they still hate us

what's the point of feminist complexities when women and girls are being murdered?

Content note: This piece references physical and sexual violence against women, transphobia, racism, and police brutality.

“And when you look at what they’re saying, how similar these slurs and insults and threats we get actually are, they always sound like they’re speaking to the exact same woman.” - Doyle, 2011

Sometimes it feels like we’ve earned the nuance. Sometimes it feels like we’ve come far enough that we can get down to the nitty gritty under-the-surface elements of feminism. With my friends I discuss how job interviews that require you to champion yourself are at odds with the way women are socialised, we talk about how the standard for criticism of women’s art is lower because of the idea that art by women is inherently feminist and therefore good. We take it to the furthest corners, the unexplored depths. We debate about the complexities of relationships and how your boyfriend earnestly, lovingly asking you what domestic tasks you need help with is still a form of domestic labour. We ask: is Greta Gerwig a real feminist? Should we care? It feels like years since I’ve even explicitly framed something in the context of ‘patriarchy’ because we all know that by now, surely?

I’m not naïve, and I’m not so deep in my echo chamber that I think that’s a realistic standard we can hold our society to. The overt sexism that women face daily is just as prevalent as the insidious, covert sexism I listen to hours-long podcasts unpicking. It’s present at all levels, and it’s highly visible. It’s just a convenient argument for some to claim that we’re past the need for that- of course we all agree that rape is bad, what have you got to complain about? The issue is that when the reality of how far we have to go in terms of the basics (i.e. not murdering women and girls) is too overwhelmingly apparent to ignore, the ‘little’ things feel futile. 

A less-than-advisable activity I sometimes force myself to do is checking the day’s headlines and counting how many of them are about violence against women. It’s a deeply upsetting number, every time. And it renders my current approach to feminism, the topics that I’m still trying to get my head around in my bubble, seemingly pointless. How do I finish my essay on the interpersonal politics of lip filler, or the piece about the relationships between women in music, when there’s so much hurt? One minute I care so deeply about the ‘is it a fit or is she just skinny?’ discourse, the next I feel ridiculous for even thinking it could be important. I know on a surface level that it is, and that it all has a place. But I also know that a baby girl born today will grow up continuing to be unsafe in a lot of ways that my Mum was unsafe as she was growing up, and in a bunch of new ways, too. 

Here’s the thing: as women go, I’m one of the safest women in the world. I’m white, I’m cis, I can afford birth control, I can afford my rent (just about). I won the lottery as far as womanhood is concerned. And I’m violated daily. I’m typing part of this on my phone as I walk home with tears behind my sunglasses, a man shouts something sexual to me from his bike, suddenly I want to vomit. I Google ‘safest countries for women’ and it feels like a game of bingo; it turns out I was catcalled in half of them when I travelled around Europe as a teenager. It’s too much to ask, it seems, for this to be the framing that many cis white women with power might take as their approach- if they feel they’re in danger, how must those without their intersections of privilege, money, and power feel? Instead, championing the safety of those whose place in our society somewhat overlaps with theirs feels like it would be a direct attack.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, who first coined the term intersectionality, is vocally supporting Kamala Harris. Harris has historically been accused of aggressively implementing legal systems that disproportionately affect Black men, in a country whose judicial system is violently, murderously racist. Even the person who held our hands through the explanation of why white feminism was racism in disguise is implanted within a system where countering your own work seems a small price to pay to keep a sexual abuser out of office. We work and read and discuss to figure out how we feel about this. And then, two clicks away on Twitter, Republicans are asking Harris how many dicks she’s going to suck to get into the Oval Office. They’re using AI to generate images of her in an embrace with Jeffrey Epstein, whilst ignoring real photos of Trump with the same man. They don’t have any interest in addressing the shooting of an unarmed Black woman, Sonya Massey, in her own home, as part of a wider problem that needs fixing, they only see the need to defend the police officers who did it. My intention here isn’t to present a thinking-Left and an unintelligent Right, because to dismiss the intelligence of many actors on the Right would be dangerous (note, intelligence here is not synonymous with correctness). But we’re truly forced to confront how many levels this hostility is occurring on, and how many we should reasonably engage with. Is it dismissive of one to engage with the other?

In the UK, white far-right extremists are using the murder of young girls, while they danced in a space designed for young girls to get together and experience joy in, to justify their violence against the Muslim community of Southport. As families, neighbourhoods, a country, sees only grief, some pounce on the opportunity to enact their agenda, and their fantasies of defending what they see to be theirs from the people they desperately want to be a threat. The irony, seemingly obvious from the outside, is that they are themselves part of the threat. What do we expect of a country whose ex-prime minister only claims to care about feminism when it’s to publish slurs against Muslim women. It’s been a couple of years since Spivak described a prevalent tool of racism as “white men saving brown women from brown men”; there’s no doubting that this behaviour is still alive today. 

The same people who are spouting transphobic rhetoric, supposedly in the name of ‘protecting children’ (as if we haven’t heard this before) and defending women’s spaces, are often the first people to, in the same breath, reel off the most misogynistic string of words you’ve heard in recent years. Their voices amplify the women with huge amounts of money who would rather spend it trying to stop trans kids from being allowed to use appropriate pronouns in school than to spend it on tangible protection from the actual threats that women and girls are facing. It would be a huge oversimplification to say that this it’s all the exact same system, but it’s all connected.

The new UK government is going to “halve violence against women and girls”, apparently, except they’re also going to set the protection of trans people back by a couple of decades. How is that going to reduce the violence that children, disproportionately trans children, face? My flatmate marched for trans rights at trans pride with over fifty-thousand people in Central London last weekend. A huge number that doesn’t even include those who missed the memo that the route had changed to avoid a Nazi rally, and those who had to stay home because they didn’t feel safe enough. Somehow, this isn’t deemed newsworthy by the majority of the UK press. 

‘But we were all there,’ she tells me. ‘We were right there.’

It’s not adding up for me. Sometimes I don’t want to hear claims like these, that they’re going to save whatever number of us from violence, because it makes it so explicit to me that we are just numbers, pieces in a game of chess where they protect as long as it serves them and then allow us to be knocked down as collateral when it’s required. Maybe they’re fooling themselves, power mad, into thinking that governmental intervention has more impact than it does, maybe I’m just cynical for not realising the scope of their potential impact. Because it can’t be that easy. I mean that with desperation, because if a single government can halve this pain in one term, the implications are just that no one bothered before. It can’t be that easy.

Either way, I think they’re hypocrites. It would seem that many with power are going to continue to use the idea of protecting women from violence as a tool to justify their oppression of often overlapping groups, and this is directly at odds with useful, impactful change. And every time government officials endorse politicians, institutions, and whole states, whether at home or abroad, who time and time again use their power to further violence against women, often operating along other lines of race and power- or use violence against women as a weapon in itself, because the money we’re sending them to buy actual weapons could never be enough- they show their apathy. 

Ana Mendieta- Tree of Life and Image from Yagul from Silueta series, 1973-77.

We need the core conversations. It’s all too apparent. How do we reckon with the fine details of feminism when we haven’t finished the base coat yet? When there are still people who think women who weren’t assigned female at birth deserve violence, people who think that Palestinian women don’t deserve the same protection from the rape that they buy guns to defend ‘their women’ from. These are causes that need our voices, our attention, and our money urgently. The world doesn’t need me to say that we have to do more to protect the girls we’re raising or we’re going to be in deep trouble. Not to mention the young boys who, if we’re not careful, will be pipelined into a world of inceldom and rape culture that might even be worse that the rhetoric I was surrounded by as a child. But the intricacies can be important too.

We do deserve the nuance. We deserve to speak about every little thing that impacts our experience in the world. Can we trust one another to be fully informed on the lines of racism, classism, other general world issues that our feminism has to take into account? Not yet, clearly. But we can talk about it. And we’re allowed to feel devastated by ad campaigns that champion certain body types, by offhand comments made by celebrities that aren’t as polite as they could be towards women, and we don’t have to feel as though we’re taking up the space that needs (imperatively) to be used to protect women and girls from daily, overt, stomach-turning violence. Mostly, we know the time and place for different discussions. It isn’t too much to expect people to understand several levels of ways in which patriarchy functions at once- if anything, it’s imperative.

I send my boyfriend a fifteen minute voice note about how I think the latest it-boy album is inherently misogynistic, sexualises its own sexism, and is another voice for women to hate their bodies (beat goes hard though, I guess). Then I read the news and cry because more women are being hurt, and I can’t stop crying enough to leave the flat. Was the rant I offloaded earlier meaningless? No, it was and is important. The things we talk about are important. Just because it doesn’t deal with the most pressing, devastating level upon which misogyny operates doesn’t mean it isn’t still real. I can complain about how I think those fucking candles in the shape of naked Instagram models are a scourge with a tone that implies it’s the biggest issue that’s ever crossed my mind, and then I can text my friend to say ‘thank you for being a woman with me’ and run home to hold her close because I can’t bear the thought that anything bad could ever happen to her. It’s all part of it, it’s all relevant.

There’s a common line of argument used by misogynists that where feminism used to be women fighting for the vote and their right to work, to be taken seriously, now it’s just women fighting to be able to wear skimpy clothing and be promiscuous. Apparently those two things are at odds. The idea that this is disrespectful to the women who “died so that we could vote” (something, more and more, that I only hear from sexists trying to belittle women who thing they deserve anything more than being allowed their own bank account) is used to keep women quiet about the things that affect them every day. And the things that affect women every day build up into a persistent rape culture. It’s one of many ways that feminism is manipulated to make inherently sexist arguments seem progressive. For some people, this is the most misogynistic thing they can get away with saying without consequence, but is just the tip of the iceberg of how they actually feel. Which is why we can’t let it be a prevailing, guiding idea.

I see the way that some people talk about women in the public eye and how disproportionately harsh they are towards them, how easy they find it to hate them for their outfit or their accent or their personality, and I don’t know how to explain to them that they hate women. They would never recognise it as that. But they truly do. They still hate us. I can’t imagine how confusing it must be to go your whole life hating women, even if you’re attracted to them, even if you love some of them, even if you are one. I can’t imagine the dissonance of objectifying women your whole life and then bringing a daughter into the world. Honestly, I don’t care. It’s really not my problem. Until it is, I guess.

We can’t forget the manipulation that will continue to be used against us, and we can’t believe them, no matter the woman that they’re talking about. We have to know when our voices are needed the most, and often that’s not for ourselves. We have to keep our standards. We can’t let violence against women become a plot point, we can’t let rape be a trope used for character development, we have to remember that we’re real at every juncture. We have to believe women who say they’ve been victimised, even if we dislike them. We think this is obvious, but time and time again we’re shown that it’s not easy for some people who like to think of themselves as feminists to be consistent. We have to remember what ‘why didn’t she say anything before now’ and ‘she’s making so much money off of this’ and ‘he said, she said’ really mean. They mean that the person you’re talking to doesn’t actually care about keeping girls safe. We can’t forget about the inquests, the accountability left outstanding, and the grief.

We will hold space for all of the women we’ve lost. We won’t forget.

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