are beautiful!
Pax, what you wrote, especially in your last paragraph, tracks so much with my experience. Even thought I have never (nor would I ever) write or say, if only s/he had done this/had done that/had had a weapon/had not done this/had not done that. I've been more focussed on why are we, who call ourselves feminists (however defined---mine is, equal human and civic worth, equal worth and abilities and rights and responsibilities as human beings and citizens) so reluctant to encourage women to defend their lives by force of arms when they know they are in danger?
In other words, trying to make the question as "political" as possible in an attempt not to rub salt in wounds that, in the kind of culture we live in, are not really allowed to heal. (Think Roman Polanski and his defenders.) And we are very far from the worst on the planet.
I'm going to try to make what follows somewhat coherent.
Vanya, yeah, when I think of mainstream feminism, not that there is any anymore, I think of NOW or for that matter, Seal Press. I do not think of Andrea Dworkin, whom I loved for the clarity and compassion, the dignity and the sheer amazing beauty of her writing. (I know I'm not supposed to say that, any more than I'm supposed to say that two of the other people I most admire are George C. Marshall and Georgi Zhukov. So there
) And who wrote in "Trying to Flee" for Nicole Brown Simpson,
Quote:
|
A woman has a right to her own bed, a home she can't be thrown out of and for her body not to be ransacked and broken into. She has a right to safe refuge, to expect her family and friends to stop the batterer--by law or force--before she's dead. She has a constitutional right to a gun and a legal right to kill if she believes she's going to be killed. And a batterer's repeated assaults should lawfully be taken as intent to kill.
|
I think that right there is a statement that could transform the world if it were acted upon on a large scale.
One very clear, significant cause of crime is economic and educational deprivation: people need meaningful work under humane conditions that enables them to support themselves and their families in a dignified and decent manner. People need education because when we are dumbed down intellectually, we are also dumbed down emotionally. We're angry but we don't know why, so we (at best) rant.
But I believe another significant cause of crime is cruelty, particularly within the home. I do not mean that everyone who is abused grows up to be an abuser. That's not true: the military (and in my experience, particularly the Marine Corps) often seems to specialize in taking such young men (and maybe increasingly women?) and offering them a positive image and definition of manhood. I do know that people who are abused are angry and have issues and act out. When you fuse that with the common belief that to be male is often to be aggressive and violent, and when acting that way, even if you're only picking on people your own size, you have a recipe for violent crime. Also, what you learn at home becomes normal to you. You may hate it but it's...normal and you take that sense of normality out into the world.
To turn to Glenn about changing the culture and active defense: if you encourage women to arm themselves, to defend themselves against intimate cruelty, you change the culture. Not completely, not perfectly---I'm not offering either monocausal explanations or solutions. But by beginning to reduce the huge traditional physical impunity that men who engage in profound, severe, long-term cruelty towards women have had, we raise the costs of that cruelty. And maybe we remove some of the incentive it provides males to "act like men" in ways that are really bad for them, as well as the folks around them. Of both sexes.
It also means that abusers and would-be abusers might think, if I do this, she might hunt me down and kill me. I don't think that's a bad thing. And I hope that's not read as a call for vigilante justice: since it is very common for a woman's perpetrator to threaten her with further attacks, I don't think it's wrong for the perpetrators to fear their victims' ex post facto response and decide, maybe not. (ETA: that thought owes a lot to my reading of nuclear/strategic deterrence literature, rather than, say, feminism or sociology or... I've been reading
Soviet Military Thought from 1981, lately.)
Stopping people from engaging in brutality does not mean turning around and brutalizing them. It can mean, after you stop the perpetrator, you turn around and figure out what the hell is going on in his life and society helps fix the problems. (I also believe that some criminals are so dangerous and so motivated by cruelty that they should simply be euthanized.)
Sakeneko, your thoughts as a human rights activist?
Hope these thoughts are not off-topic.