Covert Misogyny 2.

Right, now back to this huge subject.... Let`s see if we can shed some more light on it:

We have looked at some reasons why some doctors practice covert misogyny and now I want to think about why such a profession permits this to happen. You might say "permits it by default", since the profession as a whole would be loath to admit that it occurs at all. I think that this denial has parallels with any individual or group that pretends that abuse isn`t really happening. For example, where there was abuse of children in the Catholic Church, denial was the biggest factor in the whole saga.

When we talk about an individual denying their guilt we see that they do so to protect themselves from punishment. Somehow "denial", they hope, protects their innocence. But why do members of a group protect each other? After all, why protect someone who might be guilty? The person protecting someone else isn`t guilty, so why trouble to shelter someone who is? How do they square this with their conscience?

Well, part of this may be to do with feeling that they cannot be sure that the person is guilty, maybe they want to believe that they are not guilty, and part of it this has to do with the connection and loyalty they feel for their colleagues.
Let`s look at this in regard to a priest: The priest may be a nice man, long serving in the church, he has many close friends...he may have done kindnesses for other clergy... This creates a loyalty and a feeling in others that they do not want to believe that he is guilty. In anycase, if they report him for suspected abuse, they may be impugning him by mistake and turn his life into a nightmare, not forgetting that to report him to the police will bring trouble for themselves: they may not be believed, their colleagues may turn against them, etc. In short, keeping shtum is the preferable option. The most important dynamic here though, is reciprocal loyalty within the group: If you protect a colleague, they will certainly protect you! Because of this,cases are rare where someone is brave enough to betray a colleague in the name of right.

This is broadly what happens in groups, it is all about group cohesion and group function and group survival. This very same mechanism will be in play in the medical profession when a doctor medically abuses a patient. Doctors simply don`t want to believe that some of their colleagues are misogynists and if they half see it, they turn a blind eye.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, where someone is guilty in regard to someone else, the compartmental conscience kicks in and there is activated a demonisation of the wounded party.(In cases of sexual abuse, this would involve making the child look guilty). The function of demonisation is to shift guilt from the abuser/ perpetrator onto the victim. This facilitates a concealment of guilt. When we observe this in regard to one-to -one relationships, the power of the guilt-shift is played out depending upon the power of the individuals concerned. That is, which one is weak, which one is strong; which one has endurance and which one doesn`t; which one is more forgiving,etc. The game-play ratchets up when one uses their own social or family group as an endorsement of their demonisation strategy. The person in this one-to-one battle, who has greater social skills, greater prowess at manipulating, will doubtless win the war when they recruit a group around them to support their position. It`s simple:a group has more power.

The same is true of doctors who medically abuse women: The surest way to hide what has happened is to demonise the woman, find concrete ways of showing that she is "mad" or "bad" and that therefore the doctor hasn`t done anything wrong at all!!! The simplest way to do this is with psychiatric diagnosis. When there is a psychiatric diagnosis attached to a female patient it becomes almost impossible for the medical abuse to be revealed. Of course, this is gross misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, but who would ever find out?

You might wonder how doctors manage their consciences, both to themselves and in regard to their colleagues.. Well, it`s our old friend the compartmental conscience !!! When a woman is medically abused and she is then demonised in order to hide what has occurred, the demonisation is the salve to the conscience. The doctor thinks, "well, this woman is an attention-seeker, or at least neurotic, and my colleague certainly has, therefore, done nothing wrong. It`s the woman`s fault." This way he shuts out the truth and carries on ethically with his other patients, with this woman-victim safely shut away in a bad box in his mind.

Covert Misogyny.

Now let`s go back to less conspicuous abuse of women, one instance of which I relayed to you in my blog entitled "Misogyny in the Medical Profession".

We learn how to hurt people when we are small children, just as we learn every mode of behaviour, as we watch the adults around us in their relationships. Some children exposed to these kinds of interaction will copy them in later life, some will not. The knowledge is there, the behaviour assimilated, however, and we can see, even in the most stable and equitable of people, the mechanisms of hurt that manifest when they are stressed or angry. For vast numbers of people who slip into hurt mode for a while and come out of it, it does not become a pervasive trait, just a transitory one. Some people, with this acquired behaviour ready to jump into action, hurt some people and not others (this is something I thought about when I discussed "Compartmental Conscience" in an earlier blog).Others keep a very tight rein on this assimilated ability to hurt others, not wishing to vent it and only letting go when they are under extreme stress.

We are talking here, though, specifically about women, but the basis for needing or wanting to hurt is the same.
I think, firstly, that hostility to or resentment of women in particular, can be caused by adverse experience of a woman, the pain of which becomes ingrained and later is discharged against someone who has nothing to do with these earlier experiences. Somehow, the pain of past experience does not allow analysis of where and when upset first occurred, it just is triggered generally by women, or women with particular characteristics, and just finds outlet. Indeed, any woman can be a trigger for reflexed hatred just because something about her hooks into something in the past for the man concerned.

Another cause, as I discussed in my last blog, is that a man can have witnessed someone close to him with a bad attitude to a woman/women. Some men learn the idea that women are out to cheat them, or are after their money, or women try to get attention for disingenuous reasons,feign illness when they are not really ill, or whatever the case may be, from someone else, a father maybe, who projects these ideas onto a boy`s mother. A boy will see his mother accused of such falsehood on a day to day basis and he will believe what she is accused of, even though his father`s notions are in themselves untrue, based as they are upon his own psychopathology.

I would like to touch on another trigger for misogyny related to the phenomenon of learned behaviour: When someone learns to view someone else, anyone else, negatively, based upon false perceptions, there are factors within that interaction that are part of the package. It`s like this: a person cannot deal out a negative regard for someone without incurring some guilt, even if it is guilt on an unconscious level. I tend to think of this as like expending energy always having a consequence, we go jogging and we get tired, we get angry and we get more and more upset, nothing happens without consequence. So, when we put upon others our negative attributions, we pay a price....unless we counteract this in some way. This is why in situations where we incur guilt, our compartmental conscience kicks in to try to lift the guilt we might otherwise feel.

Finally, when someone reflexes negative regard for women, they can simply be reacting against their own sense of guilt, acquired by them when a young child, as if their father`s guilt were their own..The woman`s behaviour, or triggers, can, point-blank, make the man feel very guilty and he reacts to that with agression.


So now we come to why some doctors see women as disingenuous: I believe that in their early childhood they have acquired negative ideas about women, from whom or for what reason they have no conscious knowledge, and they simply issue this negativity upon hapless women as if it were real. It is one big delusion. Believing badly of someone without due cause expresses itself in other situations too,for example racism.

The doctor who destroyed my mother`s life would not realise that he was acting out of deep-rooted irrational motivations and probably was convinced that this was indeed a neurotic woman in need of psychiatric medication. What is a crime though, is that a doctor should be able to come to this "professional diagnosis", subjectively, and based upon his own paranoia, without any tests to make sure that his opinion is correct. The fact that this abuse of women is covert makes this phenomenon all the more difficult to prevent.

In my next blog I hope to get onto why it is that this type of misogyny is tolerated within professional groups and why the group itself has responsibility in allowing it to happen.