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2. Captive Is Bidirectionally Bonded to Her/His Captor

In this section we will examine the type of bond, called “love,” that develops between men and women. Is this bond consistent with the type of bond that Stockholm Syndrome theory would lead us to expect?

There is absolutely no question that women bond with men. From adolescence on, most females in our culture put enormous energy into heterosexual dating relationships, with the ultimate goal of finding a male mate. By college age, more women than men are both married and engaged to be married, and more are “in love, but not engaged.” More women than men report being in love. Although women and men begin dating at about the same age, women report that their first infatuation and their first love experience occur at younger ages (Kephart 1967). And college women report experiencing more intense feelings associated with love (for example, euphoria) than college males (Dion and Dion 1973). Marriage to men is almost universal among women. When women captives bond to captors, the bond often takes on a romantic or erotic flavor. Recall that in the bank robbery in Stockholm (discussed in chapter 1), two of the women became engaged to their captors. In contrast, the bond that develops between male hostages and male captors is more likely to resemble friendship or a parental or filial bond (Moorehead 1980).

Why might women’s bonds to captors be experienced as romantic love or sexual attraction? Do the same forces that shape women hostages’ bonding to male captors shape women’s bonding in general to men? Rose (1985) says, “Desire and its expression are embedded in a social context that defines what constitutes a romantic or erotic event.” Rose points out that one source of cultural-romance scripts aimed primarily at women and girls is popular fiction such as certain fairy tales, contemporary romance novels, and gothic novels. The heroines in the fairy tales that are most commonly anthologized are typically attractive, virtuous, and passive. At the beginning of the story the heroine may be captive or trapped in an evil spell or trance. Initially, the prince/ rescuer may appear in the disguise of a disgusting frog or a loathsome beast. Thus, women are reminded to be open to every male suitor, no matter how inappropriate he may appear at first. Rose maintains that, though the manifest themes are nonsexual, the latent theme in fairy tales is the sexual awakening of the female by the male. This tells women that our sexuality is controlled by men and that relationships with males promise passion and eroticism. Rose contends that similar themes also appear in romance novels.

The popularity of romance fiction is evident in its huge volume of sales to female readers. Ruggiero and Weston (1983) estimate that romance fiction accounts for 40 percent of paperback sales, suggesting that these novels appeal to a strong psychological need in women. Romantic fiction (like most well-known fairy tales) focuses on courtship and initiating relationships, or, put more precisely, creating heterosexual bonds between women and men. Rose (1985) notes that the males in romance novels are often initially described as “contemptuous or hostile to the heroine.” She further notes that “readers are schooled overtly in the strange ability to completely reinterpret this behavior [so that] the hero’s cruel and boorish behavior is really a sign of his intense attraction.”

Similarly, Modleski (1980) notes that “male brutality comes to be seen as a manifestation, not of contempt, but of love.” By the end of the story, the female has conquered the originally aloof, brutal, cruel, and powerful male through “love.” Women may be pulled to this type of fiction because it portrays the courtship period in male-female relationships— an emotionally intense phase, and the only one in which women experience some (sexual, erotic) power over men. Romance novels “serve to reinforce stereotypes about women: love, sex, violence and dependency go hand in hand” (Ruggiero and Weston 1983). They also present the culture’s intermixing of gender, sex, violence, and dependency in a way that normalizes the brew and helps women feel better about it. After all, in the end it is all about love.

– Loving to Survive by Dee L.R. Graham

“Societal Stockholm Syndrome theory explains women’s love of men as a form of bonding to an abuser, made possible in part by the mental-emotional operation of splitting. Because women’s terror of male violence is so great and male kindnesses are so small by comparison, women engage in the psychic defense of splitting. Splitting means that one cannot simultaneously see both the good and the bad in another person or persons. Applied to male-female relations, splitting means that women see men as either all good or all bad, or that we see men as good and women as bad. As used here, splitting also refers to women’s denial of men’s violence and to our exaggerated perceptions of men’s kindnesses. Splitting thus works to keep women’s perceptions of the terrorizing side of men from overwhelming our perceptions of men’s kind side and destroying women’s hope for survival. A result of this splitting is that women separate men into two classes, the predators (rapists, wife beaters, incest perpetrators) and the protectors. This compartmentalizing leaves women unable to recognize the ways in which all men are kind to women (in some ways) while also promoting and benefiting from their aggression against women. All women seem to engage in such splitting to one extent or another. Regarding antifeminists, Rowland (1984) comments: “There are … two groups of men: decent, loving husbands and fathers, and those unmarried, childless and irresponsible men.” The husband who rapes and batters his wife and the father who sexually abuses his children are not recognized; nor is the kind, responsible bachelor. Any husband or father is, by definition, regarded as good; any bachelor as untrustworthy. While Rowland (1986) found feminists to “loathe … the violence and cruelty of men, … antifeminists seem either to ignore this [violence and cruelty], or [to] believe it only exists in the ‘odd’ case.” Having split apart the terrorizing and kind sides of men so that the hope created by male kindness is not overwhelmed by fear, and having denied the terrorizing side of men, women bond to the kind side of men. After all, why wouldn’t a person bond to another person whom she saw as kind and whose threats of violence and actual violence she had denied? The result is that women “fall in love” with our oppressors even as we fear them. For instance, antifeminist women report that men are untrustworthy and are users of women, but they say they like men and find their husbands “wonderful” and “loving” (Rowland 1984). Women may “fall in love” with men because of our need to believe that the terror will end, that we can “tame” or “control” our terrorizers so that they will protect and nurture us (e.g., see Schlafly 1977). Splitting is manifested on a cultural level through societal demands that women love men no matter what they do to us and that women devalue women no matter how good we are. Dr. Edna Rawlings and I have asked students in our classes to describe characteristics of people whom they’ve heard called “man-haters” and “woman-haters.” A man hater is a woman who speaks her own mind, a feminist, or a lesbian: in other words, a woman who has her own voice and doesn’t put men first is a man-hater. By contrast, students are unable to recall any situations in which they have heard someone being called a woman-hater. We ask, “Are rapists and wife batterers woman-haters?” They answer, “Just because a man rapes or batters women doesn’t mean he hates women.” The differential definitions ascribed to terms that should have equivalent meanings suggest an enormous collective need both to deny male hatred of women and to derogate independent female action (which might be used to expose expressions of that male hatred).”

— Loving to Survive by Dee L.R. Graham