Steven Crowder and Familiar Stench of Narcissistic Abuse
A couple years ago, while my husband ran into the grocery store, I pulled the truck around to the loading zone.
As I waited, an old codger came wildly gesticulating up to my vehicle. Apparently he wasn’t a fan of my (admittedly less than perfect) parking situation. Instead of asking me to move, he pounded his fist on my window and screamed “Move it, you fat cu*t!”
Coincidentally, this also happened to be my abusive ex’s favorite pejorative for me- a “fat cu*t.” It’s like the same demonic spirit was tracking me down wherever I went.
And I absolutely snapped. Seriously, I went straight Hulk on him in some hideously primal (and pretty unsanctified) display of fight or flight. Most sensible people with a functional sense of self-preservation would scramble to get out of that situation as far and as fast as possible. Not me.
I’m pretty sure I got out of the truck and began moving toward him and that there were eff bombs involved. I don’t tolerate rage-a-holic men very well. It’s a trauma response, one I’m working on improving.
Some 20-year-old bystander decided to record the entire situation instead of helping.
Why am I sharing this embarrassing story?
Because after I posted some gnarly footage of Steven Crowder berating his soon-to-be-ex wife on Twitter this morning, a number of men leapt to his defense and rebuked me. “How dare you judge Steven Crowder based on three minutes of film at his worst?” they said.
I think the video, though really troubling to watch, pretty perfectly showcases the hell too many women silently endure in marriage. And,yes, I know men can be abused, too, but that’s someone else’s mission field. My focus here is women.
(For those who didn’t see the video, in it you can see an enraged Crowder barking orders at his 8-month pregnant wife as though she were his slave. He refuses to allow her to take the car. He basically tells her she’s a failure as a wife and that she needs to learn how to respect men. “Be a wife worthy,” he repeatedly says, as though he’s God and she is nowhere near his level of importance in this world. It was an awful video, especially for those of us too intimately familiar with the tactics employed by narcissistic abusers.)
So when these Twittermen pushed back and told me to be fair, I really stopped to wrestle with the implications. When I imagine what three minutes of my worst version of myself would look like, I remember that someone out there has video footage of me screaming obscenities at an old guy, and, divorced from context, people could draw the conclusion that I’m an absolutely unhinged lunatic. They wouldn’t have the context to rightly interpret what they were seeing. It would just be a viral TikTok contribution: “Middle-aged housewife unleashes on grandpa.”
They wouldn’t know my trauma history. They wouldn’t know that he punched my window and scared me. They wouldn’t know that the police would later confirm he’s a known troublemaker they were eager to arrest.
So I started thinking, “Is it possible I’m seeing the Crowder video unfairly?”
And my honest conclusion after wrestling long and hard with this question is that no, I don’t think I am.
When you’ve got as much public influence as Steven Crowder does, when you’re volunteering yourself as something of a poster child for the victims of no-fault divorce, when you’re a self-appointed spokesperson for the Christian right, then the standards for your behavior have got to be unapologetically high. There’s too much at stake here.
Abusers routinely use “context” as an escape strategy because, for non-abusive people, it’s super relevant. We all have less than perfect moments, and none of us want those moments to function as the basis for our reputations with the outside world. But when we are dealing with actual abuse (as opposed to an isolated moment of human failure), there’s no context one could possibly imagine that would magically confer legitimacy to the conduct in question.
What scenario could possibly make it ok for a grown man to shout at his pregnant wife that he is going to “fuck her up?”
What would make it appropriate for him to trap her in her home and refuse to let her leave? What makes it okay for him to lash out and tell her that he’s never loved her?
Of course the answer is that there is no context that justifies this behavior. It’s wicked. Full stop. This is not the conduct of a man surrendered to the lordship of Christ.
Good men don’t give themselves the option of treating their wives like this on a bad day—not even once. A truly good man who behaved this way on even one occasion would be so overcome with shame and guilt for having treated his bride this poorly that he would take ownership of his failed marriage. Never in a million years would he dream of filming public videos inviting his millions of subscribers to view him as the victim of divorce culture. Good men tell the truth and take ownership of their actions.
That’s not what Steven Crowder did.
But where I really want to draw some much-needed attention is to the specific way in which Crowder belittles his wife in this video. Beneath the cold, contemptuous rage, we hear a deep-seated disdain for women in general. Phrases like “wifely duties” and “respect men” and “become something” and “be a wife worthy” all underscore a dark, hateful chauvinism and a narcissistic entitlement that gets a free pass in too much of the Christian right.
It’s crystal clear that Steven Crowder believes he’s entitled to his wife’s servitude. She’s not primarily a treasure he should cherish but a moon who ought to orbit around the radiance of his self-important sun. It’s the same kind of 1950s Stepfordism that other abusers like Doug Wilson champion when they boldly declare that God made women to make the sandwiches. These men are God’s gift to humanity, the lords of their domain, the rulers of their worlds. Women exist to bring them glory and to pop out their heirs. As they’re fond of reminding us, “Woman is the glory of man.” They’ve placed themselves upon the very throne whose only rightful occupant is Jesus Christ.
It’s Satanic to the core, but it’s an ever-growing trend of overcorrection in the Christian right—a movement known as Christian patriarchy that seeks to resolve the world’s gender confusion by imposing the very odious sex role stereotypes that contributed to the problem to begin with. They want women in the home, largely silent and compliant. And they don’t want us to be allowed to leave. Steven Crowder preached it himself; I don’t know how many times he whined that his wife was legally allowed to leave him, as though trapping her in the marriage against her will via legislative mandate would somehow resolve all his problems.
They preach that abuse is not biblical grounds for divorce. They tell us our children will be destroyed if we leave bad men, never stopping for a hot minute to warn what might happen to our kids if we don’t. They launch global campaigns framing no-fault divorce as the source of civilization’s decline, and then they blame college educated women for all the divorce and start national conversations about why it might be wise to repeal the 19th amendment in order to save the country.
It’s Eden all over again: “The woman you gave me did give me the fruit and I did eat.” Everything is women’s fault. Feminism is cancer. Women voted for Obama. Women enable transmania. Men are under attack. The way to save the world is to make women small again. Make women compliant again. I mean, Crowder didn’t hit her, so maybe if she just prayed harder and submitted to being slapped around for a night, the church elders could intervene, and he’d come around, right? Ask Paige Patterson. Has he got a success story for you!
That three-minute video clip wasn’t an isolated incident. It wasn’t some fluke occurrence that just happened to be caught on tape. It was the tip of an insidious iceberg too keenly familiar to survivors of narcissistic abuse across the world.
We are long overdue for a candid conversation about the way some of the pervasive attitudes about women enable domestic abuse on the Christian right. If you sense my snark, it’s because I’m angry, and if I’m angry, it’s because I’m hurting. God’s daughters deserve so much more than what our culture has settled on giving them. This isn’t some fringe phenomenon. This is rampant in the men we make our leaders. The question is why?
To all the women out there secretly capturing your abuse on film so that people will finally believe you, I see you. I’ve been you. You aren’t alone.
It shouldn’t be hard to say that what happened in that video was abuse. Full stop.