Home » Invisible Men Who Hurt Women – Rebecca Solnit

Invisible Men Who Hurt Women – Rebecca Solnit

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The man accused of killing eight people, including six American women of Asian descent, on March 16 in spas in Atlanta allegedly said he was trying to “eliminate temptation.” As if others were responsible for his thoughts, as if the monstrous act of taking the life of others rather than learning to control oneself was right. This aspect of a crime that has also been horribly racist reflects a culture that blames women for men’s behavior. The idea of ​​female temptresses dates back to the Old Testament and is emphasized in white evangelical Christianity; the victims of the Atlanta shooting were employees and customers of health clubs, and it is said that when he was arrested the killer was planning to go to Florida to hit the “porn industry”.

A few days ago an older friend than me told me about her attempts in the 1970s to open a shelter for women who had suffered domestic violence in a community where men did not believe that that was a problem. And when you convinced them that it was, they asked you: “What if it was the fault of the women?”.

Last week a friend of mine shared a long anti-feminist post blaming girls for the problems of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, accused of sexual harassment: they should have put the best face on a bad situation when Cuomo violated the rules on behavior in the place of job, was it their responsibility to protect his career and reputation?

On women’s shoulders
Sometimes men are excluded from history. Since the onset of the pandemic, many articles have been published about whether women have stopped pursuing careers or have quit their jobs because in heterosexual families they have to do most of the housework, especially raising children.

In February, the US National Public Radio (NPR) opened a service stating that this commitment “fell on the shoulders of women”, as if it had fallen from heaven and not imposed by the spouse. I have yet to read an article about a man whose career is going great because he dumped that weight on his wife.

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Often the woman is blamed for the situation she is in because of her husband and is advised to leave him, without reflecting on the fact that divorce often brings poverty for her and her children, not to mention that unequal workloads in the home can reduce the chances for a woman to achieve independence.

Behind all this is the problem of how things are told. The most common way of talking about cases of murder, rape, domestic violence, harassment, unwanted pregnancy, poverty of single mothers families, and a host of other phenomena leave men out of the picture. They absolve them of responsibility. We have always treated many things men do to women or men and women do together as women’s problems, which they have to solve, acting surprisingly heroic and resisting beyond common sense. In addition to housework and childcare, what men do also falls on the shoulders of women.

In No visible bruises (No Bruises Visible), a 2019 book on domestic violence, Rachel Louise Snyder notes that the common reaction is often “why didn’t she leave?” rather than “why was he violent?” Women facing harassment and threats on the street are told to limit their freedoms and change their behavior, as if male threats and violence are something that cannot be corrected, like time, not something that can and must change. In the wake of the alleged kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard by a police officer a few weeks ago in the UK, police went door-to-door knocking to tell South London women not to go out alone.

When talked about, unwanted pregnancies are described as situations in which irresponsible women have gone to get involved: for this reason some conservatives want to punish them. Clarified that women can get pregnant on their own, with the help of a sperm bank or donor, unwanted pregnancies are 100 percent the result of sexual intercourse in which someone, to put it simply, has put the his sperm where it was likely to encounter an egg: two people are involved. But too often, if there is a termination of pregnancy, only one of the two is held responsible.

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In her 2015 book on abortion, Pro: reclaiming abortion rights, Katha Pollitt notes that 16 percent of women experienced “reproductive coercion”, meaning the partner used threats or violence regardless of her reproductive choice, and 9 percent experienced “‘sabotage of birth ‘, that is, the partner threw away her pills, punctured condoms or prevented her from using other forms of contraception ”. One of the reasons why abortion should be an unlimited right is that the violations leading to conception must be balanced by the consequences.

And obviously the laws that allow abortion only in the case of rape require women to prove that they have been raped: a tiring, intrusive and protracted process that often fails anyway. Pollitt also points out that many unwanted pregnancies result from abuse that does not fall under the legal definition of rape. Rape itself is a crime for which the victim, and not the perpetrator, is often held responsible. In his wonderful memoir Know my name, Chanel Miller says she was accused because, while she was unconscious, she was attacked by a stranger, “the swimmer rapist from Stanford”.

When Tulane University reported in 2018 that 40 percent of students and 18 percent of students had been sexually assaulted, it should have concluded that its campus was populated not only by victims, but also by rapists. But it wasn’t like that. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a US public health monitoring body, published a notice telling women that alcohol consumption could lead to violence, pregnancy, abuse or sexually transmitted diseases, as if alcohol did all of these things, and women alone had a responsibility to avoid it. Once again men had been eliminated from the stories they are protagonists of.

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There are also more subtle ways, for example describing people who suffer abuse and discrimination as arrogant or sick. Obviously, it happens when those responsible for the status quo decide to defend it rather than worry about the damaged or marginalized, thus making it easier for reporting an abuse to produce others. In February Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey wrote in an article in The Harvard Business Review that “the impostor syndrome pushes us to try to change the behavior of women in the workplace rather than changing the places where women work. .

Too often a woman “has the impression that she is not deserving or qualified” when she should think that “she works in a place where they treat her as undeserving or unskilled”. The headline of a March 7 NBC News article gives an example: “Google has recommended a sanity check in the case of employees (men and women) who have complained of racism and sexism.” The article explains that the employees who filed the complaints were fired, while no one checked who gave them any reason to complain.

Excluding the perpetrators from this way of telling things means protecting the perpetrators of the crimes, both as individuals and as a class, even if one feigns attention to those who have been abused. It is a problem that can become critical in all the situations I have described, but which in the massacre of Georgia was terrible: a young man learned from his Southern Baptist subculture that sex is sin and women are tempting, he held them responsible. of his temptations and punished them with death.

(Translation by Bruna Tortorella)

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