The inferiority complex.
Sanita, my ex, Back to Black.
Sanita ended up choosing a large, vulgar brute, to beat her up just like I suspect her father did, a perverse psychology which I’ve seen in several, otherwise rational women. The Amy Winehouse song sums it up perfectly: “I cheated myself like I knew I would. I told you I was trouble, you know that I’m no good”. Her own brief life and suicide at twenty seven validates the song, like a period at the end of a sentence.
Sanita finally found her man in Mark. And he did come through and beat her up thoroughly, as was perfectly predictable from his well-known past, his fame for bruising women, his reputation throughout Rincon. The second was his being a drug dealer and a serious drug addict, living alone and high each day in his large house halfway up a hill, secluded by jungle, blasting music to the annoyance of everyone else in that valley and universally hated.
I could never understand that psychology, though I know from my life with her and from a few other’s I’ve met, (mostly women) that it exists. They have an inferiority complex and think deep down they deserve beatings and can’t understand when a man is kind to them, agreeable to their every request. I think she tested me with her constant desires to move, like a cat playing with a mouse before the kill, seeing how much she could demand and get away with, then asking for more, hoping one day I’d snap and yell at her, or worse, smack her.
Maybe that’s what she wanted. But I never came close and never could give way to such violence or wake up to a bruised wife. Reason wouldn’t allow it. My self-respect wouldn’t either. My whole education, my nature and intelligence, every author I admired despised and abhorred violence. To beat her, even to touch her in a menacing way, besides breaking all the rules of decency, would reduce her in status from a wife to a slave and turn me into a brute in my own eyes.
I wonder how so many can continue in such relationships, both giving up all self-respect, all self-esteem and any hope for a future not miserable. The victims are frozen in fear, cowering or crying. They know the next blow is coming and almost ask for it by their whimpering. The men have reduced themselves to beasts, social outcasts, hating their marriage and losing the affection of their children in such violent displays, even their friends, and everything else worth living for.
Tom was too much like me, too nice, considerate, what they call ‘affable’. I don’t know why so many women reject such gentlemen but plenty do, as plenty of these ‘gentlemen’ are single, while many women go from one abusive, ignorant, beer swilling boyfriend to the next, living in trailer parks with prison material, human trash. My two theories on this phenomenon are both dark.
The first is that many women consider themselves inferior to men from the start, ‘the weaker sex’ and expect they should always be pushed around and dominated, like dirt, as if that’s the natural order of things. This would explain why most Muslim women wear their ridiculous Hijab’s, so covered up they’re trying to be non-humans, self-effacing when they have to walk down a street on errands and treated worse than dogs once they return home. It’s ingrained in them from the Koran, daily lessons and rules straight from a God that dictates their inferiority. Yet the fact that so many millions submit so unanimously disturbs me.
Aristotle posited that women were half-way between human beings and animals, inferior to men intellectually, unable to be truly rational. He displayed the same intellectual decline that all of Greece did between the years 400 and 350 BC. By his era, no more great books were being written.
The Greek dramatists a hundred year’s before him would kick him in the teeth for such an opinion, with numerous, shining examples of feminine valor, intelligence and doing the right thing when the men around them couldn’t, even at the cost of their lives. 'Electra' and 'Alcestis' are perfect examples. Homer treats men and women with equal respect, both in the form of Gods and humans. Socrates goes even further. He said he learned all his philosophy from long conversations with a courtesan named ‘Aspasia’ the lover and partner of Pericles, the most famous Athenian statesman of them all. She is said to have helped him in composing some of the great speeches recorded in Thucydides.
My second theory is that many girls are beaten and demeaned into thinking they are stupid, lesser beings, with the examples of their mothers treated equally so, right before their eyes, by unhappy, ignorant, husbands responding to the hard and grim reality they lead, ugly jobs without a future, then home to more unhappy scenes, noisy or unruly children, complaining housewives and the discord it breeds, with a T.V. dinner and a few, (or many) drinks their only solace. They see no escape and the only way they know how to vent such deep frustration is with their fists.
It’s not people who are bad. In any pleasant environment we are kind and generous by nature. It’s the heavy chains that our so called civilization loads upon its workers, needed to run the steel mills and car plants, pick tobacco and man the slaughterhouses. First we curtail their education, keep them ignorant by putting them to work at such a young age they can’t complain, with neither the vocabulary nor the knowledge of refusal. Then we load them with debt by early marriage, easy to do as their one and only available, free pleasure is sex.
Even the machinery we invent, ten times bigger or more complex than us and ten times our life’s earnings in value, which we’re made to use, demeans us immensely, cuts our souls, which we in turn vent on those closest to us, our wives, our children, which brutalizes them, traumatizes their minds, and makes them the twisted souls ready to repeat the cycle.
Sanita's father Jack was a roofer when he married Betty at the ripe and wise age of twenty. He fathered Sanita and Jaime with her over the next few years, adopting a two year older baby girl, Charmaine, whom Betty had in tow, that man long gone. They lasted some fifteen years together, probably in the cheapest of housing. And roofing is physically the hardest, most dangerous and most repetitive of all jobs in the construction trade. In the winter it’s bitter cold and brutal in the blasting wind and being in Oklahoma doesn't help. I’m sure sewer workers are far warmer and have more satisfaction to take home at the end of a long day.
Samuel Johnson, who hated sea travel, once said: “being on a ship is like being in prison, with the possibility of drowning”. Well being a roofer is the hardest work there is, with the possibility of falling off at any moment and breaking your neck. To add to this, they started off in Oklahoma, a state as impoverished and depressing as the job. That’s where Sanita started life. Then they moved to the outskirts of Dallas, hardly a step up.
Sanita began to fit this pattern (in my mind) when she first left me and her comfortable, idle, no-worries future, laying on a beach. But I thought then it might just be her frail mind and her being persuaded to ditch me by Becky's wicked counceling. When she fell in love with Mark, a ruinous move that invited beatings, and then ran away with him and my son to some secret town in Florida, breaking all laws and lifelines, the theory proved itself. She was a masochist with a tortured childhood. The only other possibility is that she was completely blind to the obvious and deaf to all her friend’s warnings, blinded by what she thought was love.
He soon started bruising her and she fled one night with my son through the bathroom window (just like the Beatles song). And lucky it was for both of them because some fellow drug dealer put a bullet through his brain about a month later, terminating that disastrous episode in her life.
She’s back in Dallas now, alone, in a cheap apartment, working long hours and all holidays, vying with ten younger salespeople each day to sell furniture in a large warehouse, to collect the few small sales bonuses above her minimum wage. With the Hepatitis B she caught from Mark, all boyfriends or possible husbands she met after him vanished within a few months. She did marry one, a friend of Jaime’s, but that (and Alaska where it happened) only lasted a month. Jaime wouldn’t talk to her for years after this embarrassing fiasco and her quick return to Texas. She damaged herself, “like she knew she would”.
