The following was written by Tenured Radical after the May 2009 campus shooting at Wesleyan, but it sums up so much for me and others (some of which wonder if the US flag flies for women too) that I had to share it:
But can I say one thing? I am sad, but I am also angry. I am sick, sick, sick of men beating, brutalizing and killing women and children, of boys brutalizing their girlfriends, of fathers raping and killing their wives and daughters. All these years after second wave feminists first raised this as a fundamental problem in our culture during the 1970s, the media, the police and our judicial system still treats each of these things like an isolated incident of individual pathology. And there seems to be no organized feminist movement left to insist, in contradiction to this vapid construction, that the hatred of women by men is a systemic cultural and political problem in the United States. I am sick of men who think they acquire ownership rights to women because they fall in “love” with them, men who think that “love” entitles them to do whatever the hell they please to keep women under their control so they can “love” them even more. I am tired right now and have nothing eloquent or intelligent to say on the topic, but if this short rant feeds your feminist outrage too, go to this post by Historiann about the Loyola University tragedy, where Daddy decided that his life wasn’t worth living and then imagined that the rest of the family would be better off dead too, a not uncommon scenario. I end with a quote from Historiann’s post:
Just curious: how many women and children (especially girl children, as in this case–2 women and one girl were the victims here) have to die before someone notices? One woman is accused of a child murder out in California, and that’s all we hear about all day long. But husbands apparently have carte blanche when it comes to murdering the women and girls who lived in their homes?
What’s your guess, friends? (Are you holding your breath?) If 2,100 women and children are killed simultaneously on live television by their male partners and fathers, even if it’s not by jetliners crashing into buildings, do you think anyone will notice then?
I sympathize so much with this post. Everyday I see sick stories about women raped, killed, and/or brutally attacked by men they knew. Yesterday it was a women who was attacked by her husband with a cleaver for sweeping the floor incorrectly. Today it was a women who disappeared and is suspected to have been murder. Why do they suspect murder? Because she had been complaining about a man at work who had been harassing her. Eventually it got so bad she intended to quit her job. But then she disappeared. It just sickens me that there were all these warning signs and nothing was done. It tells women that we have to be constantly on our guard and wary of the men we let into our lives because no one else will protect us. Living in fear of half the population is no way to live.
That’s the main reason why I don’t blog about specific assaults/crimes, Angel; there are just too-too many, and if I missed one, I’d feel horrible. (I really don’t think one person could, even with the use of news feeds etc., keep up with all of them… Many stories don’t even make the police blotters, let alone the news.)
There’s a cultural numbness about violence towards women… No matter how obvious, no matter how often such abuse, violence & hatred is brought to their attention, most people ignore it — until some woman opens her mouth. Then she, like the victims she discusses, is discredited (maybe even abused or attacked).
But like you said, living in fear of half the population — including the ones you love and lock in with you at night, is no way to live. So we must keep talking about this to get some action.