Abstract
Can you imagine the strategies used by a colonial power to dominate its colonized people being reflected in the tactics used by a man to dominate “his” woman? That is the frame Peter Adams offers us in his new work, Masculine Empire: How Men Use Violence to Keep Women in Line. Adams has created a text that integrates three parts: first, he provides an extended conversation among a group of five men who meet regularly at a squash club for exercise, alcohol, and conversation over a period of months. As these men have their ongoing conversations, he intersperses their talk with theoretical explanations of their performances as men, in both their relations with their partners and spouses, and their relations with each other. Then Adams takes another step that adds a level of conceptual clarity to the portrait of his men.
Adams breaks down the ongoing conversation into particular tactics used to control women, giving each tactic a separate chapter: Men are Superior, The Flat Earth, Promoting Isolation, Justifying Actions, and Total Threat are examples from the first half of the book. But that is not all he does. Each chapter begins with a useful epigraph, followed by one example from the history of the British colonization of New Zealand and its subsequent racist domination of the Maori people. This approach sets the scene for the chapter that follows by showing the way imperialist racism has used very similar techniques as those used by men in their personal relationships. Structuring it as Adams does reminds the reader perpetually, over twenty-eight chapters, that the domination of women has its parallels in global forms of domination. I found this a very thought-provoking conceit.
Four of the five men who populate “Bloke’s Central,” the name they use for their biweekly meeting, are descendants of the British colonizers, the remaining man of Maori descent. Each of the five has a slightly different relationship with woman abuse, but the Maori man, Rangi, is the one who initially begins to challenge the others in their strategic goals of keeping women down. Over the course of the extended conversation, several commit forms of emotional or physical violence against their spouses, some are arrested or served orders of protection, some slowly come to an awareness that their prior behaviors were wrong while others resist any such transformations, and eventually the group of five breaks into two; one group of three (including Rangi) effectively changes their attitudes and behaviors, while the remaining pair fissions off to start another group on a different night, committed to upholding the creeds of male superiority.
It is an unusual work. I have never read anything quite like it. Adams is a clinical psychologist and group facilitator who knows well the tropes and cadences of man speak. The way he has taken the ongoing conversation of this group and shaped it into a critical assessment of the discourses, rationalizations, misunderstandings, and emotional scars of men’s lives, including ways that some men can and do change their understanding of their entitlement to domination and control in the family, makes this work a helpful contribution to the literature on men’s violence.