The week after the release of her new book extolling their relationship, Alisa Valdes reveals that her cowboy abused her.
Earlier this week, I reviewed Alisa Valdes' memoir The Feminist and The Cowboy, in which she rhapsodized about her relationship with a manly, traditional, conservative ranch manager who had taught her to submit and renounce anti-male feminism. Yesterday, Valdes published a post on her website (subsequently removed) updating readers on her relationship with the cowboy. In earlier public statements, she had mentioned that she and the cowboy had broken up. What she hadn't said until now is that she left him because he abused her.
For readers of The Feminist and The Cowboy, this is not exactly a shock. Despite Valdes's enthusiasm for the man, it seems fairly clear in the book that he is a liar, a bully, and a creep. At one point Valdes discovers that he has been texting the exact same flirtatious sexual fantasies to her and another woman at the same time, changing nothing but the name of the girlfriend in question. When she confronts him, he bullies her until she decides it's all her fault for contacting the other woman.
Still, even though all the signs were there, Valdes's post is shocking in a numb, inevitable way. As in many relationships, the cowboy's escalation from controlling assholery to actual physical violence was triggered when Valdes accidentally became pregnant. When she said she wanted to have the child, the cowboy walked out on her. She lost the baby through a miscarriage, and foolishly went back to him...and then the violence escalated. Mostly he stuck to verbal abuse, with occasional physical threats, but there is at least one incident which she doesn't call rape, but which sure sounds like something close to it. Finally, Valdes realized that "this man did not love me. He could not love anyone," and she left him for good—though, obviously, something of the terror remains. She notes that writing the post puts her "in danger—real physical danger": by which I presume she means danger from the cowboy. (She was also worried that the post might damage her relationship with her publisher.)
In my review, I argued that The Feminist and the Cowboy idealizes masculinity and power. Valdes talks incessantly about the beauty of discovering her feminine, submissive side, but the real energy of the book seems to be directed not towards validating the submission, but towards idolizing the discipliner and his bullying. She says that dating the cowboy taught her to reject second-wave feminism's disdain for the feminine...but in fact, the book reads as if she had simply found someone who embodied that disdain for the feminine. And he embodied that disdain most obviously through his disdain for her.