How safe is your world? Not safe enough.
A woman is beaten every 15 seconds. And according to the FBI, domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to womyn ages 15 to 44 in the U.S. That’s more than car accidents, muggings and rapes combined. In fact, a 1998 survey by the Commonwealth Fund reports that nearly one-third of womyn report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives. And while statistical data about womyn outside of the United States is hard to find, news reports horrify. The New York Times reported that in a 1997 survey by the Kenyan Women Rights Awareness Program, 70 percent of men and womyn said they knew neighbors who beat their wives.
Simply, the statistics are shocking.
It’s easy to critique the legal system, which is not perfect and can, in fact, improve. But that system can’t change our biases. Only we can. Unfortunately, our cultural values reveal our resistance to change. And certain facts about our culture, like facts about the judiciary, are obscured by nebulous but popular notions.
Many things cause domestic violence. But the popular notion is that sexism plays a minor or non-existent role in this crime. Some say that womyn are full partners in society, that many millennia of subjugation of womyn has essentially vanished, that this historical bias no longer helps propel men to abuse. But if we’d really come such a long way, our culture would spurn “entertainment” that not only degrades women but also glibly celebrates their death.
The popular notion is that our culture has shed its bias against womyn. To see contradictory facts, look no further than the immensely popular rap sensation called Eminem.
Eminem’s debut album, which appeared last year and was called “The Slim Shady LP,” dwelled on fantasies of drugging, raping and killing women. Eminem glorifies this violence angrily, repulsively and remorselessly.
Billboard magazine Editor Timothy White condemned Eminem’s first CD and the music writers who lionized it. But relatively speaking, White’s was a lone voice of dissent. Mainstream critics collapsed at Eminem’s feet, helping his second album, released this year, debut at number one on the charts. His second work sold 1.7 million copies in a week, making it the second-biggest debut album and the biggest debut for a rap album ever. Eminem won top awards from MTV. Critics fawned over his talent and minimized his hatred of gays and womyn, whom Eminem respectively calls “faggots” and “b—-es.”
His second album includes “Kill You,” a song about his mother. Therein, he keeps yelling, “B—-, I’m kill you!” After musing over his mother’s murder, Eminem expresses his desire to rape and kill all other “b—-es.”
He also performs a murder reverie called “Kim,” named after his estranged wife. Toward the end of this excruciating rant, he tells Kim to “shut up,” to “get what’s coming to you. You were supposed to love me.” (Here there are sounds of Kim choking.) “Now bleed! B—- bleed! Bleed! B—- bleed! Bleed!” On stage, Eminem performs “Kim” as he attacks a blow-up doll that represents his wife.
But mass-media music writers revere Eminem. The Boston Globe barely acknowledged Eminem’s “diatribes against women and gays,” then argued that the more significant fact is that the black “rap community” embraces Eminem, who is white.
CDnow called his work “riveting and perversely funny.” VH-1 said the second album was “Eminem’s finest hour yet” and argued that “Kim” could “cement Eminem’s place as possibly the greatest storyteller in all of hip-hop.” The Arizona Republic called the work “mean-spirited, profane, shocking – and actually quite entertaining.”
This is stupefying. If Eminem, a white man, howled about killing black people and attacked them in effigy, society would never call it a “joke.” Critics would not concoct nebulous arguments, oddly detached from actual lyrics, about Eminem’s artistic merit. He would be excoriated. His albums would bomb. He would get no MTV award. And rightly so.
But Eminem doesn’t debase African Americans. When Rolling Stone asked him if he would use the n-word, he replied, “Out of respect, why would I put that word in my vocabulary?” Meantime, he has no remorse about his murderous fantasies about womyn. He and his apologists fail to see how this re-emphasizes his utter contempt for womyn.
This underscores a social pathology. A culture that genuflects to Eminem is a culture still sick with misogyny. It is a culture still blind to the role sexism frequently plays in domestic abuse.
It’s a free country, and everyone is entitled to take precisely the opposite view. They may contend that Eminem signifies nothing harmful, that men and womyn are equally violent, that the legal system is terribly unfair. But as long as these postulations obscure rather than explain irreconcilable facts, such rhetoric remains nothing more than a particularly cruel and painful joke.
