Essay: Femicide--The Approved Terrorism

The victims of the Sydney Stabbing Massacre: (clockwise from top left) Yixuan Cheng, Ashlee Good, Pikria Darchia, Dawn Singleton, Faraz Tahir, Jade Young

Every time I hear of a cisgender heterosexual man who murdered women because he couldn’t find a romantic or sexual partner, I think of my youth and the number of men my unpartnered self could’ve killed.

And every time we hear the excuses that patriarchy and its enforcers make for the violence on behalf of  those murderous men’s dicks, it tells us  everything we  need to know about the difference between the kind of violence we are told to take seriously, and the kind we are told to consider as no more than the unavoidable cost of admission to living in a patriarchal world.

The police in Australia have ruled out terrorism as the motive for a rampage by a man who stabbed six people to death at a crowded shopping mall in Sydney on Saturday. 

The police  are wrong. The motive was terrorism. 

The stabbing rampage just wasn’t the result of violence that is usually defined as terrorism–either because of its perpetrator or its victims.

Every time I hear of a cisgender heterosexual man who murdered women because he couldn’t find a romantic or sexual partner, I think of my youth and the number of men my unpartnered self could’ve killed.

Too many in Australia were confident in their bigoted assumption that a Muslim man was responsible for the worst incident of mass violence in that country in eight years. This, when every victim but one was a woman.   In fact, the only man who was killed in the stabbing rampage was a Muslim man – an unarmed security guard called Faraz Tahir—who was trying to stop the perpetrator.

That perpetrator, a 40-year-old cis white man, stabbed to death five women, including a woman who was trying to protect her 9-month old baby girl, among the more than a dozen women injured in the rampage. 

The perpetrator “had focused on women and avoided the men,” New South Wales state Police Commissioner Karen Webb said.

So it was a white man who targeted women. Nothing to see here. 

The attacker did not kill enough men for his rampage to qualify as terrorism because if we honestly look at what terrorism is, it is the violence of one group of men against another group of men and the rest of us are just background noise.  The cost of doing business. Acceptable losses. Expected.  Predictable. And therefore, okay. Approved.

Compare the refusal to call the Sydney stabbing massacre an act of terrorism with the speed with which a stabbing of a bishop and a priest in a Sydney church just three days later was called an act of terror. Is it because the teenage boy accused of the stabbing is brown and Muslim? Yes and Yes.

And still, police “Probe why man who stabbed 6 people to death in a Sydney mall targeted women.”

“There is still, to this point... no information we have received, no evidence we have recovered, no intelligence that we have gathered that would suggest that this was driven by any particular motivation - ideology or otherwise," said NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Anthony Cooke.

And there it is: the kind of violence we are told to take seriously–that which is carried out by brown Muslim men–and that which we should consider the cost of admission to living in a patriarchal world–that which targets women, and avoids men.

Patriarchy is the ideology. Misogyny is its political expression that is used to recruit and incite violence against women. Cisgender men are the terrorists. 

I want you to remember that word “ideology” as I tell you what the killer’s father believed his motivation was.

“Because he wanted a girlfriend and he’s got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain,” Andrew Cauchi said.

Patriarchy is the ideology. 

Misogyny is its political expression that is used to recruit and incite violence against women. 

Cisgender men are the terrorists. 

Patriarchy socializes men to believe they are entitled to the attention and affection of women and a "no" – whether it's a refusal to give them a phone number or not consenting to become  a girlfriend – becomes a death sentence that men like the Sydney killer carry out on women, any women, for the temerity of refusing to submit body and cunt.

I guarded my hymen like a good virgin until I was 29 years old. And yet, not once during my sexually-frustrated and you could argue socially awkward 20s did I go on a stabbing rampage.

The Sydney killer fits the description of an incel, a term that is short for "involuntarily celibate" and which generally refers to men who feel they are unable to enter into sexual relationships and who blame women for denying them what they say is a right to sex, which they discuss in internet forums.

I guarded my hymen like a good virgin until I was 29 years old. And yet, not once during my sexually-frustrated and you could argue socially awkward 20s did I go on a stabbing rampage. (Reader: save your sympathy. I have evolved from that 29-year-old virgin to a 56-year-old queer nonmonogamous woman with a long fuck-it list and I can still assure you that no man was hurt in the making of my sexual revolution). The world is full of cisgender heterosexual women who are unable to find romantic or sexual partners and yet I’m unaware of any massacres committed by those women. 

If feminism is the F word some hesitate to use, I rarely use the T (for terrorism) word because I recognize the ways in which it is used to describe the violence of enemies versus the violence committed by allies. But if terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare its target into changing the way they behave, then surely targeting women because they are women and because women refuse to date you is terrorism.

The excuses that patriarchy and its enforcers make for cis white men is legion.

The most repeated excuse, of course, is mental illness. The Sydney killer’s rampage was blamed on his schizophrenia. But surely, not every mentally ill person goes on a stabbing spree that targets just women.  And to what extent is violence out of control, when one capably and carefully chooses victims based on their gender?

Exhibit B: In 2021, a cis white man in Atlanta who massacred eight people, six of whom were Asian women who worked at spas he frequented, blamed his “sex addiction” and “sexual frustration” for his rampage. 

"He was fed up, at the end of his rope," Cherokee County sheriff's Capt. Jay Baker said. "He had a bad day, and this is what he did."

It is not just my youth that was a wasted opportunity to kill all those non-boyfriends I didn’t have. These past few years of what I call the Monapause, during which my menopause transition batted me back and forth between bad days, being fed up, and at the end of my rope and tether together, were such wasted opportunities for a rampage, clearly.  I had several bad days in there.  And “this” was not what I did. 

If terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare its target into changing the way they behave, then surely targeting women because they are women and because women refuse to date you is terrorism.

And look here: in 2019, when a man massacred nine people in a mass shooting in Ohio, officials told media that the suspected shooter “demonstrated a misogyny that was far more extreme than any of his political leanings,” as if misogyny isn’t a political leaning, a political expression, of patriarchy, and as if patriarchy wasn’t the most extreme and dangerous political leaning globally, claiming the lives of women in every country in the world, regardless of religion, ethnic background, or class.

And even when it is most obvious what the motivation of a man’s violence was, police remind us yet again why feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman said, “The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men.”

In 2020, when a white ex-sports star in Australia killed his wife and three children by dousing them with petrol and setting them alight and who had a history of domestic violence that was known to police, look at the refusal to call it what it was.

“Is this an issue of a woman suffering significant domestic violence and her and her children perishing at the hands of the husband, or is it an instance of a husband being driven too far by issues he’s suffered by certain circumstances into committing acts of this form?” said Det Insp Mark Thompson.

Menopause: where are you when I need to enact horrific violence that I can blame on “issues?”

Enough.

Enough excuses.

Enough prevaricating over the dangerous ideology that is patriarchy.

Let’s call it what it is: terrorism.

It’s not impossible to see it for what it is. Last year, in Canada, a judge sentenced an incel killer as a terrorist. The judge ruled the attacks on a spa in which a woman was butchered to death and another severely injured, “were acts of terrorism, in part because (the perpetrator) wanted to send a message that he hated women.”

It is terrorism on behalf of the ideology of patriarchy. 

And it is time for Australia, and other countries, to recognize the slaughter of women by cis men as femicide: the killing of a woman or a girl by a man because of her gender. Every week, FEMINIST GIANT contributors Samiha Hossain and Inaara Merani curate roundups of feminist resistance from around the world that include the word “femicide,” be it in Mexico, Greece, Argentina, Kenya, Honduras, Chile, or Croatia. Call it what it is.

If terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare us into changing the way we behave, then surely femicide is terrorism. We are not collateral damage in the violence that cis men enact on each other. We are the object of the one thing they agree on: that they are entitled to our bodies and cunts.

The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability has long advocated for calling it like it is.

If it has become routine to ask “Who radicalized them?” about violent armed militants, be they Muslim or white supremacists, that question is even more imperative to ask of men who commit femicide. Because they are everywhere, in all our countries, in all our cultures.

We deserve to be free of the terrorism of cis men.

When acts of militant violence claim the lives of senior politicians, security chiefs are fired for failing to do their jobs. Who do we fire for their abject failure at stemming the terrorism that women and girls - cis and trans - are subjected to? 

If we are to stand a chance of liberating women and girls from the noose of patriarchal violence, our goal must be for the very elimination of patriarchy and the violent dynamics that it turbocharges.

“How long must we wait for men and boys to stop murdering us, to stop beating us and to stop raping us? How many rapists must we kill?" I asked that on an Australian TV show in Nov. 2019. It aired live.  And the next day, it was banned from repeat broadcast. 

Australia needs to learn to say “femicide.” And it needs to be more upset at actual daily violence against women than at my questions about hypothetical violence against men. I know the reason that my questions shook some people up enough to complain to the television network was because I am a brown woman of Muslim descent who had the temerity to be in their living rooms via television demanding that they confront their homegrown hatred of women—the misogyny right here—rather than complaining about the violence from brown and Muslim men—the misogyny over there— that they wanted me to focus on. I kick patriarchy in the gut everywhere I go.

And I ask: how many men must we kill?

Give me a number.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.  

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