Feminism, 'Intersectionality', and Violence Against Women

From Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "Murder, Lies and Feminism":

The word “mansplaining” was inspired (although not coined) by Rebecca Solnit, whose book Men Explain Things to Me became a bestseller. In this book, Ms. Solnit writes: “So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year — meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror.”

Here we have an actual fact — that the U.S. annually records “well over a thousand homicides” in which women are killed by their male partners or ex-partners — supporting a dishonest insinuation, i.e., that “this particular kind of terror” is a pervasive reality of American life, a widespread form of oppression which our sexist society ignores.

It should not be necessary to say this: Murder is a rare crime, for which our criminal justice system metes out the harshest punishments.

Furthermore, criminal violence — including murder, including rape, including every species of crime against women — is disproportionately a phenomenon of the social and economic underclass.

This is not something that feminists like Ms. Solnit wish to acknowledge, because their political allegiance to the Left requires them to believe that members of the underclass (especially those who are black and Hispanic) are victims of systemic social injustice. After the Ferguson riots of 2014, for example, every feminist began hashtagging #BlackLivesMatter as a gesture of solidarity against allegedly racist police. It is asserted by feminists that the “intersectionality” of oppression in American society is such that women and radial minorities are both victimized by systemic injustice, thus uniting them in a common cause — the struggle against “capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy,” in the words of Vanessa Diaz, former executive director of the University of Southern California Women’s Student Assembly.

Feminism’s devotion to an “intersectional” concept of oppression serves to obscure the messy reality of American life, which does not conform to such tidy ideological categories. Blaming all social problems on systemic causes (capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.) is a way of denying individual responsibility for wrongdoing, while suggesting that every problem is political and can be solved by left-wing policies...

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