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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The hesitancy to name misogyny and violence against women and girls is misogyny in itself. The refusal to actually put a name to the violence we experience is just another extension of the prejudice and oppression we face. It’s violent in the same exact way our abuse is violent.
Australian here. In the same week, a 16yo boy attacked an Assyrian bishop and colleague with a knife, and was charged with terrorism offences within hours of the crime. The boy is brown and Muslim. Both victims are recovering though it could’ve been lethal had churchgoers not disabled the boy. Extremist religious radicalisation is quickly defined as terrorism, but extremist misogynist radicalisation a-la-Cauchi is tossed around as ‘a random attack’ and ‘he must’ve been off his meds’. Cauchi was a white adult Australian. Targeting someone for being a woman is apparently less serious than targeting someone for having a certain religious view/belief. Reframed, patriarchy is the ideology and misogyny/femicide is the political expression of patriarchy. In 2024 thus far, 29 women have been murdered by men, ZERO have been murdered by those deemed ‘terrorists’. But hey Prime Minister Albanese, call an urgent meeting of religious leaders, all men, to discuss solutions to this apparently urgent terrorist threat, but don’t even consider the 9 women murdered by men known to them in the last 18 fucking days and that figure doesn’t include the 5 women murdered by Cauchi, as having any urgency whatsoever. Par for the course. It’s all so fucked up, especially given religion is utilised to MAINTAIN patriarchy in its entirety.