The professor and The Age of Sex Crime author explained in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward why the backlash we’re facing is proof that we’re winning—and urged feminists not to abandon their utopic visions for a world without misogyny.
Jane Caputi has focused much of her scholarship on the intersections of contemporary pop culture, gender and violence, and gender justice. The professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Florida Atlantic University is the author of The Age of Sex Crime, the filmmaker behind the the documentary The Pornography of Everyday Life, and curator of multiple exhibits on political misogyny, including in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Caputi also co-authored “‘Femicide:’ Speaking the Unspeakable” with Diana Russell, published in the September/October 1990 issue of Ms.—and exposing, in the wake of the 1989 Montreal École Polytechnique massacre, how a male supremacist culture was also a femicidal culture.
As part of the fourth episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward, I talked to Caputi about how a culture of violence continues to permeate our lives—from the explosion of true crime to the ascension of Donald Trump—and the power that lies in our utopic visions of a world without patriarchy.
Caputi is joined in this episode by civil rights attorney and #MeToo champion Debra Katz, legal scholar and VAWA pioneer Victoria Nourse, advocate and political scientist Vanessa Tyson, and former Ms. editor and writer Ellen Sweet.
Together, we traced 50-plus years of feminist writing and advocacy confronting sexual harassment, rape culture and intimate partner violence—and outlined what it will take, in the courts, legislatures and our communities, to finally break the cycle.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Carmen Rios: Let’s start with this inception story of this piece that’s in the Ms. collection, “Femicide: Speaking the Unspeakable.” How did you learn about the Montreal Massacre, and how did learning about it lead you to co-authoring the piece?
Jane Caputi: I was in Berkeley, Calif., living in a room, rented in a house owned by Diana Russell, with whom I wrote the piece. I had already published The Age of Sex Crime, which was my first look at sexist terrorism, looking at the murder of women, particularly by these elevated or heroized serial killers, beginning with Jack the Ripper, as a form of sexual, political violence—that these were not just random acts committed by crazies, but this was part of the system of terror against women, taking extreme form in this whole phenomenon of the serial sex killer, as well as the idolization of him in the culture. You really saw that with the Boston Strangler, the Hillside Strangler. They were becoming almost these folk outlaw heroes.
Then I had a sabbatical. I was teaching in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico. I actually wrote to Diana Russell and said, ‘I’ve read all your works. We share an interest in this violence against women, men’s violence against women. I’m coming to Berkeley, I’d love to get to meet you there. She wrote back and said, ‘Oh, I rent rooms in my house. Why don’t you come?’ And I did. What a setup, right?
I was there, and we read the newspaper about this killing in Montreal, and it was just speaking exactly to what we were most concerned with, most completely outraged by. We originally wrote an op-ed and sent it to the San Francisco Chronicle. It was called “Killed for a Cause,” and it was published a few days after the massacre. Then Robin Morgan was editing Ms., and Robin knew Diana, and I had met Robin as well, and Robin called us up and said, ‘I think it’d be great if you two wrote a piece for Ms.’
If you’re going to institute male supremacy, you have to have a system of control that relies on two things, both actual force and violence—to terrorize, intimidate, as well as to silence those you are subjecting to oppression. But you also have to condition everybody to accept it as normal.
Jane Caputi
Rios: It would be hard to gloss over the sexism inherent in the massacre. Outside of the feminist media, in the mainstream media, what wasn’t being said?
Caputi: I can’t remember his name now, but whoever was in charge of the editorial page at the San Francisco Chronicle was very receptive and said that he particularly wanted this. I mean, we were in San Francisco, right? That was a really good place to have our voices heard, and there already had been activism against femicide. Diana, obviously, had introduced that word, that she first heard in Europe, at that conference in 1975 against violence against women.
We were talking about it so intensely, but it was not really being addressed that way, as part of the overall denial that tends to normalize gender-based violence. We knew that we had to make it our job to really put it out there. It was so explicit. He says, ‘I am going after feminists.’
This terrorism, beginning with sexual harassment—it’s women who are seen by men as occupying their space. The women were studying engineering, which particularly infuriated him. Years later, a plaque was put up by feminists. Feminists insisted, a couple of women in particular, that a plaque go up, and the plaque was specifically anti-feminist violence. No way to gloss it over.
This really was. We knew it then, and we knew that all of the gender-based violence was, ultimately, about silencing and socially controlling women, and this was just the most explicit.
We knew that we had to make it our job to really put it out there. It was so explicit. He says, ‘I am going after feminists.’
Jane Caputi
Rios: What would you say was the impact of your piece? In the short term, did it make waves when it first came out? In the long term, do you feel like you have seen changes in this conversation because of this piece and the writing that surrounds it from other feminists?
Caputi: I think so. The word femicide was out there. There was a competing word, gynocide, that both Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin had used, but femicide is the one that really took on. For whatever reasons, it struck the chord. And our piece—back in the day, this was before the internet—we both got letters about it, responding to the piece in Ms. It was reprinted in anthologies that were used in women studies classes.
The words and the ideas in there—we were not the only ones saying this. Carol Sheffield had a great essay about sexual terrorism. But it spread the word, which is what we’re about. We are a collective movement, and we are all having these ideas, and we are all seeing the world differently and trying to change the world. So now, most people have heard of femicide. I was invited to Spain a few years ago to talk about femicide. So, yes, word spread around this piece, but we’re still fighting so much, in that there still is no global counting going on of incidents of femicide in the world.
There’s still so much denial and cover-up and refusal to recognize this as, really, systemic terrorism against women and femmes. It is institutionalized misogyny that has this criminal expression, just as there’s institutionalized misogyny, in the church or in the medical field, that has these other expressions—but this is a very significant one, of course, that not only obviously injures, maims, and kills individual women, but all women know that we are, therefore, identified as prey, as objects, and that this can happen to us, and no one will know the name of the murdered victims, but everybody will know the name of the killer. That there’ll be movies made about him.
That new film Anna Kendrick stars in, Woman of the Hour, it was actually written by a man. He wanted to critique toxic masculinity, really recognizing that this is terror, that women live under. You show that to a group of women, and of course, everybody knows exactly what this is about.
There’s still so much denial and cover-up and refusal to recognize this as, really, systemic terrorism against women and femmes.
Jane Caputi
Rios: Why does it matter that we use the word femicide? Why does it matter that we talk about, like you do, all forms of gender-based violence, misogyny and sexism as being on this continuum of violence and terrorism? What do you feel like shifts when we use that language?
Caputi: Language is so important. It breaks through the denial, as well as the lies that have been told—that this is just natural. There are so many different lies. There are so many different so-called myths about rape or something, which is that this is just some kind of normal or natural occurrence, that these men—they’re psychopaths, we don’t know where they come from. Just a complete denial that, basically, masculinity associates men with violence.
If you’re going to institute male supremacy, you have to have a system of control that relies on two things, both actual force and violence—to terrorize, intimidate, as well as to silence those you are subjecting to oppression. But you also have to condition everybody to accept it as normal, and the ubiquity of men’s violence against women, then, actually shows how intent they are at maintaining a patriarchal system. But then they flip it to say, actually, this shows just how natural this is, that it’s just the order of things as they are.
The killer in Montreal, he said something in his note, that he was sending these women to their Maker, capital M. He means the patriarchal god, and of course, that system is very much in place, too, as my teacher at Boston College in the early ‘70s, Mary Daly said. When God is the man, the man is God. And that system has to be enforced, because that is not a natural system. That is an imposition.
You create these extraordinary ideologies, including that God is holy, that God is male, and you enforce all sorts of associated things—that men in the home, or men in the presidency, or men ever are playing the role of that god on Earth, and that women are either evil or simply inferior and the ultimate scapegoats for that system. We’re being taught this over and over, and if you do any kind of religious studies or anthropology or just really understanding how culture works—these everyday, as well as the extraordinary or sensational, murders of women really provide a ritual function for the culture.
It is a kind of human sacrifice that upholds a system. By killing women over and over, you are also destroying an alternative to patriarchy. And I mean women to expand to femmes, obviously; violence against LGBTQ people. Women includes trans women, always.
I’m not making some essential argument that women are naturally better than men or rule more peacefully or something like that, but historically, women have represented something different for humanity—whether it be communal organization, shared gift economies, care for the earth, care for each other.
Not to say that these are, again, any kind of essential qualities, but there’s a long tradition of women developing cultures that were more egalitarian, negotiating, communal-based, etcetera. You are really destroying, ritually, over and over, you’re killing that alternative to patriarchy. This whole system of sexist terrorizers operates so much on the individual, the group, the social—all the way up into really maintaining the culture in the largest sense through ritual acts and then attendant mythologies. That’s where the serial killer, like Jack the Ripper, gets elevated. He has a museum dedicated to him in London, right? This is a kind of worship.
Rios: We read these stories and the message that we receive is: This happened, again and again and again. Women are always receiving those messages that it’s unsafe to show up, to be yourself, to be out there, to be independent. Even the obsession with true crime—which, so often, women are watching, reading and listening to almost as a form of self-protection. How can I learn how to detect a guy who’s going to be secretly a serial killer or abusive? It’s a very public form of showing us that there is a line that we can’t cross—and if we cross it, there may be consequences and punishments beyond the scope of normal, this godlike idea of we get to enforce something just because we want to.
Caputi: Yeah, and it makes us God. It makes us these kinds of superbeings, in a way. The whole ideology of male supremacy is based on, obviously, this kind of male superiority that, ultimately, has its expression in the man as God, that God is seen as having absolute omnipotence, control over life and death. That is what the serial killer or ultimately, those kinds of figures, represent over women—and then it’s celebrated.
It’s turned into entertainment. This kind of violence is sexualized. A lot of my work has been about that, this sexualization of violence. Think about the F word. It can mean either I make love to you or I completely and utterly destroy you. We talked about the importance of language, the language of femicide, naming something to get through the denial, but we have to look at ordinary language, and everything is contained in that.
That sex and violence fuse, and that when Shulamith Firestone was first introducing women’s equality to leftist groups in 1969, some man yelled out, ‘Take her off the stage and fuck her!’ That was saying she was only for sex, but it was also saying, silence her by effing her. It was doing the work of that kind of gender-based and sexual violence to destroy not only the woman, but the alternative vision of possibility for human existence that she represented.
All women know that we are identified as prey, as objects, and that this can happen to us—and no one will know the name of the murdered victims, but everybody will know the name of the killer.
Jane Caputi
Rios: You write in the piece that a femicidal culture is one in which men are worshipped. What is the antidote? How do we move away from a femicidal culture, from this worship of men and a culture of violence?
Caputi: Yeah, we do worship violence. But violence is so intrinsically linked with masculinity. If men aren’t violent, they’re often shamed for it. The APA, just a few years ago, actually said we have all these guidelines for treating, therapeutically, different kind of social groups who we know are treated differently, but we actually need guidelines for working with men, because the way masculinity is constructed can have terrible mental and physical harm to men, which is, of course, true. Men are mostly the victims of men’s violence.
When I wrote that line, because I think that was one of my contributions to the piece, I had just read a poem by Alice Walker. It was called “Each One, Pull One,” and she was talking about how there’s always this attempt to look back and then desecrate the memory of African-American literary figures or civil rights activists, and things like that, and that we really had to refuse that—and at the same time, how do we end this?
She says, “We will not worship you. We will not worship your movie. We know why the White House is white.” This is not the only thing we have to do, but it’s part of it. We have to disbelieve in patriarchy. We have to withdraw our energy. I don’t really believe we should all be watching true crime. I get the idea women are trying to figure out who these guys are and all that, but it brings us into the cult of fascination and worship of this kind of extreme violence and the men who perpetrate it. I know some of them are women perpetrators, but we have to really withdraw from that. We need utopian visions of other ways of being.
So many people think—hierarchy, you can never get rid of it, or you could never get rid of violence—but not all human cultures have had that. Just on this continent, prior to the genocidal conquest of America by Europeans, what is now called America, you had gender egalitarian cultures, and as Paula Gunn Allen wrote in The Sacred Hoop—she had ancestry from Laguna Pueblo—she says “the genocide was also a gynocide.” It was really furthered not only by rape and murder of women, but it was to destroy an alternative to patriarchy. It is so important to overcome that. These things are not natural. These things are recent.
Gerda Lerner says patriarchy has only been around for 7,000 years. It wasn’t always there. The way that we have violence now, the way that we’re conditioned to see violence as inevitable or as masculine, is part of an elaborate social construction scheme, constructing masculine violence over and over, and women’s status as prey, victim and object over and over and over, and make that even seem sexual and desirable.
Rios: We’re having this conversation knowing that the people in charge in this country are people who, implicitly or explicitly, are perpetrators of violence or supporters of a culture in which violence against women, gender-based violence, hate, are all sanctioned and worshipped ways of being.
Caputi: After that Access Hollywood video came out, obviously, with now President Trump boasting, ‘I’m going to grab women by the pussy,’ et cetera, there actually were some interviews published with women who actually switched their allegiance to Trump after this, saying: ‘It made me sure he was a man.’ ‘All men do this.’ ‘This means he’s going to be tough.’ Things like that.
This whole conflation of that abusive masculinity, that we need this kind of abusive father figure at the head of the nation. Obviously, lots of members of Trump’s cabinet have had issues, like Pete Hegseth, with being multiply accused of sexual violence and domestic violence. In some ways, is this seen as an enhancement by some people?
That’s what I mean about this secret worship of violence. Everything in this book [50 Years of Ms.] is important, and I love teaching it, but that last article, “The Patriarchs’ War on Women” from 2022, by Zoe Marks and Erica Chenoweth, where they say this global authoritarianism, these strong men and the destruction of democracy, is deeply implicated in misogyny.
It’s not just this side effect that these men are misogynists or sexist. It contributes to this ideology of the strong man and of this profoundly oppositional gender binary in which women are weak and men are strong, in which men have to be heterosexual, and LGBTQ people are despised. That all of this justifies not only the strong man taking power, but the hierarchy, the use of domination to control people, to make it seem an honored, worshipful trait, not something that is an atrocity.
There is a serious backlash, but if we learn from women’s history, of course, that’s when we have to keep pressing on.
Jane Caputi
Rios: I had similar experiences talking with men. ‘That’s just locker room talk.’ So that’s what you say to your friends? You, who are getting married or have kids and are married, that’s the way you talk to your friends when you’re alone?
It reminds me of the reaction I felt, when I was a kid, listening to Eminem sing songs about wanting to kill his mother. When I would write about Eminem, men would always respond, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be a man. You don’t know what it’s like to deal with life as a man.’
It’s scary, those moments of realizing: Oh my god, other men feel this way. Other men have this anger and violence inside of them, towards their mothers or sisters or wives or friends or colleagues.
Caputi: I don’t doubt men are in pain. Of course they would be in pain, with this kind of gender role and these kinds of expectations. Men commit suicide more. Men are the victims more of violence.
They all get this patriarchal bonus, because they are men in a sexist society, but it does take this terrible toll. This has been one of the goals of the Women’s Movement. Gloria Steinem talked about it in the beginning. It would be better for men, too, if feminism were there. But they have to give up so much. Being the man is so married to their sense of identity that it’s difficult to get there.
But I do think that it is important that we have every kind of gender equity, as well as the breakdown of this terribly difficult, hard-lined binary that demands that we fit into one of these two oppositionally, hierarchically-defined genders. It is crushing. Any way we can break that down and allow, again, democratic principles of tolerance, of expression, of diversity—DEI says it all—and democracy.
We’re in the middle of this terrible backlash because patriarchy does feel so threatened—and I do mean white supremacist, capitalist, heterosexual patriarchy. There is this terrible backlash going on. It’s terrible, and it’s getting worse, but it’s because we have been so successful so far in the last 50 years. We really have been.
We’ve gotten laws against rape and marriage, against sexual harassment. For years, these were just thought of as normal occurrences, impossible to legislate—men flirting, men owning their wives. We have seen, obviously, marriage equality, the increased visibility of trans people. There really has been so much opened up, in terms of a transformation not only of consciousness, but of society.
Gerda Lerner, in The Creation of Patriarchy and in Why History Matters, she wrote a great essay looking ahead to the 21st century, and she said ending patriarchy will not be a violent overthrow, it will be a transformation of consciousness.
There is a serious backlash, but if we learn from women’s history, of course, that’s when we have to keep pressing on. Think of Ida B. Wells, born just at the very end of slavery, and then growing up during Reconstruction for 12 years, but to really educated parents. I’m getting this from her great-granddaughter’s book, Ida B. the Queen. Ida B. Wells refused to back down against any of these backlashes.
There will be backlash. It’s a sign that we are making inroads. Take heart from what we can learn from women’s history. I do think we will prevail, because this road toward violence and hierarchy and masculinity, where is it getting us? Nuclear weapons? We’re all becoming machines. AI, right? Bigger and bigger weapons, mass shootings? Where does anybody think this has gotten us? It’s so clear where it’s going, and I don’t know how it will end up, of course, but certainly we can’t stop.
We have to keep showing that there is another way and living that way. We have to really live that way. We need a utopian vision.
Rios: What should we carry forward with us from these 50-plus years in this fight? What do you hope is different in 50 years? What’s your utopic vision of the future?
Caputi: One of more communalism, where we’re not so isolated. Even the individual home, with the typical, patriarchal family with the father—it isolates us, and that’s obviously the place where women suffer the most gender-based violence. I would love to see changes in ways of living, which would also be ecological. We would be not so much all such individual consumers. We would be much more communal in how we shared things, creating a democracy in our daily life, in communities. I think that would be very important.
A lot of people feel a need for religion and spiritual experience, but the major religions right now are so patriarchal. They’re so male-led. They’re so much focused on a male god. They’re so much anti-LGBTQ, really intent on taking away any kind of reproductive justice, and health for women. I would hope we would continue to see through these, but not leave a vacuum. Maybe women, or like-minded or anti-patriarchal folks, could generate, successfully, another religion.
It takes a long time. It’s happened, to some extent, but I do think that’s important, as well, and that would have green principles, Earth-based principles. That is out there. Understanding the Earth as divine and the Earth as this, ultimately, potent principle, anti-mass incarceration—all these movements that really have a vision of a culture that would be much more based on non-hierarchy and non-dominance, and instead, communalism and sharing.
That sounds so, ‘Oh, well, when are you going to start singing Kumbaya? Go sit down,’ Better to have war, war, war, endless war all the time. It’s hard not to see some kind of collapse if it keeps going this way. All the popular culture keeps giving us the only way. We’re going to have to start from scratch all over because of environmental collapse, and I certainly hope that’s not true.
I hope we can take a word from the wise and start putting that into practice now.
Great Job Carmen Rios & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
