By Sarah Devine
Yes, yes…I know I’m very late in the game, as this song came out in 2010, but I think that “Love the Way You Lie” is still an excellent example of pop culture’s treatment of abusive relationships. I think this will be a great video to watch in my girls’ groups, given that it has 510,407,334 views on Youtube and I imagine that most of the teens I work with have already seen it.
Some responses to the song/video lauded it as a frank, honest portrayal of domestic violence, presumably from people glad to see an important and often-overlooked issue being addressed by such popular singers. Megan Fox, who plays the battered woman in the video, donated her appearance fee to a domestic violence shelter. However, I have serious doubts about the video’s effectiveness to raise awareness about the realities of DV, mainly because it perpetuates so many myths. I obviously can’t speak to the author’s intentions, but given the media’s assumption that the relationship portrayed in the song is “domestic violence” I think discussing it in those terms tells us a great deal about how our society views DV. For example, the video, and much of the commentary I’ve read about it, portray DV as the equivalent to a “tumultuous relationship” rather than one partner using abuse as a tactic to gain control of the other. This is such a prevalent myth in our society, and one that exclusively serves the interests of abusers. Because the majority of people aren’t educated about the dynamics of domestic abuse, many abusive relationships are misinterpreted as mutually dysfunctional. The survivor’s efforts to resist may look like “mutual” abuse, instead of what they are—acts of self-defense.
This is a common misconception that makes it difficult for an abused woman to receive fair treatment from the police, judges, and child custody evaluators, to name a few. Because the song attempts to make the abuse look like the natural consequence of “a tornado meeting a volcano,” the violence can easily be interpreted as the inevitable consequence of two personalities that just don’t mesh well, with both parties equally responsible for the violence: “You swore you’d never hit ’em, never do nothing to hurt ’em /Now you’re in each others face spewing venom in your words when you spit ’em /You push, pull each others hair, scratch, claw, bit ’em/Throw ’em down, pin ’em.” Interspersed through these statements, though, are moments when Eminem admits that he knows it’s his fault: “It wasn’t you, baby, it was me / Told you it was my fault.”
None of this is to say that there aren’t unhealthy and dysfunctional relationships that don’t fit the domestic violence community’s definition of abuse. There are. But do they look like the one portrayed in this song? I, for one, seriously doubt it. Eminem and the male actor (Dominic Monaghan) exhibit classic abuser traits: he grabs the woman as she tries to leave, knocks her to the ground, blames his outbursts on his love for her, promises her it won’t happen again (and admits he knows that’s a lie), and at the end says that if she leaves he’ll “tie her to the bed and set this house on fire.” The entire song perfectly displays the cycle of abuse.
The woman’s experience gets almost no voice, and the few lines she does say strike me as incredibly unrealistic: “Just gonna stand there and watch me burn/That’s alright because I love the way it hurts…/I love the way you lie.” Of course, I can’t say that no woman would ever feel that way, but I think that very few women faced with the level of violence present in the song would feel that way. Additionally, all of her lines portray her as the victim, not the perpetrator.
All of this is to say that I think this song and video offer an excellent opportunity to discuss some of the most pervasive and destructive myths about domestic violence in our society, particularly the mischaracterization of abuse as mutual and the notion that abused women “like it.”
(I am always looking for more pop culture portrayals of DV, good and bad, so please let me know if you have other suggestions.)
