Why won’t we name misogyny as an ideology or a terror threat?
Dr Jess discusses the stabbings in Sydney and why we won’t admit that misogyny is a dangerous ideology
Devastating events unfolded this weekend as 40-year-old Joel Cauchi raged through Bondi Junction Westfield on a Saturday afternoon, stabbing 18 people. So far, the majority of victims,both dead and in critical conditions in hospital, have been women and girls.
I watched the footage in disbelief, the background looking horribly familiar having only been in Bondi Junction Westfield myself a few months back whilst I was delivering book talks with my wife.
NSW police have issued a statement saying that it was ‘obvious’ that Cauchi was targeting and attacking women.
And so, the conversation must be had - what is the ‘ideology’ that drives a man to brandish a long knife, run into a mall, and murder as many women as he can?
Silence.
No one dare speak the ‘M’ word. And in such a horrific incident, the dirty word beginning with M isn’t ‘murder’, it’s ‘misogyny’.
Despite us being literally up to our necks in it, will we ever acknowledge misogyny as an ideology at all?
Other ideologies are readily attributed when crimes of murder and rape are committed. Academic research since the 90s has argued that ideology plays a crucial role in target selection in events like these. Academic or not, people seem more than comfortable with labelling neo-nazi ideologies, right wing ideologies, Islamist ideologies, and racist ideologies when murder, rape, trafficking and terror are committed. Indeed, some public figures publicly posted that Cauchi was motivated by Islamist ideologies. Julia Hartley-Brewer stated that Cauchi was an ‘Islamist terrorist’ with absolutely no evidence, before later apologising.
Even homophobic and transphobic hate crime are readily called out for what they are.
But misogyny? There is no such horror, and no such confidence in calling it what it is. Even women themselves don’t get behind it as an issue that affects them. In fact, I would go as far as saying that many women are misogynistic themselves.
Misogyny is the oldest prejudice in the world. Long before we had white supremacy, classism, transphobia, and homophobia - women and girls were always positioned and treated as inferior. They were the oppressed class. Aristotle wrote, ‘Women are defective, deformed versions of men’ - a quote that historians and philosophers have quietly ignored whilst lauding Aristotle in our universities and political institutions for centuries.
The positioning of women and girls as inferior, stupid, insane sex objects for men has been woven into the very fabric of our global society - so much so, that I’m not sure we are evenready to name it as an ideology, or a legitimate motive for crimes such as murder and rape. Even when Nottingham Police became the first police force to acknowledge misogyny as a form of hate crime, nothing really came of it. Most police forces I teach don’t see the massive rates of domestic violenceor sexual violence as related to misogyny. When I show them the connection, they seem shocked. Frankly, they are fighting a crime they don’t even understand.
And yet, the signs of this ideology are all around us. We have an uprising of incel culture, members of the elite abusing women and girls, misogynistic influencers trafficking women, overt public misogyny, a hatred of the #MeToo movement, increasing sexual and domestic violence rates.
It fascinates me that we can clearly point out a racist, antisemitic or a homophobic attack - but when a man deliberately and exclusively murders or rapes women and girls, the discussion of misogyny being the prime motivator is muted.
Is everything an ideology except misogyny, then? Is the hatred of women and girls so accepted that it cannot even be framed as an ideology?
If a man deliberately walks into a mall and targets ethnic minorities and he is shot on sight, we (probably accurately) assume that those innocent people were murdered because of his beliefs, values and hatred for that group of humans. But if a man walks into a mall and targets women and girls, which ideology underpins that motivation? None?
Is it just random? Unpredictable? Unrelated? Unpreventable?
A mental illness, even?
Anything but name the problem, it seems.
Interestingly, I have noticed that when white men kill women, the first explanation offered is their mental health. They had a hard childhood. They were depressed. They had no social skills. They were suffering from some ‘mental illness’ that is not even remotely correlated to perpetrating murder or rape.
Rather than us addressing wider systemic and social hatred of women and girls in a misogynistic world, we point to something internal and individual – psychiatric conditions. We claim they must have been schizophrenic, or bipolar, or sociopathic. And for the most part, that suits us. It means that we don’t ever have to address the sheer scale and influence of misogyny around us. We conclude that they were mentally ill monsters, and we move on.
The silence around misogyny as an ideology worries me. I regularly teach about misogyny as an ideology and anunconscious bias in police forces, military, and large institutions, and what I know is this: we cannot address misogyny if we cannot name it. Most professionals I work with can’t even pronounce it. Or spell it.
It does make me wonder whether this issue stems from us still not seeing women as a class worthy of even naming and addressing their oppression properly.
We cannot make progress whilst we are hiding from the truth. Women and girls have been hated by men and boys for centuries.
If misogyny fuelled him, I am glad that the last thing Cauchi saw before he died was a strong, brave woman taking him out.
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Misogyny - aka male hatred/male contempt for women and girls because our sex is female is centuries old and remains invisible because of men's male supremacist system. Radical feminists long ago critiqued and analysed how and why men as a group and individually believe their sex is the only default human one so therefore males cannot inflict pain or violence on us so-called 'non humans/non men!'
Racism and homophobia affect men too so it is assumed to be real whereas misogyny, which means male hatred/male contempt for women affects only women - hence it is not real or important to the women hating males!
Yes many women have internalised and accepted that male hatred/male contempt for women is okay but these women mistakenly believe parotting male hatred will somehow make them safe from male violence but reality is it does not! Note too women did not create male hatred for women - men did in order to justify and maintain male oppression over all women and girls.
This latest incident of male violence against women because our sex is female is once again ignored by the men because they are terrified - yes terrified of having their male beliefs, their male sex rights critiqued and questioned by women. Women according to men only exist to serve them and this works very well because men created their male supremacist system in order to reinforce naturalise male oppression over all women and girls.
Now once again men and their male supremacist system are eroding/destroying the few fundamental rights radical feminists campaigned for decades ago!
NAME IT!!! I am so proud of you and I do not know you!!! Fuck yea!!! Women unite!!!