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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The longest
war By Rebecca
Solnit
This summer, an estranged husband
violated his wife's restraining order against him,
shooting her - and six other women - at her spa
job in suburban Milwaukee, but since there were
only four corpses the crime was largely overlooked
in the media in a year with so many more
spectacular mass murders in this country (and we
still haven't really talked about the fact that,
of 62 mass shootings in the US in three decades,
only one was by a woman, because when you say lone
gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns but
not about men - and by the way, nearly two thirds
of all women killed by guns are killed by their
partner or ex-partner).
"What's love got
to do with it," asked Tina Turner, whose
ex-husband Ike once said, "Yeah I hit her, but I
didn't hit her more
than the average guy beats
his wife."
A woman is beaten every nine
seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not
nine minutes, but nine seconds. It's the
number-one cause of injury to American women; of
the two million injured annually, more than half a
million of those injuries require medical
attention while about 145,000 require overnight
hospitalizations, according to the Center for
Disease Control, and you don't want to know about
the dentistry needed afterwards. Spouses are also
the leading cause of death for pregnant women in
the US
"Women worldwide ages 15 through 44
are more likely to die or be maimed because of
male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war
and traffic accidents combined," writes Nicholas
D. Kristof, one of the few prominent figures to
address the issue regularly.
The chasm
between our worlds Rape and other acts of
violence, up to and including murder, as well as
threats of violence, constitute the barrage some
men lay down as they attempt to control some
women, and fear of that violence limits most women
in ways they've gotten so used to they hardly
notice - and we hardly address.
There are
exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to
describe a college class in which the students
were asked what they do to stay safe from rape.
The young women described the intricate ways they
stayed alert, limited their access to the world,
took precautions, and essentially thought about
rape all the time (while the young men in the
class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm
between their worlds had briefly and suddenly
become visible.
Mostly, however, we don't
talk about it - though a graphic has been
circulating on the Internet called "Ten Top Tips
to End Rape", the kind of thing young women get
often enough, but this one had a subversive twist.
It offered advice like this: "Carry a whistle! If
you are worried you might assault someone 'by
accident' you can hand it to the person you are
with, so they can call for help." While funny, the
piece points out something terrible: the usual
guidelines in such situations put the full burden
of prevention on potential victims, treating the
violence as a given. You explain to me why
colleges spend more time telling women how to
survive predators than telling the other half of
their students not to be predators.
Threats of sexual assault now seem to take
place online regularly. In late 2011, British
columnist Laurie Penny wrote, "An opinion, it
seems, is the short skirt of the Internet. Having
one and flaunting it is somehow asking an
amorphous mass of almost-entirely male
keyboard-bashers to tell you how they'd like to
rape, kill, and urinate on you. This week, after a
particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to
make just a few of those messages public on
Twitter, and the response I received was
overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I
received, and many more began to share their own
stories of harassment, intimidation, and abuse."
Women in the online gaming community have
been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita
Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented
such incidents, received support for her work, but
also, in the words of a journalist, "another wave
of really aggressive, you know, violent personal
threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And
one man in Ontario took the step of making an
online video game where you could punch Anita's
image on the screen. And if you punched it
multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on
her image."
The difference between these
online gamers and the Taliban men who, last
October, tried to murder 14-year-old Malala
Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of
Pakistani women to education is one of degree.
Both are trying to silence and punish women for
claiming voice, power, and the right to
participate. Welcome to Manistan.
The
party for the protection of the rights of
rapists It's not just public, or private,
or online either. It's also embedded in our
political system, and our legal system, which
before feminists fought for us didn't recognize
most domestic violence, or sexual harassment and
stalking, or date rape, or acquaintance rape, or
marital rape, and in cases of rape still often
tries the victim rather than the rapist, as though
only perfect maidens could be assaulted - or
believed.
As we learned in the 2012
election campaign, it's also embedded in the minds
and mouths of our politicians. Remember that spate
of crazy pro-rape things Republican men said last
summer and fall, starting with Todd Akin's
notorious claim that a woman has ways of
preventing pregnancy in cases of rape, a statement
he made in order to deny women control over their
own bodies. After that, of course, Senate
candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that rape
pregnancies were "a gift from God," and just this
month, another Republican politician piped up to
defend Akin's comment.
Happily the five
publicly pro-rape Republicans in the 2012 campaign
all lost their election bids. (Stephen Colbert
tried to warn them that women had gotten the vote
in 1920.) But it's not just a matter of the
garbage they say (and the price they now pay).
Earlier this month, congressional Republicans
refused to reauthorize the Violence Against Women
Act, because they objected to the protection it
gave immigrants, transgendered women, and Native
American women. (Speaking of epidemics, one of
three Native American women will be raped, and on
the reservations 88% of those rapes are by
non-Native men who know tribal governments can't
prosecute them.)
And they're out to gut
reproductive rights - birth control as well as
abortion, as they've pretty effectively done in
many states over the last dozen years. What's
meant by "reproductive rights," of course, is the
right of women to control their own bodies. Didn't
I mention earlier that violence against women is a
control issue?
And though rapes are often
investigated lackadaisically - there is a backlog
of about 400,000 untested rape kits in this
country - rapists who impregnate their victims
have parental rights in 31 states. Oh, and former
vice-presidential candidate and current
congressman Paul Ryan (R-Manistan) is
reintroducing a bill that would give states the
right to ban abortions and might even conceivably
allow a rapist to sue his victim for having one.
All the things that aren't to
blame Of course, women are capable of all
sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are
violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of
the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it
comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male)
head of the International Monetary Fund, the
current (female) head is not going to assault an
employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female
officers in the US military, unlike their male
counterparts, are not accused of any sexual
assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those
male football players in Steubenville, aren't
likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone
violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos
and Twitter feeds.
No female bus riders in
India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so
badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding
packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir
Square, and there's just no maternal equivalent to
the 11% of rapes that are by fathers or
stepfathers. Of the people in prison in the US,
93.5% are not women, and though quite a lot of
them should not be there in the first place, maybe
some of them should because of violence, until we
think of a better way to deal with it, and them.
No major female pop star has blown the
head off a young man she took home with her, as
did Phil Spector. (He is now part of that 93.5%
for the shotgun slaying of Lana Clarkson,
apparently for refusing his advances.) No female
action-movie star has been charged with domestic
violence, because Angelina Jolie just isn't doing
what Mel Gibson and Steve McQueen did, and there
aren't any celebrated female movie directors who
gave a 13-year-old drugs before sexually
assaulting that child, while she kept saying "no,"
as did Roman Polanski.
In memory of
Jyoti Singh What's the matter with manhood?
There's something about how masculinity is
imagined, about what's praised and encouraged,
about the way violence is passed on to boys that
needs to be addressed. There are lovely and
wonderful men out there, and one of the things
that's encouraging in this round of the war
against women is how many men I've seen who get
it, who think it's their issue too, who stand up
for us and with us in everyday life, online and in
the marches from New Delhi to San Francisco this
winter.
Increasingly men are becoming good
allies - and there always have been some. Kindness
and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did
empathy. Domestic violence statistics are down
significantly from earlier decades (even though
they're still shockingly high), and a lot of men
are at work crafting new ideas and ideals about
masculinity and power.
Gay men have been
good allies of mine for almost four decades.
(Apparently same-sex marriage horrifies
conservatives because it's marriage between equals
with no inevitable roles.) Women's liberation has
often been portrayed as a movement intent on
encroaching upon or taking power and privilege
away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum
game, only one gender at a time could be free and
powerful. But we are free together or slaves
together.
There are other things I'd
rather write about, but this affects everything
else. The lives of half of humanity are still
dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this
pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much
more time and energy we would have to focus on
other things that matter if we weren't so busy
surviving. Look at it this way: one of the best
journalists I know is afraid to walk home at night
in our neighborhood. Should she stop working late?
How many women have had to stop doing their work,
or been stopped from doing it, for similar
reasons?
One of the most exciting new
political movements on Earth is the Native
Canadian indigenous rights movement, with feminist
and environmental overtones, called Idle No More.
On December 27, shortly after the movement took
off, a Native woman was kidnapped, raped, beaten,
and left for dead in Thunder Bay, Ontario, by men
whose remarks framed the crime as retaliation
against Idle No More. Afterward, she walked four
hours through the bitter cold and survived to tell
her tale. Her assailants, who have threatened to
do it again, are still at large.
The New
Delhi rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, the
23-year-old who was studying physiotherapy so that
she could better herself while helping others, and
the assault on her male companion (who survived)
seem to have triggered the reaction that we have
needed for 100, or 1,000, or 5,000 years. May she
be to women - and men - worldwide what Emmett
Till, murdered by white supremacists in 1955, was
to African-Americans and the then-nascent US civil
rights movement.
We have far more than
87,000 rapes in this country every year, but each
of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated
incident. We have dots so close they're splatters
melting into a stain, but hardly anyone connects
them, or names that stain. In India they did. They
said that this is a civil rights issue, it's a
human rights issue, it's everyone's problem, it's
not isolated, and it's never going to be
acceptable again. It has to change. It's your job
to change it, and mine, and ours.
Rebecca Solnit has written a
version of this essay three times so far, once in
the 1980s for the punk magazine Maximum
Rock'n'Roll, once as the chapter on women and
walking in her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History
of Walking, and here. She would love the topic
to become out of date and irrelevant and never to
have write it again.
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