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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The longest
war By Rebecca Solnit
Here in the United States, where there is
a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five
women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and
gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New
Delhi on December 16 was treated as an exceptional
incident. The story of the alleged rape of an
unconscious teenager by members of the
Steubenville High School football team was still
unfolding, and gang rapes aren't that unusual here
either.
Take your pick: some of the 20 men
who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas,
were sentenced in November, while the
instigator of the gang rape of a
16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced
in October, and four men who gang-raped a
15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in
April, though the six men who gang-raped a
14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at
large. Not that I actually went out looking for
incidents: they're everywhere in the news, though
no one adds them up and indicates that there might
actually be a pattern.
There is, however,
a pattern of violence against women that's broad
and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked.
Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or
lurid details in a particular case get a lot of
attention in the media, but such cases are treated
as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental
news items about violence against women in this
country, in other countries, on every continent
including Antarctica, constitute a kind of
background wallpaper for the news.
If
you'd rather talk about bus rapes than gang rapes,
there's the rape of a developmentally disabled
woman on a Los Angeles bus in November and the
kidnapping of an autistic 16-year-old on the
regional transit train system in Oakland,
California - she was raped repeatedly by her
abductor over two days this winter - and there was
a gang rape of multiple women on a bus in Mexico
City recently, too.
While I was writing
this, I read that another female bus-rider was
kidnapped in India and gang-raped all night by the
bus driver and five of his friends who must have
thought what happened in New Delhi was awesome.
We have an abundance of rape and violence
against women in this country and on this Earth,
though it's almost never treated as a civil rights
or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a
pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a
religion, or a nationality, but it does have a
gender.
Here I want to say one thing:
though virtually all the perpetrators of such
crimes are men, that doesn't mean all men are
violent. Most are not. In addition, men obviously
also suffer violence, largely at the hands of
other men, and every violent death, every assault
is terrible. But the subject here is the pandemic
of violence by men against women, both intimate
violence and stranger violence.
What we
don't talk about... There's so much of it.
We could talk about the assault and rape of a
73-year-old in Manhattan's Central Park last
September, or the recent rape of a four-year-old
and an 83-year-old in Louisiana, or the New York
City policeman who was arrested in October for
what appeared to be serious plans to kidnap, rape,
cook, and eat a woman, any woman, because the hate
wasn't personal (though maybe it was for the San
Diego man who actually killed and cooked his wife
in November and the man from New Orleans who
killed, dismembered, and cooked his girlfriend in
2005).
Those are all exceptional crimes,
but we could also talk about quotidian assaults,
because though a rape is reported only every 6.2
minutes in this country, the estimated total is
perhaps five times as high. Which means that there
may be very nearly a rape a minute in the US It
all adds up to tens of millions of rape victims.
We could talk about high-school and
college-athlete rapes, or campus rapes, to which
university authorities have been appallingly
uninterested in responding in many cases,
including that high school in Steubenville, Notre
Dame University, Amherst College, and many others.
We could talk about the escalating
pandemic of rape, sexual assault, and sexual
harassment in the US military, where Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta estimated that there were
19,000 sexual assaults on fellow soldiers in 2010
alone and that the great majority of assailants
got away with it, though four-star general Jeffrey
Sinclair was indicted in September for "a slew of
sex crimes against women".
Never mind
workplace violence, let's go home. So many men
murder their partners and former partners that we
have well over 1,000 homicides of that kind a year
- meaning that every three years the death toll
tops 9/11's casualties, though no one declares a
war on this particular terror. (Another way to put
it: the more than 11,766 corpses from
domestic-violence homicides since 9/11 exceed the
number of deaths of victims on that day and all
American soldiers killed in the "war on terror".)
If we talked about crimes like these and
why they are so common, we'd have to talk about
what kinds of profound change this society, or
this nation, or nearly every nation needs. If we
talked about it, we'd be talking about
masculinity, or male roles, or maybe patriarchy,
and we don't talk much about that.
Instead, we hear that American men commit
murder-suicides - at the rate of about 12 a week -
because the economy is bad, though they also do it
when the economy is good; or that those men in
India murdered the bus-rider because the poor
resent the rich, while other rapes in India are
explained by how the rich exploit the poor; and
then there are those ever-popular explanations:
mental problems and intoxicants - and for jocks,
head injuries. The latest spin is that lead
exposure was responsible for a lot of our
violence, except that both genders are exposed and
one commits most of the violence. The pandemic of
violence always gets explained as anything but
gender, anything but what would seem to be the
broadest explanatory pattern of all.
Someone wrote a piece about how white men
seem to be the ones who commit mass murders in the
US and the (mostly hostile) commenters only seemed
to notice the white part. It's rare that anyone
says what this medical study does, even if in the
driest way possible: "Being male has been
identified as a risk factor for violent criminal
behavior in several studies, as have exposure to
tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial
parents, and belonging to a poor family."
Still, the pattern is plain as day. We
could talk about this as a global problem, looking
at
the epidemic of assault, harassment, and rape
of women in Cairo's Tahrir Square that has taken
away the freedom they celebrated during the Arab
Spring - and led some men there to form defense
teams to help counter it -
or the persecution of women in public and
private in India from "Eve-teasing"
to bride-burning, or "honor killings" in South
Asia and the Middle East,
or the way that South Africa has become a
global rape capital, with an estimated 600,000
rapes last year,
or how rape has been used as a tactic and
"weapon" of war in Mali, Sudan, and the Congo, as
it was in the former Yugoslavia,
or the pervasiveness of rape and harassment in
Mexico and the femicide in Juarez,
or the denial of basic rights for women in
Saudi Arabia and the myriad sexual assaults on
immigrant domestic workers there,
or the way that the Dominique Strauss-Kahn
case in the United States revealed what impunity
he and others had in France ...
... and
it's only for lack of space I'm leaving out
Britain and Canada and Italy (with its ex-prime
minister known for his orgies with the underaged),
Argentina and Australia and so many other
countries.
Who has the right to kill
you? But maybe you're tired of statistics,
so let's just talk about a single incident that
happened in my city a couple of weeks ago, one of
many local incidents in which men assaulted women
that made the local papers this month:
"A
woman was stabbed after she rebuffed a man's
sexual advances while she walked in San
Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood late Monday
night, a police spokesman said today. The
33-year-old victim was walking down the street
when a stranger approached her and propositioned
her, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said.
When she rejected him, the man became very upset
and slashed the victim in the face and stabbed her
in the arm, Esparza said."
The man, in
other words, framed the situation as one in which
his chosen victim had no rights and liberties,
while he had the right to control and punish her.
This should remind us that violence is first of
all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I
have the right to control you.
Murder is
the extreme version of that authoritarianism,
where the murderer asserts he has the right to
decide whether you live or die, the ultimate means
of controlling someone. This may be true even if
you are "obedient", because the desire to control
comes out of a rage that obedience can't assuage.
Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability
may underlie such behavior, it also comes out of
entitlement, the entitlement to inflict suffering
and even death on other people. It breeds misery
in the perpetrator and the victims.
As for
that incident in my city, similar things happen
all the time. Many versions of it happened to me
when I was younger, sometimes involving death
threats and often involving torrents of
obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both
desire and the furious expectation that the desire
will likely be rebuffed. The fury and desire come
in a package, all twisted together into something
that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos,
love into death, sometimes literally.
It's
a system of control. It's why so many
intimate-partner murders are of women who dared to
break up with those partners. As a result, it
imprisons a lot of women, and though you could say
that the attacker on January 7, or a brutal
would-be-rapist near my own neighborhood on
January 5, or another rapist here on January 12,
or the San Franciscan who on January 6 set his
girlfriend on fire for refusing to do his laundry,
or the guy who was just sentenced to 370 years for
some particularly violent rapes in San Francisco
in late 2011, were marginal characters, rich,
famous, and privileged guys do it, too.
The Japanese vice-consul in San Francisco
was charged with 12 felony counts of spousal abuse
and assault with a deadly weapon last September,
the same month that, in the same town, the
ex-girlfriend of Mason Mayer (brother of Yahoo CEO
Marissa Mayer) testified in court: "He ripped out
my earrings, tore my eyelashes off, while spitting
in my face and telling me how unlovable I am... I
was on the ground in the fetal position, and when
I tried to move, he squeezed both knees tighter
into my sides to restrain me and slapped me."
According to the newspaper, she also
testified that "Mayer slammed her head onto the
floor repeatedly and pulled out clumps of her
hair, telling her that the only way she was
leaving the apartment alive was if he drove her to
the Golden Gate Bridge 'where you can jump off or
I will push you off'." Mason Mayer got probation.
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