Free Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why by Sady Doyle Page A

renders you less than a victim in the eyes of a jury.
    When we live in a climate of distrusting women’s voices, of viewing women as primarily obliged to service the relationship demands of men, their pain—pain that goes beyondhurt feelings or loneliness, pain that comes from actual abuse—is always suspect. We can blame them for not being good, not making their male partners happy. We can say, not that abuse has made them act angrily or strangely, but that they were abused because they were angry or strange. And this is true even when the abuse in question is incontrovertible and well documented.
    Not only do we make trainwrecks out of abuse victims, abuse has added to the ignominy of many of the most famous cases. Think of Whitney Houston, found bloodied at the site of a domestic-violence call. Think of Amy Winehouse, seen running into the street and pleading for help from passing cars, with a bruise in the shape of a man’s hand on her throat.
    Winehouse was open about the fact that she would die for Blake Fielder-Civil, the husband who introduced her to crack and heroin, and from whom she fled on the night in question. (When questioned, she covered for him, claiming that she was misbehaving and he “saved her life.”) At one point, a reporter who’d wandered into her house at 4:00 a.m. recorded Winehouse telling a friend that, if she’d ever really been in love,“you’d be dead because you weren’t together.” Fielder-Civil was in prison for charges related to an armed robbery by that time, and Winehouse was in fact a few years away from death. But that didn’t stop anyone from turning her shout-outs to “my Blake, incarcerated” into a running joke.
    Similarly, when Rihanna was beaten by her then-boyfriendChris Brown in 2009, the fact of the abuse, and its severity, were factually established—photos of her bloodied face were leaked to the press. But, almost overnight, urban legends about what Rihanna had done to “provoke” Brown sprang up on the Internet. She had given him an STD! She had thrown his car keys through a window!A “Rihanna Deserved It” T-shirt was sold on CafePress.And in one survey of two hundred teenagers, 46 percent blamed Rihanna for the assault. The line of logic speaks for itself. Here’s a sample, from Yahoo! Answers :
Im a women myself and I never want to get beat by a man, but I know if I ever do he’s going to be beating me for a good damn reason … suppose Rihanna was just going crazy and was hitting him, Im sure he could have shaked her or something but still, I know as a women sometimes we can get a little crazy with emotion [.]
    Yet, when Rihanna reconciled with Brown—“I decided it was more important for me to be happy … even if it’s a mistake, it’s my mistake,” she said at the time—she was hated for that, too, with an onslaught of blog posts labeling her a “bad role model” and a traitor to women everywhere.“Gone [are] the days where women and everyone around the globe praised her for leaving the destructive and violent relationship [she] had been in with Brown,” celebrity blog Tell Tales claimed, ignoring the fact that “everyonearound the globe” absolutely had not done that. “Today, Rihanna is letting down her fans and friends by accepting the R&B artist back in her life.” HollywoodLife accused her of“telling young people everywhere that domestic abuse is healthy” and sending a “toxic message”; they quoted a self-help author who claimed that “She’s setting a terrible example because we know there is a high amount of abuse in teenage and adolescent relationships. They are going to follow her lead.”
    Yes, dating Chris Brown was a bad idea. But this is strikingly unfair. Rihanna was called crazy for leaving Chris Brown, and called crazy for staying with him; there was no way out of the condemnation, no matter which route she took, and the actual abusive man in question was let off the hook for his choices in both