If I quote MacKinnon it is not just because she represents a viewpoint from which I dissent, nor because I know there are many feminist scholars who draw productively from her work. It is also because, as she has most loudly and consistently alerted us, the times we live in oblige any feminist to reckon with the increasing, or certainly increasingly visible, violence against women that we are witnessing today. In March 2014, Gayatri Spivak gave the Juliet Mitchell lecture in Cambridge on rape both as a – if not the – crime of identity and as the ‘indestructible unconditionality’ of the human: ‘We are – male and female – raped into humanity,’ she stated. ‘This is the human condition.’4 This did not of course stop her from naming rape as the crime against women which it mostly is. In 2018, Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Nadia Murad, a young Yazidi woman who had been captured by Isis as a sex slave. At the Panzi hospital in Bukavu in the eastern DRC, where he worked, fifty thousand or more rape victims had been treated over the past twenty years.5 Feminism today cannot not talk about such crimes, whether rape as a war crime, female genital mutilation, or domestic abuse. To select just some out of a steadily increasing barrage of statistics and reports from the past decade: A survey of forty-two thousand women across the twenty-eight EU member states, released in March 2014, found violence against women to be an extensive human rights abuse throughout Europe, with one in three women reporting some form of physical or sexual abuse since the age of fifteen. The UK had the joint fifth-highest incidence of physical and sexual violence.6 In April 2019, a World Bank special report, Gender-Based Violence (Violence Against Women and Girls), described such violence as a ‘global pandemic’.7
According to women’s rights activists in the UK, rape has effectively become ‘decriminalised’.8 The UK Crown Prosecution Service’s 2019 Annual Report on violence against women and girls reported slumping prosecutions for the crime, which fell by thirty-two per cent in the previous year to a ten-year low, despite the number of reports of rape doubling over six years to almost six hundred thousand.9 It has since emerged that tens of thousands of cases may have been dropped because of secret targets implemented by the Home Office, which encouraged prosecutors to take ‘weak cases’ out of the system. In a statement to the Law Society Gazette, the Crown Prosecution Service admitted that such targets were inappropriate and may have acted as a ‘perverse disincentive’ in relation to cases that were not ‘straightforward’ (a term that could be applied to almost all rape cases given the problem of witnessing, as we saw in Chapter One).10 In September 2019, the action group End Violence Against Women launched a legal challenge against the CPS over its failure to pursue rape cases due to a covert change in policy.11 In August 2020, in the face of incontrovertible evidence of a fall in prosecutions to their lowest-ever level, Boris Johnson announced new conviction targets for rape cases – blundering in as usual, as if setting a target in this domain will solve the problem (a bit like past commitments, which have proved useless, to reduce waiting lists for the NHS).12 Again the problem is by no means exclusive to the UK. In the US, an October 2018 report announced that less than one per cent of rapes and attempted rapes end up with a felony conviction.13
Most of the violence against women is carried out by a current or former partner, with nearly one in four women in relationships reporting partner abuse in the EU survey. In 2019, domestic killings of adults in the UK reached a five-year high, with three quarters of the victims being women (ninety-four per cent of all women killed by men in 2018 knew their assailant).14 In February 2020, it was reported that the number of women killed by a current or former partner had surged by a third to a fourteen-year high.15 A report in October 2018 concluded that more than forty per cent of all homicides in fifteen US states involved women murdered by intimate partners. The gender ‘balance’ is glaring. Between 2003 and 2012, sixty-five per cent of women victims of violent crime in the US knew their assailants, as compared with thirty-four per cent of men: ‘A staggering portion of violence against women is fatal,’ the Center for American Progress reported in 2014, ‘and a key driver of these homicides is access to guns’ (the article was entitled ‘Women Under the Gun’).16
Disturbingly, the incidence of abuse against women does not seem to decline with a rise in equality. Violence against women in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, each praised for their gender equality, outstrips the UK rate. Central to the problem is that domestic abuse is one of the least reported crimes.17 As we saw in the chapter on sexual harassment, refuges are full of women who have, until a final breaking point, found it impossible to tell their stories or to leave a violent home. The statistics are therefore, as always, misleading, perhaps in the case of such abuse even more so than usual. We rarely hear of the obstacles that litter the path between sexual violation and language (where it is not just a matter of finding the courage to speak) – compounded of course by the institutionalised refusal of those in positions of authority to listen. All of this was massively aggravated during the pandemic, when lockdown trapped women with abusive partners in their homes (a global phenomenon which stretched from the UK and US to China and Spain). Though emergency funds were eventually released by the UK government, the crisis should also be seen as one of their own making, since it was government cuts that had reduced the number of refuges and safe havens in the first place. Even today, the effect of those cuts is still being felt, as refuges with free places are turning away migrant women who do not speak English because they no longer have the funds for translators.18
These statistics are chilling. But I do not want to carry on listing all the forms of global violence against women, as it is one feminist tactic to do. Feminism is not served by turning violence into a litany, as if the only way to make us think about such violence is by verbally driving it home. When we look at the picture of a woman who died on 9/11, the first and only feminist question should not be, to my mind – MacKinnon again – ‘who hurt her before?’; nor, when we look at the bones of a woman from an ancient civilisation, do I want us to see her, and them, as, inevitably, broken.19 Such a strategy does not help us to think. It is a central argument of this book that violence against women is a crime of the deepest thoughtlessness. It is a sign that the mind has brutally blocked itself. The best way for feminism to counter violence against women, I argue throughout these pages, is to speak of, to stay and reckon with, the extraordinary, often painful and mostly overlooked range of what the human mind is capable of. The title of this chapter is ‘Feminism and the Abomination of Violence’. Violence for me is part of the psyche. A crime to be detested and cast off, but also something which one feminism, in the very force of that gesture – however necessary, however right at one level – then itself repudiates, renders unthinkable, shuns beyond the remit of the human (precisely abominates). At that moment, feminism finds itself replicating that part of the mind which cannot tolerate its own complexity. It thereby becomes complicit with the psychic processes which lead to the enactment of violence itself. For me it then becomes crushing – or to put it more crassly, cuts off its nose to spite its face.
* * *
I take my idea of thoughtlessness from Hannah Arendt, to whom – along with Melanie Klein – I appeal here as offering a new way of thinking about violence against women in our time. Following and anticipating Sexton and Plath, both Arendt and Klein suggest that there is something about the process of human thought that is often insufferable, not least because thinking acts as a brake on the fantasy that the world is there to be mastered, and thereby prevents that dangerous fantasy from doing untold damage by running amuck or away with itself. For Arendt, violence is a form of radical self-deceit – or ‘the impotence of bigness’, to recall her evocative phrase – which punishes the world, punishes women, we can say, for the limitations of human power (the gender implications of her phrase ‘impotence of bigness’ are surely glaring even if she does not fully draw them out herself).20 To quote again what is for me one of her key statements: �
�What I propose, therefore, is very simple,’ she writes at the beginning of The Human Condition, her meditation on the conditions of human existence in the modern world; ‘it is nothing more than to think about what we are doing.’ As often with Arendt, such simplicity is deceptive. Thinking as process has to be fought for. It is threatened from all sides, by modern pseudo-knowledge which leaves us at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, ‘however murderous it is’, and by the muteness of sheer violence: ‘Only sheer violence’, she writes, ‘is mute’ (in the realm of politics, all other forms of behaviour are transacted in words).21 For Arendt, therefore, the mind is under siege, and thinking is the only restraint against murderous know-how and the cruel silence of sheer violence which mutes both itself and its victims.
Arendt wrote The Human Condition in the 1950s (it was published in 1958) – the moment of course of Sexton and Plath – when the power of death-dealing technology had reached new heights: from industrial genocide to the atom bomb. ‘The technical development of the implements of violence’, she writes in her later 1970 study On Violence, ‘has now reached a point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict.’ The ‘suicidal’ development of modern weapons involves ‘a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics’.22 Behind this analysis is her indictment of the myth of progress which the United States, where she arrived as a refugee from Nazism in the 1930s, believed itself to embody beyond any other nation. For Arendt, ‘Progress’ is a ruthless illusion, a self-fulfilling prophecy, which leaves itself no escape clause other than the increasingly violent enactment of itself. In other words, so-called progress leads directly to the burnt bodies of Vietnam.
Arendt is not, to put it mildly, most famous for her contribution to feminism, any more indeed than Melanie Klein, on which more later, although the case for Arendt’s contribution to feminism has been made strongly by scholars such as Seyla Benhabib and Mary Dietz, whose readings are the starting points for mine.23 But there is an important gender dimension to her work (and, I will be arguing, to Klein’s). It is there in that ‘impotence of bigness’ – a phrase at the heart of this chapter. But, almost despite herself, Arendt can be seen as the forerunner of one feminist analysis which traces women’s subordination, and the violence which is so often its consequence, first and foremost to the division of labour in – or rather consignment of women to – the home. Arendt’s political ideal is the Greek space of the polis or city-state. Indeed, so invested is she in the Athenian model of democracy that she has often been accused of overlooking, or, worse, reinforcing, the status of women and slaves on whose bodies and backs it built itself. But Arendt makes it clear that if the home and family life are pre-political, it is because they are the place ‘where the household head ruled with uncontested despotic powers’. It is because the paterfamilias rules with such absolute power in the household that it remains outside the domain of politics: ‘Even the power of the tyrant was less great, less “perfect” than the power with which the paterfamilias, the dominus, ruled over the household of slaves and family.’24
The consequence is violence in the home. Freedom belonged exclusively in the political realm, whereas the household was the place of necessity – read the base and messy environment of creaturely life (or housework, as we call it today). It is this domain which must be mastered for man to be free. Out of this forced discrimination, violence surely follows. Because, in Greek thought, ‘all human beings are subject to necessity,’ Arendt explains, ‘they are entitled to violence towards others.’ Violence then becomes the ‘pre-political act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of the world’. That is why to be a slave means not just loss of freedom, but being subject to man-made violence. And this is also why there is no real sexual division of labour – nothing one could even grace with the epithet of ‘separate spheres’ – since such a notion relies on an at least formal assumption of equality between man and women, whereas no such assumption existed. Women and slaves – Arendt is surely hardly condoning the equation – stand in, and for, the place where the necessity of the world is subject to brute mastery. While the ancient household head might of course exert a milder or harsher rule, he knows ‘neither law nor justice’.25 Or to put it another way, it is because women and slaves are called upon to redeem the frailty of human, bodily life – what Judith Butler would call ‘precarious life’ – that they are the objects, in fact they must be the objects, of violence.26
The key word is ‘mastery’. It is for Arendt, in the world and in the heart, a delusion. Thus when she goes on to make her famous distinction between violence and power which is at the centre of On Violence, what matters is that a government will have recourse to violence in direct proportion to a decline in its authority and power, a decline which such violence is desperate to redress (violence is always desperate). ‘Rule by sheer violence’, she writes, ‘comes about when power is being lost.’27 State violence, we could say, is the last resort of the criminal (as we saw so cruelly in the crackdown on the streets of Egypt, in the government response to Tahrir Square in 2012, and throughout the world since then). When a state ‘starts to devour its own children’, Arendt observes, ‘power has disappeared completely’ (think Syria). ‘We know or should know’, she insists, ‘that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence – if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands […] have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it.’ And she observes: ‘Impotence breeds violence and psychologically this is quite true.’28
Arendt’s distinction between violence and power is important in relation to a feminism that wishes to align violence with male power of which it then becomes the inevitable expression (which makes female power, as MacKinnon once famously put it, ‘a contradiction in terms’29). Instead, Arendt allows us to see such an equation as the lie that violence perpetuates about itself, since it will do anything – destroy women and the world – rather than admit that its power is uncertain. Women become the scapegoats for man’s unconscious knowledge of his own human, which means shared – that is, shared with women – frailty (‘The Frailty of Human Affairs’ is the title of one section of The Human Condition). Such frailty takes us to the darkest corridors of life and of the mind, to ‘the realm of birth and death’ which must be excluded from the public realm because ‘it harbors the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge. Impenetrable because man does not know where he comes from when he is born and where he goes when he dies.’30 Violence, then, is man’s response to the fraudulence of his power and the limits of his knowledge. ‘Impotent bigness’ indeed.
In her constant return to what cannot be mastered or fully known by the mind, Arendt, as I read her, is – perilously or brilliantly, depending on your viewpoint – skirting the domain of psychoanalysis, for which her stated antipathy is well known. But it is very hard not to read her account of things impenetrable to the human mind as having much in common with the Freudian concept of the unconscious which signals – over and above the sexual debris of its contents – the limits of man’s cognisance of the world and of himself. In Arendt’s account such limits strike the body politic as much as they do the human heart. This is her vocabulary for both these realms: ‘boundlessness’, ‘unpredictability’ and ‘the darkness of the human heart’. We live, she states, in an ‘ocean of uncertainty’, against which there is no redress. It is the human condition. Men are fundamentally unreliable since they ‘can never guarantee who they will be tomorrow’. And how, she asks, can you see or foretell the consequences of an act ‘within a community of equals where everybody has the same capacity to act?’ To be part of the body politic means relinquishing your control over the future – yours and that of the other who is your equal, because they are your equal. Man’s ‘inability to rely upon himself or have complete faith in himself’, which, she insists, ‘
is the same thing’, is ‘the price human beings pay for freedom’. At the same time, ‘the impossibility of remaining unique master of what they do’ – read subordinating another to your power – ‘is the price they pay for plurality and reality’.31 If Arendt describes such open, equal participation in the unpredictable reality of the world as a ‘joy’ (her word), she has also laid out with stunning clarity the unwelcome nature of her own insight and, hence, the lengths men will go to to deny that insight and subordinate the world, in which I include women, to their purpose.
In The Life of the Mind, which was Arendt’s last work, she takes this further. Now thinking appears even more clearly as the other side of false mastery and knowledge. This is why, for example, she insists that the correct translation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Verstand is not ‘understanding’ but ‘intellect’ or ‘cognition’ because it represents the ‘desire to know’, as distinct from Vernunft, which arises from the ‘urgent need to think’. ‘To expect truth to come from thinking’, she writes, ‘signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know’, a need ‘that can never be assuaged’. Both are anguished but one in the service of hammering the world into place, the other by its own interminable process, which has no end on which it can brand its name. Only intellect or cognition believes it can answer the unanswerable questions; that it can seize the world in its mental coil. Philosophers of this persuasion, she tells us, are ‘like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands’.32
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 17
