FEMINISM has always been a contested area of politics. Fierce
arguments centre on what it is, and why we need it. The best
definition I know is from Andrea Dworkin: "Feminism is the
political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as
a class." In one elegant sentence, she names both the problem -
male supremacy - and the solution - political action.
Implicit in those 16 words are also the two requirements of the
human heart: love and hope. It is an act of love to notice women.
Women are on display everywhere, of course - naked, for sale, the
coin of the realm in a pornographic culture - but being an object
is the opposite of being human. Noticing the harm that is being
done - insisting that it is harm - starts from love.
Such noticing tends to have an inverse relationship to hope.
When harms against a people are both vicious and everyday, hope
becomes a combat discipline. But, whether grim or glad, hope is
possible only because change is possible. This is the promise of
feminism: as endless as the horrors seem, they could end. We, as a
society, could end them.
ARMED with love and hope, I travelled to London recently for a
conference on male violence and how we might end it. I left the US
still braced against the details that had come out of Ohio: three
women, one six-year-old girl, a basement strung with chains ten
years long.
I arrived in London to news of Mark Bridger's trial: his
catalogue of images of murdered girls, his library of sadistic
child-porn, the stalking that escalated from online to real life.
This meant real death to a perfect promise of a girl named after
spring. Her parents are now condemned to a deep winter of grief;
how they will survive is anyone's guess.
Then there was the long fall of Chevonea Kendall-Bryan, the 13-
year-old who fell to her death from the window of her home, having
suffered sexual bullying. Longer still was the fall from human to
object, through rape, and more rape, landing finally on the
unyielding surface of complete public violation. Does it matter
whether she jumped or fell? Her life was shattered either way.
This is where we stand or fall as a society. We will have to
choose. Right now, our society is choosing to make cruelty normal.
We are choosing saturation in sadism. The choice turns on whether
women count as human.
A few brute facts will answer. Globally, one in three women will
be raped or beaten in her lifetime. Half of all sexual assaults are
committed on girls under 16: might as well start the lesson early.
In the UK, a woman is raped every nine minutes. There are plenty
more numbers, and inside each and every one are the broken shards
where body and soul, self and world, once met.
THE numbers should speak for themselves, but numbers don't
actually speak, of course. They need human voices to carry them.
The result of subordination, though, is always silence. Silence is
what happens when people are turned into objects. Violence will do
that. Sexual violence especially will do that. Sexual violence
against children is a shroud of silence that can take a lifetime to
unwind.
Amnesty International reports that rape is the most traumatic
form of torture. In fact, women who have survived prostitution have
higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than soldiers who
have survived combat, which is to say that the war men are waging
against women is in many ways worse than the wars they inflict on
each other.
If you need convincing, type the word "rape" into Google images.
Or, if you have the stomach and the spiritual stamina, try "torture
porn". What you will see is not entertainment, or sex, or freedom.
What you will see is hell. What you will also see is that men by
the million have been there before you.
WE NEED feminism because, without it, the realities of women's
lives are unspeakable - each woman cut adrift in a hostile, chaotic
sea. Apply feminism, and that chaos snaps into a sharp pattern of
subordination - from the small, daily insults to body and soul, to
the shattering traumas of incest and rape.
The crimes that men commit against women are not done to women
as random individuals: they are done because women belong to a
subordinate class, and they are done to keep women a subordinate
class.
None of this will change unless we face the truth. I wrote above
that every nine minutes a woman is raped. That is hard enough, but
it is not the truth. This is: every nine minutes a man rapes a
woman. And I am left with a human howl of "Why?" After 30 years
spent fighting male violence and pornography, I still have no
answer.
I am a feminist because I think women count as human. But
feminism also insists on the humanity of men: we think that men can
do better. The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday studied 95
societies, and found that almost half were rape-free. It is not
random. It is actually rather straightforward. Rape- free cultures
value co-operation, whereas rape-prone cultures reward competition.
In the former, political and economic power are shared by the
sexes; in the latter, women are dispossessed.
Whereas in the one, the sacred has both female and male aspects,
in the other, God is only ever male. And now we come to it: in
rape-free cultures, anyone can assume positions of ceremonial
importance. In rape-prone cultures, men exclude women from roles of
spiritual intercession.
SOCIAL subordination is like a set of concentric circles. The
innermost is where the worst occurs: the cattle cars, the severed
limbs, the missing girls found as bone fragments and blood stains.
But every circle in the set helps to constrain the people trapped
inside. The outer rings shore up the inner horrors, making them
both normal and invisible.
How can such things happen, we ask in anguish? They can happen
because each successive circle - each institution and social
practice - creates the bull's eye where Chevonea landed and April
will never be found.
We have a choice, as individual men and women, and as a society.
We can keep other humans barricaded inside such atrocities, or we
can bring those barricades down. Either women will finally count as
human, or the rancid pleasures of sadism will continue to rot our
society and our souls. Choose now, before another girl falls, and
another goes missing.
Lierre Keith is the author of six books and a founding
member of Stop Porn Culture (www.lierrekeith.com).