A man enters a hotel elevator with his girlfriend. They are in the middle of a fight. Passersby tilt their heads ever-so-slightly away from the unruly couple. The door closes.
Realizing they are alone, the man swats at her with his arm. She tries to swat it off, but only hits air. She stumbles, half-stunned, closer to him. He hits her on the side of the head. She goes down.
Later, when the elevator door opens, he half-heartedly drags her out like you would a sack of heavy flour. Her legs trail from under his feet, her flip-flops falling off. People gather, but she soon finds herself able to stand and the two leave together.
Now would you be surprised to learn that the man involved is a professional football player?
If you aren’t, hold on to that feeling of “here we go again.” That’s what I want to talk about.
The football player in this particular case is Ray Rice and the woman is Janay Palmer, his then-fiance. Rice was a NFL player with the Baltimore Ravens before his contract was terminated.
This sordid episode described above is the footage, put out by TMZ, set hyper-linked between the body paragraphs of a New York Times front-page story.
The violence and shame is so clear and irrefutable in that three-minute video, that it makes the rest of the story: the solid NYT prose, the catchy headline and the ballooning comments section feel almost beside the point.
They aren’t and here’s why: as soon as we are able to forget the details of these stories of domestic abuse, they start to lose their meaning. The people become indefinite, exchangeable and, therefore, harder to relate to.
We begin to lose a handle on the fact that domestic abuse is not a problem among football players, but a reflexive societal disease.
This kind of mental distancing happens all the time. Here’s a serious, systematic problem highlighted by single instance, like the TMZ video. It’s brutal and nasty and it sticks with you. You imagine what it might be like to be in a small room with a psychopath whose been trained for a very long time to hit and be hit.
And then you see the headline: “Ray Rice Cut by Ravens and Suspended by N.F.L.” You can feel that intimacy slowly drop away. Obviously this is a problem with football players, at least the lousy meat-head lot. Often in car-wrecks or being charged with murdering somebody, or selling drugs. And Rice has been fired from his job, apparently, so maybe everything evens out.
His wife even dropped the felony assault charges. See how easy it is to fit this story into so many others? It takes constant vigilance to remember that this series of events, summed up so easily in 500 words and happening exclusively to strangers, is always taking place for someone.
That somewhere that punch is always landing, the elevators doors opening, the legs dragging, the shoes half-heartedly being recovered.
It takes some consistency in thought to resist slotting this particular story, with its individual outrages and terrors, neatly into the “NFL Players are Violent, Sometimes Toward Women” section of your brain.
If you can manage that, you have some scale of the problem that we have on our hands.