In all honesty, the last few weeks have been hard to swallow. Anyone who, like me, regularly consumes the news and social media should actually know what I'm talking about.
Firstly, horror stories about violence against women have been omnipresent in the media – to an extent that goes beyond the almost everyday femicides in our country and elsewhere.
September sees the release of the BBC documentary «Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods». In it, 20 women accuse the Harrods owner and billionaire of having sexually assaulted them. Since then, more than 100 other women have come forward alleging that the Harrods owner molested and raped them during his lifetime. He apparently said to Lady Diana, who was with his son Dodi and died with him, when he harassed her: «In the Egyptian tradition, the father comes first.»
In September, Olympic long-distance runner Rebecca Cheptegei dies. Her partner Dickson Ndiema pours petrol over her and sets her on fire. It is the third femicide of a female top runner – not a woman, a top runner! – in Kenya since 2021.
In October, a Swiss man takes his prison release request to the Federal Supreme Court. He had previously confessed to first killing his wife and then dismembering her body with a jigsaw, knife and garden shears and pureeing it with a hand blender. The fact that he apparently thinks he doesn't belong in prison after all this is mind-boggling.
The indictment against Sean Combs aka Puff Daddy (or whatever the hell he's calling himself at the moment) is currently being read out in the USA. The charges include organized extortion, sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. The idol of an entire generation allegedly abused minors for decades and organized rape parties at which the who's who of the music industry is said to have been on the guest list. The industry has collectively remained silent about this and destroyed the lives of countless victims – men and women, nota bene! – destroyed forever.
Meanwhile, in France, a certain Dominique Pélicot is on trial for sedating his wife into unconsciousness for decades and selling her body to dozens of men. There were 83 of them, 50 of whom are in the dock with her husband. Their statements to the judge make my stomach churn. Sex with the unconscious woman was a gift he had received from her husband, says one. Another says he thought she was dead. What many of them have in common is the claim that they didn't know that it was rape, even with the husband's consent.
Thank God my heart has become a little numb over the years – both to male violence and to the reports about it. Like most women, at forty I'm a tough cookie, a seasoned barrel, disillusioned and a little numb. How else could we survive? If I had to list all the discrimination, disrespect and violence that has happened to me over the course of my life because I am a woman: We'd still be here tomorrow!
And yet such reports shake me to my core, because they speak the age-old language of patriarchy with a clarity that I have rarely heard. They reflect an image of women that lacks any empathy and humanity and makes it clear what we women still are in the eyes of many men: Property to be disposed of at will.
Secondly, the reaction of «normal» men to the current reporting on violence against women is really the worst. Instead of finally showing solidarity with us women, feeling our pain and sharing our suffering, most of them reflexively reject any responsibility – in comment columns, in personal conversations, everywhere. I hear sayings like «not everyone is like that» or «get over your hatred of men» every day – usually when I'm expressing my horror at Pélicot or Diddy.
Men: You do realize what's wrong with it, don't you?
If not: I'll explain it to you again, if I really have to.
- The «#NotAllMen» defense is infantile and counterproductive, purely rhetorically speaking. If you don't understand this, imagine if all drivers honked #NotAllCars after another child was run over. Would that help the discussion about safe roads? No? Exactly.
- As long as I'm still talking and not pureeing men in a blender, you have no reason to call me a «man-hater» when I talk about misogyny. Or to put it in the words of author and journalist Birgit Schmid: «A common synonym for men at the moment is ‘monster’. Men commit such serious sexual crimes against women that the conclusion might be obvious: The world would be better without them. The hatred of men has one cause: male violence.»
- I'm well aware that not all men rape women by the dozen, I'm not stupid. Unfortunately, it's almost always been a man in all our lives who has done violence to us. If a woman runs after me in the park at night, I'm not afraid, but if it's a man, I'll make a run for it – for good reason.
And for anyone who still doesn't know what I'm talking about, I have a thought experiment for you. Imagine the following scenario: We lock a few men, a few cameras and a few snakes – poisonous and non-poisonous – together in a Big Brother container. Then we throw away the key, eat salted sticks and mock the hysterical men in their snake panic – after all, not all of them are poisonous. #NotAllSnakes!
For transparency: We first published this text in German on 15.10.2024.
