This should not have to be said, yet we must repeat it: Stop objecting to horrific actions and words against women by defining their humanity in relation to men.
In the past few weeks, Donald Trump has boasted of sexual harassment and women have come forward to validate his claims. As some men in the Republican Party and beyond have denounced Trump’s comments (even while continuing to back his campaign), they’ve used a very specific type of language. Mike Pence was offended “as a husband and a father.” Mitt Romney said the comments “demean our wives and daughters.”
To them we plead: Stop denouncing violations of women’s bodily autonomy only by imagining them as your daughter, your wife, your sister. This makes women not human in their own right, only in their traditional role within your patriarchal protection of them. We don’t need to force a comparison to our own female relatives in order to have human empathy.
More importantly, this is not actually done as a way to empathize better. Instead, it is done as a way to find a moral objection to this behavior.
We understand that there is a natural impulse to relate experiences to one’s own relatives to conjure up sympathy. That’s not what’s going on here — it is a persistent, widespread, pervasive and deeply concerning trend. Uniformly, it defines women’s humanity exclusively in relation to the men that they are familially related to.
Every single one of these comments about “our women” point to, as Lauren Collins of The New Yorker noted about Mitt Romney’s comments, a “fascinating proof of the GOP presumption that citizens are men.”
