THE LAST WORD
SLAUGHTER, JANE
THE LAST WORD Jane Slaughter A Beaut of a Shiner I have had a black eye for a week now; it's fading and I'm sorry to see it go. People are fascinated by shiners in a way other injuries can't...
...Detroit is not a low-crime town, and I have been known to be a klutz, but all the kidding I got presumed the first option...
...At the dentist and the oral surgeon, it was worse...
...When a woman has a black eye, it is assumed that her husband or lover is responsible...
...the women aren't financially dependent on their men...
...Another girlfriend said, "I figured if you wanted me to know how you got it, you'd tell me...
...Come to Detroit and I'll show you that bent street sign...
...If you haven't been battered, you can make a joke of it and avoid admitting how nasty it is in real life...
...But that's not the main fascination...
...I believe the joking is our way of dealing with our culture's preoccupation with sex, violence, and the combination thereof...
...And the surgeon, his eyes sliding away, reassured me, "I'm sure it wasn't your fault, whatever happened...
...Notice that / would be the guilty one here...
...Men and women both use language that disguises brutality and makes it sound almost playful...
...an embarrassed grin would steal across my face...
...I'm convinced that people's reactions and assumptions are independent of the two individuals involved and are, instead, an indication of just where relations between the sexes lie in 1987, twenty years after the second wave of feminism began...
...me around...
...So why are you all smirking and saying, "Oh, sure...
...And I hadn't even claimed to have bumped into a door...
...Okay, so my witnesses have left the country, and I neglected to get affidavits...
...Well, thank you...
...But you'd be the last person to let that happen to you," she said...
...I just hope Mayor Young hasn't gotten around to fixing it...
...But he knew it would happen...
...Maybe it's got something to do with the pretty colors—mine started out with a pale green under the brow and dark purple for eyeliner and evolved into shades of lavender and magenta...
...The female assistants refrained from comment...
...But I'm still defensive...
...People are fascinated by shiners in a way other injuries can't match: Did you ever hear anyone call a broken arm or a bloody nose "a beaut...
...When I told one friend how people had been reacting to my black eye, she thought it was preposterous...
...Knock her around, give her a poke...
...Someone you know walks in with a black eye and you don't say anything...
...If your male buddy shows up with a shiner, don't you ask what happened...
...A shiner would be "kind of normal...
...My friends of both sexes call themselves feminists...
...But the unfunny truth is that it can happen to any woman once...
...When I repeated the tale of me and the street sign to those who did ask, I found it hard to make eye-contact...
...I thought, 'Peter wouldn't hit her, would he?' But I didn't want to embarrass you so I kept my mouth shut...
...All of them think a poke in the eye is politically incorrect...
...One girlfriend admitted, after I raised the subject, "I didn't want to say anything...
...I didn't know I was going to need them...
...You can come up with a better story than that," was all I heard...
...The ragging would be nonstop, and its gist would be, "You must have really messed up this time...
...Nobody would be outraged...
...His first thought, as I bounced off the street sign, was, "Now the rumors are going to fly...
...A male friend said, "I wanted to ask you, but there were too many people around...
...The universal assumption and my resulting defensiveness were so strong that sometimes I believed I really did have a guilty secret...
...Meanwhile, my sweetheart says his feelings are hurt—that our friends would think for a moment that he hit me...
...If I elaborated, I felt like the lady who doth protest too much...
...Women explain innocent cuts and bruises with a catch-phrase: "My other lover's been beating me...
...A friend who works in an axle plant tells me that if I worked there, there's no way on earth I could convince my fellow workers that my old man hadn't knocked Jane Slaughter is a staff writer for Labor Notes...
...Offhand, I can think of three ways to acquire a black eye: a fight with a friend, a fight with a stranger, or an incident of klutz...
...And yet the most common reaction of my friends and co-workers to the state of rhy face is—no comment...
...Just as my first words were, "Now your reputation is shot...
...I'm reasonably confident that wife-beating is less common among the people I see regularly than it is in the general population...
...I have two disinterested witnesses to the fact that I got mine by walking into a street sign at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Florida in southwest Detroit...
Vol. 51 • May 1987 • No. 5
