive spouse. If anything, getting a restraining order ups the possible incidence of violence. Women who seek restraining orders do so after a great deal of thought about the risks vs. the benefits. I know I did this. (When I talk about men and women here, I want to acknowledge that women are also abusers.)
The process of getting a restraining order is not one I want to repeat. After my last court experiences, I was ordered to pay for my ex-husband's psychological evaluation, to pay for half of the supervised visits he had with our children, and to pay his medical insurance premium. I was ordered to go to therapy (which I had already been doing for years). The judge also threatened to take my children away from me, because I had said to my children, "It's not OK for daddy to rage." She said I shouldn't say negative things about their father in front of them.
I have never met a woman who has successfully gotten a restraining order that had no basis in reality. I attended battered women's support groups for several years and more often than not, women's restraining orders were denied. If anything, the truth of domestic violence is trivialized by judges. Most judges I've encountered truly believe in the myth that two people in a relationship need only to "work" on the relationship. Most judges are not aware of the dynamics of domestic violence. I know of a judge who granted sole custody to a father who was caught masturbating in bed with his three daughters. The mother, who had caught the father in this act, was accused of being "hysterical" and of "making too big a deal" out of the event.
There may be ways for women to get revenge on their exes; getting bogus restraining orders is not one of them.
-- Diane Fleming
Austin, Texas
Please give my undying gratitude to Cathy Young for writing about the wrongs of restraining orders and the "women good, men bad" mentality of some family courts . Unfortunately, I've already experienced the worst of what she describes and then some. No newly estranged couple comes to a family court judge expecting Solomon, just a reasonable and insightful, even-handed arbiter. But the fact that this segment of the judicial system remains so primitive reflects very badly upon our society indeed.
It confounds me that such little recognition is given to the fact that unnecessarily depriving children of a parent does immeasurable harm. With an almost infinite array of studies detailing how a child's early years affect their long-term development, what's in the interest of a child should, if at all possible, take precedence over a woman's fears.
-- David Heide
This is only one facet of the anti-male bias present in today's family law. (Let's not even begin to go into the child-support issue.) A critical element of the success of feminism to date was in the moral authority expressed by the simple line "It just isn't fair." Unfortunately, today the issue is not about fairness; it is all about power. Women's organizations have it, they like it and baby, it's payback time. I know there are many women who actually are accepting the burdens and freedoms of equality and acting accordingly, but their voices are being drowned out by the hypocrites.
-- Lawrence Kreitzer
Cathy Young seemed to base her article on the abuse of restraining orders on physical abuse, and either neglecting or ignoring psychological abuse. While the later is much harder to convict on, or gather hard data, the implications and fear should not be ignored. If someone came off the street yelling, who was half a foot or more, taller than you, and weighed 50 to 80 pounds more, would that not intimidate you? Now what if that person also had access to your home?
The simple fact is that it's required to make reasonable attempts to locate the person who is being served with the restraining order. A John Doe order is for special cases such as an unknown stalker. If the person, such as a husband or ex-husband, is unaware of the restraining order, it's the problem of the lawyers/police for not implementing existing procedures -- not of the woman who asked for the order. If someone is served with an order, it's not too difficult to comply with: Just stay away.
There's far more cases of restraining orders being ignored, or not enforced by the police (since they often will state, true or not, that they have to observe the perpetrator violating the order before they can cite a violation) than a restraining order being used for nefarious purposes.
I, for one, would much rather have them in place than not.
-- Aaron Propes
Roseville, Minn.
Both men and women can be equally abusive in their own ways. I lived with a woman who would slam and break drawers. If I said it was unsettling I would then hear something like, "Oh, I suppose a 175-pound man is frightened by a 105-pound woman!" Violence and aggression has nothing to do with size or gender. In the long run, the children are the victims.
-- Fred Raleigh
Get Salon in your mailbox!