What grinds my gears the most about the Dominic Cummings affair (Cumgate, oh how we laughed) is his insistence that a routine childcare problem was a circumstance so exceptional it required him to decide, as the Man of the Household, to flout the rules everyone else has endured. But this piece is not about childcare. It is not about the extreme lengths to which elite men will go to avoid looking after their own goddamn kids. It is about male violence.
The exceptional circumstance which Cummings claimed as his excuse to flee London while contagious with a deadly virus was a hard-won exception, fought for by activists and experts in the face of initial government indifference and then belated, patronising acquiescence. But let me put into words the bit about the “exceptional circumstance” we assume doesn’t need saying because it’s as obvious as air; this exception is to deal with men’s violence against the women and children of their household.
When lockdown started and required everyone who wasn’t a key-worker to stay at home, women’s shelters around the UK pointed out at first calmly – assuming it was just an oversight by the Prime Minister’s all-male inner team – and then increasingly loudly, the obvious truth our society thinks too normal to plan for or even mention; that violent men routinely injure, rape and kill the women and children locked into their households. Lockdown meant lock-in for the women and children shut in with angry, confined and – as consumption patterns quickly showed – drunk men.
Do you remember the half news cycle back at the start of lockdown, the violent deaths of a whole family for which the police were not seeking a suspect? Probably not. Two women a week, dead. It’s just normal. The operation and ultimate outcome of male authority and rage in the confines of the family home is so normal it’s not news, it’s not exceptional, it’s not even worrying or problematic. It’s just a one-off tragedy, every single time. Twice a week. Every week. So you see, after a while, don’t you, that it is effectively government policy.
Which is why activists had to strain every muscle and shout as loud as they could to get the exception introduced into lockdown that women and children may still flee violent men. Even if the government had long since shut most of the shelters they could flee to.
So for the architect of lockdown, the “brains” behind the policy that didn’t for a moment consider it significant or worrying that more women and children would be murdered, to use this hard-won, life-saving exception as the justification for fleeing London because he couldn’t find a babysitter, is disgusting. I write for my living and I don’t have a better way to describe how grotesque that is.
Add this reason for white-hot anger to the hundreds of thousands of bereaved who didn’t say goodbye or publicly mourn their dead – couldn’t, in fact, because that’s what privilege is; it’s an invisible zone of wiggle-room around you as you move through a world where most people have little or none – to new cancer patients still waiting for diagnostic tests let alone treatment, benefits recipients starved for weeks for missing appointments, the list is endless – and consider the millions of people wounded physically, emotionally and morally by the government’s defence of Cummings, and you get close to understanding the country’s seething rage.
And it’s not hate. I’m personally indifferent to that man, and so are most people who judge him by his deeds alone. Hate is for individuals. Anger is for choices, for contempt, for what people do, not who they are. How dare the spineless Cabinet lackeys belittle moral outrage by trying to pass off our justified and appropriate anger as personal spite.
And by moral injury I mean the people who let their loved ones die in the care of strangers who are now told that Cummings acted as a good father, a good man, and so, by implication, should they have done, but they did not. They should have ignored the rules and acted only for themselves and their father, mother, wife, husband, sibling, or, in the case of Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, their child. Little exposes the sociopathic indifference and amorality of this Cabinet more than that they just don’t get that their clever debating point hasn’t just made people’s suffering pointless, it will live on in people’s hearts for the rest of their lives; the knowledge that they could have and therefore should have flouted the rules and just been there. When the wrong thing is the right thing, and the right thing is wrong, you inflict a profound moral injury and cause a lifetime of suffering made more bitter by regret. That, too, is what Cummings has done.
The Cabinet asks people to “move on” at the precise moment it has mired hundreds of thousands of people in what psychologists term complicated grief, grief that cannot eventually dissolve into the love and joy of memory because it is twisted up in bitter and incurable regret.
So you see how Cummings’ ‘family man’ defence does moral and emotional violence to us all. It invokes the authority of the male head of household and makes special pleading for him with the very exception created to protect women and children from his abuse of power. It insists on private morality – the old nineteenth century private sphere of the family in which a man can do what he wishes, even as he has to follow rules and public morality outside of it – in direct contempt for the effects of his actions on anyone outside his nuclear family unit.
A thirteen year-old boy was left to die without the touch of a parent or anyone who knew and loved him so that we could all be safer, and now we are come to this. A man in a white shirt, sitting at a table in a rose garden, telling us the rules were not the rules, wrong is right and up is down. And the people who believe him do so because they believe in the authority of a man, the right of a man to deal with his family just as he pleases, the absolute subjectivity of right and wrong when it comes to doing whatever the hell he wants.
Here is something else that many women know about certain men. We know what gaslighting is. It’s another form of moral injury because its precise purpose is to make you unable to distinguish between right and wrong. It confuses you and attacks you, even when – especially when – you haven’t done anything wrong. Researchers into male violence against women and children have yet to figure out how it is that male abusers all seem to hit on the same tactics to keep their victims weak. There’s a name for it, though; DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender.
Deny any wrongdoing – Cummings’ and the government’s insistence, still, that the proven and admitted offences were “fake news”.
Attack the victim and make them feel like they’re the one in the wrong for holding the abuser accountable – the Cabinet and Conservative outriders who insist those rightfully angry at obvious lies are “a mob” motivated “by hate”.
Reverse victim and offender by insisting the abuser is the real victim in the situation – the attempts to paint the Cummings family as suffering uniquely (bereavement, disability) under lockdown; the hints by Cummings that he feared for his family’s safety at their normal residence. Women MPs who fruitlessly begged Johnson to tone down his violent rhetoric last year because of the death and rape threats they received will particularly notice that one.
So we see the male head of household, occupying in his professional life a position of untrammelled and unelected power, using the classic tactics of abusers under patriarchy to confuse and subdue us, to make us think we were in the wrong despite the wrong done to us. I may have to live under this, but I refuse to pretend it is not happening.
Women see this, and nonbinary people. We see it because we live in a world that weaponises our own vulnerability to deny it even exists. And now many, many men see it too.
Patriarchy and fascism go hand in hand. They depend on the idea that authority comes from a man who both threatens violence within his household and protects his household from external interference. In patriarchy as in fascism there is only private morality and it is only for men. Everything else is coercion. Everyone else’s moral person is subject to injury and abuse. Public morality is mere cant – nothing more than hypocrisy and witch-hunting – and there are no shared interests beyond the household and the state. As the man to his wife and children, so the state to its subjects. This week in Britain we saw another small step towards the ennoblement of the fascistic concern for the immediate family and contempt at the suffering of everyone else.
So yes, joke about eyesight tests and point out the barefaced lies and changes to blogposts. Humour is part of how we survive. But do not mistake what we saw yesterday for anything other than the creeping insistence that one man can do whatever he likes with his family, can do whatever he likes to this country. That wife and that son are not the human shield. We all are.
{ 34 comments }
Jane Leaper 05.26.20 at 1:46 pm
Nice article Maria. Although I’m not entirely convinced that you avoided Godwin’s law towards the end.
Stephen 05.26.20 at 2:48 pm
I’m puzzled. As far as I know, the relevant order is the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions)(England) Regulations 2020: introduced 26th March, subsequently modified but the original order applied right from the start of lockdown. It says:
“Restrictions on Movement. 6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.
(2) For the purposes of paragraph (1), a reasonable excuse includes the need … (m) to avoid injury or illness or to escape a risk of harm.”
I am not a lawyer, but I would suppose that can only mean: the Government always intended that anyone who wanted to travel to escape from the risk of being harmed by an abusive spouse or partner should be perfectly free to do so.
If that is so, I suggest some of Maria’s indignation on behalf of vulnerable women might be misplaced.
David Moles 05.26.20 at 3:22 pm
Yes, because what people look for when they want guidance from the government is a subsection of a subsection of a UK Statutory Instrument. 🙄
The government’s public guidance on the restrictions as originally published did not even include the word “harmâ€, as a cursory glance at the Wayback Machine will tell you.
MPAVictoria 05.26.20 at 4:00 pm
Important and moving piece of writing. Thank you.
Stephen 05.26.20 at 6:32 pm
David Moles: right up to a point, but the site you quote is the advice put out by the Cabinet Office on 23 March: that is, more or less senior civil servants summarising what they think is, or ought to be, the Government policy. The actual and very different Government policy that I quoted was put out on 26 March.
Cummings, whatever your opinion of him, has prominently complained that civil servants put out statements about their ministers’ policies that may be the opposite of their actual policies, and not previously cleared with the relevant ministers.
It may be pure coincidence that the Head of the Cabinet Office was replaced on 30 March.
Regards
Stephen
Cian 05.26.20 at 6:35 pm
I’m not really seeing this to be honest. Seems an overly complicated explanation for something that seems fairly simple and depressingly common.
He didn’t think the rules applied to him (and probably thought the lockdown was kind of stupid anyways). He got caught, didn’t have a good explanation and so made up a really bad lie because he didn’t really have a reason. Now the Tories are defending him because what else do you expect them to do.
Yes it’s infuriating, and yes people have every right to be angry. But I think the family stuff is just background detail to a depressingly common example of elite malfeasance. The only unusual thing here is that the UK press seem to have decided for some reason that they’re going to push back on this.
Stephen 05.26.20 at 7:00 pm
Cian; you say that Cummings “probably thought the lockdown was kind of stupid anyways”. An alternative theory (see more Guardian references than I can cite) is that Cummings was the driving force behind the lockdown. Reconciling these is not easy.
When you say he “didn’t have a good explanation” have you by any chance read my previous posts on the subject? If not, why not?
Stephen 05.26.20 at 7:52 pm
Maria: one minor point.
You write of Cummings that his family’s situation “required him to decide, as the Man of the Household, to flout the rules”. Leaving aside whether he did in fact comply with the rules, or not: how well do you know the Cummings family? (Admission: I know nothing at all of them.) Why are you sure that the decision to put their child’s safety first was not made by both parents? Or indeed, by Mrs Cummings as Wife and Mother of the Household, with her husband following her decision?
Do you really suppose that all households, when making a decision about a child’s safety, are dominated by the man?
sue dexter 05.26.20 at 8:57 pm
And notice how casually he accepted plan B in which his nieces would take care of his son should EVERYONE fall ill with Covid. Why not, saith he. They are a good age and wouldn’t get too sick.
The words sum up entitlement.
Philip 05.26.20 at 9:00 pm
Another brilliantly written piece, Maria. His disregard for anyone outside of his family is truly appalling. I have friends whose relatives got covid19 in Durham hospital and died. They will have got it before Cummings drove up but how many people might have been infected from his decision? I think the child care issue is salient too. I know parents have been seriously ill or essential workers having to do all the childcare too. I have been working with autistic children in residential care in Durham and doing everything I can to limit travel and not getting off the bus, then this.
Stephen, I am not sure what you are trying to argue, that activists did not push for the provision for people facing domestic abuse? Or are you trying to distract from the wider point that Dominic Cummings was using a provision intended for people facing domestic abuse then using the tactics of abusers to justify his actions?
Maria 05.26.20 at 9:06 pm
Stephen @8, I’m going by the account given by Cummings on television yesterday. I think there are transcripts available if you have a look, though this humorous take on it may also be salient; https://twitter.com/RachelMuers/status/1265185306971684864
Stephen 05.26.20 at 9:48 pm
Philip: I don’t know whether “activists did [not] push for the provision for people facing domestic abuse”. If there were some and they did, then they were quite right to do so, but there is no evidence that anyone in the government opposed them, or that the very reasonable government guidelines would not have been the same if the hypothetical activists had never existed. I await, with only moderate hope, proof that your activists did exist and that the government did in fact oppose them.
As for your wider point: I cannot easily see how Cummings, however much you dislike him (and I think he is seriously wrong on some matters) is “using the tactics of abusers to justify his actions”.The tactics of entirely despicable abusers seem to me to have nothing whatever to do with the case. Elucidation awaited if not entirely expected
Stephen 05.26.20 at 9:56 pm
Maria @11: the link you gives says “Reading #DominicCummngs narrative as a work of fiction (which it is, even if it recounts true events)”.
M’lud, the defence rests its case. The legal distinction between truth and fiction (aka lies, if not perjury) is of some historical importance,
Dave Heasman 05.26.20 at 10:15 pm
Stephen is assuming something not obvious, let alone proven, when he says the Cummings’ put their child’s interests first. I think it far more likely that they planned a fortnight’s holiday over Easter and both lied like rugs to get it done. I don’t believe either of them had symptoms, if they had they’d really be endangering the child by driving.
J-D 05.27.20 at 12:54 am
Since you have taken it upon yourself to present the case for what you are pleased to call the defence, I will boldly venture to suggest a possible partial summing up for what might then conversely be called the prosecution.
Point 1: there has been invoked by Dominic Cummings, or on his behalf, as justification for his actions, a rule which was written to allow escape for victims of domestic violence, even though he was not threatened with domestic violence, or anything similarly grave. Invoking that rule in this way trivialises the sufferings of those who are subject to, or threatened with, domestic violence.
Point 2: Dominic Cummings has been defended for actions which have been taken (at least by some) to breach the rules, on the grounds that he was acting on natural (and admirable) familial impulses. This defence implies the corollary of (cruel and unjustified) criticism or blame for people who have restrained themselves from acting on similar natural familial impulses because they believed that is what the (important and justified) rules required.
Collin Street 05.27.20 at 12:57 am
There’s a name for it, though; DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender.
It’s actually a good thing to watch out for; an awful lot of toxic people do the same thing. Not just domestic abuse, but workplace abusers and what-have-you. Very common for narcissists, for example.
Why are you sure that the decision to put their child’s safety first was not made by both parents?
… but this shit is bullshit. Stephen thinks he has an angle to attack the conclusions other people have come to, but rather than actually make an argument he’d rather demand that other people respond to his arguments preemptively, before he even frames or states them.
And then, no doubt, if people don’t rebut [to his satisfaction] arguments he never actually made as such he declares himself vindicated.
It’s a nifty trick, because he gets to see your playbook in-toto before he makes a move or commits to a strategy. He can change details of the hypothetical you’re supposedly arguing against after you’ve finalised your argument, and criticise you for flip-flopping or somesuch if you try to change your response to argue against the claims he finally decides to make.
Stephen: getting people to stfu and stop arguing with you isn’t actually the same thing as vindication. You’ve probably been doing it this way your entire life, but… you might want to stop and think about how effective you’ve been in getting the sort of life you think you deserve, compared to other people who have used different approaches.
I mean, if I stop arguing with you on this exact topic it won’t be because I’ve become convinced you’re an awsome cool dude, will it? There’ll be other reasons for my so doing, and you’d probably best value your “victory” accordingly.
Collin Street 05.27.20 at 1:13 am
When you say he “didn’t have a good explanation†have you by any chance read my previous posts on the subject? If not, why not?
I await, with only moderate hope, proof that your activists did exist and that the government did in fact oppose them.
Do you really suppose that all households, when making a decision about a child’s safety, are dominated by the man?
The tactics of entirely despicable abusers seem to me to have nothing whatever to do with the case. Elucidation awaited if not entirely expected
You see? Lots of “you gotta prove me wrong!”. Lots and lots and lots and lots. Rather more of that than of actual positive claims, although quite frankly I CBF doing the counting [hey, you do the counting, prove me wrong].
Chetan Murthy 05.27.20 at 4:12 am
Maria @11: the link you gives says “Reading #DominicCummngs narrative as a work of fiction (which it is, even if it recounts true events)â€.
Stephen @13: M’lud, the defence rests its case. The legal distinction between truth and fiction (aka lies, if not perjury) is of some historical importance,
Here’s your homework: Go read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. And stop gaslighting.
Chetan Murthy 05.27.20 at 4:19 am
Chris Grey was characteristically excellent in his connecting Cummings’ escapades to the larger Brexit idiocy. There’s one law for the toffs, and one for the common people. And turns out, the Brexiters’ saying “take back our laws” didn’t mean “take them back for the common people” but rather for the likes of Dominic Cummings.
Link: https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-cummings-affair.html
Chetan Murthy 05.27.20 at 4:21 am
Stephen @13: I don’t know how British law works, but here in America, a witness is enjoined to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. Manifestly, Cummings isn’t telling the whole truth. Y’know, M’lud and all.
KT2 05.27.20 at 4:29 am
Thanks for article and “There’s a name for it, though; DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender”
(And many a ‘news’ paper)
I’ll be having read and discuss with my teenage child.
Chetan Murthy 05.27.20 at 4:37 am
Stephen @12: “I cannot easily see how Cummings, however much you dislike him (and I think he is seriously wrong on some matters) is “using the tactics of abusers to justify his actionsâ€.The tactics of entirely despicable abusers seem to me to have nothing whatever to do with the case. Elucidation awaited if not entirely expected”
Perhaps like Cummings, you should get your eyes checked. Or maybe, try reading the OP? Are you not familiar with DARVO? Or having trouble with your eyesight? I mean, I don’t want to cast aspersions on your intelligence, that would be uncivil. As would casting aspersions on your decency.
Maria 05.27.20 at 7:31 am
We’ve humoured Stephen enough. He’s clearly not commenting in good faith. No more from or about him on this thread.
Rob 05.27.20 at 9:35 am
As Chetan Murthy mentioned above, there’s a similarity between this post and Chris Grey’s post connecting Cummings’ behaviour with Brexit. While I am in agreement with Maria and Chris in their opinion about what constitutes badness, I struggle a bit with the connections between the various bad things.
Perhaps it’s just how my mind works, but I’m always prompted to consider whether the connections could be made differently. In the Brexit example, could one argue just as convincingly that some Remainers (fwiw I voted Remain) are also guilty of privileging their own views, or of assuming that they should be allowed to act without reference to the views of others? I find that the drawing of the parallel has the effect of making the case against Cummings weaker, not stronger: what was an open-and-shut case about the breaking of simple rules becomes a highly-contestible argument about motives, psychological dispositions, and the extent to which the case stands in for a much larger conflict, on which society is famously divided almost down the middle, the very opposite of open-and-shut. This seems like much more advantageous territory for Cummings.
Maria’s argument is stronger, not least because the analogies are more apt. I still feel some of the same unease though, and it takes some effort to keep the nature of the connection between patriarchy, authoritarianism, and the specifics of the situation straight, partly because they’re weaved together a few times. It’s a complex weaving where perhaps my mind prefers simplicity in matters of right and wrong, at least where there’s a rule involved.
My own “complex” read on the situation is personal: Cummings seems fairly sociopathic, and reminds me of someone I worked closely with over several years who exhibited a number of similar traits. Such people are difficult to control because they are utterly unprincipled. Rules designed to constrain them will be subverted in order to enable them. Critiques designed to frame them will be turned around and directed at others. What this behaviour is not about is any of the concepts that the rest of us care about: the particular political project, the particular sociological category. As soon as we try to apply it, they will wriggle away. Accused of being an emblem of the patriarchy, we will find them shortly returned as the patriarchy’s greatest opponent, simply because such people delight in perversity and their continued ability to wrong-foot their opponents. The only method that I found effective was to maintain utter simplicity: focus on the undeniable rights and wrongs of a situation, and resist at all costs the attempt to re-frame the situation in some broader context, because to do so is almost always to their advantage, as they can move freely where the rest of us are constrained by logic, decency, and consistency.
Stephen’s arguments above are a prelude to the kind of thing one could expect. Technically correct in some sense, but clearly missing the point. But if there’s one thing a sociopath is good at, it’s confusing people about what the point ought to be. Once we’re confused about that, it’s game over.
Collin Street 05.27.20 at 9:44 am
On the abuse angle, I think I’ve mentioned how frequently and how accurately you get an alignment between “how social conservatives argue society should be structured” and “how society should be sturctured to give abusers channels for abuse”.
I mean, look at chattel slavery. You would only invent slavery if control over others per se was something important to you. But people have, time and again.
(Look at the personal lives of the leaders of the confederacy!)
Chetan Murthy 05.27.20 at 4:29 pm
L’affaire Cummings continues to fester. BoJo seems supine in his bootlicking adherence to the man; the newspapers are starting to publish pretty scathing pieces. The Daily Star publishes a “‘do whatever the hell you want’ and sod everybody” mask on their front page. Is it too much to hope for a meager comeuppance for the man?
Cian 05.27.20 at 7:43 pm
When you say he “didn’t have a good explanation†have you by any chance read my previous posts on the subject? If not, why not?
LOL. Some serious Pooterish energy there.
Cian 05.27.20 at 7:49 pm
I mean, look at chattel slavery. You would only invent slavery if control over others per se was something important to you. But people have, time and again.
I don’t think that’s true. It might be one reason, but it’s not hard to think of other more economic reasons. For example, I don’t think slave plantations in the Caribbean had anything to do with control – it was purely about making money.
Collin Street 05.28.20 at 12:24 am
Such people are difficult to control because they are utterly unprincipled.
That’s not my experience. I mean, yes, “difficult to control” and “unprincipled”, but there’s not a causative relationship between the two. The actual difficulty-to-control emerges out of:
not a lot of people have a lot of experience in dealing with folk who don’t understand that other people have interests they will act to protect; “I would prefer” is not going to have a lot of impact on a person who doesn’t realise that your preferences affect their outcomes, and you need to be a bit more explicit, without making it sound like a threat or an outcome you desire [remembering in turn that the counterparty has less of an understanding of your intentions than most of the people you’re dealing with; all the difficulties you face with them, they face with everybody. Which gets frustrating for them too, and frustrated people get angry.]
the other part is because of the theory-of-mind issues, they won’t moderate their actions to cause you less difficulty until after you ask [sometimes demand] them to; that is, they are difficult-to-control in a strict control-theory sense, and will inevitably overshoot the limits you draw [because they can’t predict them, and don’t know about them until after they’re told].
“Unprincipledness” doesn’t play a huge issue here; if anything it reduces the factors you have to allow for and simplifies the problem.
faustusnotes 05.28.20 at 1:42 am
Today the govt is on TV telling people that if they get contact traced they must self-isolate and if they don’t they’ll be charged and fined. This is also classic abuser stuff – directly doing a bad thing and then directly, immediately telling the rest of the family that they are not allowed to do that same thing under pain of punishment.
We also know BoJo is a domestic abuser of some kind. The parallels are really depressing.
Maria 05.28.20 at 8:46 am
That’s enough from Cian on this thread. I don’t have the bandwidth to police derails.
Maria 05.28.20 at 8:56 pm
Hi Bartholomew, one of the collective let yours through, but for fairness and consistency I’ve now deleted it as it’s continuing a closed conversation. tks.
bad Jim 05.30.20 at 7:23 am
A silly parenthetical note: it would appear that some discussions of this affair, perhaps on Twitter, have been hindered because the not at all rare surname “Cummings” triggers automatic filters, an example of what is termed the Scunthorpe problem. This site was also once bedeviled by a forbidden substring lurking in some of our favorite terms.
John Quiggin 05.31.20 at 1:09 am
“This site was also once bedeviled by a forbidden substring lurking in some of our favorite terms.” I think we had to talk about sozialismus, or else use asterisks
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