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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Seventy-eight women over 18 in the US are forcibly raped every hour. That was 20 years ago.
Donald Trump’s behavior over the past decade demonstrates the truth of a pervasive American culture rampant with misogyny and violence. And his recent ranting against his conviction in the E. Jean Carroll case are just further proof that the Ex honestly believes he has the right to assault women with impunity.
Our deeply sexist and racist mainstream white culture has taught us all that it is ok to denigrate, assault and rape women. It is in our music and movies, extolled in locker room humor, downplayed by our courts, and casts the victims as the guilty parties.
And it has embraced the worst of hip-hop and gansta rap lyrics calling women hos and bitches. No, I won’t shrink from calling a spade a spade, if it’s a spade.
Cover your ears so you don’t hear DMX rap out to your children? “If you got a daughter older than 15 / I’ma rape her.” Or, are you the more racist for assuming that he is encouraging rape only in “that” community?
Do you think Snoop Dogg’s recording: “Bitches ain't sh*t but hoes and tricks / Lick on these nuts and suck the d*ck" some sort of titillation to turn on to?
How about the violence endorsed by Bizarre? “My little sister's birthday / She'll remember me / For a gift I had ten of my boys take her virginity.”
This is misogyny but, more so, it is the epitome of racism. Not because the music and the rappers are black. But because the market for this music is young middle-class white men. And those who reap in the ducats are older versions of the same.
Andrew Tate, remember him? He thrived on the edge of his self-styled “kin of toxic masculinity” thinking like the Donald that his fame as an online influencer put him beyond the reach of the law and basic human decency.
So sorry. It wasn’t the United States or Great Britain, where he has outsized impact on young and not-so-young men, that laid him low. It was a country most Americans look down on that took him out.
It was to Romania, a primary source country for sex trafficking in Europe, that Tate fled in 2017 to avoid charges when his social media monetization had veered into the clearly criminal.
And, despite that his crimes are alleged to have taken place in the U.S. and the U.K. as well as Romania, it was Romania that in late 2022 arrested Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan. And it was Romanian prosecutors who, earlier this week, filed a criminal indictment against the Tates on charges ranging from violence and rape to running a human-trafficking and organized crime ring.
They lured young women promising romantic relationships and marriage, then raped them and forced them to make pornographic videos for the online platform OnlyFans, a site that allows people to sell explicit videos of themselves.
Women who did not comply, were physically abused and had compromising photos posted to their social media accounts.
British-based OnlyFans has 150 million users who pay “creators” monthly fees of varying amounts for their content, much of it erotic or pornographic and, according to the allegations, the Tates made tens of thousands of euros from OnlyFans accounts set up in their victims’ names.
Porn normalizes rape and assault, and extols male domination. Porn is violence. Acts are always coerced – whether by force or money or prior abuse – therefore further violating women. And porn would not exist without the demand, without the market, so we are all complicit.
Now that you have read this far, let me ask you a question? Are you concerned about women’s rights or more interested in salacious details?
I don’t want this to be a shaming “gotcha” moment like Los Angeles and its Department of Neighborhood Empowerment have done to City employees and Neighborhood Council board members with their ultimately ineffective unconscious-bias trainings.
But I do want you to think about why you’ve continued reading this.
Think about why it appeals to you. I really doubt that you imbibed sleaze and a desire to vicariously engage in sexual predation with your mother’s milk.
Maybe, perhaps, it’s been ingrained through what your peers sold you on as “fun” – Playboy, Cosmo for the women, Hustler for the men, blue movies for those of us who babysat late at night, bodice-tearing novellas of lust, hard-core porn, domination, subjugation…
Hollywood may be seen as the root of all evils, moving from the family-friendly fun fare of the early years of talkies to pushing the envelope with Clockwork Orange, Last Tango in Paris and Basic Instinct.
Yes, but before that there were radio serials, books and magazines extolling divisiveness and violence.
Why? Because such fare, capitalizing on people’s fears and power fantasies, makes money.
And what we see and hear as children is embodied in our innocent psyches as acceptable behavior. It inures us to compassion, thickens our skin to cruelty.
Murder, racism, sexual abuse.
Up until last month, Tate’s website offered a course on how to shape “a girl who is submissive, loyal and in love with you.” The cost? Over $400 a pop.
That is, if you are not already a star like our You-can-do-anything-Grab’em-by-the-pussy ex-Prez.
And, sadly, our society has bred millions of misogynistic men desperate enough to pay.
Last year Meta banned Tate from its Facebook and Instagram platforms but porn websites that proliferated worldwide during the pandemic show no sign of abatement.
Passively watching or just being a bystander to abuse, sexism, racism, homophobia and not speaking up is no longer tolerable behavior if it encourages and trains people to act as if it’s ok.
If it reinforces that such behavior is acceptable, then women in abusive relationships certainly don’t have the right to complain, not only because they’ve been brainwashed to believe they deserve abuse but because they depend on the abusive relationship, economically and emotionally.
Complaining could cost them their children. It would also mean reinventing their sense of who they are, an extremely difficult process if they’ve been repeatedly told – by their father, their boss, their significant other – that they have no individual worth.
Whether the man (and it is almost always a man) is warned, arrested or incarcerated, at some point the bill will come due and they will be beaten again and harder.
The classic Trump whine that women love them, is just one more example of studies that show that some men are so narcissistic that, even after raping a woman, it never even occurs to them that such is not acceptable behavior. That they might not actually have the right to take without receiving approval to do so.
These men believe in their heart of hearts that they have not committed a crime and any blowback is because, obviously, the woman is crazy.
The unfortunate reality is that the same culture that breeds these attitudes, by doing so ensures that these men are incapable of forming a mature, reciprocally respectful relationship.
And, to justify their own failure as a human being, these same men try to glorify it by perpetuating and aggrandizing their own sad sickness.
Do people really want the lyrics glorified in gansta rap to be the defining portrayal of this generation? Of who and what we are?
These violent sexist misogynist patriarchal modes of thought and behavior that form the bedrock of our society’s values today will take a generation or more to tear out by the roots.
But, unless we start now, we will be condemning out granddaughters to the same fate as their mothers and grandmothers.
To improve the world in which we live, we must change the values of the culture in which we immerse our children.
Real change will only come if people can feel good about making incremental steps towards constructive changes that are then reinforced by continuity and positive feedback within a larger structural transformation.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
