When you find out that a hundred million women are missing from the planet, your heart breaks, and the knowledge it imparts becomes something you can’t ignore. At least that’s what happened to me. Turns out, though, when something is enormous it can seem invisible.
In the fall of 2009, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn released their book Half the Sky, convincingly declaring global female oppression the moral crisis of the 21st century. Citing Nobel Prize-laureate Dr. Amartya Sen’s estimation that 107 million women are missing from the planet as a consequence of murder, kidnapping, abortion, and infanticide, the authors note that that number is more than all the men killed in all the wars of the 20th century—combined.
I felt certain that Half the Sky would change the world in an instant, proving conclusively that we are at war with our own feminine selves and paying an obscenely high price for the delusion. Of course, the world moves more slowly than that, especially at the policy level. I was stunned that no one at the highest levels of government used the book to begin a popular dialogue about the direction and degree of violence aimed at women everywhere. After all, the White House had time to host a beer summit that summer. Why not a ladies tea?
In response to that silence, I felt compelled to do something that involved more than just signing an electronic petition or writing a check to an aid agency. Thus the onus for what would become “Hit Send! My year playing pen pals with the President,” my one-year, one-woman email campaign to pester the president about the state of women’s well being in the world. I believe one person can make a difference, and I figured who better to bug than the most powerful person on the planet?
In the process of emailing the White House for 365 consecutive days, I found my own voice and the courage to claim it. Moreover, I had to discover, for myself, whether women (and all things feminine) were suffering as much as it seemed. The process of writing those daily emails exposed these important truths that are worth sharing:
- Women may be delightfully unique and independent on an individual basis, but as a group we experience a disproportionate share of violence and victimization simply because we are women. Further, the degree and direction of violence aimed at us is extraordinary and almost always perpetrated by men.
- Children (and those “others” labeled as feminine) also suffer disproportionately. Therefore, across multiple variables, misogyny is an identifiable phenomenon that can be recognized, quantified and prevented, if we choose to see and to act.
- Although men are the main practitioners of misogynistic violence, they are not immune from its effects. To wit, the states with the highest suicide rates (Montana, Nevada, Alaska, New Mexico, Wyoming) also have the highest male-female ratios, meaning men there make up more of the population than in any other parts of the country. Clearly, hating women and what is feminine is hurting all of us. Oh, yeah, all those women in America being murdered, raped and maimed are also some man’s wife, daughter, sister, mother and friend.
- We’re a nation of “Mad Men,” indeed. We are in thrall to a consumerist perspective that commodifies women from cradle to grave. For proof, just turn on the television, pick up a magazine or research the correlation between residential robberies and rape.
