A young woman is stopped one evening around 9 pm by a policeman on a London street. He apparently tells her she is breaking lockdown. He cuffs her, puts her in the police car. He drives a ways and then changes her into his own car. He rapes her, he strangles her to death. He burns her body, and throws her in a remote pond. Her name was Sarah Everard.
There was a young woman traveling with her boyfriend. Near Moab, two people called the police because they saw him hitting her. The police interviewed them both. She is now dead, and her boyfriend on the run. Her name was Gabby Petito.
The policeman who killed Sarah was a known user of brutal porn who, though married, brought a prostitute as his date to a police party. He had been caught without pants, flashing young women, several times. His nickname was "The Rapist."
The police in Moab were much nicer, much more professional. They thankfully left their body cams on, so we can see the interactions between them and the killer, and them and the victim. How cool and collected he is; how emotional she is. We learn they sent him to a hotel and left her with the van.
Lots of regrets. Both police forces will start investigations. Such a shame about both women.
I'm ready to scream. I have just had it up to here with what Kate Manne calls "himpathy." Why did the UK keep that man on their police force? Are there so few good men in the UK that bringing a prostitute to a police party and driving around without any pants is just something to shrug off? Is brutal porn use just something to banter about with the guys? And if you say yes, I'm here to tell you that you are part of the problem.
And wasn't it himpathy that caused the Moab police to back off and wash their hands of the situation? Law enforcement and our judicial system is helpless in the face of a distraught woman and a cool, collected man. After all, these systems were built by men, for men. They are literal bastions of himpathy, even though a policewoman present, acting outside her remit, tried to tell Gabby the relationship was toxic and she should leave.
I sometimes ask myself, if women had been the ones to create and control our law enforcement and judicial systems, what would the law look like? What would our police force look like? I suspect they would look much, much different than they do now. They would not be based on himpathy, that's for sure.
The porn that teaches our men and boys to despise, hurt, and torture women as their dearest pleasure would not be permitted to exist. Men would not be allowed to purchase the use of women's bodies, period. The petty crimes of domestic terror, such as flashing, would be treated as major portents of future malevolence. And domestic violence would be treated as the crime of terror it is.
The sheer scale of male violence against women is enormous. It's gigantic. It is reckoned that three women every day perish in the US from it. The estimate is that 137 women per day are killed worldwide from domestic violence. Women do not kill men, except in remarkablly rare cases. Men kill women. In large numbers. Women they know. Women they say they "love." This is the first, immutable fact upon which all law and all law enforcement would be based in a healthy society. Why? Because when men are, basically, allowed to kill women as they do now, the entire basis of human life is destroyed. The betrayal of women at the hands of men is the death knell; with it there is no hope of a better future. Which makes the present pretty pointless.
Dejected is what I am this evening. Our world is so much the poorer without Sarah and without Gabby. And it did not have to be.