Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

"Killers" ... "The Bounty Hunter" ... soon, "Knight and Day" ... "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," from 2005 ... and "Romancing the Stone," from the cultural Stone Ages in 1984. They're all the kind of flicks today called "romaction." All "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang."

As Ann Hornaday writes in a recent review for The Washington Post, "When did romantic comedies go ballistic? Or was it the action movies that went soft?"

"Girls are the new teenage boys," Hornaday notes. We're all juiced on testosterone. We're all, shall we say, less than fully mature as well. That's why all that coed lovin'-and-shootin' go together at the movies today.

What's going on here anyway? I think it has to do with the failure of feminism in the 1970s to achieve its broader aims.

Rewind the tape back to 1963. It was in that year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and set off a movement for women's liberation. By 1972, "women's lib" had gone mainstream. By a two-thirds majority in both houses — yes, such consensus used to be possible — Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. It looked as if equality of the sexes was just around the corner.

It didn't happen.

In 1979, the clock ran out on ratifying ERA. The required three-fourths of states had not passed it in both houses of their legislatures, or passed it and later rescinded it. (The states in blue below never ratified ERA; those in yellow ratified, then rescinded; those in green saw only one house ratify; and those in red ratified ERA in both of their legislative houses. In the end, a total of 35 of the required 38 states had ratified.)

Though the U.S. Congress extended the deadline by 39 months beyond the usual 7-year time frame for ratification of a constitutional amendment, no new states ratified (or rescinded) the amendment during that "overtime" period.

By then we were into the 1980s and the Reagan presidency, and everything turned on a dime. Equality of the sexes, as the "second-wave" feminists of the era had defined it, morphed into a sort of demonic parody of itself.

According to '60s-'70s women's lib, women in the 1950s had been victims of a myth of female passivity; this was Friedan's "feminine mystique." Women's top goal was to be married with children. Women were expected to — and they expected themselves to — submit passively to their husband's aims, whims, and desires in life.

Women's lib did successfully put to rest the idea that women should passively submit to their men. Women started getting more and more forthright — blunt, free-spoken, straight-from-the-shoulder — in their dealings with men. No more shrinking violets, they, in the name of marital harmony.

Here's the odd thing: men responded by getting more combative, not less.

During the ERA era, it had been assumed that men would ratchet back their aggressiveness as women ratcheted up theirs, until the sexes met somewhere in the middle. But, no, it didn't happen that way.

It was as if both sexes were going by an unstated agreement that, whatever happened to gender roles in the larger culture, the erstwhile relationship between men's level of aggressiveness and women's would stay the same. So as women got more aggressive, men stayed one step ahead of them.

As men got more macho, not less ... that "freed" women to get more macho too.









Hello, World Wrestling Federation. (In March, 1979, the WWF was born from an earlier incarnation of pro wrestling that had been pretty much out of the cultural picture since, yes, 1963.)






Today, this generic cultural icon ...

is accompanied by this ...

Bring the two together and put guns in their hands and, voilà! ... romaction!

Problem is, as the level of forthrightness-combativeness-aggressiveness gets ratcheted up for both men and women, the chance of crossing the line into male-on-female violence goes up too.

Toward an Understanding of Male Violence Against Women

Toward an Understanding of Male Violence Against Women, at the Violence Against Women section at Feminist.com, says several reasons have been given for any particular man's abuse of any particular woman:

• his individual psychological problems
• sexual frustration
• unbearable life pressures
• some innate urge toward aggression

Well, we men have experienced psychological problems, sexual frustration, life pressures, and aggressive urges for a long, long time. Why are we being so violent toward women today?

One reason that comes to mind is that we men have somehow been given the idea that the above list of problems is now "unbearable," when it was all in a day's work in prior generations.

Psychological problems? We had no time for them before the baby boomers came along. (I'm a boomer.) In an earlier age, it was only "hysterical" women who had all these problems.

Sexual frustration? We boomers were the first generation to come to believe that it was wrong to frustrate the sex drive. Earlier generations were told by their religious leaders that channeling the sex drive into marriage, and marriage alone, was exactly the right thing to do.

Life pressures? What about our parents and grandparents who went through the Great Depression? Their mere survival was, in today's terms, an "unbearable life pressure." Yet they bore it.

Innate male aggression? It's only been going on for thousands, if not millions, of years.

Why, today, are we suddenly so heavily into beating our wives and girlfriends — abusing them, belittling them, cheating on them but taking such umbrage if we think they're cheating on us?

The VAW "Understanding Male Violence" page continues, "Men have been taught to relate to the world in terms of dominance and control, and they have been taught that violence is an acceptable method of maintaining control, resolving conflicts, and expressing anger."

I agree: dominance-and-control as a male strategy of resolving conflicts and expressing anger is much bigger today than when I was a youth in the 1950s and '60s. Why? One thought: when I was in my early 20s, around 1970, the "women's liberation" movement took hold. For about a decade during the 1970s, it looked as if it would quash male dominance-and-control strategies in the name of gender equality. Men would take over traditionally feminine roles, at least to some extent, while women would take up careers outside the home. The term "househusband" was born. It was no longer cool to be macho.

But that's all changed now. Now, not only are the coolest men macho, so are the coolest women. Where have we gone wrong?

Women's liberation — feminism — did not bring about a nonsexist millennium after all, one in which nobody was macho any more. That's not news in this post-feminist age ... but I think it is important in any attempt to understand today's male violence against women.

The "Understanding Male Violence" page goes on:

When a boss sexually harasses an employee, he exerts his power to restrict her freedom to work and improve her position. When a battering husband uses beatings to confine his wife to the home and to prevent her from seeing friends and family or from pursuing outside work, he exerts dominance and control. When men rape women, they act out of a wish to dominate or punish.

Yes, that's what rape, sexual harassment, and wife beating are, but why are they so common today?

I think it goes back to a deep-seated male view of "his" woman as a thing he is supposed to own, to possess, to rule. Particularly her sexuality and her reproductive capacities are — supposedly, to him — his to do with as he pleases. If she threatens his ownership "rights" in any way — flirts (or maybe sleeps) with another guy, is "uppity" at work (where she doesn't "belong" anyway) — she's just "asking" to be disciplined.

This deep-seated male possessiveness of women and their sexual/reproductive capacities is, to me, a better explanation of male violence against women today than all the psychological distress, life pressures, and so forth that men are subjected to. Yes, they are contributing factors, but the real reason he hits or harms her is sexual possessiveness.

What's the antidote? How about going back to the feminist program of the 1970s and fixing whatever kept it from coming to full fruition in the first place?

Why violence?

Where does male violence toward women come from?

Since I started blogging about the subject a few days ago, I've been racking my brain trying to come up with an approach to it that seems useful to others, particularly to men who sometimes experience anger toward women that can erupt as violence.

I can't make this a first-person account of my own struggles with misogyny — meaning: "hatred of women" — since the best I can do in that regard is catalog some of the low-level, mostly hidden antipathies toward women that I've discovered in myself at various points in my life. To take one example: a man knows there's something of that sort buried somewhere within him when he laughs at sexist jokes he shouldn't find funny, for example.

But there's a huge difference between laughing at sexist jokes and committing spousal abuse or date rape.

Or is there? A big question in my mind is whether both things have the same root cause, and if so what is it? Where does male antipathy toward women come from — assuming that male-on-female violence is rooted in attitudes ranging from strong, pervasive hatred to mild, situational antipathy?

In search of answers I turned to the Violence Against Women section at Feminist.com. It says in the VAW introduction that:

• young women of ages 15 to 44 have more injuries from battery than from any other cause
• the (low) official estimate of the number of women who are raped each year is in excess of 100,000; the actual number is more like 683,000
• approximately 50% of the homeless women and children in this country are on the streets because of violence in their homes
• one-fifth to one-half of U.S. women were sexually abused as children at least once, most of them by an older male relative
• nearly two-thirds of women who receive public assistance ("welfare") have been abused by an intimate partner at some time in their adult lives

"Women are statistically safer out on the street than they are in their homes," the VAW introduction laments.

Looking again at the list above, stop a moment to reflect on the degree to which sex and man-on-woman violence are so intimately related. The VAW intro says, "Sexual violence is particularly insidious because sexual acts are ordinarily and rightly a source of pleasure and communication. It is often unclear to a woman who has been victimized and to society as a whole whether a sexual violation was done out of sexual desire or violent intent or whether these motivations are even distinguishable, because violence itself has come to be seen as sexual or erotic."

Meanwhile, "family, friends, and public institutions have been cruelly insensitive about" rape and other violence against women. That in itself impresses me as being very hard to explain. Women make up half of the adults in the population — including everybody's family and friends — and I'd guess that at least half of the employees of public institutions are female today. Why do so many eyes get averted when violence against women happens?

More later ...

About burying the hatchet ...

The name of this blog, Bury the Hatchet, comes from the idea that a "hatchet" is a symbol of war  — thus, "burying" it puts an end to war and violence.

Isn't there a long-simmering war between the sexes? Doesn't it all too often erupt into violence today?

A "hatchet" is also a phallic symbol. (Any of you older folks remember when Ed Ames threw a tomahawk on the Johnny Carson show and hit an outlined target of a man right in the crotch? The handle of the Indian-style hatchet stood up at a suggestive angle, so the accidental joke which had everyone in stitches had a double meaning ... )

In my less-than-humble opinion, there would be little male-on-female violence if sex did not involve a guy burying his "hatchet" in the private parts of a girl. Phallic symbols have always had a double meaning.

It's all about sex. I think men, at some level, want to own "their" women's private parts!

Her sexuality, her fertility, her vagina and womb and sexual self — many a man acts as if they belong to him — if he's sleeping with her, and especially if he's married to her.

It begins long before the wedding. Date rape is his way of staking a claim of ownership early on.

Calling her (by whatever cleaned-up language) a "lying, filthy hoe" — see Welcome to the Bury the Hatchet blog! — is his reaction to the fact that she won't let him possess her sexual self.

If she even flirts with another guy, watch out.

If she sleeps around or cheats on him, she deserves whatever she gets.

If she gets pregnant and he's not certain the baby is his, that goes double.

That's the mantra here.

I think we men need to come to grips with the idea that, somewhere deep down, we all want to establish exclusive ownership rights over "our" women's sexuality. When that desire gets frustrated, violence can erupt.

Welcome to the Bury the Hatchet blog!

Welcome to my Bury the Hatchet blog!

The blog is about ending violence committed against women by men. It's inspired by PostPartisan : Pay attention to Holloway, Flores murders, by Jo-Ann Armao, which appeared on the op-ed page of the Washington Post today ... which happens to be the 64th anniversary of D-Day.

Armao links the murder of Natalee Holloway (left) in Aruba five years ago ...



 ... with the recent murder of Stephany Flores Ramirez (right) in Lima, Peru.



Suspected in the murder of both women is Joran van der Sloot, a Dutch national (left).





Spectacular murders are just one aspect of male violence against women. Another, more frequent aspect is domestic violence. Yet another is rape, including date rape.

The culture is permissive toward all this. Why?

We hear in the lyrics of rap music about how women are, supposedly, whores ("hoes"). Here's an example, called "She's a Hoe":

You filthy hoe, you lying, filthy hoe
You lying hoe, you trifling, lying hoe
You stupid hoe, you dumb, you stupid hoe
You filthy hoe, you young, you filthy hoes...

[Chorus]
Every night, in niggaz rides
You swear up and down, that you look fine
But she a hoe, she’s a hoe, she’s a hoe, she’s a hoe, she a hoe
She a hoe..., she got no walls
Love to lick niggaz balls, for free and that’s not all
A H-O-E muthafucka!!!! H-O-E gotdamn!!!!
A H-O-E muthafucka!!!! H-O-E gotdamn!!!!

[Verse 1: Wisemey]
Shorty young, I heard she only sixteen
She love to suck old niggaz up for free
At night, she out busy servin’ on her knees
She drinks Hennessey, smoke’s weed and pop’s ecstasy
Hoes play games, they always fuck with your mind and
Most of these hoes be out lookin’ like dymes
They play you for your dough, your cheese, your paper
Then they go and lie to the cops, sayin’ you raped her
They always go to the clubs, lookin’ for the ballers
If she gives you her number, playa don’t even call her
They wanna try to spend all of ya ins
The next thing you know, the tow truck is towing your Benz
They wanna tell lies, sayin’ they don’t suck dick
Mo’ pimples on ya face than a Overtown trick
Fuck these hoes (these hoes) they wanna act
Quick to sell they ass for cash, cash for crack...

That's just the first verse ...

OK, maybe this is just an example of heightened anger toward women, an exaggeration of resentment that in real life is much milder that the lyrics would suggest. We generally permit such exaggerations of feelings in art, so why get our knickers in a twist over this?

Maybe because we have trouble these days separating art from real life ...

Anyway, hip hop lyrics are just one example of the ways in which the culture sows the seeds of violence toward women.

I'd like to explore those ways in this blog, and think about what needs to change to put an end to violence by men toward women ...