Cynthia Miller-Idriss will be delivering the CMU Women’s History Month Lecture at 3:30 on Friday, March 13th in Posner Hall 340.
After a colleague followed me into a conference elevator some years ago and tried to kiss me, murmuring “What kind of games are you playing?” as I pushed away and ducked out the door, the first thing I did was call my sister. How could I have possibly sent signals I wasn’t aware of, I wondered? She sighed. “Your problem is that you’re too nice,” she admonished. “You have to be more of a bitch.”
God forbid you are more of a bitch, though, because some men get unpredictably, viciously aggressive when you say no, or don’t reply to their texts, or reject their advances. This isn’t all men, of course, but as I write, the news is filled with story after story of men who react violently when women or girls reject them. Some of these stories are sensational—like that of a California man who made national news in January 2023 for repeatedly slamming a dump truck into his wife’s home during their divorce proceedings, after he learned she had filed a restraining order against him. More often, the stories are so banal they barely register. Thousands of videos and threads on social media document women’s everyday experiences of street harassment, catcalling, and stalking, including the reactive anger of men when their response (or lack thereof) is not pleasing enough. For these enraged men, women who say no are breaking the rules. For some men (and which men it might be is so unpredictable that women must act as if it is all men), rejection violates an unquestioned sense of entitlement to women’s time, attention, smiles, and adoration. It can spiral into shame-fueled rage at the sheer audacity, lack of gratitude, and arrogance of women who reject them. Women who say no are often called derogatory slurs, threatened with violence, or assaulted. Still others lose career opportunities. In the worst cases, women are murdered by men they reject.
Girls and women have been killed for “offenses” like saying no to a potential prom date, or for ignoring catcalling. A Wisconsin girl recently was shot in the head multiple times by a 14-year-old boy after his “fit of rage” over their breakup. In fact, 34% of the nearly five thousand women who were killed in the United States in 2021 died at the hands of their own intimate partner—a rate of almost five women per day and a statistic that is a certain undercount, given that it is based on only 63% reporting from US law enforcement agencies. In case after case, these men kill not only their partners but also their children, bystanders, or others they target with their rage. In late 2022, a Utah man killed his wife and five children after his wife filed for divorce, tragically illustrating what the data have consistently shown: The most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she leaves.
It’s not that being a Nice Girl—or ignoring men altogether—is necessarily safer. Around the same time as I was being cornered in that elevator, a 14-year-old girl standing on a Florida sidewalk refused a driver’s offer to pay her for sex; the man pulled her into his car by her hair, choked her, threw her back onto the street and then ran over her several times. Even online rejection between people who haven’t met in person can make men angry. In one study of online dating, romantic rejection increased men’s “hostile tendencies,” measured as both aggressive tendencies toward the rejecting partner and hostile attitudes toward women more broadly.
In other words, being “more of a bitch” is risky, since refusing to give men the attention, adoration, or service they desire makes some men very, very angry. More than 94% of far-right violent and nonviolent extremists in the United States between 1948 and 2021 were men. Men commit 98% of mass shootings and at least 94% of sexual abuse. Being “more of a bitch” is even riskier for nonwhite women, who are disproportionate victims of gun violence from intimate partners—data that are clear even with high rates of underreporting in marginalized com- munities. The overall scale of the problem is staggering, with nearly twenty people per minute being physically abused in the United States by an intimate partner. The outcomes are especially bad for trans women, who experience disproportionate incidents of violence com- pared to cisgender women, and for girls and women who are disabled, who are twice as likely to experience sexual violence in their lifetime. LGBTQ+ people are often targeted with violence by men who are enraged at them simply for existing in ways that do not conform to their expected norms for gender expression or behavior. This is especially true for trans and gender-diverse people who are assaulted, as one violent attacker later described in trying to justify his violence, for “flaunting” their identity. The very idea of “flaunting”—i.e., of being somehow excessively or abnormally public or flamboyant—illustrates what the philosopher Kate Manne has so thoughtfully argued: At its root, misogyny is about policing the behavior of anyone who does not adhere to patriarchal norms and expectations.
But these ongoing, ubiquitous cases of interpersonal violence are almost always treated as wholly separate from the kinds of episodic mass shootings and attacks that fall under the national security mandate of the federal (or any given state) government. This happens even though enraged partners do not only pose a tremendous risk to the safety of their lovers: Their anger clearly can spill over to anyone who gets in the way. In well over half of mass shootings, the perpetrator shot an intimate partner as part of the rampage. Relatedly, as many as half of the people killed in intimate partner violence are not the partner themselves. Violent misogyny, stalking, harassment, and abuse of women or the LGBTQ+ community is a constant detail in reports of mass shootings or terrorist attacks, although it is barely acknowledged and even more rarely analyzed. In 2019, the New York Times detailed dozens of cases of mass shooters from across the ideological spectrum who share a common thread: “a history of hating women, assaulting wives, girlfriends and female family members, or sharing misogynistic views online.”
Of all mass murders in the United States in 2018, 83% of the offenders had a history of prior violence against women. That year was no exception. In case after case, misogynistic rage against women, the LGBTQ+ community, or prior reports of intimate partner violence are a documented part of perpetrators’ histories, even when their official motives lie elsewhere (or are unidentified).
From Man Up, published by Princeton University Press and reprinted here by permission.
