This essay was commissioned for The University of Edinburgh's Dangerous Women project which released 365 pieces of new work between International Women's Day 2016 and 2017. More details here.
We live in a dangerous world, and that danger comes from
male violence. It is hardly radical to point this out, as it’s a fact:
governments know it, the police know it, crime reporters know it, judges know
it and victim support workers know it. Statistically, this violence is
perpetrated by men and boys against women, girls, other men and other boys. Statistically,
it is males who rape, traffic, terrorise, buy and sell and rent, harass,
exploit, use and abuse females and sometimes other males. Statistically, it is
men who physically beat and brutalise women and other men.
This abuse is supported by an inescapable network of macho social
and cultural misogyny in which male authority figures with money and power head
up every area, be it politics or the arts, finance or the charity sector,
medicine or academia, law or engineering. Meanwhile, but for some few
exceptions, women are kept in the lower echelons of each organisation and often
paid less for the same work as men, discriminated against, sexually harassed, dismissed
through ageism, punished for becoming mothers and overlooked for promotions.
In a patriarchal society like this, women are punished through
comparison with negative stereotypes, impossible ideals and hypocritical double
standards which sexist men invent and reinforce among themselves to ensure
their own dominance (although many women have absorbed and internalised the
same values): an assertive woman is shrill while her male counterpart is
assertive; a friendly woman is a tease who deserves what is done to her by any men
who abuse her while a friendly man has easy charm; a child-free woman is a
selfish careerist while a new mother is a matronly sap who can’t be trusted to
concentrate at work, whereas a man with kids is a ‘family man’ even if he does
no actual parenting and leaves the childcare labour to the mother or a female
nanny. And so on.
In culture and in the mass media women are ignored,
sidelined or under-represented as writers, directors, artists, experts,
architects, designers, photographers, composers, conductors, panel speakers, whatever
it is. If it involves money, influence, self-expression, the power to influence
images and narratives, to create great spectacles and show the world our
creative vision, we are kept out, whether that’s making films or getting on
best-of lists or prize shortlists or receiving big commissions and exciting
work trips as DJs, as scientists, as academics, as poets, or whatever it might
be. Those who are not ‘lucky’ to be treated like this in full-time, middle
class professional employment are struggling as exploited workers in ‘flexible’
jobs which offer no pension, no stability, no progression and no safeguards.
At the same time, in the home, many men still use women’s
labour as cleaners, cooks, child-raisers, sexual service providers, family
admin organisers and parent-carers. And yet providing all of these free
services for a man who does far less than 50% of all the work does not mean
that a woman will not be beaten, raped, bullied, controlled, deceived or
betrayed by him; two women a week are killed by their male partner or ex
partner. And when a woman is abused, and she speaks about it, she will be told
she is lying. Women are cornered and trapped
in their lives by severe funding cuts which have affected domestic violence,
rape, legal aid, housing, early years education and elderly care charities.
Women are bearing the brunt of a macho government’s sadistic ‘austerity’, where
those at the bottom of society – always women, and in particular women of
colour – are punished again and again and sometimes kept in abusive situations
through lack of a way out, because the Chancellor doesn’t what to tax rich
white chaps like himself.
Yet it is not we who are the liars. Narratives and images
about women in mass culture from films to music videos to adverts do not derive
from reality but are chock full of malicious lies and patronising, belittling
insults. So often, the stories we ingest as part of our daily entertainment are
full of slanders against women, and give us a pantheon of females who represent
everything that sexist men really think about us. At the very best we can hope
to be sexually objectified as a ‘hot’ body to be used and then discarded or a
crying and desperate kidnap victim to be saved. We can be turned into
pornography and masturbated over, or rented and used by the hour to give a man
sexual gratification and a feeling of power and control. We can be patronised
as an infantile and endlessly supportive love interest or pityingly leered over
as a murdered prostitute on a mortuary slab. There is the useless frump, the
nagging wife, the interfering mother in law, the hard-faced police detective,
the petty fusspot, the pathetic yet predatory ‘cougar’. We are either stupid
bimbos to be used then ignored or scheming, dried-up witches to be mocked then
ignored. When our very youthful beauty
fades the true hatred and derision felt for us is revealed.
And at the very worst, we are represented as dangerous women
who will destroy the world out of our irrational malice if we are not stopped. The
succubus, the ugly hag, the sinister crone, the cold bitch who can’t take a
joke, the demonic castrator, the shrill feminist who overreacts to every tiny
thing, the dried-up spinster aunt, the baby-hungry obsessed woman, the demanding
high-maintenance girlfriend, the shallow high-maintenance wife, the ‘psycho’ ex
wife, the scheming harridan, the un-maternal career woman ‘ballbreaker’, the
embittered former beauty queen, the vengeful stalker who’s mad, sad and bad and
lives to emasculate men.
These images bleed out of the arts and culture and are used
to judge and attack all women in public life, especially in politics and
business leadership. Women who aim for power of any kind, in any area, are
represented as ravenously ambitious, selfish, inhuman witches who want to take
something away from men. Actually forget about trying to get power; when a
woman wants justice, basic justice in law, against a man who has harmed her,
and is strong enough to go to the police and even through a court to get it, it
is she who is put on trial, said to be lying, psychologically exposed,
cross-examined and destroyed in front of strangers.
There are many dangers for a woman who dares to claim more
than what is offered to her. More than a life of drudgery and abuse, of being
objectified or belittled or ignored or exploited or undermined or treated as
stupid. More than a world in which women are only tolerated when we can be used,
and where we encounter verbal violence, structural violence or physical
violence when we test the limits set down for us.
But what does it mean to be a truly dangerous woman, in this
dangerous world? Forget about film and TV myths for a moment. In a womanhating,
woman-exploiting, woman-abusing, perpetrator-excusing world, a dangerous woman
is one who points out the obvious. A dangerous woman is a woman who is made,
like all of us, to go through the gauntlet of misogyny all day every day, who
sees perpetrators lionised as pillars of society and victims tortured and
punished, and like the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes, shouts out that
something isn’t quite right and wonders why everyone is colluding with the
illusion. The sheer amount of slander directed at women who do this is simply a
way of deflecting attention from the obvious truth about the perpetrators of
virtually all the violence and abuse in the world. The slander and resistance
are themselves a form of abuse.
You wouldn’t think that words alone could make you a
dangerous woman. In a militarised, violent, capitalistic world individuals are
considered dangerous if they have ammunition of a literal or metaphorical kind:
if they are carrying a gun or have a lot of economic or political power, or if
they have a record of hurting others. Yet if I were to put this article up on
my own site I would immediately receive emails and Tweets from abusive men
enraged by my claims about abusive men. I am only pointing out what is obvious and
ubiquitous and endemic – what is, indeed, on the front pages of news sites
every single day – and yet simply to say it causes them such blistering panic
that they immediately lose their minds and confirm exactly what I am saying. I
have become, in their eyes, a dangerous woman who must be shut up and hounded
out, just for using language to express the truth.
At the very best they would call me mentally stupid or
physically hideous. At medium they would say I am mad, which is sexist men’s
most malicious and longest-standing insult against women. And at worst I would
receive threats of rape and death; these are clever threats, given that men’s
raping of women is endemic and perpetrated with impunity in societies all over
the world, from war zones to university campuses.
That is all it takes to become a dangerous woman. When women
tell the truth about what they have experienced and witnessed, from casual
workplace misogyny to gang rape, men (not all men; just enough for every single
woman commentator on the planet to have experienced it countless times) say
that we are mad. I am certainly mad, as in very angry. And that anger gives me
energy and immense, anarchic power.
You become a dangerous woman when you decide that you’ve had
it, when your anger pushes you out of your silence, out of your head, out of
your room and into the world to express your fury and woe and to begin changing
things. A woman becomes dangerous when she threatens the status quo.
A woman makes herself dangerous, and gains power, when she
throws off the shackles of propriety, feminine decorum and modest silence – all
of which protect perpetrators – and instead opens her mouth and speaks frankly
about what she has gone through, what she’s seen, what she thinks and what she
feels. A woman becomes dangerous when she talks about her mother’s life, her
sister’s life, her daughter’s life. A woman is dangerous when she points out
what is hiding in plain sight. She is dangerous when she speaks the simple
truth about what she has survived. And she is dangerous when she stands with
other women in her words and in her deeds, against abusive men and against the
macho misogyny which oppresses us and makes us feel afraid, with just cause,
even when we are taking the ten minute walk home from the station to our house.
To continue with that image, despite the dangers a woman
senses on that walk home, sometimes a woman is herself considered dangerous
simply for going from A to B. To be out in the world is to claim space and a
woman is dangerous when she claims space. A woman is considered dangerous when
she dares to occupy the workplace, public transport and the street. In all
three of these places sexual harassment by men, insulting casual misogyny by
men and intimidation by men (such as following, hissing, sexual noises, baiting
and outright assault) are endemic. The perpetrators harass us not because they
admire our beauty and long to be friends with us but because they gain a
sadistic enjoyment from our confusion, fear or fury and because, ultimately, they want to drive
us out of these places and back into the home where we supposedly belong,
cleaning up men’s dirt and bringing up men’s babies for free.
A woman is dangerous when she challenges what patriarchal culture
says about us and about other women. A few years back I wrote an essay called Emotional Violence and Social Power. It described in horrific psychological detail how
an industry peer, a feminist, socialist man well-known and well-liked by many,
groomed and sexually exploited me. Ten thousand people have read that article
and many other victims and witnesses got in touch with me; all the witnesses and many of the other victims are well-known in their fields. I learned that he is a compulsive abuser with a long history.
Writing the piece, which was the absolute truth, felt like
slashing a line straight through the female silence and male cronyism that
protected the perpetrator. The piece – just a piece of writing – felt as though had power in
itself, because it was true. It was dangerous, the truth was dangerous, to
a terrifyingly two-faced perpetrator. It was so dangerous that he teamed
up with a male lawyer and together, nightmarishly, they threatened me. There is
nothing more horrific than receiving a scathingly aggressive and sexually
detailed letter from a male stranger in the law profession, in which he stands
shoulder to shoulder with the man who abused you, in full fraternal support and
belief and power and money and misogyny, as if they are longtime friends. They
threatened me because they said I had damaged the perpetrator – because I had
told the truth about him and the truth about him was terrible and damning and
caused decades-long scars. For his victims. It is a mark of the cowardice and
self-pity of narcissistic abusive men that what they fear most is one of their
own victims showing them a mirror; the most dangerous thing they can envisage
is simply the truth about themselves becoming known.
A woman is dangerous when her desire to express her rage and
pain begins to outweigh all other reservations. It is men, not women, who get
hysterical when women tell the truth. Yet there are so many of us, writing
articles like this, that the same old arguments which used to be deployed shut
us up no longer work: the claims that we are mad, or malicious, or mistaken, or
exaggerating.
A dangerous woman holds something in her hands which does not
cost anything but is priceless. When she reveals it openly, the world shakes subtly
on its axis, even though she may not think it has and even if she is destroyed
in the process.
