Rice gave a 17 minute press conference this morning, to which the immediate reaction on ESPN was overwhelmingly positive (so far I have seen two former players almost crying, and a female columnist, both seemed impressed).
I was much less so. Rice spent most of the time talking about how the real victim the night he punched his then girlfriend (now wife) and dragged her out of an Atlantic City hotel elevator was himself. While he refused to talk about whatever damage he imposed on her, he talked at great length about the pain he will now have to suffer living with this, and how much the thought that his now 2 year old daughter will one day find out about it on Google (Hint: Ray, you might want to tell her about it before she googles it). He said repeatedly that his wife "can do not wrong" - a phrase which in my experience is a red flag, since it often marks an overreaction learned "in counseling" to an initial tendency to blame the victim for the violence. An even larger red flag was his reference several times to the Biblical model of the husband being the head of the family. This is code in fundamentalist Christianity to a doctrine known as "male headship", which teaches that women must submit and be subordinate to the absolute authority of their husband. Many observers believe that this doctrine actually increases the probability of domestic violence, as men who subscribe to it tend to believe that it is their right and responsibility to punish both children and wives (there is little difference in their view between the two) for any perceived disobedience or imperfection. OTOH, many fundamentalists are aware of this problem, and have begun trying to counter it with the message, heard in Rice's comments this morning, that his responsibility "as a Man" (which means, as the head of and leader of the family) is to exercise his power and leadership without violence. This of course is better, but in my observation can lead to troubling kinds of emotional and psychological manipulation and control. I did not hear anyone ask him if he agreed with the apparent stand of the NFL, that smoking marijuana was a more serious offense than punching a girlfriend. He did say that he was never going to appeal the punishment, even if it has been 4 or 6 games. Lurking behind this case is the likelihood that the reason Rice was not convicted of any crime, and not given a more serious penalty from the NFL, was that his girlfriend/wife took responsibility for the violence, refused to press charges or testify against him, and told both the court and the NFL that she has been intoxicated and maybe even initiated the violence by hitting him. At least twice Rice condemned "domestic violence" in general, and then specified "especially man on woman violence", which I take as a remnant of an earlier argument that he made that most of the violence that night was "woman on man", and that he was just defending himself. It may be true that she was behaving badly and started the violence (this happens fairly often) and it is also true that often it is not true, but women say it because they have internalized the abuser's propaganda that the violence was her own fault for being less than perfect. In either case, Rice's apparent fixation on this is troubling, as it is a less obvious but still serious attempt to shift responsibility for the violence away from himself (his repeated and ostentatious explicit taking of responsibility can be read as more of a principled responsibility, in which he as head of the family is responsible for all bad actions. His wife can "do no wrong" because as a subordinate woman in the relationship she is not a responsible actor). All of this can make repeated violence more likely. Ray Rice has a baby face, and comes across as a nice, likable guy - which he probably is. Popular culture has made "domestic violence" into such a stigmatized crime that it is difficult to imagine nice, regular men as perpetrators of it, which is a problem. All kinds of men hit women - some do it only once, others do it several times a week for years. I was raised with a strict boys-do-no-hit-girls imperative, which is probably not a bad rule; a more accurate rule would be that stronger and bigger people should not his smaller and weaker people. Assuming this really was the first time Rice hit a woman, he may not be a horrible person; he may really have made a really bad "mistake", and there may be a good chance that he will never do it again. However nothing I saw this morning reassured me about him, and if the "counseling" he referred to was some kind of religiously based service rooted in the fundamentalist assumption that men are the rightful heads of their families to whom wives owe obedience and submission, then I am much, much more worried about him. http://espn.go.com/blog/baltimore-ravens/post/_/id/11317/baltimore-ravens-preseason-live -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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