As a society, weâre not serious about ending violence against women. We pay great lip service to the idea, but we arenât willing to interrogate the ways in which we have accepted gendered violence in our everyday lives.
We teach boys this general message about how theyâre supposed to ârespect womenâ while writing off all behavior that is blatantly disrespectful (and dangerous) toward women as âboys being boys.â It starts young, when every hair pull, pinch, slap, push, and shove boys exact on girls is written off because âboys will be boysâ and thatâs how they flirt. No, thatâs how they hit girls. Any message to the contrary only further perpetuates the idea that all of this is OK.
Then they get older and any time they get into a physical altercation with a girl, we spend more time asking about how they were âprovokedâ than what they should have done instead of putting their hands on a girl.
Then they become adults and the police and lawyers and judges downplay the seriousness of their offenses. And they get to say âthatâs not the person I amâ or âI take full responsibilityâ and voila, theyâre completely absolved.
Where the fuck is the respect?
It should be pretty obvious why this fails, right? If the reason you shouldnât hurt people is because you should ârespectâ them, then the moment someone loses your respect, they become vulnerable to violence from you. Some losses of respect are legitimate (i.e. the person did something very bad and now you donât respect them), some are not (i.e. the person violated gender norms and now you donât respect them), but regardless of what they did, they donât deserve violence.
And some people are never considered ârespectableâ at all, because we donât consciously include them when we say things like ârespect women.â
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
titsay
