What is cowardly and what isn't

I ran across this blog entry the other day. It's a rather nasty, feminist article about something that happened a year and a half ago in Singapore. It would appear that a man punished his wife and sons for displeasing him. He ordered them to run across the block many times, and then he ordered his wife to kowtow until her forehead was bruised.

This article is not so much about that incident. That Singaporean man's treatment of his family members seems indeed grossly out of proportion, but I haven't heard his side of the story, and I'm not really interested. What made me write this were some things a person quoted in the article (someone nicknamed BowWow) said.

One thing in particular struck me: "It's such a cowardly act, abusing someone weaker than him."

Many times in my life, I've heard people call things cowardly that clearly aren't. Like the president of the USA calling 9-11 a "cowardly attack". I was dumbstruck. The cunning and resourcefulness required to plan and execute an operation like that – I can't even began to imagine how many times I would have found myself trembling and choking with utter and complete panic in the process. However, I don't think I would be too afraid to push a button and send a rocket to destroy life and property thousands of miles away, knowing perfectly well that I'm absolutely safe from the enemy – he just hasn't got any technology to attack me. Well, apparently the latter is what some Americans consider brave. Me, I think that sacrificing your life for a cause you believe in takes more courage than any American politician is ever going to have. Just my opinion, of course.

Anyway, I couldn't help wondering how could Mr. BowWow say that it's cowardly to abuse someone weaker. How do you abuse someone who's stronger? Well, maybe by puncturing his car tyres or pissing in his tea. Does that take more courage than, say, hitting someone who is weaker than you? (Obviously, you can't abuse someone who is stronger than you by hitting him; he'd just hit you back with more strength or even catch your blow.) I'm not sure. It may, and it may not.

I began to think: what would be cowardly in my book? One thing that comes into mind it this: the parliament is voting on legislation that would give yet another privilege to women, and a male MP who actually doesn't like it, votes "yes" anyway, because he's afraid that if he voted "no", her wife would refuse sex that night, or because he hasn't got balls to tell to a journalist that he voted "no" because he disapproves of giving women yet another privilege.

Next, I thought that beating a woman seems to be less cowardly than letting a woman beat you.

If I tried to define a coward, it would be one who is excessively afraid. For example:

If you fail to tell a traffic cop to fuck off and mind his own business, it's not being cowardly, it's just being sensible. If your girlfriend throws plates and glasses against the wall in fury, and you fail to stop her doing that and to tell her something like "if you ever do it again, I'll throw you out," it is cowardice.

If you refuse to travel to Somalia because of the anarchy and rampant violence there, it's not cowardly. If you refuse to travel to Mexico City because you've read about the drug gangs' gunfights in Ensenada (in the same country but 2000 km away), it is cowardly.

I admit that it's also cowardly if a person never expresses his disagreement with his superiors, but instead takes it out on his subordinates. It is possible that that Singaporean man was that kind of person. Maybe he was frustrated with kissing his bosses' asses day after day and let his anger out by excessively punishing his wife and children. But it's also possible that he was just an unusually strict master. In any case, his behaviour as described in that article doesn't say much about him being brave or cowardly, and it's absurd to say that he was a coward BECAUSE he did what he did to his wife. It would much rather be justified to call him a coward if he had let his wife and children anger him and hadn't done anything about it. I mean, I would understand if you called him a "tyrant", but "coward"? Come on.

 

Now, of course, accusation of cowardice is one of the most popular playgrund arguments. It has certainly happened to you many times that another boy wanted you to do something, and you didn't want to do it, and he said: "Oh, youre AFRAID!" When you're 10 or 14, it's really very difficult to explain to your buddies that you're not afraid to smash that window, you just feel no desire whatsoever to do it. Girls use that weapon too, as they learn soon enough that "coward" is one of the worst insults imaginable for boys.

It apparently goes on in the adult life. People use extremely insulting labels against the people they dislike, simply because they hurt more. It's like some people who hated Bill Clinton's policies, called him a rapist, because that word hurts far more than "dishonest politician" or "leftist swine". Similarly, "you are a coward" is much more hurtful to the other guy, and much more protecting of one's own self-respect than "it makes me fuming with envy to know that there are men in the world for whom women would do something like that".

Now there's something Mr. BowWow said that seems to throw light on the background of his motives:

"And what's even more shocking to me is, why did the woman do it?"

And that, I think, is precisely the point. It is shocking to him that the woman obeyed the man's seemingly outrageous orders. Well, I find it surprising that Mr. BowWow can't think of a possible reason, but for his information, I think the woman did it because either:

a) she knew that if she refused, the man was likely to beat her up;

b) she simply is a good wife who obeys her husband;

c) her husband has other extremely attractive qualities (like very much money), due to which she very much wants to please him, even at the price of being humiliated in public.

So here's your "why".

What I think it all boils down to is that Mr. BowWow (as well as several authors of furious comments and shares) is just too reluctant to face the reality that another man has such a power over a woman. He believes that he will never be able to make women obey his orders like that. Chances are, instead, that he (believes that he) has to woo his girlfriend all day long in order to even get laid in the evening.

Envy, purest envy (even if unconscious), that's what it's all about – and masking his own cowardly attitude towards women by throwing the word "coward" into a more powerful man's face, through the Internet, from the safety of his room, to which, I presume, that man accused of cowardice has no access to.

So it turned out that while writing this, I found another, very typical example of cowardice: insulting another person over the Internet, knowing that you can never be required to back up your words with your fists. Which begs the question: am I doing the same thing? Strictly speaking, I am, but I like to think that I'm doing the right thing. That is for two reasons. Firstly, he started it, and I'm just giving it back to him, defending someone who I believe is being wrongly attacked. Secondly, if Mr. BowWow is willing to look that Singaporean man in the eye and tell him he's a coward and take the consequences, then I am willing to look him in the eye and tell him he's a feminist wimp and take the consequences. That should be fair enough, considering the physical limitations imposed by this much-less-than-perfect world we live in.