Broken Bones: America’s Violent Indifference toward Women

It is instead about all of the ways in which Americans carry, and our institutions reflect, a profound and abiding antipathy toward women’s day-to-day enjoyment and our broader fulfillment.

So women’s indifference becomes aversion; ignorance becomes ignoring; testimony becomes tattling; and asking becomes extortion.

“Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined,” writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few prominent figures to address the issue regularly.

So a woman’s recognized humanity may leave much to be desired by way of moral freedom. And her sense of obligation is then likely to be excessive, on the one hand, and lacking, in many others.

It might also point toward the way that valuing a woman for her difficulty can, in ways that are unexpectedly destructive, obscure her actual, particular self. Feminist discourse has yet to fully catch up to the truth that sexism

If you go door to door in our nation and talk to citizens about domestic violence, almost everyone will insist that they do not support male violence against women, that they believe it to be morally and ethically wrong. However, if you then explain that we can only end male violence against women by challenging patriarchy, and that means no longer

Because in this rarefied world there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.