Overturning Roe v. Wade Exposed a Bigger Problem: Discrimination, Violence, and Femicide

When you expose a problem, you pose a problem. This is what the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision did when it finally legalized reproductive rights for women. In addition to protecting women mentally and physically and granting them privacy and choices of their own, it empowered women to have the same rights as men, who do not experience pregnancy. This was at the heart of the predominantly male Supreme Court’s decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade: Femicide, controlling women through violent means.

Violence against women is not simply an issue of individual men abusing individual women. Rather, it is symptomatic of larger power structures that normalize men’s contempt for women. In its most extreme form, men murder women. The “milder” forms of discrimination, violence, and other kinds of mistreatment will be felt among all women, resulting in demeaning stereotypes such as the “angry White woman.” Blacks, Latinos, and Asians will suffer even more with the combination of sexism and racism: angry “Black” and “spicy” or “Asian dragon lady.”

Ignoring the roots of femicide while painting feminists’ anger feminists themselves as the problem is nothing new in the United States. Detractors in the 19th century accused suffragettes of being ugly and “mannish” or simply “irrational” and “insane.” More recently, right-wing zealots have characterized feminists as “feminazis” or “privileged snowflakes,” millennials who have been raised to think of themselves as coequals, and to think FOR themselves. In the meantime, male entitlement and domination continues its march of violence.

In response to this crisis: femicide, Michael Kimmel wrote in his 2013 book, “Angry Men: American Masculinity at the End of the Era, that female violence was due to the shrinking of male privilege. The solution must be the creation of a masculinity that rejects violence and the hierarchical “othering” of disfavored groups-namely women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.(1) Unfortunately, the male dominated court just did the opposite: denying their violent masculinity and male insecurities and granting femicide through other means.

(1) Rutland, Zoe. The Feminism Book. New York, New York: Penguin Random House, 2019., p. 315.

Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)