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October 16, 2006, The New York Times<br>
Op-Ed Columnist<br>
Why Aren’t We Shocked?<br>
By BOB HERBERT<br><br>
“Who needs a brain when you have these?”<br><br>
— message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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?”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible,” said Taina
Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality
Now.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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<font size=2>"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the
application of it to human affairs."<br>
--Ralph Waldo Emerson<br><br>
"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings
who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."<br>
--Mohandas Gandhi<br><br>
"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." --Ma</font><font size=1>x Planck<br><br>
</font>Nicholas F. Gier<br>
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho<br>
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm</a><br>
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950<br>
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm</a><br><br>
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