Femicide

 In 2023 the Italian government passed a law making femicide a crime, which in my opinion was redundant.   Killing a woman is no less prohibited in European culture than killing a man.   Whether the victim or the perpetrator is a man or a woman, the result is the same — death.  The legal measure making femicide a crime parallel to homicide, was put in place to mollify those who were alarmed at the high incidence of women being killed by their male partners or ex-partners, but the law puts women in a unnecessarily separate category.  Making a special law, marching to take back the streets, wearing red shoes or dresses, and taking up self defence, are backwards responses to the problem.  Women can make all the noise they like, but they are not the problem.  The men who kill women should be the focus to change the narrative.    

Patriarchal Western societies are not far away from a time when women were chattels with no more rights than slaves.  Like cows to be raised for the production of calves, women were the property of their husbands and fathers.  The laws have changed to expand women's rights but many men have a difficult time adjusting to women who assert themselves because they learned from their fathers that women are meant to be obedient servants.   If a woman is not submissive, she is called difficult and if the man she belongs to can't control her, it reflects badly on him. When a woman breaks a man's rules, she is treated like a faulty robot whose wires have become crossed or questions are asked about whether she was defective from the factory.

When children are involved, the separation of families adds the burden of alimony of child support to a man's wallet, even though he may be struggling to justify working for a family he is no longer allowed to be part of.  Many men commit suicide at this stage.  Their dreams have evaporated because their dreams were based on the myth that if they worked hard they could have a life and a partner that conformed to what they were taught to expect. If the relationship breaks down, men feel like their image of themselves has been snatched away.  Everyone finds it difficult to admit they are wrong so a relationship becomes a standoff that cannot be resolved.

The difference between men and women, is that women usually don't pursue their ex-husbands to get back to the lives they once had.  They know when a glass is broken it is never the same.  Men will try to return to a past before things went wrong, apologizing and minimizing the disagreement, but if their women refuse, or try again but fail again, men blame the woman and believe the only way they can resolve the problem is by force because that's what they know.  If they aren't giving women a punitive beating, it's a dog-in-the-manger action that says, "If I can't have this nobody will." Either way it is a bad outcome for the women.

If a man and a woman begin a relationship, it is often the woman who decides whether to continue or not.  Women are the quality control agents because it is women who give birth, so they are particular about choosing their partners.  Whether seeing each other romantically or being happily married, many couples stay together because it makes them appear normal in the eyes of the world.  If they have 2.5 children, two cars, and a house in the suburbs, the image is complete.  If this goes wrong, the partner who is banished, often the man, can be angry, resentful, and feels unjustly cast out of what he helped build.  If a man doesn't have a wife or a girlfriend he is less than a man and he finds that impossible to accept. He may move on quickly to another woman or remain bitter and poisoned with blame.  In the Incel movement, the celibate state of those without a female partner is always somebody else's fault, usually someone who has what they want. Some men are so insecure in their masculinity that they can only see themselves as a legitimate man if they are with a woman.  If their girlfriend or wife leaves them, their masculinity is in doubt and they must do something to correct that.  They would rather kill the woman who gave them legitimacy than admit they might not be the 100% masculine man they would like to be.   There are very few cases of women killing men because if women feel less female without a male partner, they don't often react by killing someone.

If there are to be less killings of women by men, the change needs to come from men.  Women are better at forming communities and supporting each other, while men have maintained their removed individualist way of dealing with their problems.  Men don't like to talk to each other about their emotions and as long as that continues they will take their frustrations out on women.  One of the logical places for this change to begin is in the home, but although mothers can teach their boys respect and understanding, they don't always get support from fathers who perpetrate no-tears behaviour and a reining-in of so-called feminine emotions.   Less and less we live in societies where men need to be brutes and fight physically to stay alive, so if there is any chance to reduce the number of femicides, it has to start with men.  One of the best slogans to come out of Communist China was attributed to Mao, who said "Women hold up half the sky."  What is there about this truth that men have such a hard time understanding?  We are all different but we know it is not right to take a life because of jealousy or power dynamics unless it's on a battlefield fighting for survival.  In Italy the law changed in 1981, men often received lighter sentences for killing their wives or girlfriends.  If their women were unfaithful it was called a crime of passion and was forgivable.  Unofficially the practice hasn't died out and sometimes its ghost influences judicial sentencing.  If a woman steps outside her traditional role, whatever happens to her is her own fault.  It is an unusual dichotomy to have a law specifically against the murder of women by men, but the same society accepts men's actions that are based on male jealousy.  Until this contradiction is resolved, women will never be free from their killers, but the responsibility for fixing the horrifying statistics isn't a woman's problem, but a man's.  Men and the concept of masculinity need to change.