The Funny Thing About Abusive Relationships

January 7, 2016 7:04 PM

The Funny Thing About Abusive Relationships "Offhand, there are maybe three times in my life I can clearly recall laughing at something really terrible. One: when my mother told me my grandfather had a heart attack. Two: when a friend and I were driving to Cape Cod and a huge bird careened into the windshield, instantly bonking itself dead. Three: when my friends tried to keep me from going home from a party because they thought my boyfriend might kill me."

Julieanne Smolinski writes about sex jokes, comedy, and abusive relationships for NYMag.

posted by sweetkid (21 comments total)

This is going on in my IRL social circle right now and I have basically nothing articulate to say except OMG COMEDIANS STOP RAPING PEOPLE CHRIST ON A GODDAMN CRACKER
posted by Sara C. at 7:31 PM on January 7, 2016 [4 favorites]

On the other hand, there has been a lot of talk amongst my female comedy friends and I about why this issue is spreading like wildfire in the community right now, whether it's because male comedians are more likely to be abusive, whether there's something wrong with all of us, or what, and I think this piece speaks to that question in an interesting way.

I do think that there is a widespread feeling, among comedians both male and female, that "I am fucked up, I deserve to be treated like garbage, if I ever find love it's going to have to be a highly complicated and volatile relationship with another equally fucked up person." And I think that can enable abusive relationships to fly under the radar for a long time.

OK, so that's my more articulate take on TFA specifically.
posted by Sara C. at 7:46 PM on January 7, 2016 [12 favorites]

Wait, did she say her boyfriend was a comic? I mean she did say he was "messed up and needy" but that doesn't always = comedian.
posted by cotton dress sock at 9:02 PM on January 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm going to express this very badly, but I feel like this piece really made me think about the relationship between "punching down" and self-deprecating humor in a really powerful, interesting, upsetting way.
posted by Four String Riot at 9:02 PM on January 7, 2016 [18 favorites]

I laugh because I must not cry. That is all. That is all. - Abraham Lincoln

I remember toasting the memory of Robin Williams with my friends, and the conversation turned to the 'tears of a clown' phenomenon. We named others of his trade that followed the same path. So talented, so entertaining, in public at least. Then we find out the truth when it's too late.

I don't much like self-deprecating humour. It certainly has it's place explaining the other side of the story, but sometimes it feels like they're doing the bully's work for them. Whatever adversity you've faced, I'm proud you can talk about it and even smile. I don't know what it's like to be a Jew, or a redhead, or overweight or a lesbian or a cripple or whatever you're poking fun at yourself for. It may even be very therapeutic, to have a room agree with you by ovation. Alternatively, making your career about that could be extremely fatiguing.

Anyhow, I hung a $2500 Les Paul guitar next to it's new friends on the wall. I'm standing back admiring these beautiful instruments all lined up on hooks, when there's a groan. The added weight of the LP... They all came crashing down. Everything was fine but the Les Paul, the head stock was snapped clean off. I was stunned for a moment, then I began LAUGHING LIKE A MANIAC because it was... so absurd? I don't know, better than crying.
posted by adept256 at 9:21 PM on January 7, 2016 [14 favorites]

cotton dress sock -- in this particular article, that's not (necessarily?) a factor. But in cases like that of Beth Stelling and a few other very high profile instances of rape, harassment, and abuse in the comedy community, yes, male comics are the perpetrators. At least IRL among the people directly or more tangentially involved, you can't really talk about issues like this without talking about both the gender politics of the comedy scene and also very personal micro issues of dating within a certain social milieu.

It's "the personal is political" writ large, which makes it fascinating and also heartbreaking
posted by Sara C. at 9:22 PM on January 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

This makes me wonder if comics don't have a partly miswired brain because they spend so much time pushing boundaries. Like that practice bleeds over into other parts of their lives, and the comfort with boundary-pushing leads to fucked up personal relationships. I'm not trying to blame the victim, because honestly I'm talking about both sides of the situation, it's just a thing that struck me after reading this.
posted by axiom at 10:37 PM on January 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sara C.: I do think that there is a widespread feeling, among comedians both male and female, that "I am fucked up, I deserve to be treated like garbage, if I ever find love it's going to have to be a highly complicated and volatile relationship with another equally fucked up person." And I think that can enable abusive relationships to fly under the radar for a long time.

Hold up, I need someone to explain this to me because I can't afford to go to my psychiatrist for a while.

I've read some books and articles about people who have gone through child abuse and this is a recurring theme. I was physically/sexually abused by my peers growing up. A big thing about child abuse appears to be that when those who are abused become adults they feel worthless and ashamed and have low self-worth and low self-esteem, etc. In my own life I've constantly felt a sense of low self-worth, self-destructive tendencies, and have had my share of relationships where I've felt "well I'm a piece of shit I deserve this." It's like that whole saying "you take the love you think you deserve" and I felt like I deserved every bad thing that happened to me in certain relationships.

Why is this? Is there a specific psychological thing going on here? And on top of that, and this may be unrelated, but how do I not become the abuser? I've caught myself picking up things from the people who have abused me (most recently it was the end of last year, a relationship that lasted Nov through Feb and in which I lived with the person in that time).

This may be somewhat off topic but SO much of this article is relatable to me, especially in the use of humor. I had friends of mine say "so-and-so is going to kill you" and I'd say "yeah maybe she'll drive the car off a curve on the west hills so I don't have to die alone" (if you live in Portland I'm talking about Germantown Rd and Skyline lol) I just don't understand but it's so relatable to me it's ridiculous. This in particular:

“I believed that’s why I had "selected” this boyfriend: because he was also messed up and needy. And it turned out, he was also drunk a lot. It was great! This way I would never have to worry about him being repulsed by my face and body because he wouldn’t ever remember seeing them. Better than that, I had somebody who told me he loved me and wanted to be told, constantly, that I loved him. I believed that I was responsible for whatever happened to me, because I was staying with him, because I was needed and wanted and I wanted that and I was smart enough to know exactly what I was doing. I believed that this was the only kind of person who would want to date me: someone who was fucked up in every conceivable sense of the words.“

I've been in this situation so often and felt this same way (albeit not always with a drunk person, I often was the one drinking because I didn't know how to cope).

Anyway, great article. Really glad this was posted. Thanks!
posted by gucci mane at 11:17 PM on January 7, 2016 [13 favorites]

In my own life I've constantly felt a sense of low self-worth, self-destructive tendencies, and have had my share of relationships where I've felt "well I'm a piece of shit I deserve this." It's like that whole saying "you take the love you think you deserve" and I felt like I deserved every bad thing that happened to me in certain relationships.

Why is this? Is there a specific psychological thing going on here?

This is a guess based on a wide amount of information (I am a therapist, I am not your therapist, etc...).

To set a foundation: I personally believe that what we think of as consciousness is a thin film on top of extensive depths created through the development of all animals. I believe we have emotions, reactions, etc... which all operate automatically, and consciousness is in place because sometimes the automatic responses need to be assessed and choices need to be made - but those parts of us are tenuous, last to develop, and very responsive to how we were raised.

To build the floor: Morality is either innate on a certain level or it is taught very early. Children have a sense of empathy as infants and a sense of basic fairness as children (so, by the way, do our cousins the primates). Human children are almost uniquely made to observe, assess, and build heuristics out of their experiences which allows for a lot of the learning that is so natural to us but it is done with a certain structure (also seen in the purer grammar children produce when learning language, before they learn the exceptions).

A Wall: Learned Helplessness is a process we really don't understand, but we know it exists and we know it doesn't require complex thought - it was first discovered in dogs, but it seems to me to be central in how and why people remain in bad situations. Learned Helplessness is also rational - for example, children who were abused are helpless for that abuse and so need to come up with a way to conceptualize what is happening to them. The most logical conclusion, because children have a basic sense of morals, is that they must deserve it. Good people are rewarded. Bad people are punished. They are being punished. They must be bad.

Another wall: Women in particular are trained both that we need help to accomplish things (adult caregivers rescue girl children from struggles while letting boy children overcome obstacles) and that we should put other people first. This begins at birth; studies show that adult caregivers treat infants differently based on the gender they perceive them to be even when that gender is randomly assigned.

Another wall: People are most addicted to what is called intermittent positive reinforcement - that is, positive and enjoyable feedback which happen only sometimes when we do a behavior. This is so stable that a standard part of any behavior modification plan is to phase out positive reinforcement and make it random after a while, so the behavior can become more internalized and less a response to positive reinforcement.

To put this all together, this is being learned before we have complicated language and therefore before we have complicated thought. It is stored in our assumptions and emotions, not in our thoughts. It requires better feedback that is trusted, practice, and time to rewrite/remake what we were taught about ourselves. Learned Helplessness makes this harder because you have learned through experience that trying things is A Bad Idea.

Even women who weren't abused can end up in abusive relationships, though, because abusers are predatory. If they can't find a woman who will get hooked into their cycle, they will make one. And one part of that cycle is extremely positive - the men are attentive, loving, generous, kind, and thoughtful. The abuse also tends to ramp up slowly, so slowly a person might not notice. And again, a lot of this is operating not at the "thinking about it" level of language but rather somewhere much deeper and more unconscious. It's also becoming increasingly intermittent, which triggers not an impulse to leave but rather an impulse to try harder to get the reward again. All of this is found in other animals, indicating it doesn't operate on the level of consciousness as we think about it.

And the way out of it is pretty opposite to how we tend to treat people who end up in these situations. People need love, care, reassurance they are valuable, positive feedback, and reasonably critical feedback. I've also heard very good things about EMDR about bringing up these issues and working through them.

In my personal struggles with self-hate, I've found pretending I'm one of my friends and then treating myself the way I would treat them helped a LOT in terms of resetting my self-care. I am a lot nicer to other people than I am to myself, excusing myself in my ill treatment by saying I deserve it. I don't believe other people deserve it, though, so this has been a way to work around my own self-hatred.

(( Sends comfort and whatever kind of hugs you're most comfortable with ))
posted by Deoridhe at 12:23 AM on January 8, 2016 [59 favorites]

I still need to finish the article but this subject is close to my heart and I can't wait to comment. Dark humor, or gallows humor, is something I've overrelied on and while I think that dark humor can be a therapeutic thing, it can also be just corrosive to the soul. Maybe it's my overall verbal impulsivity, but I used to really shock others and ultimately myself by some of the crap that would spill out. I'd worked in social services during serious crises, lived in very bad areas, & generally been around things that I was just not mentally prepared for (that's the key part), so I over-relied on that mechanism to accommodate the shock. Somewhere along the line I transformed from a naive compassionate kid into a fucked up monster without even seeing the change.

It's a knife-edge; it can be so useful in getting you through, but also so messed up in the long run if you don't have some kind of emotional or spiritual balance to get your humanity back.

I'll never forget the line from "Gods and Monsters" in which the James Whale character talks about gallows humor in war time and how fucked up they all were by the horrors around them, how they joked about it, how their humanity had been comprimised. He recalled joking about men in his squad passing by a corpse that had been strung up on a fence- how they gave him a nickname, etc etc, thinking 'better him than us'.... "Oh we were a witty lot!" Ian McKellen spat in remembrance. The way he delivered that line, with such soul-searing regret and shame just captured the long-term toxic effects of gallows humor so perfectly.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 2:11 AM on January 8, 2016 [8 favorites]

In Spanish we call this "reir para no llorar" (to laugh so you don't cry).

I have made my share of inappropriate jokes about suicide to the horror of friends and family, and I remember feeling like joking was the only way to let off steam and maybe even find someone who would empathize.

At least in my case, when I joked this way it was because I could barely help myself, and I didn't have the presence of mind to think about taking care of others. If you have ever felt so shocked or nervous by something that you felt like laughing, you know the feeling.
posted by Tarumba at 5:59 AM on January 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

I am surprised with just how much of this resonated with me. I just recently realized that up until a few years ago, I've always had an abusive relationship in my life - sometimes more directly than others, but always present.

I think most of my single life can be defined by the following, though:

>I believed that this was the only kind of person who would want to date me: someone who was fucked up in every conceivable sense of the words.

This - and the insightful comments here - are going to take a bit to digest, but are really wonderful and important reads at this particular point in my life.
posted by MysticMCJ at 7:33 AM on January 8, 2016 [6 favorites]

Deoridhe: Thank you. Thank you so much.

For, uh... reasons.

*hugs back similarly*
posted by seyirci at 9:31 AM on January 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

tl;dr: see Deoridhe's comment instead (she's an actual therapist not just an enthusiastic amateur with an interest in psychology and some academic background in philosophy of mind)...

Why is this? Is there a specific psychological thing going on here? And on top of that, and this may be unrelated, but how do I not become the abuser? I've caught myself picking up things from the people who have abused me (most recently it was the end of last year, a relationship that lasted Nov through Feb and in which I lived with the person in that time).

Self-esteem issues can be trust and relationship killers because the foundation of people's ability to empathize with and trust others is their esteem for and view of themselves. The clinical evidence is pretty clear that we develop the ability to empathize with and form social bonds with others through the development of mirror neurons at a certain stage of our childhood development. The way empathy works is by allowing us to identify ourselves with others--so conceptually, we see ourselves in the place of those other people we're empathizing with, and that's how we understand how they feel, what they're experiencing, and how we predict how they might behave in response.

Well, if you hate yourself and think of yourself as some scummy liar/asshole who doesn't deserve to be treated well, when you use your capacity for empathy to put yourself in the place of others, the quality of your empathy suffers because you project those negative feelings you have about yourself onto the other people (who, after all, you empathize with by imagining are basically you).

So if you know you might be tempted to do something bad in a particular situation, you'll be more inclined to suspect another person of being capable of the same when there's ambiguity in the relationship. Basically since empathy, down at the physical level, works by allowing you to see yourself mirrored in another person, if you believe you're an awful, awful person who can't be trusted, you're likely going to assume the same is true of others you might be in a relationship with whether there's good reason to or not. I think that's why bullies always seem so sanctimonious: they think they're just showing you for the full of shit entitled asshole you've always been when they finally torment you enough to provoke a reaction out of you, because that's how they already see themselves. Not necessarily low self-esteem, mind you, just distorted self-esteem is what can cause the trouble. Healthy self-esteem means you see yourself realistically, strengths and weaknesses alike. You need that to be able to form solid, empathetic relationships with others, I think.

I don't have a lot of first-hand experience with really abusive relationships. My dad was an abusive ass but I barely had contact with him and that was due to physical injury to his brain, so not sure esteem issues played a role in his case so much as impulsivity from his broken cerebral cortex. By all accounts, before his motorcycle accident at 18, he was a good guy; afterwards, a monster. I've known a couple of people socially who had reputedly been in abusive relationships, but in most of those cases, the people in my peer group still tolerated hanging out socially with the alleged abusers. It always bugged me because my instinct was to shun them, and I couldn't understand why people still wanted to be friendly with people who deliberately abused other people they cared about. I really have no idea how solid the claims of abuse actually were since no one but me ever seemed to take them seriously and people always insisted I was making too much of it. I do think it's possible for some abusers to reform. But sometimes, relationships aren't as simple as the abuser/victim dichotomy; sometimes they're just toxic on both sides or become that way due to external factors, circumstances, and contingencies that place too much stress on the relationship, with neither party being a deliberate "abuser" in the way the clearer cut cases tend to break down.

That's all I can offer; analysis and abstract stuff. I've had some experience in toxic and abusive relationships myself, socially and professionally, but I'm an outlier and it's women who generally have to deal with the worst of it, so the best I can offer is my hopelessly abstract/intellectual approach to grappling with these issues.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:23 AM on January 8, 2016 [6 favorites]

Reminds me of Patricia Lockwood's "Rape Joke". Both powerful pieces of writing.
posted by goodnight to the rock n roll era at 2:18 PM on January 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

Male comics as rapists: You know, I think there's male rapists in every career. There's probably a shit ton of rapist engineers and bus drivers and toilet cleaners. However, comics are more likely to be well known or famous, so we actually hear about it and care when we recognize the name, and comics in general are pretty blunt about what goes on in their lives.

Self-worth: I think women are pretty much socialized to hate themselves because they're hated in general by men. I think it comes along with the vagina, as it were. We learn instantly we're not good enough, have to suffer and sacrifice to keep anyone around, and take whatever anyone dishes out because that's still better than being a loser that's publicly alone.

Why people still hang out with known abusers:
(a) denial
(b) fear -- I don't want to piss him off by taking a stand
(c) I'm a guy and thus I don't have to care about this shit
(d) Or the reason why I have: because the abuser is still married to my friend and she won't leave him, and odds are she'll be in worse shape if I let the abuser drive me away entirely because his goal is to isolate and trap her.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:03 PM on January 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

I know many non well known or famous male comics. This article isn't about like, Bill Cosby, it's about this specific comedy guy culture.

Some of them are awesome! Some of them are assholes. MANY of them are assholes, in fact, I personally could not ever imagine myself dating a comedian, and I've dated like, musicians and startup millionaires, who are also known for being assholes. But it's that mix of being sort of removed from life *plus* the depressive fuckup stuff that makes me feel like it would be a toxic mix for me. I went out with a comedian once who brought me a dozen roses, and then spent two hours insulting me. Stuff like that.
posted by sweetkid at 6:18 PM on January 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

comics are more likely to be well known or famous

While I suppose you can lump in cases like Bill Cosby or a few other notorious famous comedians into this overarching problem within the comedy community, most of the cases that are causing a stir right now among actual comedians and people adjacent to the comedy scene are not celebrities. My female comic friends aren't worried about Bill Cosby. They're worried about their improv teacher or important bookers around town or whether that guy who knows "everybody" in the scene can really get them an agent if they sleep with him, like he said.

That said, one thing that strikes me as more plausible is that, as you say, there are no more rapist comedians than rapist bus drivers. It's just that comedy is often directly about personal experience. So you have female comics who feel empowered to speak up in their work. And in general there are a lot of grey areas between personal and professional in this particular scene. If you're a bus driver and your dispatcher says she'll blacklist you if you don't sleep with her, you call HR. That's not really a thing in comedy. The fact that it's a "community" and not a "job" speaks to how personal everything is.
posted by Sara C. at 7:41 PM on January 8, 2016 [5 favorites]

And, yes, toxic bordering on abusive behavior is such a common trope that I think that if people don't act that way/allow that sort of thing in their relationships, they worry that they're not "real" comics. It's another aspect of the way that the tropes of "suffering for your art", "the sad clown", and "creative madness" are absolutely awful for real world creative people trying to be minimally functional human beings.
posted by Sara C. at 7:45 PM on January 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

And, yes, toxic bordering on abusive behavior is such a common trope that I think that if people don't act that way/allow that sort of thing in their relationships, they worry that they're not "real" comics.

This was brought up in a startlingly realistic way in You're The Worst, Season 2.
posted by sweetkid at 7:54 PM on January 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

Buzzfeed is now also covering this, probably to my sister comics' doom...
posted by Sara C. at 11:56 PM on January 14, 2016