Femicide is a silent epidemic in the United States. The intentional killing of women has gone largely unnoticed, due to the normalization of misogyny in our culture. This is why males, regardless of age, are allowed to express sentiments such as “your body my choice” without fear of significant backlash. Men do not suffer from monumental character assassinations or face any tangible consequences for being misogynists, not in the same way one would for being a racist or homophobe. While we can clearly form a link between spewing racist and homophobic rhetoric to hate crimes, the United States largely ignores the parallel between misogynist rhetoric and gender-based violence. And, with the rate in which incel culture is growing, and self-proclaimed misogynists such as Andrew Tate are at the forefront of our society, we can not continue to ignore the epidemic that is femicide.
Gender-based violence has always been a phenomenon in the United States, but the rates at which women are being killed has increased in recent decades, coinciding with the increased levels of misogynistic norms in our society. In our society there has been a recent shift to right-wing ideology that encompasses traditional (i.e. trad, tradwife) lifestyles which place women back in a submissive state. The issue with this is not all women subscribe to trad ideology and the society that existed for those conditions to thrive no longer exists today. Women are still fighting against barriers to social climb but ultimately have way more autonomy than their predecessors. For instance, women can live fulfilling lives outside of the home that do not involve marriage or kids. They are also now allowed to gain access to economic means which past generations could not do, such as owning credit cards and bank accounts. However, this does not erase the femicide epidemic we are facing.
Women were an oppressed group in early post-colonial America and continue to be oppressed in modern contemporary America. With the founding of America and legitimization of the constitution, the framework was established for women to be viewed as property, an extension of man, and often not being allowed their own personhood. This early patriarchal structure held women to nonautonomous standards which decades later, if strayed from, created a culture of misogyny. From roughly the late 1700’s to the early 1900’s women were expected to only bare children and take care of the home. This was deemed the natural order and reinforced by religious institutions. Under these conditions women faced extreme conditions of abuse including – but not limited to – physical, emotional, mental, and financial. In fact, women were largely unprotected from these various types of abuse. Wife beating did not become illegal in all American states until 1920, lobotomies did not stop being performed until 1967, though still federally legal, and only in 1974 were women allowed to own a bank account without a male co-signer. For women to have gained even an ounce of independence, significant legal reforms were necessary. This change did not come without the emergence of feminist ideology and the help of the feminist social movements labeled the first and second wave of women’s rights movements. These movements granted women suffrage, equal opportunities, and access to social and economic capital they were once shut out of . While our society has made progress in dismantling the oppressive social structures harming women, the culture of patriarchy still exists. With this increase in autonomy for women, I believe there has been significant pushback from men who feel they are no longer “in control” of women and furthermore I question how this misogyny allows for violence against women to be commonplace in society.
