About "Stubbed Toes" and "Train Wrecks" ("Puffy Face Moments IV")

So ... on to tweet number two. It went something like this: "We live in a world where women and girls are being murdered for being female - how can you make a big deal out of comments about appearances?" In other words: why bother with something so small, when there are more important things to worry about?

For me, this comment exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding. It's not that we have to choose between caring about school girls in Afghanistan being poisoned for wanting an education or the objectification of Ashley Judd, and that's because these two instances are examples of the same underlying system: different expressions of a deeply misogynistic mindset, in which women are somehow less than, and it is therefore okay to treat them as things. Things that can be ridiculed, humiliated, and (ab)used. If I was somehow limited to only caring about, only paying attention to, one single issue, if I had to rank poisoning and a discussion about someone's face according to magnitude or extremism of misogyny, I would choose to address the former. But luckily I can care about more than one thing, and I am aware of the way misogyny works.

By separating the two things, by somehow claiming that they are unrelated, we are ignoring the fact that they are simply expressions of the same thing. People that murder, rape, or physically assault women simply for being women are not sick or out of control, they simply feel that they have the right to act that way. It's an expression of entitlement, of power, and of dominance. We are contributing to the propagation of this system by trivializing other acts of misogyny. 

Why would a society spend days talking about the face of an actress, or the "scrunchy" of a secretary of state? Which message are we trying to send to the women we are publicly scrutinizing, ridiculing, and putting down? And which message are we sending to other women? These debates suggest that it is somehow okay to judge these women not for what they say or do, for what they have contributed and accomplished (and both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ashley Judd are amazing women that have worked hard for years to make this world a better place not just for women, but for all of us), but for how they look. It suggests that it is okay to treat them not as persons, but rather as bodies, or body parts. And it suggests that these bodies or body parts are public property. We don't talk to them, we talk about them. They are not allowed to be subjects in the stories we tell, they are objects to be regarded, judged, and dissembled.

The character Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series "Sex and the City" says at one point: "The only two choices for women: sexy kitten and witch", and even though she is supposedly talking about the choice of Halloween costumes, these words convey something fundamental: we, as a society, will only tolerate women who are "pleasing to the eye", according to patriarchy's unattainable standards - but these women have to accept being treated as nothing more than decoration for others to enjoy. Once we, as women, fail to meet these standards, we will either become invisible, or we will be ridiculed, humiliated, and disrespected.

How is this in any way related to poisoning Afghan school girls? It is part of a continuum that stretches from subtle sexism all the way to violent and deadly acts of misogyny, but the root is and remains the same. If we accept sexism in its less open form, if we ignore it or trivialize it, we help open the doors to more aggressive and more violent acts of misogyny. 

The Roman poet Ovid coined the phrase "principiis obsta", which means something like "resist the beginnings", which warns us of the dangers of being quiet too long. The longer we remain silent in the face of seemingly "harmless" and "innocent" acts of sexism, the harder it will become to change things. If we let the "stubbed toes" pass without complaint, we won't have the power to do anything about the "train wrecks" that will be following in their wake.