In 2014, a younger man named Elliot Rodger murdered six folks and injured 14 others, utilizing weapons, knives and his BMW as a weapon. Rodger, who killed himself on the finish of his rampage in Santa Barbara, left behind a manifesto that provided many people an introduction to the misogynistic world of “incels,” sexually pissed off younger males who blame their issues on ladies, and collect on-line in darkish locations to vent.
“There isn’t a creature extra evil and wicked than the human feminine,” Rodger wrote. “Girls are like a plague.”
Somebody quickly created a Fb web page, “Elliot Rodger is an American Hero,” which paid tribute to his “final sacrifice within the battle towards feminazi ideology.” On the time, such misogyny was stunning as a result of it appeared so delinquent, old-fashioned and off the wall. However actually, the tragedy merely tore the lid off a phenomenon as outdated as time. Seems, misogyny is alive, pervasive and as harmful as ever.
A spin by means of latest occasions proves it.
On Monday, a panel of United Nations specialists issued a press release elevating the likelihood that Jeffrey Epstein’s years of trafficking and exploitation of girls and ladies “might moderately meet the authorized threshold of crimes towards humanity.”
The offenses, together with sexual slavery, reproductive violence, enforced disappearance, torture and femicide “have been dedicated towards a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, excessive misogyny and the commodification and dehumanisation of girls and ladies from totally different elements of the world,” the specialists mentioned.
The assertion additionally implicitly rebukes President Trump’s Justice Division for its ham-fisted dealing with of the Epstein recordsdata, which has put survivors vulnerable to “retaliation and stigma.” And in an unsubtle swipe at Trump, the panel additionally writes, “Any suggestion that it’s time to transfer ahead from the ‘Epstein recordsdata’ is unacceptable. It represents a failure of duty in the direction of victims. Resignations of implicated people alone usually are not an ample substitute for legal accountability.”
Accountability could also be elusive in the US, however different international locations take Epstein’s crimes way more critically. On Thursday, the previous Prince Andrew was arrested on suspicion of passing confidential authorities data to Epstein, although, maddeningly, the royal has by no means been charged with a criminal offense referring to intercourse with underage ladies.
The recordsdata themselves completely drip with misogyny.
In electronic mail exchanges, ladies are known as b-words and c-words, their bodily attributes harshly judged. The phrase “pussy” is flung round with abandon by Epstein and his many correspondents. The longevity physician, Peter Attia, for instance, who was employed lately as a contributor by new CBS chief Bari Weiss, joked lewdly in 2016 concerning the dietary points of oral intercourse utilizing, after all, the p-word.
“I concede sexism,” the celebrated linguist Noam Chomsky introduced to Epstein in a 2016 electronic mail.
“We see behind the grand façade normally offered by males who run the planet, in authorities, academia, royalty and enterprise, from presidents to Andrew the previous prince,” wrote The Instances of London columnist Helen Rumbelow after spending two days perusing the recordsdata earlier this month. “We see the distinction between their public distancing and their personal networking. However we additionally see their on a regular basis exchanges making the cogs of the world flip, oiled by porn-saturated woman-hating.”
Rumbelow quotes a be aware that Epstein wrote to himself about an unnamed lady, a “wrinkly outdated hag, simply because she is wealthy she thinks she will speak right down to everybody. Everybody is aware of her husband is f—ing younger russians… nasty c—… baggage of cottage cheese in her pants.”
What a criminal offense, being wrinkly, outdated and feminine.
After which, after all, there’s the gut-wrenching case of Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman who was unwittingly drugged by her husband and raped over 10 years by at the very least 50 strangers in her personal mattress. The crimes have been rooted in what she describes as “millennial-old misogyny.”
At his rape trial, her husband, Dominique Pelicot, testified that “I wished to power an insubmissive lady into submission.”
Her rapists got here from many walks of life: a nurse, a journalist, a soldier, a jail warden, farmworkers, a grocery store worker, a restaurant supervisor, a software program technician. She was shocked at their selection as she confronted them in court docket, “however they did share one factor,” Pelicot writes in her disturbing new memoir, “a way of entitlement … as a result of energy had all the time been on their facet.”
The violence she endured, explains Pelicot in “A Hymn to Life: Disgrace Has to Change Sides,” “is the grubby reflection of the domination and predatory exercise that also construction our world.”
All these items have been occurring throughout the identical time frame: Rodger’s simmering resentments that led to a grotesque act of violence, Epstein’s rank sexism and crimes towards ladies and Dominique Pelicot’s incomprehensible violation of his spouse.
As we speak, we’ve Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has lengthy been accused of sexual impropriety towards ladies and who doesn’t imagine ladies ought to serve in fight. Tuesday, he elevated the white Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, inviting him to talk at a Pentagon prayer service. Wilson has referred to as the nineteenth Modification, which gave ladies the fitting to vote, a “unhealthy thought,” and promotes a strict patriarchal construction the place ladies should undergo their husbands. (Calling himself a “paleo-Accomplice,” Wilson has additionally argued that chattel slavery produced “real affection between the races.”)
A century in the past, when Our Gang convened the He-Man Girls Haters Membership, it was alleged to be a joke. By 1994, “The Little Rascals” film resurrected the membership. The film’s most quotable line got here from a breakup be aware: “Expensive Darla, I hate your stinking guts. You make me vomit. You’re scum between my toes. Love, Alfalfa.”
Seems, it wasn’t actually a joke then. And it’s not a joke now.
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