Why Aren't We Shocked?
By Bob Herbert
Published: October 16, 2006 (NYT)
"Who needs a brain when you have these?"-- message on an Abercrombie &
Fitch T-shirt for young women
In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania
and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of
their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately
attacked only the girls.
Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was
killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.
In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little
was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a
gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of
race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the
white kids. Or only the Jews.
There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have
first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to
eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls
for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for
what it really was: a hate crime.
None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have
become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny
that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories
about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples
of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling
aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing
happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.
The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so
pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability
to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown
no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show
their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier
shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a
competitor. The text asks, "When was the last time you got screwed?"
An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman's face with the
lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn
video.
We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on
women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most
sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated
by that violence. We've been watching the sexualized image of the
murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead.
Her mother is dead. And we're still watching the video of this poor
child prancing in lipstick and high heels.
What have we learned since then? That there's big money to be made
from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a
misogynistic culture, it's never too early to drill into the minds of
girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability
to please men sexually.
A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so
in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is
far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We're all implicated
in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and
girls is linked at its core to the wider society's casual willingness
to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as
sexual vessels -- objects -- and never, ever as the equals of men.
"Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible," said Taina
Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women's advocacy group Equality
Now.
That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of
pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream
America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old
days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion
mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being beaten and
sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like "Ravished Bride" and
"Rough Sex -- Where Whores Get Owned."
Then, of course, there's gangsta rap, and the video games where the
players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp
culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was "It's Hard Out
Here for a Pimp"), and on and on.
You're deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It's all
part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest
extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in
normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.