The misogyny in the air we breathe

By Heraclitus

Bob Herbert has an excellent column today on the recent spate of shootings that targeted only girls, and how this is part of a larger pattern of objectification and misogyny that permeates our society. The column is available in full here (sorry, New York Times, looks like there's a hole in your little gated community), and is well worth reading in its entirety. Herbert begins by noting that in the recent school shootings in Colorado and Pennsylvania, only girls were killed (and, in the Colorado case, molested).

In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.

There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.

The reasons for this silence are, of course, complex, but Herbert identifies what is surely a major factor, probably the most important one. These murders took place in a society that isn't just constantly selling sex. It's constantly selling a dehumanized version of sex, one that is defined by male domination and comsumption and female submission and destruction. The promise of sexual pleasure is not enough; the woman must be degraded and reduced to an object to be owned and consumed. As Elvis Costello wrote almost three decades ago, "You want her broken with her mouth wide open, 'cause she's this year's girl." Herbert provides more recent examples.

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”

An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman’s face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.

The silence that Herbert notes is even stranger when one considers how integral women are to everyone's lives. Even for most people living in large, multicultural cities, opposition to racism or religious bigotry is more a matter of principle than it is of immediate concern for those closest to them. But the dehumanizing misogyny Herbert identifies and describes so well hurts many men as well: imagine what it must be like to be the father of one of the girls killed in Pennsylvania. My point of course is not that men are the real victims here, but that the degradation and humiliation of women, whether by gun-toting murderers or by drunken yahoos at baseball games, doesn't only hurt women. Yet men remain mostly silent, despite the fact that the writing is often literally on the wall. What does this say about the male psyche in our society?

For more see Echidne and Feministing.