First Blood:
So-Called Battered Men on the Offensive
By Richard Leader
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It all started with a push. In the film, First Blood,
the small town of Hope, Washington is ruled over by the Sheriff
Will Teasle, a despot who prefers his community nice and boring:
to preserve his ordered universe he makes the mistake of “pushing”
one John Rambo, who just happened to be the quintessential protagonist
of the 1980s. While Sylvester Stallone went on to play John Rambo
for another two sequels, children the world over got to take up
the role of the character in at least nine different blood-soaked
videogames, and underground comic book artists even recruited his
likeness for pornographic scenes of rape and destruction—even
as then President Ronald Regan took to proclaiming Rambo a Republican
in his speeches—Teasle himself is hardly a household name
despite the eponymous listing of his nemesis in dictionaries.
This, of course, should come as no surprise: Teasle was an outlandish
character, a caricature of a man who was willing to let his obsession
with proving his own authority result in the destruction of the
town he professed to love, the injury and death incurred by its
inhabitants a mere distraction in his quest to bring Rambo to justice.
Or at least audiences were supposed to think him an outlandish
character, a cartoon intended to serve as a foil to Stallone’s
sanitized version John Rambo; the redneck insinuations and the plump
physicality of the actor Brian Dennehy working in concert to make
his actions seem less reasonable than they actually were by male
society’s standards. After all, President George W. Bush had
less cause to invade Iraq. When looking at the sacrifices that he
was willing to make in order to have Saddam Hussein’s pistol
mounted on an office plaque, Teasle begins to look a bit less fantastic.
While Teasle has many real-life counterparts—all of whom
most likely choose to identify with the Rambo character, such reversals
being the social utility of genre fiction—perhaps the most
chilling example is that of David Brame. The son and brother of
police officers, Brame also entered into career in law enforcement
and became Tacoma’s chief of police at the relatively young
age of 43, having less experience than several of his more seasoned
but less glamorous competitors for the position. Indeed, a certain
sense of stardom pervaded his command: his swearing-in ceremony
was the most elaborate in Tacoma history, often remembered as “the
coronation” by witnesses, and he quickly became a regional
celebrity, giving a speech at a local flag dedication ceremony on
the first anniversary of September 11th. Later, he would find himself
in the national spotlight when it was discovered that the Beltway
Sniper, John Mohammad, once took target practice in a Tacoma back
yard.
On April 26, 2003 Brame was in the spotlight for a final time,
having murdered his wife in the parking lot of a strip mall before
turning the gun on himself, their two young children sitting in
another car nearby. Only in the wake of his actions on that day
did the truth about Brame begin to emerge: his term as chief was
one of intense corruption where he ruthlessly forced opponents into
early retirement while he routinely promoted friends who were loyal
to him alone, even if their test scores ranked them at the bottom
of the barrel. Brame himself had failed his share of psychological
exams as a recruit and he was accused of rape in 1988, an accusation
that investigators believed to be credible although prosecution
never went forward. The public records of that accusation were later
sealed by city manager Ray Corpuz, the same man who would appoint
Brame as chief.
But it was in private where he was at his most vicious: he maintained
absolute control of his wife, Crystal Judson, keeping her under
his thumb economically and terrorizing her with physical abuse:
his favorite tactic was to send her flowers after a fit of violence
and then deny that he sent them, using their appearance as an excuse
to accuse her of having a male admirer and then beat her once again
for her fictitious transgression. He even scraped his own arm on
one occasion and with the resulting wound having been videotaped
by a fellow police officer (one he would later promote to serve
as an assistant chief), he threatened Crystal that he would make
sure it was her who would be charged with abuse if she
failed to comply with his wishes. After she made plans to divorce
him he used the police department as leverage against her, forcing
her to entertain therapy sessions with a police chaplain who blithely
dismissed her complaints that David was trying to coerce her into
having group sex with an equally unwilling female officer under
his command. He would later use his foremost assistant chief, Catherine
Woodard, to intimidate Crystal on several occasions.
Despite the mountain of evidence, David’s father, Eugene
Brame, still insists that Crystal was the abusive partner in the
relationship. He even spoke at a Washington State symposium on domestic
violence, commending the panel of lawmakers for their work. He added
that he wished to “remind them that men can be the abused
as well and children can be abused,” only to continue on in
front of the rapt audience of 400, “This thing happened in
David’s case. He was driven over the edge and his mind snapped
at the last moment.”
In other words, she pushed him and he pushed back: Eugene Brame’s
rhetoric is nothing new—so-called men’s rights advocates
have been uttering such sentiments for years—only here the
meaning of “push” is obvious. She defied her husband,
his absolute and unconditional control over her, and male entitlement
allowed him to view that defiance as abuse of his personhood, akin
to a physical beating, just as Sheriff Teasle and Rambo each viewed
the other as making the initial, and therefore most egregious, push:
the former wanted a supposed vagrant out of his town and on the
road down to Portland while the latter wanted to exercise his God
given right to enjoy a hamburger wherever he pleased.
That was not the only “push” however: moments after
that incident in the film, as Rambo was being led through the basement
corridors of the police station, Teasle’s equally tyrannical
white deputy belittled a black janitor with a “come on Leroy,
sling that paint, boy” that went forever unchallenged. (One
of the most notable cases of corruption under Brame’s administration
involved a sergeant named Leroy who was passed over for promotion
four times in just six months in favor of lower scoring candidates.)
If he had pushed back, as Rambo eventually did by visiting destruction
over the space of an entire county, it seems unlikely that Reagan
would have ever held a sign declaring that “Leroy is a Republican.”
When Rambo is finally confronted by his former commanding officer,
Colonel Troutman, on the extent of his pushing back, his only response
is a dour “they drew first blood,” which he repeats
breathlessly a second time, the tautology serving as much to convince
himself that his violent actions were justified as it is to make
audiences remember the exact moment from which the film’s
all-important byline sprung. After all, the John Rambo of First
Blood is not the same one—who lacked a first name—that
occupied the David Morrell novel from which the story sprung: here,
the idea of “first blood” represents Sylvester Stallone’s
interpretation of the character, one that audiences were supposed
to accept as possessing the moral high ground, rather than Morrel’s
sociopathic monster.
Contemporary Rambo fans are themselves a divided lot with some
preferring Stallone’s salute to Vietnam veterans while their
more—perhaps ever so slightly—literate counterparts
are drawn to the novel’s more thorough painting of the Sheriff
figure, there a Korean War veteran who is in the midst of a divorce
which is used to further explain his proclivity to engage in a tête-à-tête
in order to maintain some semblance of control over a world that
seems to be increasingly slipping out of his grasp. Perhaps if Rambo
did not exist as his White Whale, he would have followed the same
route as David Brame.
Morrel himself, to this day, seems surprised that many readers
of First Blood, prior to the film, had latched onto Sheriff
Teasle as the main character. It should have been expected: throughout
male history, freedom has traditionally meant not freedom from domination
but the ability to dominate others; the Greek writer Thucydides
once used “liberty” and “empire” as synonyms.
Just as the Code of Hammurabi listed separate punishments for slaves
and free men, while Christian Rome continued the legal system of
honestiores and humiliores—their linguistic legacy should
be obvious—patterned after the patrician and plebeian roles
of the past, even today, all persons are not guaranteed the same
right to interpret “pushes” as actual assaults, nor
are they all given the same moral imperative to push back (remember
Leroy). Rambo and Teasle can be viewed as two sides of the same
coin—averaging their personalities between their cinematic
and print incarnations reveals similar rationales behind their behavior—and
they form a continuum of white male entitlement ranging from David
Brame to the perpetrators of Columbine. By the creation and idolization
of mythical figures such as Rambo, men can continue to pretend that
they do not identify with those men patterned after Teasle (or Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold for that matter) or other such embarrassments
because there are more dynamic and alluring alternatives in place.
While the blame for Columbine was cast in a wide net, from films
such as The Basketball Diaries to videogames such as DOOM,
nothing was ever made of David Brame’s obsession with The
Godfather series: he even had a mounted photo of Al Pacino on his
office wall. Given the youth of Harris and Klebold, the inclination
to turn to their media influences is more understandable: being
that they were not yet old enough to have a string of failed psychological
exams and rape accusations under their belts, it was necessary for
a society set on willing itself into a state of mock-surprise to
turn their microscope towards their more passive pursuits. However,
in that such active infractions never seemed to slow Brame’s
inexorable career advancement, it seems more than a little bit disingenuous
for the same society that once ignored those red flags (indeed,
if the Tacoma police had taken domestic violence seriously, John
Mohammad might have been jailed on a battery charge and the Beltway
shootings might never have occurred) to highlight them in retrospect,
pinning the sum of the blame on Brame’s supposedly damaged
psyche alone, to the exclusion of outside media influences—influences
to which adults are supposedly immune.
That the police chief of Tacoma was likely patterning his administration
after the mafia is something that should not have escaped the attention
of the press; after all, these are people who traditionally thrive
on such facile irony, their readership not requiring them to go
the extra mile and view law enforcement and the mob as equally patriarchal
institutions, thus a similarity exists through syllogism even without
the poster on the office wall existing as evidence. Still, that
such irony was excluded from bombastic headlines and kept from front
page after front page is a mystery: perhaps it would have raised
questions about whether or not it should be only police officers
who are forbidden to watch The Sopranos while the rest
of us are free to participate in the cult of cool that surrounds
the glamorization of crime, from our centuries old fascination with
pirates to the MTV show, Cribs, a recycling of the Lifestyles
of the Rich and Famous phenomenon, which even has a running
joke where celebrities take special care to note that the movie
Scarface is the linchpin of their DVD collections, some
even preemptively apologizing to the audience if it is missing.
Bad-cops themselves have never been more popular: a generation
that was raised on Michael Chiklis playing the saccharine-sweet
Tony Scali in The Commish (patterned after Anthony Schembri
who was recently in the news for an ill-advised showing of a Chris
Rock video at a meeting with NAACP leaders) can now watch him as
the so-called antihero Vic Mackey on The Shield. The series
even featured an officer who was responsible for his wife’s
death (he paid a criminal to break into her home in order to steal
items he lost in a divorce settlement) who later takes his own life
in a parking lot, presumably an adaptation of the Brame case. However,
there the officer was only indirectly responsible for her death:
the writers and producers lacked the conviction to play it one way
or another, any sincerity being unnecessary when they can so easily
satisfy everyone with melodrama; something that is intensely political
in its inherent apoliticism.
Popular imagination of the term “antihero” is centered
on the idea of flaws and vices (as if ‘traditional’
estimation of such values are a constant), often in an anachronistic
conceit that demands that the pop culture of the past neatly divided
its characters into white and black colored hats. As the bulk of
the vices associated with the antiheroes of today have lost their
moral imperative, to pretend that antiheroes exist in an altogether
different category is a fantasy, one that is expressly political
in establishing a straw man to frame moral arguments; similar to
how those in the sex industry work hard to more firmly establish
the myth of American Puritanism. Being that the system of values
that antiheroes supposedly transgress is framed not by social reality
but by social fiction, the idea of The State conveniently becomes
elided from the equation.
Without the advantage of hindsight, it can indeed be difficult
to determine what value a contemporary society places on a certain
hero, real or imagined—at least compared to what can be said
about the Roman Horatius who stood steadfastly on the bridge—but
vice is seldom reason enough to believe that a hero lacks the state
sanction that would then place him in the antihero category. The
gender in the previous sentence was not required to be read neutrally,
after all, it being a patriarchal state. There is no reason to believe
that Vic Mackey, Tony Soprano, or any of the new-wave comic book
characters that are so often described as antiheroes lack state
sanction just because Reagan is no longer around to officially declare
them Republicans: they are all beings who are pushed and are entitled
by male culture to push back, often in the most obscene ways imaginable.
The antihero then—as it is most often conceived—is
a myth created to depoliticize the concept of the hero, to hide
the fact that the status quo, the ruling elite, the patriarchy,
or however it is convenient to describe the primary authority in
our lives, routinely backs men that are embarrassments. Not only
does it allow them to wash their hands of the undesirables, escaping
responsibility as they placate the masses, it also allows them to
keep the door open for their return when the controversy has faded
from the public memory: e.g. disfavored icons such as Jimmy Bakker
and Geraldo Rivera being allowed a second chance at glory, one that
their female equivalents would never receive; the ultimate example
being Oliver North who is invited once again to speak of sacrifice
and heroism on Fox News despite his former extralegal support for
terrorists. His brief stint as a scapegoat is over, where he effectively
‘took one for the team,’ the white male-team, one emulated
by men of all colors the world over.
Regardless of the glut of bad-cop icons we have in both real life
and in our popular culture, none have become dictionary entries
like Rambo, entrusted into our lexicons, it being too truthful,
too embarrassing, and so we often find it convenient to block it
out of our collective memories. Because of that, despite the fact
that First Blood was released in cinemas over twenty years
ago and barely a week goes by when it is not rebroadcast on one
television network or another, not one comparison between David
Brame and Sheriff Teasle was ever made. Not one newspaper or alternative
press thought to compare them even though their geographic proximity
in Washington State and their choice of careers should have made
it an obvious and immediate conclusion. Still, it would have made
little sense for journalists to have gone that route, given that
the reaction of their readership—nearly all of whom have seen
First Blood at least once and most certainly know who Rambo
is—would most likely have been “Teasle who?”
People were so hesitant to believe what David Brame had done on
April 26, 2003 that preliminary news reports made no mention of
Crystal Judson and simply said that the police chief had been shot;
the possibility that he had committed the violence himself somehow
seemed far less intuitive than the slim but fanciful chance that
it was some kind of mob hit or assassination attempt on him. While
the memory of the murder-suicide was used as a launch pad for public
discussions on domestic violence (though such things seemed to fall
by the wayside once exploiting the Brame case became an easy inroad
for other men seeking political power in Tacoma), it often seemed
to do more harm than good with the likes of Eugene Brame taking
the floor at symposiums.
This has bolstered Washington State’s status as ground zero
when it comes to American men’s rights groups which have been
historically eclipsed in notoriety by their Australian and New Zealand
counterparts with their fascist “Blackshirt” organizations,
or the more theatrical—and well known—examples in the
UK where a pair of men pelted Tony Blair with various powders designed
to create an anthrax scare during a session at the House of Commons.
The primacy of Washington State in the American men’s movement
is due in no small part to the presence of Microsoft Corporation
in Redmond, which marks men who fail to share in its riches as perpetual
also-rans, fostering a specific kind of resentment amongst white
men in the area that often gets turned towards women as a class.
Most of the major cities in Washington all have their own minor-celebrities
in the men’s movement, with websites such as Backlash.com
(run by a disgruntled ex-Microsoft employee who blames a pink-collar
management ghetto at the company for a sexual harassment claim leveled
against him) existing on the fringe, while not all that dissimilar
sites such as BatteredMen.com, a subset of the more general Seattle-based
MenWeb.org (whose purveyor was once in charge of the men’s
section of MSN.com until Microsoft phased it out while pumping money
into forming MSN Women—a crass partnership with iVillage,
Lifetime, and other demographic trivialities—which he then
inexplicably viewed as some sort of feminist conspiracy), often
get taken seriously by mainstream domestic violence resources for
the lack of better alternatives.
When it comes to the question of men and domestic violence, denying
the obvious is generally the foremost goal: not just in regard to
their immense share of the culpability, but also in the unsurprisingly
futile endeavor of putting human faces to the doctored statistics
of alleged male victims. While a number of roughly 834,000 is routinely
produced by men’s rights activists as the amount of men who
suffer some form of domestic abuse in a given year—the figure,
taken from a 1998 Justice Department report, being rendered specious
given their refusal to acknowledge the more damning aspects of the
study, favoring to pick and choose amongst other data sets for their
rallying cries—anecdotal evidence to bolster such claims is
slight and the personal account that is actually compelling remains
a rara avis. Indeed, men’s rights publications and
websites are voracious for such anecdotes, which themselves constitute
their own peculiar genre of literature.
An unruly mishmash of design, BatteredMen.com is filled in part
with checklists and warning signs rudely plagiarized from feminist
sources and initiatives, while the rest of the content is divided
between borrowed reprints of articles provided by celebrity pundits
and academics working on behalf of the Independent Women’s
Forum—a libertarian venture of big business special-interest
groups that would prefer the world believe that feminism began and
ended with Ayn Rand—and often comically amateurish male writers
whose own lack of means and status forces them to use the site as
a bridge to sell formulaic new-age materials such as instructional
videotapes demonstrating psychic-exercises for so-called “ultra-sensitive
men.”
With such a chimerical combination of contributors, with the men
lazily allowing themselves to become the underdogs on their own
website, heroes and mythology are necessary in order to avoid reality
and keep the peace: indeed, unlike feminists who would often prefer
women’s shelters to remain single-sexed for the comfort and
security of the residents, men are so hungry for tales of violent
women to underscore their cause that they nearly worship the ones
that do come forward, one of whom uses Batteredmen.com to promote
her own erotica website. If Cathy Young or Wendy McElroy, two of
their most admired pundits, admitted to abusing an intimate partner,
it would only make them even greater heroes (or antiheroes) to the
same men’s rights crowd that blames their own lack of publishing
success on a “Lace Curtain”—a mythological bloc
of man-hating feminists that somehow maintains control of all the
presses—while ignoring the fact that their friends at the
Independent Women’s Forum owe the success of their own careers
to the powerful men who are bankrolling them from the shadows. The
most telling aspect of this phenomenon is that, despite the show
that most men’s rights websites put on about being gay affirmative,
there is little attention paid to homosexual relationships that
encompass the vast majority of men suffering from domestic violence;
as there is no woman to blame, there is no real interest.
While feminists have created a wide framework out of the lived
experiences of women, the average anecdote from an alleged male
victim is instead created to fit into preconceived theories that
are then used to construct and organize the events of the account:
being that truth is often stranger than fiction, that men so often
claim to have been severely beaten with objects—many largely
ineffective when it comes to real violence—with direct ties
to femininity (hair brushes, stiletto heels, etc.) or to props indicative
of domesticity (bowls, rolling pins, picture frames), indicate that
these narratives are not very strange at all but are instead rather
derivative in their use of semiotics; these tales are most often
not a reflection of actual events but a form of genre fiction that
should be read as cheap misogynist allegory. More balanced accounts
admit to suffering not from physical abuse, but from emotional:
something with hardly quantifiable standards and a bar that grows
ever lower due to men’s need as a social class to present
their own ‘victims’ to challenge the claims of feminists.

Illustration
by Timo Honkasalo
For all of the incessant rhetoric about how male victims of domestic
violence are ‘shamed’ by society, parallel to outlandish
beliefs that chivalry costs men as a gender more than it provides
for them, in a strange twist, amongst the contributors to BatteredMen.com
it has become a badge of honor to claim to be the largest, most
physically intimidating battered man on the block: according to
the website, one might surmise that the average male victim of domestic
violence is roughly six-foot two and well over two hundred pounds,
not to mention extremely adept at wrestling and several forms of
martial arts. Evidently, when it comes to being beaten by an intimate
partner, smallish effete men need not apply. Rather than just a
laughable irony created out of familiar inter-male competition,
it is instead another fiction intended to underscore a political
framework that needs to negate the actual evidence with a reversal:
the paradox of men proudly proclaiming their shame existing
as a simple sleight of hand intended to declare a lack of evidence
damning women to be evidence in and of itself. If one points out
that emotional abuse does not necessarily measure up to physical
violence, whether nominal or life threatening, it is fairly easy
for men to make accusations that they are being shamed or blamed
for their own abuse, no matter its comparative tokenism.
Despite the numerous efforts made to massage facts and statistics
into a more flattering shape, most of the contributors seem to have
little idea how unsympathetic their anecdotes tend to render them.
Even if they are correct and police do sometimes arrest male victims
rather than helping them (something that has always happened to
female victims and is increasingly on the rise due to contemporary
efforts by men), the fact that nearly every primary-contributor
to the website has been brought up on charges of violence himself
should still give them pause to consider exactly what type of men
BatteredMen.com is serving as a mouthpiece for. Primary-contributor,
that is, in that nearly half of the anecdotes are supplied by third-parties
(something which is almost never the case in resources for battered
women) who seem less than credible themselves. After all, if Eugene
Brame can still speak publicly in defense of his son, ignoring evidence
turned up after thousands of hours worth of research and investigation
by police and journalists alike, all working to find the truth about
David, it seems doubtful that the friends and relatives of men involved
in similar cases that do not receive such treatment would remain
any more objective.
In all likelihood, David Brame felt cornered, terrified, and battered
the day that he turned his gun on his wife: he had decided that
his own life was ruined, over, never mind that it was his own actions
that had led him down that road. And like Rambo—hiding in
that cave with bulging muscles and veins, crouched low with a long
knife and a submachine gun, the brutal light of his torch flickering
against their cold metal—there was a profound disconnect between
his conception of a tortured inner identity as a victim and the
external reality he presented the world. With men in our society
becoming increasingly reliant on fiction to serve as a buffer for
such disconnects, BatteredMen.com is itself a vestigial organ of
the brief Mythopoetic movement of the 1990s which has long been
superceded by more polished and less pretentious forms (cp. the
wave of superhero films in the wake of September 11th), the gulf
between what men feel and what they are is ever widening, increasingly
losing touch with reality.
The Justice Department might be right in its statistic of 834,000
each year, only it could very well refer to the number of perpetrators
of violence who are under the delusion that they are victims. No,
perhaps not all the men in that number, but for men as a gender
to flock to the stories of those rare cases, investing themselves
utterly in exceptions to the rule—flights of fantasy ripped
straight from the oeuvre of Michael Douglas—also does a disservice
to men who truly are victims of domestic violence, who now have
to share the title of “battered man” or “abused
husband” with the likes of David Brame.
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