#YesAllWomen: Rebecca Solnit on the Santa Barbara Massacre & Misogynist Violence

This is what the return of the Goddess  means to me, just as much as the beautiful, nurturing, and contemplative.  The Return of the Goddesss is also, and profoundly,  the arising of women, who say, like the brilliant author  Barbara Solnit, "Look at this.  Take a good look at what it really is, how it's everywhere,  and what it does.  And it has to stop." 

Misogyny kills.

#YesAllWomen:  Rebecca Solnit on the Santa Barbara Massacre & Viral Response to Misogynist Violence

 "Santa Barbara is grieving after a 22-year-old man killed six college students just after posting a misogynistic video online vowing to take his revenge on women for sexually rejecting him. The massacre prompted an unprecedented reaction online with tens of thousands of women joining together to tell their stories of sexual violence, harassment and intimidation. By Sunday, the hashtag #YesAllWomen had gone viral. In speaking out, women were placing the shooting inside a broader context of misogynist violence that often goes ignored. In her new book, "Men Explain Things to Me," author and historian Rebecca Solnit tackles this issue and many others. "We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern," Solnit says. "Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender."

http://youtu.be/iIHg7IY_31s



http://youtu.be/PmexrnazNhE        
(Part 2 of interview)

**See also, 

By The Numbers: How The Santa Barbara Shooting Reflects A Culture Of Violence Against Women

CREDIT: Adam Peck/ThinkProgress

• More than one in three women will experience rape, violence, and/or stalking at the hands of an intimate partner in their lifetimes.
• Eighty-five percent of intimate partner violence victims are women.
• About three women are killed by their partners every day. One in 13 murder victims are killed by their intimate partners.
• Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44. One in six women with bone or joint fractures is a recent victim of abuse.
• Violence is often paired with controlling behavior: women whose partners are jealous, controlling, or verbally abusive are significantly more likely to report rape, physical assault, and/or stalking from their partners.
• A domestic abuser who has access to a firearm is more than seven times more likely to kill his partner.
• Between 2009 and 2012, 40 percent of mass shootings started with a shooter targeting his girlfriend, wife, or ex-wife. In nearly 60 percent of mass shootings during the same time period, the gunman killed a current or former spouse, partner, or other family member. In at least 17 incidents, the shooter had a prior domestic violence charge.
• The leading cause of death for women at the workplace is homicide, most often at the hands of an intimate partner.
• While the rate of intimate partner violence declined by 64 percent between 1994 and 2010, most of that decline came before 2001, and since then the fall has slowed and stabilized while the overall crime rate has kept dropping.
• Domestic violence support services get more than 75,000 requests for assistance on a typical day, but last year they had to turn away more than 9,000 people thanks to tight budgets.

Misogyny and "crazy women"

 

On the bus recently, I listened to a group of noisy adolescents, out from school, carry on.  Their  common language was continually interspersed with "slut", "ho", and "F--k", so much so that I was shocked.  A daily language that makes absolutely profane sexuality, and in particular, girls and female sexuality.  So very sad to see this as the ugly petri dish within which these girls are blossuming into their female beauty and potency.  A very long cry from, say, the coming of age "Pollen Ceremony" for young women among the Navajo. 

I reflected on why the imagined world of Jane Austen is so popular to many sensitive young women, in the face of such brutality and vulgarity everywhere. 

I have to thank  Max Dashu  for forwarding this article by "Dr. Nerd" Harris O'Malley, which articulates so well something I know most women have had to deal with in one form or another.  At least, I did in my youth, and it was a long process learning to not become disempowered and self-negating.   Examining language is so important, as it reveals what is deeply, and collectively, embedded beneath the surface currents of social interaction. 

"There are certain words that are applied to women specifically in order to manipulate them into compliance: "slut," "bitch," "ugly/fat" and, of course, "crazy." These words encapsulate what society defines as the worst possible things a woman can be. Slut-shaming is used to coerce women into restricting their own sexuality into a pre-approved vision of feminine modesty and restraint. "Bitch" is used against women who might be seen as being too aggressive or assertive... acting, in other words, like a man might. "Ugly" or "fat" are used -- frequently interchangeably -- to remind them that their core worth is based on a specific definition of beauty, and to deviate from it is to devalue not only oneself but to render her accomplishments or concerns as invalid.

"Crazy" may well be the most insidious one of the four because it encompasses so much. At its base, calling women "crazy" is a way of waving away any behavior that men might find undesirable while simultaneously absolving those same men from responsibility. Why did you break up with her? Well, she was crazy. Said something a woman might find offensive? Stop being so sensitive. The idea of the "crazy" woman is so vague and nebulous that it can apply to just about any scenario."


"The association between women's behavior and being labeled "crazy" has a long and infamous history in Western culture. The word "hysteria" -- defined as "behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic" -- is derived from the ancient Greek word "hystera," meaning uterus. Until the early 20th century, female hysteria was the official medical diagnosis for a truly massive array of symptoms in women including but not limited to: loss of appetite, nervousness, irritability, fluid retention, emotional excitability, outbursts of negativity, excessive sexual desire and "a tendency to cause trouble."

While some of the symptoms of "female hysteria" could be signs of legitimate (if misdiagnosed) mental health issues, most of it described male (as the medical field was a men-only profession up until the mid-19th century) discomfort with women's behavior and sexuality. Calling it a medical issue meant that men didn't have to respond to behavior that challenged male sensibilities or belief structures. Instead, labeling women as "hysterical" made it much easier to diminish women's concerns and issues without having to pause to consider them as possibly being valid.

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harris-oamalley/on-labeling-women-crazy_b_4259779.html