No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Certainly, we are living in an age in which progress and the attendant backlash that Gilligan cites are extreme. Plenty of men are spewing bigoted, racist, misogynistic rhetoric in manifestos before they kill—Dylann Roof, Elliot Rodger, Alek Minassian. At times our highest leaders in office today seem to normalize these killers’ brand of sexist and racist vitriol, their sense of entitlement. It’s hardly a secret that presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have all been accused of rape (in Jefferson’s case, of course, the accusations have long been confirmed). The difference to me compared to all of these other moments—from Jefferson’s pre-suffrage systemic rape to John Kennedy and Bill Clinton’s serial philandering and even to Donald Trump’s bleating misogyny—is not only that today’s heated rhetoric unleashes, in my view, extreme violence, mostly in the form of mass shootings—but also that such violence is happening at the same time the majority of women are very publicly and very vociferously demanding better. It is no longer assumed that we will endure harassment at work, or assaults on campus, or even endless womanizing from our partners. Women are fighting for more and better laws from our legislators, for more and better treatment from the judiciary and law enforcement. As I write this, thousands of women are marching on the steps of the Supreme Court after a white upper-class man accused of attempted rape has just ascended to the highest co...