State senator Hiram Monserrate has finally been expelled from the senate. More than A YEAR after was arrested for STABBING HIS GIRLFRIEND IN THE FACE.
It all started after Monserrate was arrested in 2008. When it first happened Monserrate’s partner told police it was an intentional attack (obviously). But soon after the story broke, Karla Giraldo (his partner) recanted, claiming it was an accident and that she didn’t want to press charges. Fortunately the law in New York does not allow people to drop domestic violence charges, and Monserrate was prosecuted anyway.
Monserrate, the monster, had the nerve to claim that he slipped and “bumped into her with a glass”. The fact that this “defense” was even taken seriously for one minute infuriated me. THERE WAS EVEN A VIDEO, AN INSANELY DISTURBING VIDEO, taken by a building surveillance camera, showing Monserrate dragging his partner through the hallway.
So now he has FINALLY, more than a year later, been expelled from the Senate but not due to any real dispersal of justice by our legal system. Monserrate was essentially expelled for political reasons having little to do with any concern for the assault crime he committed.
This case, alongside being infuriating, also raised a few questions in my mind re: domestic violence. I am a bit torn over the issue, which I have been thinking about for a while.
After the first six months or so went by and nothing happened with this case, nothing significant anyway, I remember saying to a few of my friends that this is an instance where I think it would have been overwhelmingly positive if women would have organized and done some kind of vigilante direct-action, in the name of justice.
I tend to look down on vigilante-ism, as a tactic that is overwhelmingly negative and unproductive, mostly because it doesn’t do much to actually organize masses of people to resist or understand the political situation they are reacting against. But in this instance, I thought that having a man who violently and grotesquely assaulted his girlfriend on camera, remain in Senate, was a very serious ideologically powerful symbol of misogynistic violence. Of course this is not limited to just Monserrate. Anytime acts of terrorism or violence go unchallenged and unpunished it has a net negative affect, at least in my mind. It is a kind of psychological violence embedded deep in society’s collective consciousness because it reinforces, normalizes, rationalizes and justifies these actions.
On the other hand, I am trying to back away from the whole good guy/monster dichotomy that I am often guilty of, and which is the going narrative in mainstream society.
This good guy/monster guy narrative assumes that there are only two kinds of men in the world = aggressive/dangerous and those who are normal. This narrative tells us that women are in a position to discern clearly the one from the other, and blames them harshly when they don’t.
Why? Because it gives the impression that any dangerous or exploitative relationship/man/situation would be easily identifiable as abnormal and thus any woman who does not leave or immediately avoid the encounter must be responsible due to her poor judgement, OR, that the woman in question must not be a victim since she must have asked or tolerated that behavior.
Another important feminist contribution to the casual acceptance of domestic violence stems from the understanding that these kinds of situations are only an exaggeration of typical hetero-normative relations. They are the disproportionately extreme versions of what passes for romantic behavior in many popular movies and television shows. The forceful man shows his value for a woman by pursuing her aggressively, ignoring her attempts to thwart his advances, being macho and beating everyone up, etc.,
So yeah am a bit torn on the subject. Its good for collective society that Monserrate has been shamed for his act, but does this reproduce the good guy/monster narrative? I don’t know. Whatever. At least the bastard is gone. Good riddens.
