[Vision2020] Crimes Against Women: Why Aren't We Shocked?

[Nick Gier]

October 16, 2006, The New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Aren’t We Shocked?
By BOB HERBERT

“Who needs a brain when you have these?”

— message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women

In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a 
large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to 
separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the 
girls.

Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was 
killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.

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.

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so 
accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence 
against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, 
murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as 
familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the 
Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in 
Amish country, not that it happened to girls.

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.

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women 
every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational 
stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. 
We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old 
JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And 
we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and 
high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from 
thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic 
culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what 
really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the 
U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond 
the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage 
because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its 
core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and 
girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and 
never, ever as the equals of men.

“Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible,” said Taina 
Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality Now.

That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography 
that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the 
embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid 
Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his 
kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites 
with names like “Ravished Bride” and “Rough Sex — Where Whores Get Owned.”

Then, of course, there’s gangsta rap, and the video games where the players 
themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the 
Academy Award-winning song this year was “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”), 
and on and on.

You’re deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It’s all part 
of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches 
down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel 
Mines, Pa.


"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to human 
affairs."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
  --Mohandas Gandhi

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
--Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

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