Articulate, Progressive Democratic New York Feminists

Regarding the fall of former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, few people are asking this question: why did the women put up with his behavior? The New Yorker described his girlfriends as “articulate, progressive Democratic feminists in their forties who live in Manhattan." 

What is it about articulate, progressive Democratic feminists that makes them accept being treated the way Eric Schneiderman treated them? We are not talking about one-night-stands. We are talking about women who sustained long term relationships. And who thought of themselves as progressive feminists.

Has their feminism denuded them of their self-respect? Did they think that he was a good catch, a rising political star, one who would provide entry into higher social circles? Did they think that they were sacrificing themselves for the cause?

The Zero Hedge blog (via Maggie’s Farm) reports that four women accused Schneiderman of:

…choking, hitting, and threatening them during brutal, alcohol-fueled sexual assaults. 

He drank excessively, took prescription anxiolytics, beat them, slapped them and threatened to kill them.

One woman explained to The New Yorker:

I would come over for dinner. An already half-empty bottle of red wine would be on the counter. He had had a head start. ‘Very stressful day,’ he would say.” Sometimes, if she didn’t drink quickly enough, she says, he would “come to me like a baby who wouldn’t eat its food, and hold the glass to my lips while holding my face, and sweetly but forcefully, like a parent, say, ‘Come on, Mimi, drink, drink, drink,’ and essentially force me - at times actually spilling it down my chin and onto my chest.” Schneiderman, she recalls, “would almost always drink two bottles of wine in a night, then bring a bottle of Scotch into the bedroom. He would get absolutely plastered five nights out of seven.” On one occasion, she recalls, “he literally fell on his face in my kitchen, straight down, like a tree falling.” Another evening, he smashed his leg against an open drawer, cutting it so badly that “there was blood all over the place.” She bandaged it, but the next day she went to his office to change the dressing, because the bleeding hadn’t stopped.

Why would  a progressive New York feminist stay with a man who treated her that way?

Another woman, Tanya Selvaratnam explained that he would slap her around.

“The slaps started after we’d gotten to know each other,” she recalls. “It was at first as if he were testing me. Then it got stronger and harder.” Selvaratnam says, “It wasn’t consensual. This wasn’t sexual playacting. This was abusive, demeaning, threatening behavior.”

And also:

When Schneiderman was violent, he often made sexual demands. “He was obsessed with having a threesome, and said it was my job to find a woman,” she says. “He said he’d have nothing to look forward to if I didn’t, and would hit me until I agreed.” (She had no intention of having a threesome.) She recalls, “Sometimes, he’d tell me to call him Master, and he’d slap me until I did.” Selvaratnam, who was born in Sri Lanka, has dark skin, and she recalls that “he started calling me his ‘brown slave’ and demanding that I repeat that I was ‘his property.’ ”

Schneiderman "not only slapped her across the face, often four or five times, back and forth, with his open hand; he also spat at her and choked her. “He was cutting off my ability to breathe,” she says. Eventually, she says, “we could rarely have sex without him beating me.”

Think about it. Only on rare occasions did their sex not involve him beating her. You can ask why it took so long for her to come forth, but still, you have to wonder why she put up with it at all. How is it possible, after decades worth of denouncing male sexual predators, that these liberated women allowed themselves to be the victim of one of them.