Women being randomly punched - guardian

[CheeseChamp]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/29/nyc-woman-punched-tiktok-response

What the f have I just read?

No wonder I barely leave the house anymore.

I misread that at first - I think the poster means 'minimising' as in 'being dismissive of', not actually reducing it.

This is woeful, but part of the pattern of the Guardian's reporting on attacks against women. See Gaby Hinsliff's article about the Cologne attacks (mentioned by a PP):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/08/cologne-attacks-hard-questions-new-years-eve

Or the article by a lesbian subjected, along with her partner, to a homophobic attack, which bizarrely tries to claim that people only cared about the attack because the two women were "attractive, white cisgender".

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/14/homophobic-attack-bus-outrage-media-white

And let's not forget the sexual predator exposing himself in front of women and children in a US spa, which apparently was really just a bit of moral panic whipped up by right-wing extremists:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/28/anti-trans-video-los-angeles-protest-wi-spa

The Guardian's message to women is loud and clear: if you're subjected to sexual assault or violence, you must shut up about it, because it might make someone look bad.

The oddest thing about the second article is it was wirtten by one of the victims, ina strange form of self flagellation. She was the subject of a horrificly violent homophobic and misogynistic attack and still felt the need to apologise for her self in public for being white and cis gender.

I find that so much worse. It's like the Guardian is giving us a moral lesson in how to be stoic as the perpetrators are probably the real victims. My view is that if it helps her mentally cope with what happened to frame it that way then fine but she and the Guardian can fuck off with projecting it onto other women.

Yes. It is another example of internalised misogyny - where even though she has been the victim of a violent assault, she has decided to play it down, because after all, she's white and "cis". As if that makes her privileged in some way.

There's a fascinating book by Ayaan Hirsi Ali called "Prey", in which she tries to work out whether mass immigration to Europe from countries with embedded misogyny has created a rise in assaults on women. She points out that in many newspaper reports of these assaults, the women often play the assault down, sometimes even refusing to report it to the police, because they don't want to demonise immigrants.

The degree to which women have internalised the message that they aren't important is quite extraordinary.

God forbid women weaponise their trauma.

This is part of the sad reality of modern America where educated people are so used to seeing everything in victimhood, that they tend to regard perpetrators of crime as having more right to victim status than the people who are the actual victims of crime. Is your attacker black, or seemingly a migrant, or behaving as if they are mentally ill? Well, it's unfair to have them arrested, no matter what they have done, and it's better, instead, to wring your hands over how terrible society is for making these people behave this way

yes if you are victimised by black or brown men, you will not be taken seriously. How has it come to this?

There was an odd form of this brain worms on Twitter after a horrific knife attack on a suburban London train this week.

One left wing commentator mused that help may have been got quicker or the situation defused if there were still guards on trains. Other left wingers lept to say more authority and "policing" was not the answer here.

While online, comfortably off people exercise out intellectual arguements about this sort of stuff women and (overwhelmingly) young black men are getting hurt and dying.

This is what "anti-carceral feminists" like Alison Phipps have made a career out of.

unherd.com/newsroom/why-is-gender-studies-promoting-anti-women-literature/

I think you also saw something of this attitude in the response to Sarah Everard's murder. There were some people, including women, regrettably, who decided that if Everard had been black, there wouldn't have been so much publicity or outrage. Of course, we can't possibly have known if that was the case, but the implied message was that we were wrong to be so upset about Everard's murder, and our distress was an example of white privilege. As if Everard was fortunate, in some way, because, well, she might have been raped and murdered, but at least people were upset about it.

In the late 90s living in New York City, in Midtown , 5th Avenue I saw a big heavyset guy shambling around, sneaking up on women, only small women, and walloping them on their as. They scurried away and did nothing.
I'm very street smart and tiny, tried to avoid him and he hit me. It hurt. I was so angry. I ran, found the cops, told them and they could see it themselves.
They got him, wrestled him to the ground and kicked him in the ribs for being such a cowardly creep. Sure he was drunk or on drugs. So Fecking what? They sent him to Bellevue for observation. And thanked me; it could have been their mother, wife or sister harmed by that bstard.
I left the US but if I stayed I would have gotten a handgun permit. NYC women should arm themselves and shoot male attackers; that would stop them and warn other males.

This brings to mind the image of Shani Louk being abducted by Hamas terrorists, half naked and seemingly unconscious in the back of a truck - surrounded by men with heavy armoury and one with his leg placed territorially over her lifeless body. This photo has just won a journalism award for photograph of the year.

According to many - this act of sheer brutality was the consequence of Israel's inherent evilness - and so can be contextualised away. The victim had it coming to them and Hamas bear no responiosibility for their actions. They are the real victims.

There's a thread about this on the Middle East board.

I'm not getting into it on there but I agree with you on this.

I was responding to someone's point. The image is all over the press today - because it has just won an award - controversially, for obvious reasons.

The point remains the same as the article above. Violence against a woman - excused.

When Gabby Petito was missing in the American west there was wall to wall news coverage about it. After she was found news coverage berated us for not caring about non white women going missing. Women people didn't know about because news stations don't report about them.

It's like an abusive relationship.

When Gabby Petito was missing in the American west there was wall to wall news coverage about it. After she was found news coverage berated us for not caring about non white women going missing. Women people didn't know about because news stations don't report about them.

It's like an abusive relationship.

This.

It's like an abusive relationship.

Yes - this is exactly what gaslighting is. If someone punches you hard in the face, it doesn't really matter, and if you complain about it, it's probably because you're a Karen, a whiny white woman who is weaponising her privilege.

On the other hand, if you misgender a trans woman, that's literal violence and you should probably go to jail.

The number of murders in NYC a year is more than half the number for the whole of England and Wales. Sounds pretty hellscapey to me.

Seen a similar thing recently with people objecting to the idea that London is "unsafe" when its crime rate is rather higher than most of the UK (other very large cities and a few particularly rough towns aside).

If ever I came to the conclusion, "people aren't responsible for their bad behaviour", I would still probably think, "we have to pretend otherwise and insist on individual responsibility or it's just going to be chaos".

I suspect a lot of this stuff is people with socialist leanings that want to say, "the REAL problem is not having enough socialism".

I think you made a good the point there, Murica, in the last sentence:
When Gabby Petito was missing in the American west there was wall to wall news coverage about it. After she was found news coverage berated us for not caring about non white women going missing. Women people didn't know about because news stations don't report about them.

As you say, the US media don't report about missing women who aren't white, and this must really anger the families and communities of the murdered and missing women and children who don't merit the same media attention because they are the 'wrong' colour, and therefore don't matter.

Obviously that doesn't justify downplaying tragedies just because the media found the young White blonde victim more photogenic - a tragedy is a tragedy is a tragedy.

But the relative lack of media attention when Black women and children go missing has life-or-death implications - it means that they are less likely to be found while in the short window of opportunity when they may be found alive.

Maybe somebody with Film Studies knowledge could confirm this, but aren't female murder victims in crime films usually young, white and blonde i.e. the 'ideal' victim of male violence, precisely because of their relatively privileged social status?
Maybe this also influences the media in which victims to prioritise.

I've got to be honest, the idea that because black women are treated by the media as not worthy of discussion we should extend that to white women so that there is equality in the media in that ALL women are treated as inconsequential if they die and not fully human is not the way I really want this to go.

I want there to be more reporting of crimes against black women so that the coverage is equal to that afforded to white women please. Even if it means less time given to Taylor Swift's latest romance or the royal family, or some z list celebrity losing weight.

I'd like the media to be held to account for racism when they don't report these crimes with real world consequences such as massive fines.

Anyway, anyone expecting anything other than rank misogyny from the Guardian is living in cloud cuckoo land. Several women have been forced out of working there because of the toxic misogynistic environment.

I entirely agree. It's absolutely obscene that some people's preferred solution is to reduce the coverage given to white women. Gabby Petito's disappearance got exactly the amount of coverage it should have done, thus meaning the man who killed her didn't get away with it. What we need to see is an increase in the coverage given to suspicious disappearances of women of all ethnicities. When someone abducts a black woman, there should be wall to wall coverage of that woman's face until she's found, too.

I can think of more than one case where a woman's disappearance was reported widely in the media, leading to her killer's capture, which then led to the solving of other cases of missing women who it turned out he'd killed years before.

We know predators currently pick on vulnerable women without secure social networks, who can be abducted without anyone immediately reporting them missing. They carry on doing that, until they get caught. Honestly, I'm appalled that people honestly think the solution to this is media policies that would widen the pool of women whose abductions won't be investigated. Sure, let's help out wannabe serial killers!

It was a 'scales falling from the eyes' moment for me.

I heard on here that something had happened. Went to the 'good' media; the BBC, The Guardian, The Independent. The honest, moral reporting of my youth. I had cut-out articles on the wall of my childhood bedroom. Nothing, nada, zilch. I found something in Breitbart. I assumed something was amiss, that there was more to this, that it was just racism, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, whipping up hatred.

Then days later it all turned out to be true. This is the issue with the ad hominem, I suppose 'ad medium' actually (excuse the pig Latin), attacks on the truth. If you see it in the Daily Mail or Breitbart it must be wrong and if it's in The Guardian it must be right. Thank goodness for the critical thinking professors I met in my 20s. Otherwise I wouldn't have seen it. Hatred for women writ large. Throwing us under the bus to save the 'real' people. Men.

It was awful to see. I actually can understand why some women want to remain in the safe, cozy warmth of the 'right' side. At least they have a team. Feminism does involve hard truths. It's easier to live inside the denial.