International Women's Day 2024: Another Dead Woman

I'm male, questionably a man. Tracking through the years, I find my personal awareness of international women's day tracking downwards over time. This year I would not have known but for the google doodle of the day, one that furthermore required me to hover over with my mouse to interpret. I thought it might be international quilt day or something. Had I known it wasn't I probably wouldn't have paid it any mind.

Yes, of course, International Women's Day isn't for me. It isn't about me. I am precisely, not the point. Bringing me at least, to the question of flattery - the Kantian ethic of always treating a conscious person, or peoples as an ends, not a means. What for me, is an honest reaction to something like International Women's Day? Which coworker am I in the music dance experience as women of the world shake their maracas to defiant jazz?

Is International Women's Day Galentine's Day by another name?

Am I free to do my level best to simply leave it to those who would have it? Am I a free enough person upon this earth to choose not to care? Like I would react to the Adelaide Crows or the Geelong Cats winning an AFL premiership. I personally was far more excited to see my Blues beat the Brisbane Lion's by 1 point at the GABBA after being eliminated by them in the semi-final last year.

Well I would have not cared, but for strange and mysterious happenings on an otherwise quiet IWD. The strange thing was facebook notified me of some friends' posts. It seems most people like me have learned perhaps over the course of Covid, that facebook is as much a means to stay out of touch as it is to stay in touch. A way to learn who your friends really aren't as bold declarations of who they would like to be make you forget the authentic reasons you are friends in the first place: usually that they are good and decent people, mostly harmless.

So it transpired that facebook told me on IWD of two profoundly impactful statements made by male friends. By profoundly impactful, I mean they got more than 50+ "like" reactions. The first was from someone who was personally proximate to the latest mass shooting in the USA calling for prayers. The second was from someone responding to the news that, and I must be careful to describe what actually happened, the police arresting a man for killing Samantha Murphy in my hometown Ballarat. A marking of the passage from likely dead, to presumed dead with confidence, though to my knowledge her body has not been recovered and even though her alleged killer had been named I know nothing of the police's case against him.

The coincidence of two tragedies and public responses to them on facebook I'll be honest prompted me to want to write this facetious status update:

"I wish to once again affirm that I am for everything good and against everything bad. I will not stay quiet or silent while injustices persist. I take responsibility by recognizing the need for betterment and call upon those responsible to stop *not* implementing the simple solutions to problems that have persisted for almost all of human history."

Something like that. I refrained because I assumed that most people would assume that I wasn't commenting on the generalized behaviour, and how I view it in many ways as counter productive, verging on vacuous* though I acknowledge that for some distressed people saying something to someone might give them personal relief...I assume most people would assume I was referring to Sam Murphy's news developments, making light of a specific situation. 

*(By vacuous I mean, that with some confidence, I can predict that most public calls to action assume that all the worlds problems could be solved if people just committed to doing everything correctly, as though we know what is correct and that it is within not even most people's power to actually apprehend and implement correct behaviour.)

One of my friends who posted, I consider a very authentic person. The other, time has wearied me into stark cynicism. I worry that posting such messages relieves him too much. We are all in some ways running a newsroom, susceptible to noticing how great tragedy is for ratings.

By 2024, the imagined discourse I don't even witness likely riles me more than were I to actually look to my newsfeed and see what people were saying about another woman killed by a man not even known to her or the family being revealed on IWD. Reported on by bright young women news correspondents with their whole lives ahead of them.

I carry to the present day the damage of the mob's catharsis-voice in the wake of the murders of Jill Meagher, the murder of Eurydice Dixon, the murder of Aya Maasarwe who I must confess, the last's name I couldn't recall off the top of my head. If Kimberle Krenshaw demanded I stand and "say their names" I'd get the first two, not Aya's. 

People who might remember the furore over Eurydice's murder and the media frenzy covering and generating the public response may also remember a few lonely banners carried to the vigils and protests asking that we also consider a woman murdered by her husband at approximately the same time that Eurydice was murdered by a stranger, can you remember her name?

I remember she was ethnically asian, though I can no longer recall whether she had a Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian etc. name. As such I can't exclude that the failure of her murder to gain any real traction in the public discourse, as attributable to racism - white victim takes precedence in a white culture. Equally I cannot exclude the implicit implication that society broadly still regards women as property, getting killed by your husband is sad, getting killed by a stranger is outrageous, what right does a stranger have to kill a woman? 

Okay. Having read that last paragraph, I hope you read this my memory, or impressions of the case was wrong and I who thinks about the issues women raise am as prone to basing my conclusions on things I assume I know, but do not, as anyone else: the woman's name was Qi Yu, she was murdered in Sydney by her housemate, not her husband, both Chinese nationals he was a construction worker who had overstayed his visa, he plead guilty, internet searches by him indicated the murder was premeditated, the judge accepted testimony by a psychiatric assessor that her murderer had schizophrenia though there's not much evidence this was accounted for in sentencing so much as his guilty plea.

So yeah, the likelihood that her case was eclipsed by Eurydice's was likely racism*. Finally looking up the details of Qi Yu's case, I'm put in mind of when a home intruder in October 2008 caused the death of a Chinese student who jumped from a balcony to try and escape her assailant, I remember it as a horrific crime that seemed to me to be barely making the news compared to Britt Lapthorne's death that had dominated headlines since her disappearance in September 2008 one month earlier. There was much criticism of Croatian police, Australians, looking at what GoT would make a tourist destination for losers everywhere, as dark and scary and backward. Meanwhile as Liao "Elva" Wei's mother stated she "thought Elva was safe here," at least according to a family friend. Her daughter's death remains as unsolved by Australian law enforcement as Britt's by Croatian law enforcement.

*(I'd still hesitate to conclude this strongly. A quick consultation with Googletrends indicate that compared to Jill and Eurydice, white victims killed by white perpatrators, both Qi and Aya were non white and killed by non-white men, I strongly suspect that Melburnian's particularly on the left are averse to touching non-white perpetrators for fear of looking like a Queensland Nationals voter.)

Is Australia racist? Of course it is. Do I think the people most vocal about racism are competent guides to a brighter tomorrow? Not at all.

I would still guess that the relative lack of coverage and public outcry as to women being killed by romantic partners, vs. women getting killed by a stranger with notable exceptions like the woman whose whole family got burned alive by her ex-partner, is akin to the disparity in public outcry about people who get killed by someone with a car versus people who get killed by someone with a gun or blade. Driving is too relatable, as is dating and marriage and breakups.

Personal experience in Mexico I guess has somewhat inured me to Samantha Murphy's horrific demise. In my heart lives a woman, that I watched suffer mostly alone when her partner, my friend, disappeared one day, just before Christmas, never to be seen again. An experience that told me, long before the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible, that horror is a part of life, one that we need be capable of processing. At the time this man I knew joined 107,000 Mexican's who were registered as disappeared. I used to jog regularly by the Glorieta de las y los desaparecidos - the monument to the disappeared, where families and loved ones attach their own missing person in a monument to a Mexican tragedy. 

Photo credit D. Hernandez T.

The number now stands at 111,896, which excludes any missing person's that were later found dead. Yes in a nation roughly 5 times the size of Australia, 4,000 people disappear each year, never to be seen again. It's extremely rare for any of those 4,000 stories to really make the news. Not when cartels leave bodies in the streets or hanging from bridges. The thing is, I never saw any cartel related crime or violence in the four years I lived in Guadalajara. I saw people using drugs. I looked up where various Mexican cities ranked on "the world's most dangerous cities" a statistic that is determined by homicides per 100,000 population. Okay, nowhere in Mexico is as deadly as the town in Australia where someone was murdered in a population of 11. Furthermore, if a friend told you they were moving to Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis, Milwaukee, Detroit or Cleveland you would probably picture them doing something akin to living in Fitzroy, Melbourne. Bondi, Sydney. You understand that millionaire athletes move to these towns and hit their clubs, enjoy fine dining. The same is true of Mexico, if you want a huge carbon footprint for no fucking reason at all go stay in the district of Roma, Mexico City, it's just like where you fucking came from.

The big difference is, where community volunteers coordinate to conduct a search across acres of Bushland where a woman disappeared on her Sunday jog, with multiple detectives working the case to gradually close in on someone to charge with her murder by looking at cell-phone tower data and whatever else, in Mexico my understanding is, you will probably have 5 different police explain you need to fill out a form when someone you love disappears. You will also not be able to exclude the possibility that the very officer you are talking to knows where your missing person is because they disappeared them. Mexico's present institutions are very broken, but Mexico's future, I feel, is bright.

A friend once told me "if you can spot it you've got it." and all I write is really my own testimony as to my own frank incompetence. I'm not fit to tackle the problem of violence in our society. Furthermore, life has delivered to me perspective that while Australia is not free from horror, it's societal response to violence against women is pretty good. 

We have a slow, deliberate judicial process that is pretty good. This has the unfortunate effect though of meaning there might be a year between a particularly graphic crime capturing national attention, and the quiet to almost silent sentencing of the criminal. Police took into custody both Jill and Aya's killers within a matter of days, sentenced to 40 and 36 years respectively. Eurydice's killer turned himself in to police and was sentenced to 35 years.

There are of course numerous problems with the criminal justice system, and some, are likely baked in, unfixable, without omniscience. Prescience. 

So perhaps it's fitting, rather than depressing, for IWD in my locale to be punctuated with an arrest of a killer of a woman. Justice is likely never going to take the form of swapping the guilty living for the innocent dead.

And that's where I'd like to think there's space for me to be an Adam Scott dancing along from a safe and respectable distance while women of the world shake their maracas on the day patriarchy generously allows them. Alas, I'm probably somewhere between Adam Scott and Zach Cherry trying actively not to participate while those hyping the day remain insensitive to my emotional confusion.

For example, how is one supposed to feel about propaganda?:

*everything does not include co-ed education experiences. **nowhere does not include the numerous other places like MLC, some within walking distance.

has anyone ever said this? is it a former Pymble Ladies College slogan?

How long has it been since some pipe smoking singlet wearing father informed his daughter that she couldn't change the world like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did because they were a girl. Who in this post "The Descent" world is still crushing little girl's dreams of cave exploration? Mountaineering? People should be discouraging kids from mountaineering, way too many tourists are climbing Mount Everest now, and none of them are changing the world. Of course, it's obviously a metaphor a metaphor for...for how girls need to ignore the naysayers* and forge their own path by enrolling in a finishing school.

*(and seriously, I would not be surprised if the people most guilty of broadcasting messages about what women can't do and can't achieve, are now feminists of the Iago variety.)

I've long been fascinated by the outdoor advertising put up by Methodist Ladies College. It is perhaps my marketing sensitivities, but I think I read them as intended, the target market is private school's customer base - parents (tweenage girls in Australia don't tend to grab The Financial Review on IWD and be so inspired they beg their parents to send them to Pymbles Ladies College, they are targeting affluent conservative adults). The strategy is to facilitate being able to deny sending your daughter to a finishing school, a safe environment where she will be shielded from the harsh real world while learning the skills necessary to avoid reality forever, by hopefully progressing through a series of gated institutions until they retire to a gated community or something. No, you can tell your friends, you are not doing that, you are sending them to be challenged and inspired. Even though if you can afford private tuition they will be challenged and inspired by being sent to a public coed school across town where refugee immigrants get to send their kids. The difference being the latter option contains real and certain risk - incompetent unmotivated teachers and administration, defective disciplinary programs etc. 

I guess in pointing out my personal distaste for propaganda - propaganda that frequently misrepresents both femininity and misogyny, as per the Pymble Ladies College - I allude to a greater unintelligibility regarding feminism. It is no one thing, as are women themselves. There is also a distaste for the euphemism "ally" which is very much an off-the-shelf pre-packaged fait-accompli, not even a mule to be tailor fit. Functionally terms like "ally" and "allyship" and phrases like "being a good ally" are talking about serfdom, or protestantism or something. 

An alliance is a deal struck over a shared goal. If we take a really one-sided negotiation, like the terms & conditions I agreed to use google products, that isn't something I negotiate, it is something I can take or leave. Which again is to say, I recognize that the invitation extended to me, and men like me is to lend my weight but not my mind, not my voice. A good ally follows and surrenders their resources to the cause.

But it's even more than that, I don't even need to touch any of the lukewarm buttons on the issues like sex and gender, feminine and female. I can simply invoke for intelligibility purposes old names like Andrea Dworkin and Valeria Solonas compared to Ariel Levy and Rebecca Solnit all feminists of previous generations, previous waves. 

I do not see the current "wave" as innovating through clarity, cohesion either. Nor would I expect a wave born in the social media era, to produce clarity and cohesion. The best opportunity for alliances in the modern era, is in civilizing the wild-west of internet misinformation, much as "the west" had to be recivilized after the printing press created pamphleteering. I can find common ground with anyone who doesn't wish to see another Witch's Hammer.

I can only possibly ally with a form of feminism that interprets "equal" as "equal in dignity and respect" not one with a three-word-slogan like "equal is equal" as in my experience of the past decade such slogans generally predict a lack of any considered thought. 

As I dignify and respect myself as an aspirational reasonable person, averse to dogma, appeals to authority and assertions, I cannot respect as my equal, anyone who will not argue their case, nor cannot argue their case.

For this I can circle back to the problem of dead women at the hands of men. Somewhere in the past week I saw a screenshot of a tweet making the claim "until women can safely walk the streets at night we are not equal." a statement that is as vacuous as it is righteous.

If I'm reading the mood of the mob, the optics of me attempting to correct the error of this statement in order not to defeat feminism as movement, but to improve it, are worse than a women suffering through life as a result of her misapprehensions regarding the transformative powers of righteousness.

One thing about Mexico that is very visible, is that disappeared men outnumber disappeared women about 2~1. Just as it is clearer that a woman murdered by a stranger is a social issue than a woman murdered by a former romantic partner (allowing a woman's death to qualify all romantic partner femicides as former) most Mexicans allow that disappeared women are more outrageous than many disappeared men, given a tendency to presume that men who disappear are likelier to be involved in "the drug game."

But there is an absolute (in terms of raw statistics) truth on display that male violence in absolute numbers is far more dangerous for men, if less outrageous as a phenomena, because it is harder to predict which of two men will be victim and perpetrator based on sex characteristics alone.

There are likely very real and stable facts however that can predict reliably that I for example am 98% more likely to be a victim of male violence against men, than a perpetrator of violence against men. That just cannot be determined by looking at me standing next to another man. The fact is though, that it is not safe for men to walk the streets at night. 

I invite my fellow Victorians to consider the word "stabbings" Since I returned to Australia, I would guesstimate that I have heard of at least 6 fatal stabbings being covered in the news. Generally these stories have involved teenage boys stabbing each other. An alarming social phenomena that actually does not alarm me at all.

Therein the fundamental difference - the psychological difference. That while men are in far more danger of being violently attacked by other men, they don't suffer psychologically for the risk. They go to pubs expecting to come home, not anxious that they will bump someone causing them to spill their beer and then in a rage king-hit them and end their life. They walk the streets with no expectation that a group of pubescent little boys will pull out box cutters and stab them over a six pack of beers, or while they may fear getting called "freckle-face" at school, walk home from school with no expectation that their classmates will stab them to death because they have freckles.

Strict equity in this case is undesirable. For one, it would mean that the world needs to become more dangerous for women, to the point where what happened to Jill, Eurydice and Aya verges on being boring. Something I noticed walking Mexican streets at night, was despite the ubiquitous purple spray paint defacing statues, school campuses and government buildings with radical feminist complaints about femicide and abortion legalisation, and the very visible posters and murals dedicated to disappeared women and girls, even the stories of Police gangraping women that I have heard, none of these daily realities have left Mexican women more as afraid and angry as Australian women. A morbid conclusion suggested by the data, that the more progress we make toward equity the more women as a population will suffer psychology. As crime goes down, coverage goes up, but how else would we have it?

For second, I attribute the lion's share of the disparity in crime to phenotype and extended phenotype differences. This easily explains the massive disparities in crime within the male population. I have written at length previously, that I have heard enough rape jokes and seen enough posters outing male-feminist "allys" as sexual predators, that I find neither men who tell and laugh at rape jokes nor men who express their solidarity and "do the work" predictive in any way as to who will be the violent offenders among men. A reassuring number of men laugh at rape jokes, because they understand that rape is really really wrong. An alarming number of men who express their solidarity, are seeking access to vulnerable women.

The reality that has to be accepted, is that most women on this planet can give birth to a male, who in some 12~14 short years will be fully capable of overpowering them and beating them to death with their own hands. I've heard but haven't verified, that the average 70 year old male has a stronger grip strength than the average 25 year old woman - a suggestion that a man some 50 years removed from his physical prime can grab the arm of a woman in her physical prime such that she could not remove the offending hand on average.

That's the phenotype difference I allude to, and just the phenotype difference. What I would expect is that where there is pronounced sexual dimorphism like in the human species, there will likely be corresponding behavioural traits. A convoluted way of saying, that I somewhat expect people more capable of violence to wind up with frontal cortexes and hormone systems more prone to behaving violently.

So the second undesirable aspect of equality, would be men being as afraid of violence from women, and women being as afraid of violence from women, as women are afraid of violence from men and men are afraid of violence from men.

At my gym I got to watch a muted screening of "Where the crawdads sing" a film and story in a similar vein but likely inferior to "Fried Green Tomatoes" where ultimately, paralegal "justice" is somewhat glorified or justified - spoiler alert, women kill men who wrong them and escape conviction. 

I suspect these books and films hold appeal, as an archetype, because human stock is being civilised by institutions rather than being innately civilised. We are probably all naive-tribalists with double standards applied to people we identify with or feel we understand and different standards for those we don't.

I will hedge my bets in predicting a future, (I mean the easiest future to predict is one in which some baseline, equivalent to the neoliberal definition of "full employment (about 96-98%)" is reached in which women will continue to be killed by men, mostly by current or former romantic partners.) But that the fickle-fashions will turn again to problematise Where The Crawdads Sing for glorifying a false analogy to fire-flies and praying mantises as justifying a unilateral decision to murder a perceived or even real threat. The hedge is that if we don't live in that future, it will be a worse future.

The first two waves in hindsight appear to have merged into one and the same, a grounded feminism with some fringe elements that largely concerned itself with real problems many of which persist today and are in ample supply to be meaningfully addressed by the supply of feminists. 

From reading Ariel Levy, I got a brief primer in the confusion that arose between the simultaneous movements of Women's liberation and the Sexual Revolution - the basis I think, of her thesis for Female Chauvinist Pigs, the current era appears more confusing as women's liberation has become entangled with the deconstruction of women and intersectionality to the point that it is in my opinion, genuinely unintelligible. Though I will concede, my answer to "what is a woman?" is not so narrow as "adult human female" though I recognise how someone can arrive at that position rationally. 

Personally I regard "man" and "woman" as honorifics, indicating males and females that have attained the desirable attribute of maturity, and the reason it is as okay to label bathrooms with these signifiers as clear honorifics "ladies" and "gents" which are honorifics pertaining to more specific characters, is because manners are a huge part of our civilisation and explicitly are our guidelines as to how to treat with strangers so our bathroom doors give strangers the benefit of the doubt as to being worthy of the honorifics "men" and "women" even if they then go on to prove that they pee on the seats or don't wash their hands or prefer to use the disabled only toilet for the space and privacy.

Now the third wave is either current, or part of what I think is the second wave. What I'm sure of is that the current wave, let's call it fourth increasingly looks to me the product of a social science as undignified as economics. 

There is an economics joke involving respectable scientists and an economist stuck on a desert island with a can of beans and the punchline, at the expense of the economist is "assume we have a can opener."

With what economics training I have, I can appreciate this punchline, and it becomes morbid when you look at the human cost of austerity budgets and learn the economists assumption was that a person who lost half their household income due to public school teachers getting fired as a result of austerity, would be so thrilled at their anticipated lifetime savings in tax obligations that they would go out on a consumer binge and thus repair the economy. 

The current wave, the fourth wave appears to have it's own theories-into-practice underpinned by a premise of "assume men don't exist."

Where to comment that nobody, in a lifetime has ever uttered within earshot of a man "Girls can't change the world" such that a marketing slogan of "Girls can't change the world" seems like trite propaganda for a finishing school that will leave your daughter less capable of competing in a world in which men exist as a reasonable inference to draw about the efforts they appear to be promoting of protecting young proto-women from the stress of sharing spaces with men.

To comment as a man, even granting the limits of standpoint-epistemology, is an affront to theory's right to exist without reference to, or constraint by, reality.

Yet, a piece of text rings in my years following the death of Eurydice, who's death haunts me based on its proximity to a significant death in my life, of a friend lambasting the "deafening silence" I assume, on social media, from men in response to her death.

That was but one voice among many female voices, and more than one female voice in public argued a case that though tragic, the public outcry was overblown given that the dark streets of Melbourne remain statistically safer for women than the places they call homes. I just suspect I'm reading "the room" of public opinion right, when I continue to view that invitation to speak up as a man is an invitation to toe the line. It is not a suggestion I might have anything of value to offer (as I would if one assumes that men exist and need to be negotiated), it is a suggestion that I am passing up the incredible value on offer, because if I said what hyperbolically speaking "everyone" was already saying as a man and an ally, it would indicate I have read the material because the only outcome of reading the material is to agree. 

The truth is I've read much of the material, had the arguments, and remain unconvinced that it is as simple as presented.

All I choose to offer here, is the suggestion that often the deafening silence, is in practice a deafening politeness. The story of Samantha's murder I predict, will be the story of a troubled young man committing a crime of oportunity, much the same as Eurydice's story and Aya's story and Qi's story. But few people outside of me, will even follow up when the media covers the trial, verdict and sentencing.