by Peter Topolewski
“Wilcox married a police officer who worked crime scenes. He gave her advice on how to protect herself from an attacker: She should always carry keys in her hand when she walked to her car alone, and she shouldn’t keep a block of knives exposed in the kitchen. Too often, her husband told her, he’d seen women murdered with their own knives.”
Wilcox is Dawn Wilcox, a school nurse in Plano, Texas. The quote comes from 14,445 and Counting, a story about her and several other people—women—who document victims of murder. Specifically, victims of femicide, the murder of females because they are female. The article by Christa Hillstrom appears in The Atavist Magazine. It is a grim snapshot of the world women live and die in circa 2026.
After a friend of Wilcox’s daughter was murdered by an acquaintance, Wilcox “thought about how often women were harmed by men they knew…Did women have no choice,” she wondered, “but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?” Looking for further details about the number of murdered women, and who they were, she found no comprehensive database. What data existed was “grossly incomplete”. Wilcox began to build one herself in 2016. Her focus was the victims.
Wilcox maintains Women Count USA right up to today. It contains the names of 14,445 women—thus the title of the article. The real world has created a backlog of entries, ballooned by Wilcox’s refusal to automate the process, by her insistence of manually entering each name. Because, she says, “tracking femicides became another way of providing care”. Not the same as, but similar to, her work as a nurse.
In her 2006 book Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz documents her search for a failed murderer: A man who randomly attacked Jentz and her friend while they were camping on a bike trip from Oregon to Virginia on the TransAmerica Trail in 1977. In the middle of the night, he drove over their tent and then came at them with an axe. He was never caught. The focus of the book is Jentz’s search not for justice—the statue of limitations had run out—but for her attacker and for what he’d done to her life.
Over her years-long pursuit, Jentz learns of the prevalent violence against women, including femicides, up and down the West Coast of the U.S. from the 1970s through the 1990s. Again, not surprisingly, her mind—and her heart—goes to the victims. “You hear a lot about killers and little about victims,” she writes. “No one thinks about the victim, the one who loses the contest. Most people don’t want to consider the aftermath of murder, or those whose dignity and has been stripped away.”
There is sixteen-year-old Christina, a rape and murder victim in San Francisco. The rape and murder victim Laverna Lowe and the murder victim Betty Richie. There are the rape and murder victims Kaye Turner and Rachanda Pickle—who with Melissa Sanders and Sheila Swanson became the Ghosts of Highway 20. As Jentz became more attuned to this violence, she noticed and documented femicide further afield. Her Yale classmate Bonnie Garland, killed with a hammer in New York by a boyfriend and fellow Yalie when he found out she was leaving him. Another classmate, Sarai Ribicoff, murdered in Venice, California.
Then there is Valerie McDonald, a twenty-six-year-old aspiring filmmaker who went missing in San Francisco in 1980. Between Valerie’s disappearance and the discovery of her remains in a Washington riverbed in 2000, her parents DeeDee and Bob Kounse helped form and foster the victims’ rights movement. It was born of “the women’s movement of the early seventies,” Jentz writes, “when impassioned, mostly twentysomething women protested violence against women and changed laws for rape, child abuse, and battery.”
As DeeDee put it, the movement was not welcomed at the time. To the state, she said “‘Victims were just another piece of evidence. Difficult to deal with. A pain in the ass.'”
Through the hard work of DeeDee and Bob, and thousands like them, things improved. But progress is not linear, and periods of regression can and do come around. A pain in the ass. That sentiment toward victims, and to women in particular, has a familiar ring to it once again.
The #MeToo movement was about taking women out of silence. About holding men accountable, powerful men. In time, men became the “victims” of this call for women to be heard.
There has been a push back. The shrillest complaints spill from a minority, loud and obnoxious, who’ve leaned into their meatheaded-ness as though its attractive and aspirational. From their frustrated corner comes wailing about the emasculation of men and the proliferation of “beta” males, growing grievances over the loneliness of men, and a ragtag effort to build and profit from methods to turn boys into alpha male men. This coterie has a botched, self-indulgent concept of the alpha male—which is, in fact, one who leads through coalition building. Still, in an age where screen time is bad— and thus getting your manly education from YouTube has to be the lowest of the low—even their greatest detractors could admit men spending weekends among men sharing feelings and wholesome activities can produce some good.
Comedian Andrew Schultz is an admitted member of a bigger, less passionate slice of #MeToo reactionaries. He voted for the current president of the United States. Partly out of greed, more because the woke stuff bothered him. Schultz’s podcast might not deserve more than a minute of your attention, but this does: Rather than vote for a woman—who, due to her gender, might be too emotional for the job—Andrew Schultz voted for a ignorant, unstable, felon and abuser who wallowed in Epstein’s pigsty, whose modus operandi is to grab ’em by the pussy, whose lone skill is his inability to tell the truth, whose one enduring trait is his addiction to adulation. Less than a year in, he’s feeling—like most who’ve had even a passing relationship with the former TV performer—duped.
So all along, one of the things these man’s men were feeling bad about was their own stupidity. Some are painfully fessing up to it, others turning to nihilism as they monetize every instance of their devolution to one dimensional beings. With more self awareness, they’d clue in they’re all citizens of what Hillary Clinton called the basket of deplorables. She was right all along.
Since 2016, the population of the basket has grown and the demographics have morphed. It now includes incels and looks-maxers from around the globe, anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes, and misogynistic preachers like Doug Wilson. As they’ve pushed back against women and minorities getting any semblance of say or institutional priority, you wonder where they find common ground. It could be, like their inspiration in the White House, it’s the adoration. Specifically, the adoration of other men, adoration that is being stolen by women who want a voice, by minorities who seek justice. It’s no surprise that when Terri Jentz found her attacker she learned he was obsessed with his clothes and grooming, that despite his financial straits he always “looked like a movie star or a model in a jeans commercial.”
The winner of the last election in the U.S. didn’t create racism or cons or misogyny, obviously. But his victory was a symptom and an accelerant of their lurching resurgence, including into the mainstream. Dale Partridge—a pastor who casually condemns immigration and other religions—is an advocate of repealing a woman’s right to vote. Even he is “surprised at how fast the conversation has shifted. Just a few years ago, ‘you’d be slaughtered talking about this.'” Today, this crowd speaks their misogyny out loud. They hope and pray and work for its flourishing. How many men will this mindset turn into landmines women will step on?
You can’t say the “victims” of #MeToo lack imagination.
Louis C.K. is a comedian who briefly retreated from the public sphere and the entertainment industry after he masturbated in front of two women, fellow comedians Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov. Correction, he only retreated from the public sphere and his various productions 15 years later, after this and other stories of sexual misconduct hit the newspapers. Whatever else churn through his mind at the time of his creepy performance, one thought was probably This is what they want. This is as good as it gets for them.
Imagine. Imagine you think you’re such a man of allure you’d do that.
Offensive acts like this de-humanize women. But it is perhaps not because men like Louis C.K. see women as objects. They don’t fantasize about objects. They fantasize about people, and they abuse people they have power over. Louis C.K. did not abuse the biggest female stars of comedy. He abused women striving to make it in the business.
Where the imaginations of Louis C.K. and the other “victims” of #MeToo fall short is in imaging what it’s like to be a woman. They don’t or can’t imagine that cancel culture has been around thousands of years, cancelling women who spoke out of place, who didn’t want what their husbands wanted, who wanted a job, who wanted a say. These men, all men, never have to—have never had to—think about where to put the kitchen knives.
Not long after Louis C.K.’s shameful behaviour came to light, the comedian Laurie Kilmartin detailed what it’s like to be a woman in the industry. “The truth is,” she writes, “if you are a woman in most professions, there are a bunch of extra rungs on your ladder to success.”
Why?
“I’d say almost every female comic could name a comedy club she can’t walk into, a booker she can’t email or an agent she can’t pursue because of the presence of a problematic guy. We are all avoiding someone who could help us make money.”
This is not only Kilmartin’s experience. Or Goodman’s, or Wolov’s. Every female comedian’s. Can men imagine that? Every day, in every room they walk into?
In Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz does not only write about victims of femicide. She writes about women who survived abusive relationships with rapists and killers. She came to understand why women were trapped. “A process of debasement erases a woman’s earlier stronger self,” Jentz writes, “until the point where her sense of self is drastically altered. Her will is entirely reconfigured. There’s a systematic process involved, a dizzying progression of absolutely deliberate intimidation intended to coerce the victim to do the will of the victimizer. Abusers are clever. They take possession of their victims gradually. The process builds by degree.”
This systematic program of abuse was not new. Not to Jentz and not among the abusers she encountered. “Is the basic grammar of terror intuitive?” she asks. “I knew from my own frontline work on a violence-against-women crisis hotline in Southern California that women—regardless of race, class or ethnicity—were telling the same stories. It’s as though they were all describing the very same guy, recounting stories of violence drawn from an identical arsenal of tortures.”
How much easier to erase a woman’s self, to implement these programs of abuse and torture, when a woman is in her place in the home. When she cannot vote. When she cannot control her bank account. When she lives in a place without equal rights. Exactly what squealy men like Fuentes, and anti-woke crusader Pete Hegseth and his preacher Doug Wilson are calling for. Sometimes they can’t hide their disdain for women and sometimes they try to rationalize their affinity for subjugation, going so far as invoking God’s will.
When Teri Jentz thought back to the young, primly dressed cowboy who attacked her in Oregon, she knew he was “getting high off what he was doing; he was doing just what he wanted to do. His actions sprang from desire.” And she thought of a quote relayed to her friend DeeDee Kounse from a forensic psychologist who’d interviewed a rapist-murderer: “‘Imagine the best sexual experience you’ve ever had, Doc, then multiply that by a billion.’”
It’s unfair to compare limiting a woman’s access to a job to slapping her around. It’s unfair to compare splitting a woman’s lip to taking away her vote and giving it to her husband. It’s unfair to compare verbal abuse and workplace harassment to rape. Jentz doesn’t think so. “Categories of male violence against women and children are not distinct: beating a wife or girlfriend is not distinct from raping or murdering strangers, not distinct from molesting a niece or nephew. A guy who slaps his wife around is along the same continuum as rape and incest and murder, which are merely situated farther along the spectrum. Street harassment is on this same continuum. Pioneering feminists in the early seventies had a name for such hectoring as wolf whistles and animals noises. They called them ‘little rapes.'”
The men #MeToo wanted to call to account liked this stuff. They got off on it.
As Dawn Wilcox got further into compiling her database of femicide, she saw similarities in the circumstances of these women’s lives. She assigned tags to each entry to categorize them. Among them, one covered women murdered while in the midst of a breakup. One was for women murdered after a being stalked, surveilled, or controlled by technology. Another was for women murdered along with their families, their homes and possessions destroyed—sometimes followed by the murderer’s suicide. Out of these tags a came pattern, all too familiar to cops and women and scholars of femicide, of murder by men the victims knew. A pattern of control.
Control. Seemingly by any means. Personal, systemic, physical, emotional, financial, violent. Men like the pastor Dale Partridge—and his female followers—believe the submission of wife to husband, women to men, is God’s vision for the world. Who wrote the Bible? Men. Who interprets it? Men.
In such a godly marriage, where does submission end? How vast is the distance between this Biblical arrangement and control, coercion, stalking, ownership, and worse? Is that a valley, or a line in the sand?
As abuse is a continuum from wolf whistles to femicide, so is the anti-#MeToo messaging. Not every person who has pushed back against the #MeToo movement is calling for the repeal of women’s suffrage. When they brush off the humiliation of a female co-worker or roll their eyes at a woman doing a “man’s job”, what they’ll say is they want a level playing field. They want guys to be guys. But on their level playing field, women work and live with one arm tied behind their backs, wondering what every guy on the job is capable of. On their level playing field, rape is a tool of war for Russian soldiers in Ukraine, for Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers in Tigray. On their level playing field, women die at the hands of their boyfriends and husbands. On their level playing field, Gisele Pelicot’s husband can drug her and solicit men to rape her while he films—and dozens of regular guys can feel at ease answering his online ad.
When men whine about #MeToo and women’s rights, what they’re really saying—what they’re really pushing back against—is competing with women. For all their pontificating and display, their competitive nature and flexing, what they’re complaining about is that they’re not up to competing with women. When they can’t compete, they get angry. When a man gets angry, too often a woman pays the price—usually because she was asking for it.
When it ends in femicide, at least in the U.S. they have Dawn Wilcox to keep a record.
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