The Mother of All Questions Read online

  ‡ Martin, in 1955 a cofounder of the Daughters of Bilitis, the nation’s first lesbian-rights group, married her partner of fifty-one years, Phyllis Lyon, in February 2004 in the first of San Francisco’s season of same-sex weddings that launched the momentum for marriage equality that culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision.

  An Insurrectionary Year

  (2014)

  I have been waiting all my life for what 2014 has brought. It was a year of feminist insurrection against male violence: a year of mounting refusal to be silent, refusal to let our lives and torments be erased or dismissed. It has not been a harmonious time, but harmony is often purchased by suppressing those with something to say. It was loud, discordant, and maybe transformative, because important things were said—not necessarily new, but said more emphatically, by more of us, and heard as never before.

  It was a watershed year for women, and for feminism, as we refused to accept the pandemic of violence against women—the rape, the murder, the beatings, the harassment on the streets and the threats online. Women’s voices achieved a power that seemed unprecedented, and the whole conversation changed. There were concrete advances—such as California’s “Yes Means Yes” campus sexual consent law—but those changes were a comparatively small consequence of enormous change in the collective consciousness. The problems have not been merely legal—there have been, for example, laws against wife-beating since the nineteenth century, which were rarely enforced until the late 1970s and still can’t halt the epidemic of domestic violence now. The fundamental problem is cultural. And the culture—many cultures, around the world—is beginning to change.

  You can almost think of 2014 as a parody of those little calendars with the flower or the gemstone of the month. January was not for garnets; it was finally talking about online threats, and about Dylan Farrow’s testimony that her adoptive father had molested her when she was seven. The conversation in April was about kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, and a Silicon Valley multimillionaire caught on video battering his girlfriend. May wasn’t emeralds; it was the massacre of six people in Isla Vista, California, by a young misogynist and the birth of #yesallwomen, perhaps the most catalytic in a year of powerful protests online about women and violence.

  September wasn’t tourmaline; it was the release of a videotape that showed the American football player Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée in an elevator, and a renewed public conversation about domestic violence, accompanied by the hashtags #whyileft and #whyistayed. October brought, at last, a substantive conversation about street harassment, and an overwhelming response to the claims of fifteen women that Canada’s most famous radio host, Jian Ghomeshi, had assaulted them.

  Not all the allegations listed above have been proven true. But in some cases crimes that rarely received much coverage, if any—or had been treated as isolated incidents, or dismissed in various ways—were finally being recognized as part of a pattern of violence that constituted a genuine social crisis. Enough women were speaking up and being heard that the old troubles could no longer be dismissed. Thus it is that the circle of who has rights and who is heard widens, and though the two are not quite the same thing, they are inseparable.

  In Wanderlust, my book on the history of walking, I described my own experience as a young woman:

  It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness out of doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wished to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem.

  I was given advice about how to modify or limit my own life—rather than an affirmation that this was wrong and should change.

  It was, and still is, a sort of blame-the-victim framework, this insistence that women modify their presence in public space, or just give up and stay in, rather than that we transform public space (or men) so that women have the right to walk down the street unharassed. The same blame has been applied to women in nearly every situation in which they are attacked by men, as a way of not blaming men. If I’m exhilarated this year that I’ve read more rape trial transcripts; victims’ testimonies; accounts of murders, beatings, and threats; and rape tweets and misogynist comments than in probably all my other years put together, it’s because violence against women is now a public issue. At last.

  Waiting for the watershed

  Why has this issue finally come to the fore? Why has something that’s long been tolerated become intolerable—or rather, why are the people for whom it’s intolerable finally part of the conversation? Why is it possible to talk about what has long been hushed up, glossed over, trivialized, and dismissed? I have been waiting for decades.

  In June 1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found murdered and her ex-husband’s extensive history of battering and stalking her was revealed, I hoped we would have a real conversation about domestic violence and misogyny (which often results in collateral deaths of the target’s friends, family members, coworkers, and others, and is a major factor in mass shootings in the United States). But O. J. Simpson hired a platoon of high-powered lawyers, who made him out to be the victim. Then the racism, corruption, and incompetence of the Los Angeles police and legal system let him off despite a monumental amount of evidence against him. (He was later found responsible for the murders in a civil trial.)

  Throughout the televised trial, which dragged on for almost a year, there was little public discussion of domestic violence. As one advocate said, following the trial:

  There were some juror comments after the verdict that said, “Why were they talking about domestic violence when this is a murder trial?” When I realized the jurors didn’t understand the connection between domestic violence and homicide and didn’t know why domestic violence was being described to them, I realized that we were not doing a good enough job to get people to understand that this is a pretty common outcome.

  Globally, 38 percent of all women murdered are killed by their intimate partners, according to a recent World Health Organization study.

  Four years later, in 1998, the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, brought worldwide attention to homophobia (though whether Shepard’s sexual orientation was a motive in his murder has more recently been questioned). A year before Shepard’s murder, a fifteen-year-old named Daphne Sulk was found dead outside Laramie—nude, bludgeoned, and stabbed seventeen times. A thirty-eight-year-old man who had been her lover (or her molester; she was below the age of consent) was convicted of voluntary manslaughter—not murder—shortly before Shepard’s death. There was no national outrage over Sulk’s murder, nor over the rape and murder of an eight-year-old Laramie girl, Christin Lamb, that summer.

  All three of these deaths were monstrous, but two were barely news: business as usual, like many thousands of other violent crimes against women. If these crimes were addressed at all beyond the inner pages of a newspaper, they were treated as isolated incidents—the crimes of aberrant individuals. There had been titillating coverage of murders of white girls and women, but never the kind of indignation seen this year—the public assertion that this is part of a pattern, and the pattern has to change.

  It’s always something of a mystery why one particular incident becomes the last straw: why the suicide of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia, in late 2010, set off the Arab Spring, rather than another event; why the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, set off months of protests across the United States in a way that previous police killings of young Black men did not. It’s the breaking loose of cumulative tension, the exhaustion of patience, the work of rage at what has been and the hope that there can be, must be, something better. I live in earthquake country, and here we know that the sudden shake-up is preceded by years or decades or centuries of tension. But that doesn’t mean we know when an earthquake will come.

  For violence against women, th
e long silence was ruptured late in 2012 with three stories: the sexual assault by a group of high school boys of an unconscious minor in Steubenville, Ohio; the unprecedented public account by Angie Epifano, a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, of being raped and essentially punished for reporting it, while her assailant went free; and the attack on a young woman on a New Delhi bus, a rape so violent that the victim died of her injuries. Why did the earthquake come when it did? I can see several reasons.

  The world in which these incidents happened had already changed. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of earlier generations, feminist voices on crucial issues have become normal and more or less mainstream. They appear in major newspapers and magazines, not just women’s media or small progressive sites. And that has created a bulwark often able to resist the mischaracterization, trivialization, and silence on issues of concern to women.

  Another factor is the rise of social media. The Internet is a strange place, where trolls, misogynists, and haters run rampant, from 4chan to Reddit to revenge porn sites to the fake indignation and real hate of Gamergate. Twitter has become the world’s most effective delivery system for rape and death threats aimed at silencing and intimidating outspoken women. But at its best, social media is what its users make of it, and from the Arab Spring to this feminist insurgency, activists have created a sort of Greek chorus to the dramas of our lives and world.

  Sometimes at big political demonstrations—against the war in Iraq in early 2003, for example—the thousands of placards with handwritten statements, jokes, and facts, for all their brevity, constitute a cumulative critique that covers a lot of angles. Social media can do the same, building arguments comment by comment, challenging, testing, reinforcing, and circulating the longer arguments in blogs, essays, and reports. It’s like a barn raising for ideas: innumerable people bring their experiences, insights, analysis, new terms, and frameworks. These then become part of the fabric of everyday life, and when that happens, the world has changed. Then, down the road, what was once a radical idea becomes so woven into everyday life that people imagine that it is self-evident and what everyone always knew. But it’s not; it’s the result of a struggle—of ideas and voices, not of violence.

  The most transformative such moment I witnessed this year was after the Isla Vista mass shooting—you remember, the incident in which a young man poisoned by “pickup artist” misogyny and possessed of a sense that all and any women owed him whatever he wanted, and that he had the right to administer collective punishment to the gender, killed six and wounded fourteen before he took his own life. He had set out to massacre members of a sorority but ended up killing anyone in his path, including other men. Many in the mainstream media rushed to assert that this was an isolated incident due to mental illness, and both the strong individual voices and the great collective roar on social media pushed back, hard, to insist that it was part of a pattern of misogynist violence and mass shootings.

  Feminism succeeded in framing the story. A young woman coined the hashtag #yesallwomen and was hounded into silence and invisibility for a while, but what she started was unstoppable. Women began telling their stories of harassment, threats, violence, and fear, reinforced by each others’ voices. Change begins at the margins and moves to the center; social media has made the edges more powerful and the transit from margin to center more swift—or maybe even blurred the distinction, as mainstream media sometimes scurries to catch up to a vibrant public debate in social and alternative media.

  The public conversation about violence against women had begun to change: all of a sudden, the world was talking about how common such violence is and what excuses are made for it, calling out the men who were more concerned with excusing themselves than addressing the violence. (Thus it was that their aggrieved refrain, “Not all men . . . ”

  —as in “not all men are rapists”—mutated into #yesallwomen, as in “Yes, all women have to deal with rape in one way or another.”)

  Many men who took the time to listen to what women were saying—on social media and elsewhere—realized for the first time what women have long endured. And the presence of actively engaged men was another sign of what seems to have been new and transformative this year—which is key, because changing the world for women means changing what is acceptable and admirable among men, where misogynist behavior has long been, in some circles, something to boast about. Some men wrote publicly about their realization of what kinds of hostility and danger women face, and how shocked they were to finally face it themselves. For decades, feminism was supposed to be women’s work, though women can no more mitigate sexism without engaging men than people of color can address racism without the participation of white people.

  After the rules change

  There is no better sign of how changes in the conversation changed the rules in 2014 than the treatment, late in the year, of the allegations against Bill Cosby and the charges against the Canadian radio star Jian Ghomeshi. The two men seemed to think the old rules still applied yet found that the world had changed since they last checked. Watching them try to brush aside the many claims against them was like watching a windup toy that has reached the wall; their wheels spun but they weren’t going anywhere.

  Ghomeshi was fired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for workplace sexual harassment in October 2014. He filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, demanding 55 million Canadian dollars and hired a fancy public relations firm. Most loudly, he issued a preemptive strike against potential accusers with a longwinded, widely circulated Facebook post that claimed, “I’ve been fired from the CBC because of the risk of my private sex life being made public as a result of a campaign of false allegations pursued by a jilted ex-girlfriend and a freelance writer.” He claimed that the writer and the ex-girlfriend were distorting his perfectly consensual sexual activities out of malice, and that he was being attacked for being a sexual minority, a person into sadomasochism. In other words, he was the victim. It backfired.

  The very language raised red flags for some readers, because the framework of viciously vindictive women who just lie to get men into trouble is maybe the tiredest stereotype around. It has been key to the routine discrediting of women who testify that they were assaulted. Ghomeshi’s public gesture pushed the Toronto Star to publish a report based on testimony by four women about activities that were not consensual and not conventionally sexual (though they seemed to excite Ghomeshi). They claimed he had assaulted them, brutally and suddenly. The women withheld their names, because they knew they would be attacked, and their accounts were extensively attacked at first.

  The consequences of going public with allegations are usually unpleasant. Needing to tell your story or wanting to see justice are motives that can override that reluctance. In the Ghomeshi case, more women came forward, five more immediately, then several more after that. Perhaps the most remarkable was respected actress and Royal Canadian Air Force captain Lucy DeCoutere, the first but far from the last to go on the record: “All of a sudden he choked me and slapped me in the face a few times,” she said of a 2003 incident. “It was totally bewildering because I’ve never had anybody slap me in the face before. It’s not a pleasant feeling to be choked and it came out of nowhere. It was unprovoked.” By that time eight women had said they had been throttled and struck, and that the violence was not consensual sex play. By the accounts of these women, Ghomeshi was a man who desired to strangle and club women against their will, and often did.§

  So many assailants believed they would get away with it forever, because their victims lacked voices and credibility, or because the perpetrators could obliterate those voices and that credibility or terrorize them into silence. That the rules have, sometimes, to some extent, changed clearly baffles some of the perpetrators.

  The entitlement to be the one who is heard, believed, and respected has silenced so many women who may never be heard, in so many cases. Because, as these stories come to light, you have to remember how many more neve
r will—in cases where the victims died silent, as they have over generations, or have not yet found an arena in which they dare to come to voice, or have spoken up and only been mocked, shamed, or attacked for so doing. DeCoutere remarked: “The past month has seen a major shift in the conversation about violence against women. It has been an overwhelming and painful time for many people, including myself, but also very inspiring. I hope that victims’ voices continue to be heard and that this is the start of a change that is so desperately needed.”

  The allegations against Cosby had been hovering in the wings for years, and even decades. A 2005 civil trial had gathered fifteen women who charged that he had sexually assaulted them, but the plaintiff settled out of court, and the case received only modest coverage. Most of his alleged victims had remained silent. Barbara Bowman, who reports being drugged and raped by Cosby in 1985, when she was seventeen, tells a typical story:

  A girlfriend took me to a lawyer, but he accused me of making the story up. Their dismissive responses crushed any hope I had of getting help; I was convinced no one would listen to me. That feeling of futility is what ultimately kept me from going to the police. I told friends what had happened, and although they sympathized with me, they were just as helpless to do anything about it. I was a teenager from Denver acting in McDonald’s commercials. He was Bill Cosby: consummate American dad Cliff Huxtable and the Jell-O spokesman. Eventually, I had to move on with my life and my career.

  Most of his alleged victims were young and vulnerable, with a vulnerability compounded by the lack of voice and credibility young women have always had.

  This autumn, standup comic Hannibal Buress called out Cosby on stage: “Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches.” Many complained that it took a man accusing Cosby to trigger a response—but perhaps Buress represented something else, a man who listened to and believed women and thought what happened to them was important. An extended discussion about why women don’t report rapes; about how, as Bowman was, they are discredited, shamed, blamed, put on trial, retraumatized; and about how rarely rapists are convicted had laid the groundwork for people to understand that it was very likely that these women were telling the truth and that the world had given them little reason to try to bear witness earlier.