She's Gotta Have It

Over the past weeks, I’ve become addicted to The First Post’s serialisation of Rosalind B Penfold’s wrenching Dragon Slippers: This is what an abusive relationship looks like. Scrolling through Penfold’s brilliant graphic novel, which you can now read in its entirety on the site, I was struck by the fact that a relationship doesn’t have to be violent to be abusive. It’s true that the terrible Brian finally does assault Ros, but the violence is preceded by years of psychological ‘SLAP! KISS! SLAP! KISS!’, as she puts it, which gradually undermines her grasp of reality and sense of self. When she hears Brian musing, “It’s really so easy to control and destroy people. You just have to cause dysfunction because it creates insecurity. Once someone feels insecure you can do anything you want with them,” she begins to understand his hold over

her. But Dragon Slippers makes important reading not just because it describes exactly how a clever, beautiful, confident woman can be all but extinguished, but also because it sensitises one to all varieties of dragonslipperish behaviour. In The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout speculates that four per cent of ordinary people ‘have no conscience whatsoever’, ie, ‘no ability to feel shame, guilt, or remorse.’ The ‘devil you know’ could be ‘your lying, cheating ex-husband’, your ‘sadistic high school gym teacher’, the ‘boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings’ or ‘the colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own’. These people aren’t misunderstood, and it isn’t your fault; but the best revenge is to try and imagine the cold dark hell of being them.
Laura Tennant