tangerine trees and marmalade skies

lennonlove:

i’m just curious. why do you hate Cynthia?

Ugh, she’s so… whiny and bitter about John and it just… angers me so much because the last line in her book states that if she could do it all over again, she wouldn’t have ever wanted to meet John or whatever the fuck she said. And it like… brings me to the point of fucking tears because I would do ANYTHING just to know him and she’s just taking all those years for granted.

She exaggerates a lot too to make herself look like a poor delicate and abused puppy stuck in the rain and John is this big old mean man. Yet everybody else who knew him says he was never like that, only minimally. But that’s John for you. And a lot of people say like, “Oh I hated John after I read her book.” And it just makes me so fucking sad because she totally wrote him as this bastard and he’s not, y’know?

Yeah … see, here’s the thing: you may give anything to meet John Lennon, but John Lennon never hit you, or emotionally abused you for years.

And that’s the simple truth. I hated Cynthia’s book, too — but it wasn’t because it was filled with “whining,” it was because she spent the whole time making excuses for his behavior. I just kept yelling over and over again “No! No, he did not have a good reason to do that!” Because he didn’t. And I don’t blame her for having that attitude — hell, people give her tons of shit for saying as much negatively about him as she already does, as we can see above — because it’s a very common reaction among abused women to make excuses for their abusers and rationalize that they had some good reason for doing what they did. But it’s also extremely difficult for me to read.

So, you know, he was a bastard, actually. A major fucking bastard. And I really don’t at all feel comfortable with someone saying that woman who was hit by her husband is an asshole for portraying him as such. And please, do not deny that he did that. Because he wouldn’t fucking want you to. He fucking admitted to it in 1980. He told the world when he didn’t have to, out of his own conscience, and seemed to feel that he should be held responsible for it. (And even if he didn’t feel that way, it shouldn’t make a damn difference.)

And while Cynthia adamantly claims in her book that he “only” hit her once, which still would have not been anywhere remotely fucking near acceptable and is still abuse, John’s own fucking words seem to indicate really strongly to me that it was way more than “only” that once. Let’s refresh all of our memories:

I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically — any woman.  I was a hitter.  I couldn’t express myself and I hit.  I fought men and I hit women … I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.  I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster. (Playboy, 1980)

I somehow doubt that when he was hitting “any woman,” he kept his wife out of it.

So, you know what? John has not earned the right to be excused for his misogynistic violence. That’s not even touching on how he actually treated Cynthia verbally and emotionally, nor the way that he was unfaithful to her with every woman with a pulse. And Cynthia does not deserve to be torn to shreds for daring to be bitter about the way he treated her, especially when she’s all the while explaining that she still loves him and making excuses for him. If a woman who was abused wishes that she never met the man who abused her, well Jesus Fucking Christ, if there’s ever a right to anything, that’s it.

And for everyone who needs reminding: I love John to itty bitty pieces. He’s my favorite Beatle. He was an utterly magnificent songwriter, singer, performer, thinker, wit, and so on. I also think that he worked very hard to redeem himself in his later years, and that he largely saw the very grave error of his ways and felt repentant for them. While he still turned out very imperfect at the time of his death, I profoundly respect that. I want fewer things in the world than for many, many more men with misogyny in their hearts to learn to see women as human beings, worthy of respect and dignity — because while we can wish such men to hell and have damn good reason to do so, that’s not going to be what actually changes things.

And yet, everything else I said above is still true. Mocking a woman for portraying herself as abused when she was abused is nowhere near right. If you don’t want to like Cynthia, no one is making you — I personally don’t like the way that she seems to blame Yoko for all of John’s shitty actions, but while I feel that’s misogynistic on her part, I also know that it’s a pretty common reaction and coping mechanism. And if you want to love John, no one is even remotely trying to stop you. But the minimizing, victim-blaming and victim-mocking taking place up above is not okay.