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Instead of blaming the victim, others who expressed himpathy with Turner tried to erase Miller from the story—an act of “herasure,” as I call it.
Erasure is a form of oppression, the refusal to see.8
Himpathy imaginatively transforms presumptively brutal murders into understandable acts of passion or, alternatively, warranted desperation. And it imaginatively turns other crimes, such as rape, into mere misunderstandings and alcohol-fueled mishaps.
When it comes to himpathy, herasure, and victim blaming, there’s no shortage of possibilities. And so we see that rape involves so much more than individual bad apples. It involves bad actors who are enabled, protected, and even fostered by a himpathetic social system.
“exceptional clearance.”
this classification applies, or is meant to apply, only to cases where “you know the crime, you’re able to prove a crime occurred. You have a victim, you know where the person is and who they are. And either the prosecutor doesn’t want to prosecute or the victim doesn’t want to go forward with the case.”25 A
Meanwhile, many cities and counties boast of high clearance rates, making no distinction between cases that actually resulted in an arrest and those cleared via exceptional means. Exceptional clearances thus threaten to skew public perception with regard to police efficacy.
Another sobering reality: of the rape kits that had previously gone untested, some 86 percent of the victims were people of color—primarily girls and women.
“You’re not going to find too many blond-haired, blue-eyed white women [with untested kits]….Their kits
are treated differently, their cases are solved….Race is at the center of this in many ways as well, unfortunately; we know that a...
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we regard certain men as entitled to take sex from certain women. A white man who is in a relationship with an equally or less privileged woman, or who was once in such a relationship, is often deemed sexually entitled to “have” her.31 This is especially likely to be the case until she is otherwise spoken for—by another no less privileged man, not a woman or a man of color, at least typically. The
For girls and women who are marginalized in multiple ways—in being Black, trans, or disabled, among other possibilities—the proportion of men who may rape them with impunity tends to be so large as to render their rape kit not worth testing.
Statistics from RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, suggest that fewer than 0.6 percent of rapes will result in the rapist’s incarceration.36 This
Recall from the introductory chapter that I take misogyny to be the hostility girls and women face, due to patriarchal forces, rather than the hostility men feel, deep down in their hearts.
Given this, it seems clear that the sexual offenses perpetrated by (typically, adolescent) boys against girls count as misogyny.
Another possibility: something has changed about the perpetrators. The obvious factor is that they have gotten older, making it easier for people to cast them as “dirty old men”—albeit a more powerful variant of the ageist cultural trope, rather than a more pathetic figure. Notably, older men also tend to be less useful than young earners from the perspective of late-stage capitalism; their sell-by date is approaching. And so, in some such cases, they are more disposable than their younger counterparts.
As we’ve seen, misogyny need not target girls and women universally; it often singles out those who are “bad” by the lights of patriarchal norms and expectations, and punishes them for their misdeeds, be these real or apparent.
There is ample room in my framework to
acknowledge the obvious fact that misogyny can target or victimize almost any girl or woman, regardless of her indi...
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Finally, it bears mentioning that misogynistic social structures may have a reach that vastly exceeds their aim, and thus may punish a vast swath of women, beyond the intended or first-line targets.
And the first rule of misogyny is that you do not complain about such mistreatment.
In the most egregious instances, women will effectively be punished for being, and claiming to be, the victims of misogyny.
And so we see that, for boys and men—especially those endowed with privilege—being held accountable for misogynistic behavior is often the exception, not the rule, even in rape cases. Meanwhile, for many girls and women, particularly those who are oppressed along other axes—race, class, sexuality, and disability, for starters—not only does their rapist or abuser often go unpunished; the women themselves may be punished for protesting this injustice.48
Why, and how, do we regard many men’s potentially hurt feelings as so important, so sacrosanct? And, relatedly, why do we regard women as so responsible for protecting and ministering to them?
when women do minister to men’s hurt feelings, they tend to be rewarded. And when they do not, they are liable to be punished.
Grace probably feared much the same thing the fictitious Margot did: being deemed rude, even a “bitch,” by deflating a man’s sexual ego.
Why would a woman take such drastic actions—acting against her own will in such a fundamental way—simply to avoid this seemingly trifling social consequence? But we know from social and moral psychology that people often do, as a matter of fact, go to great lengths to avoid disrupting a social situation in which their behavior is culturally scripted—especially when it is prescribed or even suggested by some kind of authority figure.
The lesson of the Milgram experiments is not only what people are prepared to do to others, under such conditions. It is also about what they are prepared to do despite themselves, given such a setup.
It’s not that Gutierrez’s no meant yes to Weinstein, exactly; it’s that it meant nothing—it merely being his cue to keep asking, prompting, needling.
But this story goes to show just how difficult it can be for a woman to resist a sense of male sexual entitlement that she has internalized, on his behalf. “How do you assert your agency when its price is the pain of others?” the author asks. At the time of writing, I have no real answer to this question.
“all the feminist texts I had read could not drown out what I had absorbed from society and popular culture: that it was my duty to satisfy my husband, regardless of my own feelings.”
estrangement—a woman may experience intense guilt and shame for saying no to the men who feel entitled not just to sex but to her eager consent and participation.
True, the consensual/nonconsensual distinction has come to mark the line between legal and criminal sex acts, by default if
not by design. But there is more to ethical sex than merely not doing something criminal; the same goes for most areas of human life and moral conduct.
Hence this particular form of internalized misogyny: the shame and guilt women often feel for not protecting a man who mistreats us. We do not want to hurt him or let him down; we want to be a good girl.
When the medical profession systematically denies the existence of black women’s pain, underdiagnoses our pain, refuses to alleviate or treat our pain, healthcare marks us as incompetent bureaucratic subjects.12
one is marked as incompetent, then one’s pain is liable to be taken far less seriously. Women in general, and Black women in particular, routinely encounter medical professionals who regard them as hysterical, and subsequently treat their pain with skepticism.
Female chronic pain patients were hence likelier to receive a diagnosis of “histrionic disorder” (defined by “excessive” emotionality and attention-seeking behavior) than were their male counterparts.16
Samulowitz and her colleagues found a particular unwillingness on the part of medical professionals to believe women’s pain reports for conditions without obvious physiological markers, such as fibromyalgia (which predominantly affects women).
But despite its popularity, the notion that boys and men are comparatively stoical and inexpressive about their pain does not appear to have a robust empirical basis.
However, as the researchers go on to point out, most of these studies are not comparative: they do not show that men are more reluctant than their female counterparts to seek help.23
“there is still a dangerous (often implicit) tendency to assume that, if men employ a public reluctance to seek help as one important way of demonstrating their masculinity, then this must necessarily suggest that women are not reluctant to seek help.”
As men’s “under-usage” of the health care system is constructed as a social problem, there is a danger that a contrasting presumption that women “overuse” health care, consulting sooner and more often, sometimes for trivial symptoms which are self-limiting or amenable to self-management, is reinforced.25
This hypothesis is strengthened by evidence that people take male cries of pain more seriously than female ones long before socialization could possibly render boys hesitant to fully express their pain states. Two
This suggests that the documented tendency to perceive boys’ pain cries as indicating greater pain is merely reflective of gender bias.
Or do we regard them as more stoical because, at least in many settings, we tend to take their pain more seriously? The latter hypothesis is also bolstered by evidence that, when women are in pain, they are more likely than men to continue to perform household labor and family duties. Indeed, “an overload of responsibility for family, work, household, their pain, and their wellbeing seemed to be an obstacle for recovery for women with pain,” researchers observed recently.
men may exhibit stoicism largely in certain contexts—for example, in front of other male peers or in certain hypermasculine, competitive settings. Around women and others who care for them, it may be a different story.
When girls and women complain of pain, they are liable to be dismissed, as the above research shows. The same plausibly holds for non-binary people, as well as many of the men who are not privileged, in terms of race, disability, sexuality, or class, among myriad other social factors. And, of course, for women who are subject to multiple, compounding forms of oppression on such bases, the situation is often far worse than for women who are privileged along these axes.
The above studies suggest that when women try to testify to their pain, they are routinely dismissed by the medical establishment on both of these bases—impugned as incompetent and hysterical, on the one hand, or as dishonest malingerers, on the other. And these injustices are often vastly worse—sometimes not merely in degree but in kind—for women who are multiply marginalized, because they are Black, queer, trans, and/or disabled.
This is misogynoir, to use a term coined by Black