VIOLENT FATHERS

In my usual recalcitrant fashion, even though it’s supposed to be Mother’s Day, I’m writing about Father’s Day. Who is the media to tell me what day it is? Anyway, when it comes to parents, the days are pretty well enmeshed. I’ve been thinking about fathers who beat their sons, which is a problem for mothers, and I’ve been trying to understand how fathers, like my father above with myself and two brothers, would get to the place where they would beat sons. He read us the comics every Sunday so I still hear hear his voice when I look at certain strips.

In my father’s case, he was a spanker -- that is, no stick or belt -- and he was not gender discriminating. I got as many spankings as my brothers. Always vowed I wouldn’t cry, but never could hold out long. Partly it was the humiliation. The last time he lost his temper he dragged me out of the car (for fighting with my brothers) and spanked me on a public highway. If he did that now, other people would probably interfere. I was as big as an adult woman, though only beginning high school, and dressed up. I locked the car door to keep him away from me. After a good deal of stalling which made my father even angrier, my mother unlocked the door.

I have no idea what my brothers thought. They made a transition from fear to anger somewhere in there and joined the Marines at seventeen. None of us talked about my father’s rages. None of us ever lost our reciprocal rage except that my mother managed to suppress it mostly. Anyway my father was a traveling man, only home on weekends. None of our relatives ever knew anything about it and they think I’m lying or at least exaggerating if I talk about it now.

Such a situation is “sticky.” I’m attracted to overtly angry men, but split in a hurry if anger turns to violence. I have an exceptional need to be an “emergency responder,” an adrenaline junkie who tries to match my spiking emotion to competence that justifies and shapes it. But I go a little nuts when nothing happens, when it all gets soooooo noooooormal. On the other hand, I’m a crackerjack sublimator and I can let the syndrome play out in a virtual mind-bounded universe which is a source of writing. Reading and movies are also good.

There is a bunch of redneck motorcycle bums up the street: they beat up their womenfolk until the sheriff intervened. Now the women are gone. I have no intention whatsoever of drawing their notice. I hear them go by on their machines -- that’s all I care to know. My alarms for danger go off early. I believe in prevention, which is why I think about violence.

As I do with everything, I tried googling for research on fathers who beat their sons. It seems clearly related to the biological phenomenon among all animals of throwing out males as soon as they are old enough to be a threat. Wolves are a little more tolerant, if the extra males will help feed the pups. Male lions will kill cubs if they belong to a different sire, so that the female will come back into season and he can start his own cubs.

It’s pretty clear that my father changed when he suffered a frontal skull fracture and concussion in 1948. It was subtle damage, but the structures of the brain behind the forehead are delicate and they are the ones most crucial to human characteristics, like empathy, compassion, ability to work with others, the impulse to protect, and so on. The same thing happened to my brother, except at a slightly different location on his forehead. He was not functional after that, not because of being violent but because of being always inconclusive, never being able to judge or choose, and because of being deeply invested in obfuscation, which mostly took the form of telling wild stories. My movie last night was John Le Carre’s “A Perfect Spy,” and those were the kinds of resourceful tales my brother told.

Another clear source of paternal violence is the social conviction that sons “belong to” fathers, are economic chattel who can be forced to work or be hired out with wages going to the family. My great-uncle’s son, in his eighties, told me about being sent to work for a neighbor without so much as shoes or a lunch. That was seventy-five years ago in rural Dakota. He wouldn’t have thought much of it, except that the neighbor was scandalized.

No doubt psychological boundaries between an overwhelmingly powerful father and his son must shift over a lifetime, especially if the son turns out to be as powerful as the father. Bob Scriver had two actual fist fights with his delinquent teen-aged son: one on the main street of town in front of the show house and a crowd, and the other in the house, where I found the sprays of blood on the walls the next morning. The explanation I got never made sense. The son had been stealing as a misguided way of asserting his own power.

The phrase “I’ll beat it out of him,” comes to mind. The way one beats bad behavior out of a dog or horse. (But does that work either?) Notoriously, fathers over-react to what they most fear in themselves, like homosexuality or incompetence. What would be wrong with “son whispering?”

Once I called a father to tell him about his son who was misbehaving and defiant in the classroom. The father said, sighing, “Well, okay. I’ll beat him again. But I doubt it will do any good.” It didn’t. I don’t know where we got the idea that beating anyone would change their behavior. Was it the mothers who put discipline over onto the fathers? (“Wait until your father gets home!”) Was it all those English schools and early American schools that believed in “caning?” Is it an expression of ignorance and, therefore, frustration?

I did find one study of men on steroids that described “roid rage” as a possible cause of violent behavior. Some feminists would chant “testoterone poisoning” -- as good a theory as any. And since families would inherit their hormone levels, a big dominant father is bound to run into a big dominant son. If they have the same values, things might go well, an alliance. If they don’t, one or the other must win the war or leave. If it lasts long enough, it’s likely to be the son who wins because even the most powerful men must age. But if the son loves his father, what can he do but leave?

Very hard on mothers. I haven’t seen any good writing about what they should do, esp. if they are economically dependent, isolated from others, or emotionally enmeshed. It’s fiction material, but I’d like to see some insightful psychological material.