This week, I finished listening to the Tortoise podcast series about the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is a very famous, very wealthy writer who has been accused by five women of sexual assault and violent abuse (he denies the allegations). A report of yet another man treating women as expendable commodities is as surprising as it is rare. I mean, of course, that it is neither. Seven years on from the height of the #MeToo era, story after story continues to emerge. We see it, we shrug, we move on.
Nearly two years ago, I started writing a newsletter piecing together evidence of the backlash against feminism. Over this time certain themes have reoccurred: the tightening of anti-abortion laws in parts of the US; reproductive rights in general; crises in maternity care; gender apartheid in Afghanistan and Iran; economic inequality; childcare; motherhood; the incel movement; the increasing dislike of feminism among young men (with multiple reports on how this trend is playing out in South Korea); the tradwives hankering after a 1950s life. But, alongside abortion, the most common theme has probably been violence against women. These stories keep coming. They make the news agenda before fading away.
“The global impact of misogyny is in the news as fragments, a spatter pattern...,” Rebecca Solnit wrote recently on X, “seldom added up, seldom seen as such, but all around us in the news and in the homes and hospitals and parliaments and policies...”
In her post, Solnit included screenshots of two stories. The first was a report that the Taliban in Afghanistan has “hired/coerced” women into spying on each other. The second was the story of Gisèle Pélicot, the French woman whose former husband is on trial for drugging and filming her being raped by other men, most of whom lived locally, such that they might have bumped into their victim while shopping, or out for a walk.
The abuse is reported to have happened between 2011 and 2020. Dominique Pélicot, 71, is currently on trial alongside 50 other men accused of raping his wife while she was unconscious, some repeatedly. Pélicot has pleaded guilty to the charges. A further 22 men seen in the footage that prosecutors said Pélicot kept on his computer in a file labelled “abuses” have not been identified. It appears not one man called the police, even the handful who turned up at the house and didn’t go through with the rape.
Gisèle has waived anonymity in an act of tremendous bravery and generosity. She asked for the trial to be made public in an effort to raise awareness about the use of drugs in sexual abuse. Gisèle, who prosecutors say was plied with sleeping pills by her then husband, unbeknownst to her, had blank periods in her memory. She suffered from STIs. She thought she had dementia. The crime was only uncovered after Dominique was arrested for filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket. It was then that the police found the footage.
I would bet that this is one of the worst such stories many of you have ever heard: the idea that so many people actively abused this woman, knowing that she did not know, that so many were complicit in the lie. Another man alleged to have participated is also accused of copying the methodology with his own wife. What does one do after hearing such stories? What changes?
On 1st September, in Kenya, Rebecca Cheptegei, a 33-year-old Olympic athlete from Uganda, was doused in petrol and set alight by a former partner. She died a few days later, and her ex-partner also later succumbed to the burns. Earlier this summer, up the road from the flat where my young daughters sleep every night, safe and cared for, a man suspected of killing his former girlfriend, her sister and mother with a crossbow was on the run from the police. Four weeks later, a teenage boy was arrested after young girls were stabbed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on Merseyside. Three girls died, the eldest of whom was only nine.
The idea of my newsletter was to put together these disparate pieces of the backlash against progress towards gender equality, which necessarily involves “fragments”, as Solnit calls them, of the hatred of women. There are incels, yes, extremists who spend their time online posting about how much they hate women, but most of the men who enact violence against women aren’t incels or extremists. They are ordinary men.
Nearly 20 years ago, the Guardian ran a story called “A year of killing”. It was about every person killed in Britain by an intimate partner or ex-partner between December 2003 and December 2004. The research uncovered 68 cases that year and the majority of the victims were women. Only the previous month, the paper reported, “new guidelines were drafted by the lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, which promised tougher sentences [for men who kill their partners] and said that nagging, or a man’s discovery that his wife was unfaithful, did not justify a lighter sentence”. A Manchester University study cited in the piece found that “male murderers who used violence against their female partners tended to have more ‘conventional’ backgrounds than, say, men who murder other men—they tended not to come from difficult homes, or to have fathers who used violence against their wives. However, they were likely to have used violence against previous or current partners—they ‘specialised’ in violence against women.”
The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s last novel, 2666, was published in 2004, the year after he died. The plot centres around the unsolved murders of women in Santa Teresa, a fictional town based on the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, which is known for its very high rate of femicide. In the book’s fourth section, “The part about the crimes”, Bolaño spends nearly 300 pages clinically describing case upon case of women being killed. It is a strange read. In his 2017 book The Global Novel, the critic Adam Kirsch (cited by Robert Rea in the South West Review) said this section was “difficult to read, in a double sense: Its monotony repels attention, and its subject—the rape, torture and murder of women and girls—repels imagination. In this way, Bolaño enacts, and even makes the reader complicit in, the psychological mechanism that allows Santa Teresa to go on ignoring the murders, even as they grow into a terrifying epidemic.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic there was a trend, visible worldwide, of domestic violence rising as the economic crisis, lockdowns and the associated pressures bit. In her recent book Sick of It: The Global Fight for Women’s Health, Sophie Harman points out that something similar happened when Ebola was spreading through West Africa in 2014–16, only a few years before Covid. Yet in 2020, when the frontline organisations that knew this would happen during the pandemic duly gave a warning, they received little more than a shrug.
I wonder, sometimes, what the point of this exercise is—of the putting together of fragments, the surfacing of their patterns. Is this anything more than an academic endeavour? Is it an act of protracted voyeurism? When does this exercise go from mere description to helping something change?
Another trend: when such a story makes it through the noise to the top of the news agenda, to women the pattern, the urgency, the crisis, is clear as day. When Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a police officer in 2021, for days (weeks?) women were sharing their experiences of walking through their neighbourhoods at night in fear. Or when the mother and her two daughters were murdered this summer, as soon as the report was out, before it was known that the accused was an ex-boyfriend or some such, women knew. They saw it for what it was.
I will keep collecting the fragments. Putting them together might somehow help to shift the immovable, that shrug at every woman lost, or hurt, or worse, at the things that seem beyond change.
Recently, aside from listening to the Neil Gaiman podcast I’ve been reading Jenny Diski’s memoir essays (inhaling them, more like), which were published in the London Review of Books some ten years ago, and later formed the basis for her book In Gratitude. Diski, who died aged 68 in 2016, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. These essays were about coming to terms with death, but also about her difficult childhood and her complex relationship with the writer Doris Lessing, who took her in as a teenager. Diski’s life story is filled with abuse, at the hands of her parents and others.
In one instalment, she wrote of Lessing’s belief that Diski, then aged 15, needed contraception. This urgency was “for all Doris’s explaining the catastrophe of getting pregnant and the terrible world of backstreet abortions, a bit theoretical, it seemed to me. A year before, living in Holland Park with my father, at the age of 14, I’d been raped. During my final term at St Christopher’s I’d had a boyfriend who worked on the local paper and lived in Letchworth, but try as he might, it turned out I had seized up or something, because when we tried to have sex on the school playing field in the early hours of the morning, he couldn’t get inside me. He’d been annoyed and said I was frigid. I didn’t know the word. That, apart from moments and shadows as a child—the Humbertian rabbi, and the more or less unconscious behaviour of my parents towards me—had been the extent of my sexual experience until then.”
Diski wrote about these things so matter-of-factly, almost casually. It is as if the writing itself symbolised how violence against women is so readily accepted: as just another part of life.
A version of this article was first published on The Backlash
