Femicide

Jane Caputi, Ph.D., and Diana E. H. Russell, Ph.D.

This is a longer version of the article we wrote for Ms. magazine, "Femicide: Speaking the Unspeakable" (September/October 1990), that was published in Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell, Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992). by Jane Caputi, Ph.D., and Diana E. H. Russell, Ph.D.

"Kill Feminist Bitches" - Graffito, University of Western Ontario, after Marc Lepine's murder of 14 women in Montreal, 1989.

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood once asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women. He replied: "They are afraid women will laugh at them." She then asked a group of women why they felt threatened by men. They answered: "We're afraid of being killed."

However wildly disproportionate, these fears are profoundly linked, as was demonstrated on 6 December 1989, at the University of Montreal. On that day, 25-year-old combat magazine aficionado Marc Lepine suited up for war and rushed the school of engineering. In one classroom, he separated the women from the men, ordered the men out, and, shouting "You're all fucking feminists," opened fire on the women. During a half-hour rampage, Lepine killed 14 young women, wounded 9 other women and 4 men, then turned his gun on himself. A three-page suicide note blamed all of his failures on women, whom he felt had rejected and scorned him. Also found on his body was a hit-list of 15 prominent Canadian women.

Unable to complete an application to the school of engineering, Lepine felt humiliated ("laughed at") by women he defined as "feminists" simply because they had entered traditional male territory. His response to the erosion of white male exclusivity and privilege was lethal. It was also eminently political.

In the aftermath of the massacre, media reports regularly denied the political nature of Lepine's crimes, citing comments such as that of Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler: "It was the act of an absolutely demented man [that does not] lend itself to any explanation." Richler ignored Lepine's clear explanation of his actions. He hated women, particularly feminists. Whether such a killer is "demented" is beside the point. Fixation on the pathology of perpetrators of violence against women only obscures the social control function of these acts. In a racist and sexist society, psychotics as well as supposedly normal men frequently act out the ubiquitous racist, misogynist, and homophobic attitudes with which they are raised and which they repeatedly see legitimized.

Lepine's murders were hate crimes targeting victims by gender, not race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. In the cases of lynching and pogroms, no one wastes their time wondering whether about the mental health of the perpetrators or about their previous personal experiences with African-Americans or Jews. Most people today understand that lynchings and pogroms are forms of politically motivated violence, the objectives of which are to preserve white and gentile supremacy. Similarly, the goal of violence against women -- whether conscious or not -- is to preserve male supremacy.

Early feminist analysts of another form of sexist violence - rape -- asserted that it is not, as common mythology insists, a crime of frustrated attraction, victim provocation, or uncontrollable biological urges. Nor is rape perpetrated only by an aberrant fringe. Rather, rape is a direct expression of sexual politics, an act of conformity to masculinist sexual norms (as "humorist" Ogden Nash put it, "Seduction is for sissies. A he-man wants his rape"), and a form of terrorism that serves to preserve the gender status quo.

Like rape, most murders of women by husbands, lovers, fathers, acquaintances and strangers are not the products of some nexplicable deviance. They are femicides, the most extreme form of sexist terrorism, motivated by hatred, contempt, pleasure, or a sense of ownership of women. Femicide includes mutilation murder, rape murder, battery that escalates into murder, the mmolation of witches in Western Europe and of brides and widows n India, and crimes of honor in some Latin and Middle Eastern countries, where women believed to have lost their virginity are killed by their male relatives. Calling misogynist killings femicide removes the obscuring veil of non gendered terms such as homicide and murder.

Widespread male identification with killers demonstrates how rooted femicide is in sexist culture. For example, engineering student Celeste Brousseau, who had complained about sexism in the engineering faculty at the University of Alberta, was subjected to chants of "Shoot the bitch!" from hundreds of her "fellow" students when she participated in an engineering society skit night shortly after the Lepine killings.

Misogyny not only motivates violence against women, but distorts the press coverage of such crimes as well. Femicide, rape, and battery are variously ignored or sensationalized in the media, depending of the victim's race, class, and attractiveness (by male standards). The police, media and public response to crimes against women of color, poor women, lesbians, women prostitutes, and women drug users is particularly abysmal -- generally apathy laced with pejorative stereotyping and victim-blaming (for example, "All women of color are drug addicts and/or prostitutes who put themselves in danger"). Moreover, public nterest is disproportionately focused on cases involving non white assailants and white middle-class victims, such as the uproar in Boston over the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, a pregnant white woman who, her husband falsely claimed, was shot by an African-American robber. Carol Stuart was not murdered by a Willie-Horton-like phantasm of her husband's concoction, but by her affluent, white husband.

Femicide is on the extreme end of a continuum of anti female terror that includes a wide variety of verbal and physical abuse, such as rape, torture, sexual slavery (particularly in prostitution), incestuous and extrafamilial child sexual abuse, physical and emotional battery, sexual harassment (on the phone, in the streets, at the office, and in the classroom), genital mutilation (clitoridectomies, excision, infibulations), unnecessary gynecological operations (gratuitous hysterectomies), forced heterosexuality, forced sterilization, forced motherhood (by criminalizing contraception and abortion), psychosurgery, denial of food to women in some cultures, cosmetic surgery, and other mutilations in the name of beautification. Whenever these forms of terrorism result in death, they become femicides.

The Magnitude of Sexist Terrorism in the United States

Federal statistics do not reveal the scope of violence against women. One feminist researcher, Mary Koss, has described the federal government's efforts to gather national statistics on rape as "a cruel hoax that covers up rather than reveals women's risk of victimization." Surveys by independent researchers ndicate shattering rates of female victimization. In Russell's probability sample survey of 930 San Francisco women, for example, 44 percent reported being victimized by rape or attempted rape, 38 percent by incestuous and extrafamilial child sexual abuse and 16 percent by incestuous abuse, and 14 percent by wife rape.

As with rape and child sexual abuse, femicide is most likely to be perpetrated by a male family member, friend, or acquaintance. Ironically, the patriarchy's ideal domestic arrangement (heterosexual coupling) holds the greatest potential for femicide. Although it is not legitimate to assume that a misogynist element is present in all murders of women by men, it s probable that this is the case for most murders of women by their legal or common-law husbands. Table 1 shows that women murdered by their husbands outnumber all other categories of victims where information about the relationship is available. Specifically, in those cases where it is possible to determine the relationship between the murdered women and their murderers, husbands constituted a third of the murderers during the 12-year period analyzed.

Table 1: STATISTICS ON THE MURDER OF WOMEN 15 YEARS AND OLDER BY RELATIONSHIP: 1976-1987

Source: James A. Mercy, "Men, Women, and Murder: Gender-Specific Differences in Rates of Fatal Violence and Victimization," Journal of Trauma. Forthcoming.

(N=33,942)

Violent crimes against women have escalated in recent decades. Some believe this increase is due to increased reporting. But Russell's research on (largely unreported) rape, for example, establishes a dramatic escalation during the last 50 years. Although it is not yet possible to assess the number of sex murders in any given year, virtually all experts agree that there has been a substantial rise in such killings since the early 1960s. A surge in serial murder (when one perpetrator kills a number of victims in separate incidents) is recognized by criminologists to have begun in the 1950s and has become a characteristic phenomenon of the late twentieth century in the United States.

We see this escalation of violence against females as part of male backlash against feminism. This doesn't mean it's the fault of feminism: patriarchal culture terrorizes women whether we fight back or not. Still, when male supremacy is challenged, that terror is intensified. While many women who stepped out of line in early modern Europe were grotesquely tortured and killed as witches (with estimates ranging from 200,000 to 9 million killed), today such women are regarded as cunts or bitches, deserving whatever happens to them. "Why is it wrong to get rid of some fuckin' cunts?" Kenneth Bianchi, convicted "Hillside Strangler," demanded.

Many law enforcement officials have commented on the growing viciousness in slayings. As Justice Department official Robert Heck said, "We've got people out there now killing 20 and 30 people and more, and some of them don't just kill. They torture their victims in terrible ways and mutilate them before they kill them." For example:

Teenager Shirley Ledford screamed for mercy while Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker of Los Angeles raped and mutilated her with a pair of locking pliers, hit her with a sledgehammer, and jabbed her in her ear with an ice pick. The men audiotaped the torture-femicide from beginning to end.

Such atrocities also are enacted upon women by their male intimates. Joel Steinberg -- who murdered his adopted daughter, Lisa, and tortured his companion, Hedda Nussbaum, for years -- and Curtis Adams are extreme, but not unique, examples:

"Steinberg had kicked her [Nussbaum] in the eye, strangled her, beaten her sexual organs, urinated on her, hung her in handcuffs from a chinning bar, lacerated a tear duct by poking his finger in the corner of her eye, broken her nose several times and pulled out clumps of hair while throwing her about their apartment. 'Sometimes he'd take the blowtorch we used for freebasing and move it around me, making me jump [said Nussbaum]... I have burn marks all over my body from that. Joel told me he did this to improve my coordination.'"

In 1989, Curtis Adams was sentenced to 32 years in prison for torturing his wife in a 10-hour attack. After she refused anal sex, Adams handcuffed his wife, repeatedly forced a bottle and then a broomstick into her anus, and hung her naked out the window -- taking breaks to make her read Bible passages adjuring women to obey their husbands.

The sex-and-violence culture of the late twentieth century is a breeding ground for such amateur torturers and executioners who have emerged as the shock troops of male dominance.

A sense of entitlement is another major cause of sexual terrorism. Many males believe they have a right to get what they want from females. If girls or women thwart them, some become violent, sometimes to the extent of committing femicide. Consider the extraordinary hatred exhibited by men in response to a complaint by female students at the University of Iowa about the loud stereos of male students who resided on the floor above them. A list in graffito, titled "The Top Ten Things to Do to the Bitches Below," was found in the men's bathroom and subsequently published in the university newspaper. These suggestions included exhortations to beat women "into a bloody pulp with a sledgehammer and laugh" and instructions on "how to mutilate female genitalia with an electric trimmer, pliers, and a 'red-hot soldering iron.'" In a similar display of contempt for women, a suggestion was made in the University of Toronto engineering students' newspaper that women "cut off their breasts if they were sick of sexual harassment."

To see where these students get such gruesome ideas, we only need to look to pornography and mass media "gorenography" (movies and magazines featuring scenes of sensationalized and eroticized violence). Like many feminists, we believe pornography is a form of anti female propaganda, peddling a view of women as objects, commodities, "things" to be owned, used, and consumed while also promoting the logical correlates: all women are whores and therefore fair game; sexual violence is normal and acceptable; women deserve and want to be hurt, raped, or even killed. Research indicates that objectifying, degrading, and violent mages of women in pornography and gorenography predispose certain males to be turned on by rape and other violence against women and/or undermine their inhibitions against acting out sexualized violence.

An FBI study of 36 sex killers found that pornography was ranked highest in a list of many sexual interests by an astonishing 81 percent. Such notorious killers as Edmund Kemper (the "Coed Killer"), Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz (the "Son of Sam"), and Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono (the "Hillside Stranglers") were all heavy pornography consumers. Bundy maintains that pornography "had an impact on me that was just so central to the development of the violent behavior that I engaged in." His assessment is consistent with testimony from many other sex offenders, as well as research on the effects of pornography.

Femicidal mayhem is the essential subject matter of slasher films, "splatterpunk" horror novels, or the endless outpouring of sex killer paperback thrillers -- all genres which count the vast majority of their fans among men, particularly young men. In contemporary super-hero comic books, graphic femicidal visuals abound. For example, a recent issue of "Green Arrow" depicts a near-naked prostitute, tortured and crucified. As a comic book distributor/apologist explained: "The readers are teen-aged boys, so what you have is a lot of repressed anger.... They do like to see the characters sliced and diced."

We do not mean to imply that one must go into the side pockets of culture to encounter femicidal themes. Mainstream filmmaker Brian DePalma once whined: "I'm always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach -- chopping up women, putting women in peril. I'm making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?" In Harlem Nights, a "comedy," Eddie Murphy first beds, then blows away Jasmine Guy, the film's object of desire. Misogynist and femicidal themes abound as well in rock and roll. Twenty years ago, Mick Jagger threatened: "Rape, murder, it's just a kiss away." Currently Guns 'N' Roses croon: "Well I used to love her / but I had to kill her / she bitched so much / she drove me nuts."

Femicidal atrocity is everywhere normalized, explained away as a joke and rendered into standard fantasy fare. Although the annihilation of women has not been formally institutionalized, our annihilation in media portrayals has been -- from comic books through Nobel-prize-winning literature, from box-office smashes through snuff films. "C'mon girls," the refrain goes, "it's just entertainment." Meanwhile the FBI terms sex killings "recreational murder."

Most Americans refuse to recognize the gynocidal period in which we are living -- and dying -- today. To traverse the streets is often to walk a gauntlet. The nuclear family is a prison for millions of girls and women. Some husbands and fathers act as full-time guards who threaten to kill if defied, a threat all too often carried out. "Dedicated Bible reader" John List was convicted for mass murder in New Jersey in 1990 after escaping detection for 18 years. In a letter to his pastor, List complained that his wife refused to attend church, an action which he "knew would harm the children." Moreover, his daughter wanted to pursue an acting career, making him "fearful as to what that might do to her continuing to be a Christian." In a rage over his loss of control of his family, this godly man slaughtered his wife, daughter, mother, and two sons.

If all femicides were recognized as such and accurately counted, if the massive incidence of nonlethal sexual assaults against women and girls were taken into account, if incestuous abuse and battery were recognized as torture (frequently prolonged over years), if the patriarchal home were seen as the nescapable prison it so frequently becomes, if pornography and gorenography were recognized as hate literature, then we in the United States might have to acknowledge that we live in the midst of a reign of sexist terror comparable in magnitude, intensity, and intent to the persecution, torture, and annihilation of European women as witches from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Rememory and Resistance

"Basically, I worshipped him. He was the most wonderful man had ever met. I believed he had supernatural, godlike powers." - Hedda Nussbaum on Joel Steinberg

We do not worship them.
We do not worship that they have made.
We do not trust them.
We do not believe what they say...
We do not worship them.

It is unspeakably painful for most women to think about men's violence against us, whether individually or collectively. And when we do attempt to think about the unthinkable, speak about the unspeakable, as we must, the violence, disbelief, and contempt we encounter is often so overwhelming that we retreat, denying or repressing our experiences.

In November 1989, 28-year-old Eileen Franklin-Lipsker of Foster City, California, suddenly remembered having witnessed her father sexually abuse her 8-year-old school friend, Susan Nason, then bludgeon her to death. Twenty years later, she turned her father in to the police. Such remembrance and denunciation is the work of the entire feminist movement against violence against women: to disobey the fathers' commandments to forget, deny, maintain silence, and instead to turn in our abusive fathers, husbands, brothers, lovers, sons, and friends.

The recollection and acknowledgement of the history and experience that has been so profoundly repressed is what Toni Morrison in her masterpiece Beloved, calls rememory. Beloved concerns the unthinkably painful subject of slavery. In an nterview about the book, Morrison noted that there is virtually no remembrance -- no lore, songs, or dances -- of the African people who died en route to the Americas. "I suspect the reason s that it was not possible to survive on certain levels and dwell on it," Morrison suggested. "People who did dwell on it, it probably killed them, and the people who did not dwell on it probably went forward.... There is a necessity for remembering the horror, but...in a manner in which the memory is not destructive." Morrison's concept of rememory, though developed to describe the psychic torment inflicted upon African-Americans, s crucial for women grappling with a femicidal world. We too must be able to face horror in ways that do not destroy, but save us.

Following the mass femicide in Montreal, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa rejected petitions to close the legislature and universities on the day of the funerals. A day of official mourning was only appropriate, he insisted, "when someone important to the State had died." Currently, some Canadian feminists are working to establish 6 December as a national day of remembrance for the slaughtered women. We encourage women worldwide to join our Canadian sisters in declaring 6 December an nternational day of mourning and rage, a "Rememory Day" for all women who have been victims of sexual violence. As Ntozake Shange writes: "We shall have streets and monuments named after / these women <&> children they died for their country."

Still, such commemorations remain palliatives, modes of healing, but not cures. Feminists, collectively and nternationally, must take on the urgent task of formulating strategies of resistance to femicide. Progressive people rightly favor an international boycott of South Africa so long as apartheid reigns; why then does no one consider the potential efficacy of boycotting violent and abusive men and their culture? The women in Aristophanes' Lysistrata engage in a sexual boycott of men to compel an end to war. In 1590, Iroquois women gathered in Seneca to demand the cessation of war among the nations. We must now demand an end to the global patriarchal war on women.

A femicidal culture is one in which the male is worshipped. This worship is obtained through tyranny, subtle and overt, over our bruised minds, our battered and dead bodies, and our co-optation into supporting even batterers, rapists, and killers. "Basically, I worshipped him," said Hedda Nussbaum. "We do not worship them...we do not trust them," wrote Alice Walker. In a myriad of ways, let us refuse nurture, solace, support, and approval. Let us withdraw our worship.

Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Joan Balter, Sandy Butler, Phyllis Chesler, Candida Ellis, Marny Hall, Robin Morgan, and Helen Vann for their comments and/or editorial suggestions.

Copyright © 1998 Jane Caputi and Diana Russell.  All rights reserved by author.