That she was perhaps read with approval by so many people because she did not constantly use those all-encompassing empty words, Christien Brinkgreve said during an interview afternoon in Groningen, but rather words such as ‘denigration power’. That word struck me. It is a power that many people know from experience: your superiors at work, the teacher at school – oh I can still see him, the science teacher who, when I made a mistake in front of the blackboard, said scornfully, ‘You will never be a good nurse’, in front of the entire class. I was so afraid of him and his disparaging remarks that I hardly dared to open the physics book, which of course didn’t make things any better.
This power also plays a role in more intimate relationships. Parents have that power, friends sometimes too, lovers.
Brinkgreve gives a terrifying example in her book Loaded house that is about the derailment of her marriage and about the role she unintentionally and unintentionally found herself in and where she wonders, now that her husband has died, why she did it that way. The disparagement I am referring to takes place at the deathbed of the man always referred to as A., where Brinkgreve and a girlfriend are sitting a few weeks before his death. A conversation arises about the girlfriend of one of their sons, who A. finds ‘very ambitious’. Which he has nothing against, ‘as long as it is not at the expense of the husband and children’. Brinkgreve asks if he is referring to her? He says: ‘Don’t always make yourself bigger than you are.’
Especially that ‘always’, which implies that you mean little, but you seem to think otherwise.
Why does an independent and educated woman who can take very good care of herself stay with a man who belittles her (also, because that is of course not the whole story)? Brinkgreve herself explains that she wanted to take care of him, that she thought he wouldn’t make it on his own – the rescue fantasies that affect more people, especially women it seems. But there must be something else.
In The Guardian I read a chapter from the book by Virginia Giuffre, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and his companion Ghislaine Maxwell from the age of seventeen. Giuffre describes the first time she comes to Epstein’s home, how her clothes are taken off and how Maxwell and Epstein laugh at her about her childish underwear with hearts: ‘How cute!’. Then she writes: “Many young women, including me, have criticized the fact that we went back to Epstein’s lair even when we knew what he wanted from us. How can you complain about being abused, some asked, when you could so easily have stayed away?” It is a question she also asks herself and she answers it by appealing to her past in which she had been belittled and abused so many times, just like most of the other girls as far as she knows. Epstein and Maxwell had a nose for such easily manipulated girls.
There is certainly a lot to explain from someone’s past. But the word ‘power’ in belittlement power is about more than the ability to belittle someone, it also stands for the power itself that such a person has over another, precisely by belittling them. That has a paralyzing effect, and the self-esteem you need to save yourself disappears. The desire to do well in the eyes of the mighty actually grows. And then you don’t stay or leave.
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