Why I Stopped Slapping My Boyfriend In The Face
The influence of Pop Culture in our relationships.
I used to think that it was normal to slap my boyfriend on the face once in a while. As if slapping someone in the face was a legitimate form of arguing. When I asked my female friends I found out that many of them had, at least once, slapped their boyfriends or dates. Many of my guy friends have gotten slapped. When I repeated this behavior, my boyfriend said enough.
My boyfriend is a reasonable person and he argued that it wasn’t fair for me to slap him for three reasons: 1. He felt humiliated 2. He couldn’t hit me back 3. The maxim that you should simply never hit another human being. In that moment I realized he was absolutely right.
Since we are kids we learn that we shouldn’t hit our friends, or our little brother, or anybody. Hitting is not cool. As a man, you are taught never to hit a woman. As a woman you are taught never to accept being hit. Report it. Although, for some reason, I thought the slap in the face was an exception, like a gap in the system.
I was intrigued and being the Agatha Christie fan I am, I had no choice but to investigate.
Where did I get this idea that a man slapping a woman on the face is a crime, but the contrary is acceptable?
The answer to the first half of this question is obvious. As a society, we face the serious, global issue of violence against women. We constantly see campaigns on this subject and read about it in the news. It’s an historical, cultural and educational matter. Violence against women is a problem still far from resolution. Ok, that answers why it is socially unacceptable for a man to hit a woman, but it doesn’t justify my behavior in any way, right?
This general acceptance of women slapping men, reinforces the idea of the weaker sex. The woman can hit because she can’t hurt, she is weak. A stereotype from which we’ve been trying to detach ourselves for so long. Despite the fact that men, in general, are physically more capable of defending themselves, quantifying violence is like quantifying racism or misogyny, there is no acceptable measure.
Journalist Jennifer O’Mahony wrote on The Telegraph, in 2013:
“One in seven women aged 15–22 in the US admits to hitting their partner, compared to just one in twenty men.”
Still without an answer to my question, I started to observe if there were any cultural influences that promoted my behavior. Bingo! Do you know when you start noticing something and it suddenly just pops up everywhere? I discovered that the slap in the face is like Seth Rogen, it appears in almost every movie and series that I watch. In dramas and comedies.
The slap often appears as a symbol of righteousness. In this case, the moral of the story is always the same: she is right and he deserved it. No one deserves violence, on any scale. In comedies, a woman attacking a man is considered, by itself, something hilarious — it is clear by the other character’s reactions. Don’t get me wrong, I write comedy and I love comedy, far be it from me to take the “funny” out of things. A slap in the face can be funny with both men and women. It all depends on what the sub text of the scene is, what is the scene actually trying to say? We have to pay attention to the message to make sure we’re not promoting a backward way of thinking.
References
Among the TV shows and movies with scenes of girls slapping, punching and kicking dudes (out of the context of fighting or action) are:
Mindy Project, The Good Wife, Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother, Scandal, Key and Peele, Sherlock, Jane the Virgin, Glee, Desperate Housewives, House of Cards, Lost, Suits; When Harry Met Sally, Groundhog Day, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 — The Curse of the Black Pearl, James Bond — Tomorrow Never Dies, Beerfest, The Anchorman, 17 Again, She is Funny That Way, Pan, Frozen and Ratatouille.You can check out some of these scenes in this VIDEO.
That’s right, even on children’s content we see this behavior represented. So it’s understandable that girls are imitating it in real life.
Sometimes we just need to stop to think, and change comes naturally. I want to tell girls that a slap in the face is not an argument, it is disrespectful and, even though we see it in movies or on TV, we should not reproduce this behavior in real life.
