... and ain't i a woman?: Reclaim the world

Issue 

Reclaim the world

By Janet Fraser

Just as I was sitting down to write, life threw up one of those amazing coincidences. As I sat poring over statistics, rhetoric and newspaper clippings, my partner called me to the window to ask what I thought of the strange scenes across the road. A man and a woman were throwing punches, but she was the one going down and he was the one standing over her.

What do you do? They were on the first floor of a block of units with no intercom. Should I call out? Should I blow my Whistle Project whistle? As it appeared to get worse, we stopped debating and rang the persons in blue.

The two who arrived weren't exactly full of initiative. Their attitude was, "It can't have been that bad, or more people would have called".

Isn't that just classic behaviour? Our patriarchal society doesn't admit to the violence committed within it. When we can't hide it by making the victim feel guilty and responsible, we hide it behind language developed not to embarrass.

Incest is a much more polite word than rape. It excludes that uncomfortable feeling people get at the mention of such nasty things.

And rape is confused with sex. Rape is not about sex. Rape is about power and degradation and hate. Researchers Burgess and Holstrom (1985) proposed that rape is so common (men rape one in four women in adulthood [Russell, 1984]; men attempt to rape one in three adult women [Russell, 1984]; husbands rape one in seven married adult women [Russell, 1982]) that it should be viewed as such, and not as a bizarre, one-off occurrence.

Reclaim the Night is about much more than rape. It is about a culture that condemns women to take responsibility for everyone else. Well, I'm sick of having to bear the world's shit. Isn't it about time we broke open the boys' clubs and sent a breeze of responsibility through?

Instead of women being constantly on guard, why don't men just lay off the power games and act sociably? The huge problem of sexual violence is not helped by women changing their lifestyles to attempt to avoid it. How dare people impose a curfew on us!

The need to dominate and control needs to be spoken about by women and men interested in ending this gross violation of personal and collective freedom.

Yet again women have to stand in the streets protesting about their own basic human rights. Well, today's pigs be warned: we've had enough. You're not going to play power games with the lives of women and children any more.

Oh, the woman across the road? The coppers said she'd just had a baby and was feeling tired.

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