Violence, the Domestic, and a Woman's Place

I saw this commercial for the first time this weekend, during an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit*.


I'm pretty sure it wasn't just the context of SVU that had me thinking this was going to be a public service announcement about domestic violence. Lying about injury is a widely-known indicator of abuse. Instead, it's for a housekeeping product. In this commercial, victims' shame and fear of revealing abuse is revealed to be the result of domesticity—not violence. And since domesticity is the proper domain of women anyway (as you can see from the fact that only women sport those embarrassing cleaning injuries), that shame and fear is not just trivial, it's normal for women. It's acceptable. Like domestic labor, domestic violence is just a woman's place.

*The way that show reveals and reinforces damaging cultural assumptions about rape and other sexual violence is a blog post I only dream of writing someday.