When one hears the expression "war on women", I believe they are mostly reminded of the American 2012 election cycle and in that sense the term "war" may be thought to be a hyperbolic exaggeration of legal and cultural conflicts over such things as legal access to abortion and the more general women's health services provided by Planned Parenthood (breast cancer screenings, birth control, etc.), or perhaps of the rhetoric commonly used to describe women and validate sexual violence, or perhaps even simply the problematic ways that women are represented in movies and games. Perhaps it is simply motivational to think of these sexisms as collectively constituting a war? No. One wishes it were only that. One wishes that we lived in a world wherein the term "war on women" could only be motivational hyperbole. Instead though this...
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...is our world. I highlight the Islamic State as an especially pronounced illustration of my point, but it is worth pointing out that none other than
the official government of Syria, the Assad regime, also uses rape, most often (though not exclusively) against women and girls, as a weapon of war in that same conflict in Syria on a substantially wider scale than most of the opposition forces (with the obvious exception of the Islamic State). We could say something similar of the current war going on in Yemen. ALL of the wars we see being fought today are, in many respects, essentially wars between men against women. And, as have we have recently been reminded by the terrorist murder spree in Toronto, Canada that killed 10 (8 women and 2 men) and critically injured another 16, militaristic violence targeting women for being female is hardly confined to the Middle East or the ideological framework of physical jihad or existing police states:
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For those who don't know, Elliot Rodger was that guy who killed six people in a 2014 shooting spree, posting a YouTube video shortly in advance describing his motive as his personal 'involuntary celibacy'. He had not achieved sex with the women he desired, so he decided to lash out at the world by going to a sorority to shoot up the place. He described himself as a "magnificent gentleman". You may not realize it, but Mr. Elliot has many fans and followers online. They are a collection of particularly extreme men's rights activists who call themselves "incels", or "involuntarily celibate". This section of MRActivists contend that sex is a right owed to men by women, that "alpha" females unfairly withhold sex from "beta" males, and that, to remedy this unequal distribution of sexual favors, a revolutionary war is called for. Movement participants describe the aim of such a hypothetical war as, to quote one example I saw from a self-described former "incel" on the CBC Twitter feed, the implementation of a "state distributed girlfriend program", which sounds like something out of The Handmaid's Tale to me. A handful over the years have sought to initiate said war by way of mass killings (most often shootings, but in this case an ISIS-style car attack).
Continuing my creepy comparison to The Handmaid's Tale,
so-called incels often literally describe Elliot and other similarly-motivated mass shooters as saints, referring to Elliot as "Saint Elliot", the Virginia Tech shooter as "Saint Cho", etc. because of their "virgin suicides", framed that way to intentionally mirror Christian ideas surrounding the virgin birth of Jesus. There is currently a debate in the "incel" community as to whether the Parkland school shooter who killed 17 and injured another 14 recently at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, prompting a 2 million-strong national protest for gun control, should also be canonize in some form or fashion as one of their own.
One can find plenty of such communities through such readily accessible venues as the online video game download service Steam.
It's not just a handful of lunatics though who are legitimizing and advancing the ideology of the so-called incel community that sex is a right owed to men by women and/or that perhaps violence in protest of that right being denied is justifiable.
It's also the New York Times! And the Daily Mail! The feminist Internet has reacted to these legitimizations and defenses with rage. (
Typical example.) Frankly, I think that hostile reaction is understandable. When the New York Times, "America's paper of record," and the world as a whole it would seem,
is more offended by Michelle Wolf's comedy routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner than by the mass murder of women just for being female, I think we have a right to be angry. That logical contrast illustrates how completely upside down our priorities are. One cannot tell a hostile joke about the White House Press Secretary for her repeated defenses of wife beaters, child molesters, and of course her own boss who has plenty of accusers of his own, without incurring the wrath of both the conservative and liberal press alike and being disowned and condemned by the White House Correspondents' Association itself in response, but murder a bunch of women at random because you can't get laid and your ideas have to be shared and validated to at least
some degree!
These developments are suited to our times though. We live in a time where we hear a lot about "witch hunts" since the days of Nixon especially, mostly from very powerful men who are somewhat desperate to cover up real crimes. (A certain president of ours is particularly fond of the term at present, as are all those accused of sexual harassment, assault, and rape (er I mean "misconduct", sorry).) Witch hunts are not a legacy for rich and powerful, anti-feminist men to appropriate arbitrarily for their own convenience. Witch hunts were and remain perhaps the most infamous form of warfare against women in Western history. The term refers to a period in Western history in which the property of women was systematically confiscated with support from the Catholic Church and the states they controlled and wherein people, but women in particular, were arrested, convicted by confessions extracted through torture, and executed (often famously by burning) for any display of personal independence (i.e. for being, on any level, what we today would probably call a feminist).
Wars on women are real things is my point. The expression is not simply a euphemism. When people declare them, we should take it seriously.