I woke this morning, early, because of an argument going on outside my window. I missed, I presume, the beginnings; for the first line I could make sense of was claiming that, if the girl ever called the guy again from jail in the middle of the night, he was going to fucking kill her.
From my window, I watched it continue. The guy seemed, to me, to be the type of guy that achieves his catharsis through overstatements like the one above. I wasn’t sure, though, which is why I stood there. Things rarely begin full-boiled and my thinking, (wrongly perhaps), was that should things progress, some intervention could be made, even if it was just dialing the cops.
I couldn’t hear the girl’s side of it—she was in a car and he was outside it—but I don’t think it mattered; I’d be surprised if the guy really heard her. After about five minutes of this, she starts to drive out the parking lot but stops. The start in some more. This goes on; she must have said something that didn’t agree with him—it looked like he reached into the car and smacked her. At this point she did drive off, down the wrong way of the one-way street, while he walked after her and exasperatedly called her name.
He came back a few minutes later and called her. It sounded like he left her a message with liberal uses of “slut” and its variants to describe how he felt. After adding in a couple of racial epithets to describe his view of her apparent partner choices, he hung up and that was it.
The entire episode annoyed me. It shouldn’t have been any of my concern, but they made it mine—likewise with everyone in the building who slept with the window open. When someone is willing to make a death threat, even if it’s not ‘really’ meant, it obliges the witnesses, at least, to be on guard. I would have preferred to finish sleeping.
Barring the physical acts—I can’t imagine a probable situation where it’s morally acceptable to hit your woman—it was the last phone call that really annoyed me. “Slut,” as a term, bothers me more than most of the forbidden words. Philosophically, as a feminist, it’s bullshit …or just a gendered double-standard. Either way. Resorting to personal attacks, that is, attacks on character instead of attacks on actions is not usually a good thing, and to go so far as to record a diatribe about the slut-ness of your (now former) girlfriend? It has power only because of that gendered double-standard, because it’s meant only to hurt. There’s this exchange in Network where the Faye Dunaway character says to the William Holden character: “I’m sorry for all those things I said to you last night. You’re not the worst fuck I ever had. Believe me, I’ve had worse. You don’t puff or snorkel and make death-like rattles. As a matter of fact, you’re rather serene in the sack.” And Holden’s response is perfect—with a note of resigned unbelief in his voice, he asks, “Why is it that a woman always thinks that the most savage thing she can say to a man is to impugn his cocksmanship?” This is what I think of in cases like this.