“A playful tiff”? Give us a break, Charles Saatchi.
The hand around the throat, the pinching of a nose – in public view in a big city – you can’t help wondering what Mr Saatchi’s last wife meant when she divorced him for “unreasonable behaviour”.
As painful as it must be for Nigella Lawson to have the whole world know about her predicament, it’s important that we do, not in some cheap women’s magazine tell-all expose, but in the adult world of real life.
We now have proof that when a woman is beautiful, clever, famous and independently wealthy, it’s no protection against domestic violence, because that’s what an observer photographed on June 6.
Here is all the evidence you need that it doesn’t just happen among the under-classes of the world, the people who are not like us.
The sequence is so familiar that an estimated one in four women knows about it first hand.
There is seduction, of course, the apparent meeting of minds, the talk of respect and protestations of love.
There is a shoulder to cry on, good advice given, humour appreciated, the life of the mind and of culture savoured together. Men at every level of society can manifest such things to women who believe a man is necessary to feel whole. Then, slowly, it changes.
This man shouts, Ms Lawson is on record as saying, and then she goes quiet and resentful, she says, as women do, because they don’t want a man’s anger to escalate.
Where do we learn to be this craven? I call this – the shouting – violence already, because it’s about domination and control of another person through fear. Possibly some women behave like this and they are no better, but this week it’s about a celebrity woman cook and a famous male art lover. Continue reading
Sources
- Rosemary McLeod in Stuff
- Image: The Guardian
Rosemary McLeod is a NZ journalist and columnist.