Last summer,
while browsing in my favorite bookstore, Hungry Mind, in St. Paul, Minnesota I came across a strange and wonderful
book that has helped me understand the aesthetics of power.
The book is: Dominance and
Affection: The Making of Pets
by Yi Fu Tuan (1984), a distinguished
Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin.
He writes about aspects of psychological geography and human
experience in physical and human environments.
I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Tuan last December while
visiting Jim Gustafson. A
slight man in what I imagined to be his late 50’s or early 60’s
met me outside his office and invited me in. I walked through this dark aisle of books in stacks to the
ceiling back to his desk at the end of the room where a trio of windows
surrounded his desk, letting in the late afternoon winter sunshine.
He told me that being a naturalized Chinese allowed him to look at
his surroundings from an angle different than most of us.
When Dominance and Affection
was first published, it was greeted with some controversy.
People did not want to look at the darker sides of affection.
His basic premise is that we all want to dominate in some way or
another. And when we dominate
without any affection, it
produces the victim. But when
we dominate others with affection, it produces the pet.
“So, you can be a victim or a pet” I said to him.
“Yes,” he said, laughing. “Take your pick !”
Let me explain.
In Dominance
and Affection he explores the psychology of playful domination, its
interesting and sometimes horrifying effects.
He suggests that the desire for power and the desire to dominate
one another seems inherent in human nature.
Even during times of cooperation between persons one might conceive
of such acts as having the goal of dominating a third party – such as
nature or other human competitors. To
many of us, this might seem like a fairly cynical view.
We might argue with Tuan that there is, after all, such a thing as
unconditional love. Surely
that is without any ulterior motive.
He would respond by insisting
that while agape love is
a social fact, it is very rare and is more likely to show itself in
momentary epiphanies than everyday life. Its the baser aspects of
“love,” such as lust, obsession, and passion seem to be more closely
associated with power and dominance than agape
love. Observers of the social scene, novelists, social scientists,
and we therapists are generally less preoccupied with unconditional love,
and seem to have our hands and ears full of stories about the baser forms
of love. However, in addition
to lust and passion, Tuan suggests we can benefit by studying affection
– which is not the opposite of dominance, but it is dominance with a
human face: “Dominance may be cruel and with no hint of affection in
it. What it produces is the
victim. On the other hand,
dominance may be combined with affection, and what it produces is the
pet.” (Tuan, 1984, p. 2).
While power (or agency)
can be good and represent vitality and effectiveness – a state of being
that we all strive for, it can also conjure up images of abuse or even
heresy. For example, when I
used the word “power” in the presence of a group of orthodox
Batesonians recently, I was
attacked with a great deal of vehemence (with no accompanying affection
!). But Tuan suggests we go beyond the social and economic realms of power
and instead examine power and dominance in the aesthetic realms, in the
realms of pleasure, play, and art. For example, if we look at a Bonsai
tree from an aesthetic perspective, we see that it is beautiful in its
shape and miniature form. But,
if we realize that the form it takes was made possible by torturing the
plant, by cutting, wiring, and manipulating the plant’s growth in
various ways, then the “beauty” of the plant takes on a different
meaning. Similarly, he asks
us to consider if it was right for a woman of eighteenth-century England
to keep a black boy as a pet, even if she dressed him in finery and
allowed him special privileges.
In ancient times, potentates, as a means of
displaying their power, would have lions and other powerful animals in
prominent roles in processions. These
symbols of power were under the domination of the more powerful and feared
human leader. Furthermore,
the pleasure we feel when feeding animals at the zoo, although it may seem
generous and innocent, derives from a base of superiority and enjoyment in
the exercise of power. While pets may seem to exist for human pleasure, no
matter how fond some owners profess to be of them, castrating the males or
spaying the females for convenience is not given a second thought.
While all of this is interesting, what may be
the most interesting to therapists is Tuan’s discussion of children and
women as pets. In the 19th
Century, the woman was seen as the guardian of the home, the haven from a
heartless world. As
child-wife, she was expected to prattle on entertainingly and to dispel
the clouds gathering around her husband’s brow as he returned from
battlefield of economic life. But as women were understood to represent both culture
and nature, they were seen as a mysterious forces that threatened to
domesticate and emasculate the male, robbing him
of his freedom and wildness. She
must therefore be dominated, tamed, and harnessed.
In patriarchal societies, women in harems, as playthings and pets,
had no rights or purpose beyond that as objects of prestige and sexual
indulgence. Each member of
the harem had her exact duties to perform and she might spend most of her
time perfecting such skills as coffee-making, dressmaking, and
accountancy. Her moment of glory would come if she should ever catch the Sultan’s eye and rise to a
special status above the others. “...a
woman’s greatest aspiration and constant hope (up to a certain age) was
to be able to crawl humbly into the bed of her lord.
Humiliation plumbs a poignant depth when its victim regards it as
the highest form of honor” (p. 126).
Tuan says that pets are diminished beings,
both literally and figuratively, serving the needs of vanity and pleasure
of their possessor. As
personal belongings, they are supposed to charm us so that we might take
delight in them and yet be able to set aside if we momentarily tire of
them. We like our pets when
they can amuse us with particular tricks or minor talents that we have
taught them. They can be
doted on, teased and even called names of “endearment” that serve to
humiliate them further. In
colonial times, slaves were given such names as Pompey or Socrates or
Othello or Alexander the Great. Being
called either “boy” or a name of someone so obviously of a different
status than the person serves to humiliate and tease them. They were
sometimes dressed in fine livery or at other times in tatters.
What may at one level seem like benevolent patronage is only a
pernicious blend of affection and condescension.
In order to justify dominance (with
affection), it is important that distinctions
get made between culture and nature, between mind and body, with righteous
justification that culture and mind can dominate nature and body. This
kind of condescending attitude, Tuan says, justifies the belief women and
slaves, fools and blacks are immature, naive, sexual, and in need of
constant control. “Men of power, arrogating to themselves the attributes of
mind and culture, find it pleasing to have around them humans of a lesser
breed – closer to nature – on whose head they may lay an indulgent
hand” (p. 167).
Postscript
When I shared
these ideas with other members of my domestic violence treatment team, we
thought of a number of implications for the men and women we saw in
therapy. It helped us understand from a unique perspective, the
complex nature of domination within a context of affection. Domination
without affection is easy to understand in
it’s victimizing practices.
But domination with
affection creates a complex set of associations in which the mixture of
control and “benevolent” affection
produces highly ambivalent reactions in its recipients.
The relationship feels good and stifling at the same time.
As a result, as “pet” you are much less quick to raise a voice
in protest. Linking dominance with affection helped us better understand
the powerful ambivalent feelings so prevalent in abusive relationships. Things aren’t as simple as they look. A woman might feel
attracted to her partner when others can see little appealing about the
relationship. After all, she
likes getting the affection from him.
It feels good. The
desire to be benevolently taken care of resides in most of us.
Its just that in the case of couples caught up in domestic
violence, benevolent caretaking always seems to be tied to domination
with, but most often without, affection.
Simultaneously attracted to him by the affection and repulsed by
his practices of control and domination, an abused woman often feels
confused as she is continuously subjected to the chaos created by his
quick shifts from dominance with affection to dominance without affection.
Tuan’s metaphor of the master / pet
relationship also helped us understand that some women more willingly take
on subservient roles than others. These
women were likely to feel confused, dependent, and frightened.
One woman, became pregnant
with a fifth child while separated from her abusing, occasionally
affectionate and chaos-producing husband. (He would alternate from reading
the Bible out loud to her to threatening to getting in her face and
threatening to hit her.) Unable to go through with an abortion, she felt
trapped. One team member likened her condition to that of
“a deer in headlights” –
frozen, unable to think of any evasive actions to take.
Another woman would occasionally behave in a child-like manner,
acting excessively dependent, calling her husband at work who would
describe her phone calls as “prattling on” about nothing significant.
She would show
irresponsibility in managing the family finances.
Her husband in turn, would become furious with her (with no
affection). She seemed more
devoted as a pet to him, but he seemed to treat her in a dominating,
disrespectful manner, much as a master might beat an animal for not
performing well.
However, we found another woman less
deferring and with greater sense of her own entitlement.
This independent behavior on her part seemed to engender appeals
for affection on his part. He wanted
reassurance from her which he equated with affection and sex.
One night, six months
after entering therapy, he asked his wife if she would be his “whore”
for an evening. But since
their history had as turning point an incident of marital rape, this
appeal for submission and subjugation seemed like just another case of
sexual assault to her. She
refused to be humiliated any further (dominance with forced sex, no
affection). However, the team later inadvertently discovered and she
subsequently revealed to the female therapist member of the co-therapy
team, that she was having an affair with her boss at work. This had been going on for at least two years.
So while she was treated as a victim in her marriage (dominance and
sex with no affection) conversations with the my co-therapist seemed to
suggest that she was being treated as a pet by her boss.
To dominate someone with affection and have
the relationship remain stable seems more like a scene out of another era.
But Tuan’s metaphor is still instructive.
The metaphors of dominance / affection, master / pet are sometimes
funny, but often horrifying as a lens through with to view contemporary
male / female relationships. We did not encounter many relationships in
which the woman was simply willing to be her husband’s pet. But
dominance/affection as a metaphor helped us understand how many of these
relationships might have started out that way – where the woman was
deferring and subservient and the man was dominating with affection, charm
and promises. Such
gender stereotypes seem especially prevalent in violent relationships.
But pet status sooner or later becomes intolerable.
Dominance inevitably ceases to be “benevolent.”
Cruelty and humiliation eventually emerge in any relationship based
on a master / pet arrangement. Using this metaphor,
our team found women treated with dominance and affection (treated
as “pets,” early on in their relationship);
women treated without affection but as objects of gratification by
men (where the man thought of her as a pet, but she felt like a victim);
and women treated as victims without affection.
We also found one man objecting to being treated as a pet by his
wife (he used the term: “toy-boy”).
As
a metaphor for understanding the aesthetics and pragmatics of power in
gendered relationships – dominance / affection, master / pet – is
quite useful. Tuan says in
his concluding remarks that we all like to be occasionally passive and
taken care of at times. We
can even enjoy being played with, if affectionately, at least for a while.
Being temporary dominated can be pleasureful, if along with the
domination comes power and intimacy and some tangible rewards, or at least
some affection. But this
arrangement wears thin if it lasts too long, isn’t easily reversed, or
given up altogether in favor of an respectful relationship among equals. Or as Barb
Stanton, a member of our
domestic violence treatment team said, “No matter how well I treat my
dog, when I open the door, she still wants to make a break for it.”
References
Tuan, Y. F.
(1984).
Dominance and Affection: The
Making of Pets. New
Haven: Yale
University Press.
Stewart, K. (1993) Victims or Pets ? Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy. Vol.
14, No. 1.
45 - 47.
