Loading...Although I only have the precedent of one post, I’d like to state for the record that I intend this space to be, above all else, funny. (Cut to no post being funny ever after this.) Today I’m making an exception, because it’s Memorial Day and I’d like to remember the women who have died in the epidemic of violence that seems to be the sacred core of American society.
Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve heard about the UCSB shooter. And I mean that very specifically. You’ve heard about the shooter. We know his name, we’ve read his manifesto (those many pages are the most some people probably will read this year, barring the comment section of YouTube and Buzzfeed captions), we’ve seen his video, we’ve stalked him to the ends of the Interwebs and back. (Somewhere someone has probably made a doge about it, because if there is one thing we’ve learned in the Age of Information, it’s that people are terrible and nothing is sacred.) The Daily Mail, a noble bastion of journalistic integrity, has posted pictures of “the girl who made him do it” in a bikini. As if she had anything to do with someone buying automatic weapons and letting loose in a spray of narcissistic self-indulgence, feeding on fear and pain like only a human really can. I am not giving them a link. They don’t deserve one second of our attention.
The people who do deserve our attention—the dead women, the dead men—are next to faceless and nameless, overshadowed by blond and slutty Everywomen who is so keen to have sex with people who are Not Him. He’s a true gentleman. He’s a Nice Guy. He is Duckie Dale, taken to his logical end. And by god, if this fleshbot made flesh does not up and offer him sex, he’s going to kill everyone. She didn’t, because she is imaginary, but the real people are still really dead.
So now that I’ve proven myself a hypocrite by talking about him, let’s remember the fallen. They are not heroes. They are normal people who should be spending today at barbeques and beach parties. They should be going to class tomorrow.
Katherine Cooper
Veronika Weiss
Cheng Yuan Hong
George Chen
Weihan Wang
Chris Martinez Cooper
I’d also like to remember the 1300 American women who died in the last 365 days at the hand of a domestic partner. We don’t have their pictures, because this is so prevalent as to be unremarkable.
This is rape culture. This is misogyny. This is Not All Men. This is the glass ceiling. This is gender bias. This is “you shouldn’t have been”. This is purity balls. This is The Game. This is under-representation in the media. This is an impossible beauty standard. This is the NRA. This is ‘slut’. This is never using women in medical studies. This is criminalizing abortion. This is Hobby Lobby and birth control. This is street harassment. This is martial rape. This is headless mannequins. This is American Apparel. This is revenge porn.
This is what happens when you treat women as if they are disposable and you treat men as if their gender is normal and woman is abnormal. This is what happens when you teach men that they have a right to women’s bodies. This is what happens when you devalue human life and you teach that power belongs to the person with the biggest stick and and the least empathy. This is what happens when you gut the mental health care system.
I am over it. I am done. I am not making anything easier and I am not backing down. American culture is killing us and I don’t want to die. Join me.
Other thoughts and resources:
The WHO Factsheet on violence against women
Images via powderroom.jezebel.com and cbs.com.