Misogyny is actually the title of my latest long-read draft of #GoodFences / #SomethingRottenInTheStateOfPolitics prompted specifically by the recent Afghan / Taliban debacle after a long series of “TERF War” examples.
This isn’t it.
Today’s prompting is the sentencing of Sarah Everard’s killer. Particularly serious from the point of view that if a woman, anyone, can’t trust a genuinely identifiable policeman in an everyday context who can we/she trust. The police and policemen have a lot to answer for here and quite rightly Cressida Dick is being challenged on this.
And it is the trust aspect that is the important feature. Several takes on the “blamelessness” or otherwise of the victim (in the sentencing statement) and on precautions women can and should take to reduce risk and avoid becoming victims. But the focus must be on the males that represent the potential threat – and social / institutional arrangements to minimise this perceived threat, to increase the trust – not on the actions of females (and minors) as victims – aka “victim blaming”.
This has come up several times previously in the TERF War context, with many on the Self-ID (M>F) Trans Ideology activist side of that war, holding that women (and gays and minors) resisting the access of such “Trans” are somehow tarring all Trans with the threat of that ideology and the threat of violence. The fact is most violent attacks on females come from males, even if the number of actual offenders is statistically small amongst men and genuine (more than Self-ID) trans, and that young males are in fact more likely to experience direct physical violent attacks.
It’s a threat that females feel when exposed to males in confining / controlling contexts and it is for males to reduce any perceived as well as any actual threat. Those that scientistically quote the stats of how few males / trans are in fact a threat and that females should somehow “get over it”, completely miss the point. We males (cis or trans) need to care about how females feel.
[Hat tip to Jess Phillips for reminding us all.]
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Tom Chivers take here. [Hat tip Timandra Harkness.]
[And a great tweet I’ve mislaid … along the lines that setting limits along the lines of a group identity is not the same as giving a job rejection to each member of the group. Banning all men from female spaces is not condemning every member of the group “men”. #GoodFences.]