White (hot) Female Rage
(I hesitated to post this today. This isn’t what I sat down to write originally. It was going to be a think piece with links and references, but this morning I changed my mind. This is a little more raw, less nuanced. More authentic. Here’s a little dose of the truth from my perspective.)
There has been so much talk about white male rage and toxic masculinity in my newsfeed. Every day I find new atrocities revealed and the perpetrator is reliably male and most often Caucasian. It was even the subject of an SNL skit a few years ago.
This is five years old, but still relevant.
Around 1 in 3 women have reported being the victim of physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The prevalence of intimate partner violence is not a topic that is widely discussed. Women don’t walk around wearing T-shirts announcing their status of being assaulted by the person they trusted most.
There is a great deal of shame surrounding the experience of being abused.
First, there’s the cognitive dissonance. How do you square the knowledge that the person who you love most in the world, who professes to love you the most, is also the person who is most likely to put your life in danger? How can the person who is most tender, most intimate with your body be the person who also injures you?
Second, who would you tell? If you tell the people who care about you, they will hate him on your behalf, and if you patch things up and stay with him, then they might come to despise you for your failure to save yourself.
I’ve heard other people say the words, “Well, she must like it because she stays with him.” Nobody “likes” it. Maybe she has no means of escape.
Then comes the shame. It must be your fault. He’s repentant, showering you with love. Maybe you can avoid a repeat if only you modify your behavior to appease him. Don’t make him so angry. And that’s exactly what he wants.
I’ve been in abusive relationships. Yes, multiple. I’m a slow learner. I kept thinking I could make things better if only I tried harder. I grew up in an abusive home, so it was ingrained in me that people expressed their feelings by hitting each other, and I was usually the one to get hit. I learned that people who love you also have the right to hurt you. That’s how love works, right? Right? (cue popular meme).
Within those relationships, I’ve been slapped, punched, choked, kicked, twirled around by my arm until my shoulder dislocated, thrown across the room, against a wall, pushed down a flight of stairs, put face-first through a window, plus much more. Every single time, the point of the violence was to control my actions.
Coercive control.
On one notable event, I remember being told by an ex, “Teaching you not to do something is like training the goddamn dog. I’ve got to make it the worst fucking day of your life, so you never do it again.”
Training me like a dog. Like an owned animal. Not a human being. Personal property.
That’s what it boils down to. Men who believe that they are the rightful owners of this world – including our bodies. This becomes evident when a woman becomes pregnant. In some states, the woman ceases to be an independent human being and becomes an incubator for the man’s fetus. A field cultivated by the colonizer who has claimed dominion over her womb.
Gun Violence Now a Leading Threat to Pregnant Women, Study Finds
Pregnant women in the United States are more than twice as likely to be murdered during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth than they are to die from the three main medical causes of maternal death associated with childbirth, research shows.
The majority of the homicides of pregnant women in the U.S. are at the hands of an intimate partner with a firearm, according to an editorial, which reviewed recent research and was published in the medical journal BMJ earlier in October.
“Pregnancy represents a particularly high-risk time for experiencing intimate partner violence,” Dr. Rebecca Lawn, lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard School of Public Health, told ABC News. “While these statistics are shocking, pregnancy-associated homicides are preventable.”
In recent years, especially since the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court, efforts to codify control over female bodies have increased. Not just efforts to undermine access to abortion, birth control, and feminine health, but defunding research into women’s health and reclassifying careers traditionally held by women.
White-hot Female Rage
Women aren’t passively accepting these attacks on our rights. Women are on the front lines of demonstrations against ICE and other efforts to destroy our American way of life. And they are being remarkably effective. Otherwise, why would conservative male media figures and influencers say the ludicrous things I’ve heard recently?
Fox News’ David Marcus says that harassing federal agents “doing their jobs” is “criminal behavior,” and warns that it “got a woman killed.” “What we are seeing across the country as organized gangs of wine moms use Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is not civil disobedience,” Marcus writes. “It isn’t even protest. It’s just crime.”
Marcus also calls these women “cosplaying would-be revolutionaries,” and he asks whether groups of people “training and then executing missions that put law enforcement and the public in harm’s way may, in fact, be criminal conspiracies.”
Organized gangs of wine moms. Seriously? They’ve inexplicably shifted from pushing the fear of vicious Venezuelan gangs taking over cities to (checks notes) gangs of wine moms. Sign me up. You know someone is bringing a charcuterie board, and Susan is making artichoke dip.
Some right-wing commentators have coined a new dehumanizing term for women who are standing up for their rights. The term AWFUL – an acronym for “affluent white female urban liberal”- has begun circulating on platforms such as X. Of course it has been amplified by the king troll over there.
AWFUL. That’s going to be my new band name.
The same men who have been promising to protect the women and children are the ones most likely to kill us. Who is protecting us from them?
Woman are banding together to protect ourselves and others, and the patriarchy is very afraid.
The man who shot Renee Good was afraid, but not in the “fear for my life, self-defense” manner. He was afraid because the balance of power is shifting and no amount of male rage is going to stop it. He didn’t see a human woman in front of him. She was an effigy of all women who stand up to authority. He encapsulated his view of her humanity by referring to her by the same name he probably uses for all the women who refuse to recognize his superiority.
For all the shock expressed at her murder, it doesn’t come as a surprise.
The women are angry. You won’t like us when we’re angry.
This isn’t meant to be male-bashing. There are many, many good men also involved in the fight. They support the women in their lives and around the world.
Don’t give up the good fight. Either we move forward, or we go backward.
Want people to look after the people that are caring trauma from abuse, they are being triggered by the violence in the streets. In abuse you have to find places to hide, live in fear…ICE is triggering this in millions of people.
I know this to be fact!
Take care if people you know that have trauma!
The words "fucking bitch" after he shot her, will never leave my ears. These are not the words of a man afraid. They're the words of a predator. The entitlement so many men feel with female existence, their willingness to neglect us, treat us with lack of care and mindfulness, is the cause of our perpectual rejection of men. Men need to heal in the same way we women dedicate ourselves to healing, and until they do, we will continue to reject their dysfunctions. Second chances aren't in my sphere anymore. I believe they all know exactly how they're behaving and simply don't care.