An Immodest Proposal
CONTENT ADVISORY: Discussions of sexual assault, gun violence, domestic violence,
physical child abuse, child homicide and violence against peaceful protesters.
One of my first graduate school compositions, it’s another rant with a lot of truth. Obviously, it’s patterned after
Johnathan Swift’s famous satirical essay. Gender-neutral corrections to the statistics cited are at the end of the essay.
According to the current crime statistics, in the U.S. a woman is raped every minute and beaten by a man who is supposed to be her lover or husband every fifteen minutes. If what you just read doesn’t exactly move you to tears, you’re forgiven. Numbers don’t elicit emotion; they just hide reality behind newsprint.
If you have a copy of Janet Jackson CD The Velvet Rope, then you’ve heard her mad rant at her own anonymous ex-asshole, “What About That.” Just imagine Ms. Jackson spiting at this guy, “What about the times you hit my face!/What about the times you kept on when I said no more please!/What about these things!/What about that!/What about that!” while sticking a nine-millimeter down his throat.
Shocking, huh? Unimaginable? We don’t want to think of women being so compassion-less and violent, yet the gun in the hand is the difference between a woman having a hysterical fit and a man being vengeful.
There is no getting around the power of violence. Millions of mamas and daddies use it or the threat of it to control kids, in spite of all the experts who decry corporal punishment or coercive child rearing.
Malcolm X once told a young Black woman who had laid herself down in front of a truck or some moving vehicle in an act of protest not to ever do it again; she was crazy to think that the white folks wouldn’t run her over. The problem with protest is that it depends on the sympathy of those in power: “If they see us poor Negros/girls/queers out here suffering, then they’ll feel sorry for us and change things.”
All the therapy, support groups don’t do a damn thing to stop rape and woman-beating from happening. As my old philosophy professor used to say, consciousness raising just means, “Well, we live in a state of oppression, but at least we still feel good about ourselves.” Feeling good about yourself after surviving a rape isn’t going to stop you from being raped again. Being taught all the safety rules and obeying them perfectly isn’t going to stop it, either. Being taught all the warning signs of an abusive male isn’t going to protect you from getting your ass kicked by another man because there is no particular type of man that beats women.
Feminists protest victim blaming all the time, yet all the time women are told that they “attract” the “type” of man that beats women because of something that happened to them in their childhood, or low self-esteem, or whatever current psychobabble is popular in self-help books and therapists’ offices.
Numbers don’t allow you to hear screams. But it’s pretty hard to ignore a gunshot. Or piles of bodies in the street.
Just imagine, what if every one of those men who try to rape a woman every day caught a bullet instead? Every one. Why, that would be war in the streets, you might think. Well, let’s do the math, shall we?
A woman is raped every minute every day in this country. There are 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day. 60 times 24 equals 1440. That’s 1440 women raped every day.
At this point, you’re either a) shocked, b) cynical, c) numb or d) apathetic. One thousand four hundred and forty women raped every day. Unbelievable. Lies, damn lies, and statistics, it’s gotta be. Doesn’t it?
Only one way to find out, I say. Let’s pass a law, we could call it a cute name like the “Calamity Jane Law” or the “Stagecoach Mary Law.” Let’s allow all women to carry concealed weapons of deadly force. A switchblade, a .22, a bow and arrow, it doesn’t matter. Long as it has the potential to kill, not stun or maim. In the movie The Last Seduction, a woman hiding out from her mobster boyfriend is confronted in her car by one of his hired killers. When he gets in her car, she quickly pulls out a can of mace and sticks it in his face. At the same time, just as quickly he pulls out a pistol and sticks it in hers. Not exactly a big standoff.
How could we justify such a discriminatory law, you might ask, arming women but not men? Well, let’s do some more math: the average man is 5’10” and 175 pounds; the average woman is 5’4” and 145. Xena: Warrior Princess fantasies aside, most of the time, there is no such thing as a fair fight between a man and a woman.
Thousands of deaths of male accused perpetrators at the hands female victims would be considered a society-threatening crisis. With the legal system — which disproportionately targets alleged perpetrators of color — out of the way, the dead bodies will show that most rape and woman beating is intra-cultural: white men do it to white women and Black men do it to Black women. Knowing this, you might think, “Women killing their men—that’s genocide!”
No, what’s genocide is that rape and woman-beating are so common that it’s not even considered big news unless race or some other factor is emphasized to distract the public from seeing the violence as a gender hate crime. For example, during the same week of that infamous Central Park rape of a white woman in 1989, 28 Black and Latina women were raped in New York City, and that wasn’t in the national news every day.
What is genocide is little girls being raped and murdered. Like the little Black girl who was left with her older brother in a Nevada casino at three o’ clock in the morning to be lured into a restroom, raped and strangled while her father gambled the night and his daughter’s life away. The murderer’s buddy was on 60 Minutes saying how he doesn’t feel bad about seeing his friend assault a seven-year-old in the restroom and walking out to let him kill her.
I could go on and on naming women and girls recently raped, beaten, and murdered. We are living in a society–threatening crisis state right now. Women and girls die from and live in fear of male violence every day. The genocide is already going on.
So, let’s up the arms race between the sexes. Let’s bring the war against women out in the open. Let’s start treating rape and battery as the hate crimes against women that they are. Let the shots ring out, let the blood run in the streets. If enough men are killed attempting to rape or beat a woman or a girl, maybe then rape and woman beating will make the national nightly news. Maybe then men will be scared to walk the streets out of fear of women.
It’s time to recognize that we live in a state of a civilization-killing warfare waged against half the population. We sure as hell aren’t living in peace, not with all the violence against women that we accept as normal.
NOTES: According to RAINN, “Every 68 seconds [an] American is sexually assaulted.” Also, “nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States,” according to NCADV. Survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence come in all genders.