Missing Genders Response to Roundtable Discussion: Violence and Aggression in the Consulting Room

I am happy to have been asked to comment on this panel (PP, Issue 6.1), albeit from afar, because I found the discussion quite riveting as I read it. I come from the perspective of someone who works primarily with female, and sometimes male, victims of men's violence, and I do so as a feminist, a gender theorist, and a psychoanalyst. So my only addition to this discussion is that which was left unremarked upon: gender. Although I am focusing on gender, it needs to be understood that this seeming simplicity is constantly rendered more multidimensional, as race, class, and ethnicity are always shaping gender and being shaped by it.

There is something to the way contempt, humiliation, shame, and identity are used in this discussion, and I would want to ground them fairly deeply within a culture that demands oppositional binary gender roles. As many on the panel noted, a common trigger for men's violence is humiliation or feelings of being humiliated or dismissed. Men feel humiliated by a woman's refusal of sexual invitation, or by another man questioning their power and authority. All of the examples that the panel