A Concrete Example
Several recent posts here are basically a reaction to this YouTube channel:
Dr. Ruth | That Was Abuse
@HealingbytheNumbersThe recent post Abusive Relationships starts:
I've been watching YouTube shorts about abuse and I'm reluctant to link to anything in specific because I don't want to have my words misinterpreted as an attack on the character of anyone in particular about a very personal, private matter that's extremely hard to prove under the best of circumstances.
I don't know what really happened behind closed doors between her and her ex. I don't really want to question her personal story about her life.
But I'm extremely concerned she's doing a lot of damage to a lot of other people. I don't think her channel passes the sniff test and she's got nearly 40k subscribers and I don't think she really provides a good resource for people.
At best, she's projecting her baggage onto the world at large. At worst, she's intentionally harming other people for personal gain because she is apparently getting substantial money for her messaging and I don't think her messaging is in the best interests of society nor in the best interests of the individuals who follow her channel.
She says she has a PhD. You can say anything you like online. I'm unaware of YouTube having any meaningful means to check your credentials and the fact that the Internet generally lacks that has gotten me bitten in the butt a whole lot for a lot of years for telling the truth about my life that other people find unbelievable.
But it benefits a lot of other people who somehow have figured out how to take advantage of that crack in the system. And I don't really have traffic and I don't expect to ever get traction. My blog posts are unlikely to do this woman any harm, but thanks to how Internet algorithms work, I'm continuing to get her crap videos thrown at me because I watched one or a few clips.
That's why I'm still blogging in reaction to its existence. I don't really expect to make a difference here. But it's still on my mind and bothering me because I am still having this garbage shoved in my face.
I also wrote Ask Arlene and Forget Paris because of being exposed to her videos. Some of the things that don't sit well with me:
1. She claims she has a PhD and implies she got it DURING her so-called abusive relationship.
Abusers don't typically help you further your education and historically women relatively rarely got PhDs. A quick search says: The share of doctoral degrees awarded to men has significantly declined from 73 percent in 1980 to 43 percent in 2022.
I find it unlikely she got a PhD while in an abusive relationship. I nearly dropped out of the first college class I took while married with children in my twenties and I had a very loud argument with my husband about how he was making it impossible for me to study on the weekends because he was continuing his gaming hobby, which involved inviting people over, and they were nonstop loud.
My husband wasn't really being abusive. He didn't have good grades in high school and didn't have a family that supported his desire to go to college at age eighteen. He was clueless about what it takes to do well in school and an insensitive jerk, which is frustrating as all hell but, no, it's not intentionally abusive.
Getting good grades and completing challenging academic projects -- like a PhD thesis -- requires substantial unbroken concentration and quiet time. You don't complete a PhD without arranging your life to make that possible and an abusive husband is the opposite of the kind of support you need to do something like that.
Plenty of people don't go on to complete a PhD because the opportunity and support simply isn't there, in part because of their family obligations getting in the way. I find it extremely implausible that she completed a PhD while in an abusive relationship.
So I think either he was far too supportive for it to be reasonable to characterize their arguments as abuse or she's straight up lying and doesn't have a PhD. Or both.
2. She uses her claim that she has a PhD to position herself as educating women about what constitutes abuse. This is her way of calling you stupid to your face and you apparently agree with that based on the tens of thousands of subscribers she has.
That's rife with problems. To me, it looks like a brainwashing agenda. But let's break it down some:
For one, I've seen zero effort on her part to be evenhanded and admit that men can and do get abused too. She is actively promoting the idea that only women get abused and that makes her channel a problem in my eyes on the face of it.
She's also suggesting it's extremely hard to figure out what constitutes abuse and as someone told me once: "The best lies are the truth."
It can be hard to see. But if someone is beating you, you know it's not right and you don't need her to tell you that and her channel is labeling all kinds of stuff as abuse that should be viewed as "young couples have friction and things to sort out."
As an example of something that did take a long time to clearly see and was abusive: It took me a long time to conclude that my husband was financially abusive. Early in the relationship, I kept the checkbook and he would ask if he could buy X, to check if we could afford it. Then when I was shorted, it was my fault because I kept the checkbook and he asked.
When I began saying no, he stopped asking. He slapped it on a credit card and made it my problem to figure out how to pay it. And he never stopped being selfish to use my mother's word for such behavior.
But some of the stories Dr. Ruth tells can easily be explained as poor communication in a young couple. She has one clip where she talks about her husband expecting her to do the laundry and it resulting in him being upset with her because she didn't clean and iron the one shirt he really wanted ready to wear for some event on the day in question.
Young couples have misunderstandings like that. Furthermore, real abusers practice DARVO and claim they are the real victim.
So if she's the real abuser, we have no means to prove she intentionally failed to clean the shirt he wanted clean to shaft him and aggravate him and encourage an ugly fight.
If you are a woman in a heteronormative relationship and the laundry is a point of contention, I don't think you are doing yourself any favors to watch a channel like this and conclude your husband is abusive based on that.
I suggest you watch Forget Paris, put the issue under the heading "changing gender roles" and view it as an unfortunate side effect of gradually improving women's rights.
I was still a full-time homemaker when I decided to stop laundering my husband's military uniforms and send them to the dry cleaner and stop sewing his name tag on new uniforms and send it to a tailor. I continued to handle the rest of the laundry because I was a full-time homemaker and that was my JOB.
But I felt I was being treated like slave labor and not appreciated and me going the extra mile to save a few bucks wasn't resulting in things I wanted to see happen. It didn't mean we had money left at the end of the month. It didn't mean debt was being paid down.
It just meant he got more fun money to blow on himself. So I saw no reason to continue doing that.
So I'm aware laundry is a point of contention. It's also typically done by the wife because it's cheaper than a laundry service and that's part of her contribution to making ends meet. So it's not as simple as "him expecting her to do the laundry is abuse."
No one really wants to do the laundry. Someone has to. Hopefully, future generations will have better solutions worked out. But currently, there's no clear, bright line solution to this issue.
3. Her channel is defacto promoting ideas that are harmful to the cause of improving things for women.
She's actively promoting a gender war and promoting divorce as the only solution. There's absolutely no mention in her videos of going through any process of trying to hash out questions like "Who should do the laundry?" or "How might we better address the laundry issue?" first.
Her channel labels every single argument she ever had with her ex as abuse and her solution is "You need an escape plan." And this is a message with all kinds of potential to convince young couples that their COMPLETELY normal frustrations and misunderstandings are "abuse" and the only solution is "Leave him!"
I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and I expected to have a two-career couple marriage. I ended up a full-time homemaker for years and in my twenties I read a lot of library books -- because FREE was a hobby I could afford while my husband pissed away money like there was no tomorrow -- to sort out what happened that I ended up with a 1950s-style marriage after that stellar start in life.
TLDR of a decade of reading feminist literature and research:
American women took a peculiarly American political position of "Don't tread on me!" and "Get out of my way! I'm just as good as the guys!" And that works as long as she's single and childless. American women with no man and no children were making 97 percent of what men were making for similar education and career experience.
And it breaks down the minute you have a man or a child in your life, at which point you are probably making two-thirds of what men make. That's the value cited in the Bible from 2000 years ago for the value of a woman versus a man.
In contrast, European women took the political position that "I can compete if you will help me with the burden of child bearing and child rearing that biology skews towards being a woman's problem." And European women have historically done a much better job of closing the wage gap and they have done it with more family support and lower divorce rates.
I see no good coming from a channel that reviews her personal history and takes the position that "My relationship was always abusive from the start and I was too stupid to see it though I have a PhD." and tries to convince other women to see it sooner and make their escape plan.
I also wrote Underlying Concerns and Miscommunication in reaction to this channel. If you are in a frustrating situation, I encourage you to do what I did and plan a better future for yourself.
Plan to get an education and credentials and plan a career for yourself. If you stay married, it will be a happier marriage. If you ultimately divorce, it doesn't have to involve an escape plan and time in a domestic violence shelter which is basically a variation on homeless services.
I never spent time in a shelter and I spent years homeless. I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy and I've spent years talking with other homeless people and writing about homelessness and I wouldn't actively encourage anyone to go to a homeless shelter if they can reasonably come up with a better alternative.
This is a woman actively encouraging other women to choose to flee a relationship and go to a homeless shelter instead of getting couples counseling, improving your communication with your husband and quietly working on a better future for yourself.
If you are twenty or twenty five and married and don't yet have a PhD and a high paid career and you are slinging hash and counting pennies, that's called youth, not "an abusive relationship." And getting your education and establishing your career probably won't be sped up by homelessness.
I chose to go be homeless and sleep in a tent because of my medical situation and I thought it would be easier to get back into housing than it was. The best cure for homelessness is don't do it to begin with.
It's vastly easier to rent a place while you still have housing than to convince a landlord to rent to you after you are on the street. Reddit has a sub called Almost Homeless and I watched a lot of people get told "Go talk to your landlord, make calls, etc. You still have two weeks. FIND a place in that time if at all humanly possible." And a high percentage of people avoided homelessness at the last minute.
If you are not in the ER because your husband is escalating the severity of his physical assaults on you, please don't consume garbage like her channel and convince yourself you need an escape plan because laundry is a point of contention in your relationship and thus time in a homeless shelter is a good plan for your future.
If you are street homeless and want to get into a shelter, have at it. If you have anything resembling a middle class lifestyle, please find other material to inspire and inform your dreams of a better future and stop watching garbage like the YouTube channel That Was Abuse.