On Violence and On Violence Against Women Read online

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  For Braham Murray

  1943–2018

  INTRODUCTION

  ON VIOLENCE AND ON VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

  The evil that is in the world almost always stems from ignorance […] the most hopeless vice being ignorance which believes it knows everything and therefore grants itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind and there is no true kindness or loving and being loved without the utmost far-reaching vision.

  ALBERT CAMUS, THE PLAGUE, 1947*

  We’re going to tackle the virus, but tackle it like fucking men.

  JAIR BOLSONARO, PRESIDENT OF BRAZIL, PUBLIC STATEMENT ON COVID-19, 30 MARCH 2020

  It is a truism to say that everyone knows violence when they see it, but if one thing has become clear over the past decade it is that the most prevalent, insidious forms of violence are those that cannot be seen. A group of identical-looking white men in dark suits are photographed as their president signs an executive order banning US state funding to groups anywhere in the world offering abortion or abortion counselling.1 The passing of this ‘Global Gag Rule’ in January 2017 effectively inaugurated the Trump presidency. The ruling means an increase in deaths by illegal abortion for thousands of women throughout the developing world. Its effects are as cruel as they are precise. No non-governmental organisation (NGO) in receipt of US funds can henceforth accept non-US support, or lobby governments across the world, on behalf of the right to abortion. A run of abortion bans followed in conservative Republican-held US states. In November 2019, Ohio introduced to the state legislature a bill which included the requirement that in cases of ectopic pregnancy, doctors must reimplant the embryo into the woman’s uterus or face a charge of ‘abortion murder’ (ectopic pregnancy can be fatal to the mother and no such procedure exists in medical science).2 At a talk in London in June 2019, Kate Gilmore, the UN deputy commissioner for human rights, described US policy on abortion as a form of extremist hate that amounts to the torture of women. ‘We have not called it out in the same way we have other forms of extremist hate,’ she stated, ‘but this is gender-based violence against women, no question.’3 The resurgence of hate-fuelled populism has become a commonplace of the twenty-first century. But it is perhaps less common to hear extremist hate, notably against women, being named so openly as the driver of the supreme legal machinery of the West.

  Judging by that original photograph – which has become iconic of twenty-first-century manhood in power – the White House officials might just as well have been watching the president sign off on anything. They looked as bland as they were ruthless, mildly complacent and bored. No shadow across their brow, no steely glint in the eye or pursing of the lips to suggest that their actions were fuelled by hatred. Doubtless, they believed that their motives were pure, that they were saving the lives of the unborn. It is a characteristic of such mostly male violence – ‘violence regnant’, as it might be termed, since it represents and is borne by the apparatus of state – that it always presents itself as defending the rights of the innocent. These men are killers. But their murderousness is invisible – to the world (illegal abortions belong to the backstreets) and to themselves. Not even in their wildest dreams, I would imagine, does it cross their minds that their decisions might be fuelled by the desire to inflict pain. Neither the nature nor the consequences of their actions is a reality they need trouble themselves about. With their hands lightly clasped or hanging loose by their sides, what they convey is vacuous ease. Above all, they brook no argument. Their identikit posture allows no sliver of dissent (not amongst themselves, not inside their own heads). It is the central premise of this book that violence in our time thrives on a form of mental blindness. Like a hothouse plant, it flourishes under the heady steam of its own unstoppable conviction.

  I start with this moment because it stands as one of the clearest illustrations of the rift between act and understanding, between impulse and self-knowledge, which for me lies at the core of so much violence. We can name this male violence against women, as the UN commissioner did without reserve, but men are not the only human subjects capable of embodying it. Women throughout history have wrapped themselves in the mantle of state power. And men are also the victims of violence – the most prolific serial rapist in UK history, sentenced to life in January 2020, had preyed consistently upon vulnerable young, heterosexual men.4 But, in response to the crisis of the hour, the increasing visibility of gender-based violence, this book tilts towards male violence against women, and towards one deadly mix in particular: the link between the ability to inflict untold damage and a willed distortion – whether conscious or unconscious – in the field of vision. Violence is a form of entitlement. Unlike privilege – which can be checked with a mere gesture, as in ‘check your privilege’, and then left at the door – entitlement goes deeper and at the same time is more slippery to grasp. As if hovering in the ether, it relies for its persistence on a refusal to acknowledge that it is even there.

  To take another iconic moment of the last few years: Prince Andrew’s infamous BBC television interview of November 2019, when he tried to explain that his visit to the home of child trafficker and abuser Jeffrey Epstein in 2010, barely months after Epstein’s conviction for sexual assault, arose from his tendency to be too ‘honourable’ (staying with a convicted sex offender was the ‘honourable’ thing to do). He was floundering in the dark. His denials that he had ever met or had sex with Virginia Giuffre, formerly Roberts, who states that she was coerced into sex with him when she was a seventeen-year-old girl, were the subject of ridicule. It was an extraordinary display of blindness: to the young women victims, trafficked by Epstein – allegedly with the support of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now awaiting trial – not one of whom got a single mention; to the self-defeating farce of his own case (unlike Oedipus, his blindness was atoning for nothing). But he was also revealing a chilling truth, which I suspect played its part in the speed with which he was summoned by the Queen and dismissed from his royal duties without ceremony, despite the fact that he is reputed to be her favourite child. Honour, here in its royal incarnation, revealed its true colours as the right to violence with impunity (in the UK any investigation into Epstein has been summarily dropped). For that very reason Virginia Woolf warned women in the 1930s not to be tempted by the panoply of power and the trappings of national honour which would suck them into war.5 But the shiftiness is not an afterthought. It is hardwired into the whole process, the chief means whereby entitlement boasts its invincibility and hides its true nature from itself.

  * * *

  In one of his best-known formulas, Freud wrote of ‘His Majesty the Baby’, by which he meant the will to perfection and the burden of adoration which parents invest in their child. Narcissism starts with the belief that the whole world is at your feet, there solely for you to manipulate
. Beautifully self-serving, its legacy is potentially fatal – as in the myth of Narcissus, who drowned in his own reflection in a pool – since it makes it well-nigh impossible for the human subject to see or love anyone other than themselves. Aggressivity is therefore its consequence, as the child struggles with the mother or whoever takes her place against the dawning recognition that they are as helpless as they are dependent on others to survive. ‘Every injury to our almighty and autocratic ego’, Freud writes in his essays on war and death, ‘is at bottom a crime of lèse-majesté’ (in the unconscious we are all royalty).6 But for those at the top of the social pecking order, narcissism mutates, not into loss, not into something you have at least partly to relinquish, but into an accursed gift, one which too easily leads to violence. No human, however powerful, is spared confrontation with the limits of their own power, with those realms, in the words of Hannah Arendt, ‘in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy’.7 Arendt was writing in the 1950s about the forms of murderous totalitarianism that had spread over the earth, but her prescient words are no less relevant now, when dictatorships are on the rise, we face the destruction of the planet, black men are being shot on the streets of America, and the rates of death from austerity, rampant inequality and impoverishment are increasing by the day. When the pandemic started to break across the globe from the end of 2019, it soon became clear that one of its most striking features would be the way it accentuates the racial and economic fault lines of the world – from the fact that BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) citizens in the UK are four times more likely than whites to die of Covid-19, to the killing of George Floyd which, mid-pandemic, repeated and underscored a historic context of violence. At the same time, the conduct of dictators and would-be dictators (or close) – Bolsonaro, Trump, Erdoğan – in their boastful and death-dealing defiance of the virus, has given Arendt’s idea of ‘impotent bigness’ a whole new, chilling dimension. Her concept will reappear in what follows as one of her most eloquent and suggestive (Arendt shot into the US bestsellers list on the election of Trump in November 2016).

  Who decides what is called out as violence? Who determines the forms of violence we are allowed, and permit ourselves, to see? Not naming violence – its often undercover path of destruction, its random disposal of the bodies it needs and does not need – is one of the ways that capitalism has always preserved and perpetuated itself.8 In one of her sharpest insights and most trenchant ripostes, socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg cautioned against the charge that the 1905 Russian Revolution had spilt blood by pointing out that the level of suffering was nothing compared with the indiscriminate, mostly unremarked, cutting down of lives by the brute machinery of capital which had flourished up to then. ‘Abroad the picture created of the Russian Revolution is that of an enormous blood-bath, with all the unspeakable suffering of the people without a single ray of light,’ she stated at a rally in Mannheim in 1906. ‘The suffering during the revolution is a mere nothing compared to what the Russian people had to put up with before the revolution under so-called quiet conditions.’9 She then listed hunger, scurvy and the thousands of workers killed in the factories without attracting the attention of the statisticians. ‘Quiet conditions’ is key – she is referring to the skill with which capital cloaks its crimes.

  In January 2019, Conservative ministers in the UK recommended that grant allocations to local authorities no longer be weighted to reflect the higher costs of deprivation and poverty so that money could be redirected to the more affluent Tory shires (a move variously described as a ‘brutal political stitch-up’ and ‘an act of war’).10 These moments of violence move silently, as do the women today who are so often the most affected: threatened by Brexit with the loss of equality and human rights protection, including employment rights and funding for women’s services, notably in relation to sexual violence where the level of reporting amongst survivors is around fifteen per cent, with prosecutions falling; or forced into sex work as a result of the Universal Credit system, part of a Conservative overhaul of benefits for people on low household income which is now acknowledged as catastrophic for the most socially vulnerable (six previous benefits rolled into one, with payment delays threatening many with destitution). When Iain Duncan Smith, architect of the policy, was knighted in the 2020 New Year’s Honours List, 237,000 people signed a petition objecting to the award for a man ‘responsible for some of the cruellest, most extreme welfare reforms this country has ever seen’.11 The Department for Work and Pensions denies any link between the new credit system and survival sex, dismissing the tales of women as ‘merely anecdotal’.12

  Today the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has never been so high. From the time of the Conservative government’s first election in 2010 (in coalition) up to 2020, tax cuts for the rich have been accompanied by the slashing of public spending in the UK. As a direct consequence, thousands of people were left to die on beds in the corridors of NHS hospitals over the three years from 2016 to 2019.13 It is generally recognised that the spending ‘free-for-all’ inaugurated by Boris Johnson after his 2019 election victory is intended to secure a further electoral term but will have no effect on the basic gulf between the rich and the dispossessed (the monies released for the NHS are a fraction of what is needed). Nor is there any confidence that the flurry of NHS spending brought on a year later by the pandemic will be significantly sustained. The pay increase announced in July 2020 for NHS staff excludes nurses; there is no increase mooted for workers in care homes. Meanwhile, Johnson refuses to sack Robert Jenrick, his minister for housing, communities and local government, despite troubling allegations of corruption in his dealings with the former porn baron, publisher and property magnate Richard Desmond, who boasts that Johnson promised to change the gambling rules on his behalf.14

  Why, I once asked someone whose opinion I valued, do millionaires like Richard Branson, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch go on accumulating past the point at which their riches could possibly serve any tangible, let alone benign, purpose? His reply was as instant as it was illuminating: because they only feel powerful in the act, only in the very moment when they accumulate; and because they cannot take their wealth with them when they die. For Arendt, such grandiose, ultimately self-defeating behaviour would fall under the rubric of the ‘impotence of bigness’, words which might help explain, for example, why the level of sexual abuse in Hollywood and in the corridors of Westminster is so high and persistent – as we will see, the public fight against sexual harassment in the US and UK has significantly increased awareness, but we cannot be sure of its long-term effects. These places are full of men who have been led to believe they rule their domain, but who somewhere know they are deluded, since even the wildest success, the most obscene wealth, does not spare anyone from potential humiliation, or from the perils of life and death, although it can cushion you for a while. Abuse is the sharpest means, the one most readily to hand, to repudiate such knowledge with hatred.

  This book is not exhaustive. It makes no claim to cover violence in all its forms or violence everywhere. Its focus is mainly on male violence. But it is central to my argument that the masculinity enjoined on all men, and paraded by so many, is a fraud. Throughout, I take my distance from radical feminism, notably of the influential school of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, which sees violence as the unadulterated and never-failing expression of male sexuality and power, a self-defeating argument if ever there was one (if true, then men will rule the world for ever).15 Instead of which, it is crucial for me that, even while calling out masculinity in its worst guise, we allow to individual men the potential gap between maleness and the infinite complexity of the human mind. How can we as feminists make that gap the beating heart of women’s fight against oppression, against the stultifying ideology of what women are meant to be, and not allow the same internal breathing space to men? Surely it is on the ability of all of us to stop, think and reje
ct the most deadly requisite behaviours that our chance of a better world relies? No man comfortably possesses masculinity (any more than, other than by killing, one person is in total possession of anyone else). Indeed such mastery is the very delusion which underpins the deranged and most highly prized version of masculinity on offer. Prowess is a lie, as every inch of mortal flesh bears witness. But like all lies, in order to be believed, it has to be endlessly repeated.

  One of the most striking aspects of the saga of Hollywood producer and sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein, as told by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey who broke the story in the New York Times, is that he seems to have been at least as keen on the slow burn of coercion and resistance, which would sometimes go on for hours, as on any act of so-called consummation. Rowena Chiu, for example, describes how, shortly after being hired as his assistant, she endured four hours of threats, cajoling and bribes. At the end, ‘He parted her legs, and told her that with one single thrust it would all be over.’16 She managed to get out of the room. (What exactly, we might ask, was in it for him?) Emily Nestor, a temporary receptionist in Weinstein’s Los Angeles office, described him as ‘very persistent and focused, though she kept saying no for over an hour’. (Nestor chose not to file a complaint so these words come from a first-hand account by someone in whom she confided.17) Clearly, for Weinstein, the revulsion he provoked was a core component of his pleasure, which is not to say that he did not also wish to get his way with these women. ‘If he heard the word “no”,’ commented one of the key witnesses in the February 2020 New York rape trial, who chose not to be named, ‘it was like a trigger.’18 For Zelda Perkins, another assistant who was subjected to his assaults, he was ‘pathologically’ addicted: ‘It was what got him out of bed in the morning.’19