We Need to Talk about Negligent Relationships

Men who refuse to care for female partners may or may not be abusive. We need a new way of talking that recognizes the harm they do—and how women deserve something better.

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It’s a sad and well-known fact of life that some partners are abusive. They hit, they rape, they strangle. And abuse goes well beyond physical and sexual violence: the concepts of emotional abuse and coercive control are now, by and large, familiar.

This wasn’t always the case, of course. Indeed, the advent of these concepts is relatively recent. And like the concept of sexual harassment in civil law, they correct what the philosopher Miranda Fricker calls a “hermeneutical injustice,” where certain people are systematically deprived of a notion they need to make sense of their social experience—and then, oftentimes, demand justice on this basis.

Friends, I think we need a new concept to make sense of another common and bitter experience, which is especially common for a woman marred to a man within patriarchal settings.