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Where the White Women at?
White Liberal Men and their Race Card
By Richard Leader
Printable
Version 
“Has Katrina saved the US Media?” The question was
posed by the BBC in the wake of the hurricane: news pundits such
as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann were abandoning stoic nonpartisanship
and leveling harsh words at the Bush Administration, race and class
were topics now being broached by the most mainstream of journalists,
and even visibly distraught FOX News anchors were breaking script,
overawed by the callousness they encountered. The answer to that
question is a resounding “no.” Just as the West quickly
slipped back into its old ways after a grave declaration of “everything
changing” after September 11th, Americans encouraged to be
good consumers in the fight against terrorism, we have also bounced
back from disaster after disaster (mostly of the “over there”
and “natural” varieties) in order to focus on more manageable
matters here at home.
The question itself requires contextualization: what was the US
media up to before Katrina and in what ways did it need saving?
Prior to the devastation of New Orleans, race was also central to
a simmering media crisis: The saga of the murdered Laci Peterson
having been put to bed by both the legal system and the nightly
news, Terri Schiavo’s unfortunate destiny having been met,
a fresh drama was required; enter Natalee Holloway and her disappearance
in Aruba. Given the more participatory medium of the internet, a
certain segment of public opinion quickly shifted against this “soft”
news, this latest story being the tipping point, and the burgeoning
resentment against it likely emboldened those in traditional media
as well: Bob Costas balked at filling in for Larry King on an episode
devoted to Holloway and for his reticence became a sort of hero
for the cause. Still, critics of the trend towards “news lite”
found their complaints did little to stem the tide, at least until
they turned in desperation to another tactic, accusations of racism,
pointing out that almost all of the women featured in these stories
were white.
There have been some sincere attempts at communicating this racial
imbalance, typically by those optimistic that such news stories
fundamentally are about the public good: locating missing women
and finding a measure of justice for them, not just more crass objectification
of the same sort that led to the violence against them in the first
place. Latoyia Figueroa, a Philadelphia woman likely murdered by
the father of her unborn child—and thus an easy parallel to
Laci Peterson—became the figurehead of this counter-movement
intent on giving equal time to minority women. Still, as many white
males involved in promoting the case of Figueroa were dissatisfied
with personal tragedy as news in general (no matter the ethnic background
of the women involved) and were only participating as a way to strike
back at cable news media, once Figueroa’s body was found and
her boyfriend jailed they did not move on to other missing women
of color: instead, they found a way to make the discussion about
themselves and their own cleverness. The lion’s share of the
discourse was framed by satire, the genre of choice for pointing
out the illegitimacy of soft news. This came to a head when NPR’s
“On the Media” borrowed material from a weblog at thepoorman.net
for a segment called “White Noise.” [transcript from
onthemedia.org]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: A headline in this week’s USA Today
declares that sending teens on group trips can be harrowing—part
of that paper’s in-depth coverage of missing vacationer,
Natalie Holloway. Apparently, it also makes great television.
On her blog, huffingtonpost.com, Arianna Huffington points out
that NBC News aired 62 segments on the missing teenager in May
and June. Compare that with six segments on the Downing Street
Memo during the same period. And CNN—294, compared to
30 for the memo. Which got us thinking about the future of TV
news.
ANNOUNCER: In a surprise move expected to send shock waves
through the world of TV journalism, CNN, the original cable
news network, and NBC, which owns cable channels MSNBC and CNBC,
announced a deal to consolidate their news divisions into a
single giant network. The new network, to be called Where the
White Women At or WWWA, is set to debut this week. CNN spokesman
Jack Little explained the deal at a press conference Monday.
JACK LITTLE: For most of history, journalists could afford
to spend their time covering wars, famines, politics and business.
The reason for this is that everyone knew where the white women
were at—at home, probably in the kitchen, minding the
kids. Sometimes they were out shopping or knitting at a friend's
house or, or even working as elementary school teachers, but
by and large, the location of all white women was known. However,
society has changed, and the business of journalism has changed
with it. These days, with the increased opportunities available
to white women, as a nation we are losing track. White women
are disappearing in Aruba, from their jobs as Washington interns
and even right before their own weddings. With this merger,
we will increase the breadth and depth of our missing white
women coverage, and so we meet our sacred obligation to keep
the electorate informed and aware about where the white women
are at.
ANNOUNCER: The new network will include WWWA Headline News
which will deliver key missing white women developments every
half hour. Most of the network's time will be devoted to covering
current missing white women, but there will also be talk shows
where groups of white men get together to discuss the significance
of past missing white women, imperiled white women and white
women in persistent vegetative states. WWWA debuts in most markets
on Monday. Coming up, missing white boy scout found in Utah.
[THEME MUSIC]
The lengthier version at thepoorman.net contains all of the same
substance but with several extended sections on specific personalities
and news networks that NPR was able to safely omit without diluting
the message, or more importantly, the humor. Other weblogs followed
the lead, posting similar stories, such as bigpicnic.com and their
“White Women Under Siege” feature. Theirs mostly consisted
of a graphic taken from the videogame Donkey Kong—a
woman yelps “help” in defiance of the big brown ape
holding her hostage—complaining that the media “devoted
about 50 times more airtime to Lacy [sic] Peterson than recent proof
that the march to war was a lie.” A whitewomeninperil.org
(complete with splattered blood for the “PERIL”) was
unveiled, turning the work from satire to a reality of sorts, where
visitors could even purchase branded merchandise with text such
as “Where is [insert random missing white woman here]?”
Disturbingly, five of the eight clothing items offered are designed
specifically for female wear.
All of this was largely abandoned in the immediate aftermath of
Katrina (coverage of Natalee Holloway has since resumed in part,
answering the question posed by the BBC), though the ephemeral attention
to matters of racism during the initial period of the disaster in
some ways mirrors that of the “Where the White Women at”
phenomenon: liberal white men are typically only interested in matters
of race when it puts their conservative white peers and rivals at
a disadvantage. Similarly, conservative white men were suddenly
and miraculously interested in the sexism of Kanye West and his
song “Gold Diggers” after his remarks about George W.
Bush not caring about black people.
Indeed, much of the “Where the White Women at” trope
was not so much about genuine care over the well being of minority
women, but men of all races communing together—as men—over
the bloodied corpses of women. Satire as a genre mitigated responsibility
for their words and their allegedly anti-racist polemic served to
silence those who would be most likely to object to the often callous
words employed in these campaigns: feminists, especially the white
variety, would be forced to stifle any possible reservations with
the rhetoric lest they be called racist themselves. It was a tremendously
effective tactic as few people are equipped to deal with satire
today, most being taught to read it as a humorous but simple one-to-one
inversion of a scenario in order to make a singular point; an “opposite
day” for the reader’s edification and someone else’s
expense, a sacrificial victim being required.
People seem inordinately confused as to whether sexism in satire
renders it sexist satire (it can and usually does): even when confronting
misogyny and male privilege is not the focus of the work, the sexism
only present to add spice, many readers approach the text as a total
inversion of reality even if not all of the work’s elements
function ironically. That is, readers who might accept sexist content
at face value, reacting to it as such—or even enjoying it
as such—rather than “inverting” it, will often
find themselves claiming that the sexist content is not sexist precisely
because it is located within the category of satire. A spectrum
of arguments states that such sexism is, at worst, not to be taken
seriously (only the most “humorless” of feminists would
dare object), and frequently, is purportedly actually anti-sexist
in its result, regardless of the author’s intention. Many
often claim, rather incongruously, that it is the very best variety
of feminist polemic because that feminism is accessible for use
by everyone, never mind that patriarchal apologists are counted
among that number.
Thus critics of such satire often have to battle uphill when confronting
it in public venues, even against other feminists and pro-feminists
reliant upon a more simplistic reading of the material: oddly enough,
it was the latter who were armed with vicious condescension. Those
sophisticated enough to understand that “Where the White Women
at” operates on a number of levels, and can be framed in different
ways when weighing the competing factors at play in its creation,
transmission, and reception, were often treated as grade-school
children in need of basic dictionary definition of “satire.”
Patriarchy has certainly taken notice of this confusion, making
the medium the favorite for a number of roles, including racist
propaganda; see any number of both apologias and critiques of the
white “underground” comic artist, R. Crumb, who has
published stories such as “When the Niggers Take over America.”
Bigpicnic.com’s use of the Donkey Kong imagery deserves
examination: it is impossible to say for sure whether the potential
parallel of using an ape as a stand-in for the men of color being
accused of involvement in the disappearance of Holloway is one the
author intended. Whether they were deliberately highlighting the
Black Brute stereotype in political resistance to it, were attempting
to capitalize on a racist trope for heightened dramatic interest,
or were pathetically incognizant of it and chose the image solely
for the white “damsel in distress” remains unknowable.
Good satire attempts to limit its potential readings; yet most contemporary
satire leaves all possibilities open in order to insulate the author
from personal responsibility, where they are able to say everything
and yet nothing. As popular conception of the genre requires not
only a moral point but the written or verbal subordination of the
inferior party, who is adroitly put in his or her place, it is also
easily colonized by masculinity and its fetish for dominance and
submission. Witness the decade of abuse leveled against the pop-singer
Alanis Morissette for her song “Ironic,” men—by
and large the less literate gender—taking every opportunity
to point out a language-technicality (“irony” requiring
more than a dramatic coincidence) in order to disqualify her from
appropriating a format reserved for them alone.
Many feminists were certainly involved in promulgating the “Where
the White Women at” response to media coverage of personal
tragedies, but paradoxically, it was not minority women who were
at the helm of creating the phenomenon (although many were quoted
for sound bites, efforts such as Tiffany B. Brown’s reporting
at blackfeminism.org did not break through into the wider discussion),
nor even minority men for that matter, but white men themselves.
This is undoubtedly part and parcel of white male domination of
the media, even of the allegedly free and democratic kind perpetually
rumored to exist on the internet, but in many ways it seems that
their rancor was less about the racism of the media concentrating
on missing white women to the exclusion of all others and more about
the media daring to concentrate on women at all.
The narrative of personal tragedy is a feminine one in our society
(for its emphasis on characterization and its serial nature) and
for it to overtake a forum such as the conventional news broadcast
is an affront to masculine sensibilities: the last thing men want
to see when they tune in to CNN is a “chick flick.”
Not only is it an affront to what they prioritize—hard news,
backed by either pseudo-objectivity or scathing and vituperative
subjectivities—it also signals to them that they are not the
intended or most sought after audience of the network. To become
secondary or immaterial is the greatest fear of men, as it is to
become like women. Those congratulating Bob Costas for his rejection
of the Holloway story often declared his actions to be exceptionally
manly—the opposite of womanly. Individuals responding to the
Associated Press story posted at Ariana Huffington’s website
(the same cited by PBS for “On the Media”), spoke of
him as “having balls,” others as “refusing to
whore himself,” and one anonymous commentator, comparing several
other newscasters with a background in sports coverage who have
behaved similarly to Costas in defiance of soft news, stated, “Maybe
there is something good about the whole sports/testosterone thing!”
The Donkey Kong imagery employed by bigpicnic.com (labeled
“last known footage of the victim”) is a reminder of
another male response to losing out on status. Where men were originally
the primary audience for video arcades, the once masculine spaces
have lost that appeal due to changes in technology that encouraged
men to stay home for such entertainment. For video arcades to survive
through hard economic times women had to be invited into these spaces.
Many males now rail against their dance-hall like atmosphere and
the loss of an arena dedicated to their sex alone. The image at
bigpicnic.com speaks to that loss as it is written in a vocabulary—i.e.
videogames—produced and dominated by men. It proves the authors
of the website are authentically male, being able to first mentally
locate and then reproduce the image on demand; conversely, it serves
as a reminder that the shared culture it represents is an ideal
one, ripe for allegory (Donkey Kong as idiomatic to male-gendered
speech), alleviating any anxiety a male reader might have that he
is not being directly spoken to as part of that gendered category.
Men’s fear of becoming immaterial is so strong that even so-called
lesbian pornography is ultimately about men.
Although many of the white men participating in the “Where
the White Women at” discussion are likely on the level when
it comes to their anti-racist stance (thepoorman.net’s founder,
Andrew Northrup, is the son of a Boston College professor and prominent
writer on the issue of the Atlantic slave trade), the polemic itself
is a lightning rod for the expression latent misogyny. Though most
of the content at thepoornman.net is now simply credited to “the
editors,” rather than Northrup alone, the original piece included
a joke about “Girls Gone Wild” type antics by white
women, sandwiching it carelessly in a text primarily concerning
violence perpetrated against them: this was later followed up by
another quip, delivered while bragging about NPR’s notice
of his site, that he was “currently negotiating a very lucrative
deal to host pop-up advertising for naked pictures of Mara Liason,”
an NPR anchor.
Liason’s female status singled her out among the cast of
NPR and made her vulnerable to the joke, reducing her personality
at the precise moment when he viewed his own power as increasing,
if only marginally given the ironic tone of the celebration. Northrup’s
statements were hardly the most outrageous of those offered but
then writers today can often get away with merely affording the
occasion for sexism, allowing their readers—fostered by the
more interactive element of the internet—to step in and “cross
the line” for them, after conveniently drawing its outline.
The anonymous have little to lose and make convenient foot soldiers
for patriarchy, especially when they are able to paint misogyny-by-number.
A great part of the appeal of “Where the White Women at”
rhetoric is the ability to surreptitiously blame women.
Sometimes this blame is for specific, alleged, or even potential
licentious crimes: reviews of the documentaries Born into Brothels
and Inside Deep Throat were released on Roger Ebert’s
website on the same day. While the children of prostitutes in the
Red Light district of Calcutta are worthy of liberal sympathy (though
their mothers considerably less so), and thus the win at the Oscars,
prostituted white women in America are clearly deserving of whatever
befalls them: the evidence that Ebert presents to prove that Linda
(Lovelace) Marchiano was never really raped or under duress was
“By the time she was 50, she was posing for Leg Show Magazine
and saying she thought she looked pretty good for her age.”
Other times, the blame is purely for these women being white, their
race making them the safest targets for expressions of misogyny.
While white women are hardly the primary benefactors of white privilege,
indeed, patriarchy rules that a woman’s connection to such
privilege is through her relation—and hence subjugation—to
a white man who can choose to dispense the benefits of his own racial
privilege to her according to his own vagaries, the archetypal role
of women as caregivers makes their betrayals of humanity sting all
the worse. The haunting images of grinning white women in photographs
of lynchings stir powerful emotions, even though in most scenarios
it was white men with both the rope and the tales of black men’s
rapaciousness towards white women; tales white men continue to propagate
today in their pornography. (A fact disguised by white liberal America
through its crediting of Larry Flynt as a fighter against racism
and not an opportunistic trafficker of it through people’s
ignorance of the magazine’s actual content.) However, such
feelings of betrayal, the uneasiness that comes with women stepping
outside of their traditional roles of caregivers, are promoted,
harbored, and exploited by the true beneficiaries of racism.
A frequent tactic of liberal white men, when confronted by their
own failings by feminists, is to turn the tables and cite the racist
and eugenic associations of Margaret Sanger, the feminist icon and
founder of Planned Parenthood. While minority populations in the
Americas, not just blacks in the southern states but indigenous
peoples in both continents, have good reason to be suspicious of
social planning and have complicated relationships to birth control,
abortion, and surgical sterilization, the focused attention paid
to Sanger’s racism is more often the result of efforts concocted
by white men. Sanger is at a distinct disadvantage given her female
status: No one ever bothers to speak of the eugenic beliefs of Winston
Churchill as he had Adolph Hitler as a foil. Because there always
exists a worse or more racist man for comparison, all white men
benefit, while the dearth of influential women in history makes
those who do stand out significant targets for degradation. This
is often to the disadvantage of their contemporary daughters, no
matter their ethnic heritage.
While all white people in the West are privileged and are likely
universally racist to some degree or another, an uncontested fact
among those considering themselves on the Radical Left or part of
the general progressive movement, it is interesting to note that
no white feminist who supports the “sex-industry” has
ever had a serious accusation of racism leveled against her. On
the other hand, it is those women who are least of use to men—Mary
Daly and other separatists of various sorts—who become embroiled
in such matters. When feminists saw the widespread publication of
photographs taken at Abu Ghraib as a launch pad for discussions
of how the same humiliation is often visited upon women in mainstream
pornography, and how that is an equally political crisis, they were
told by the male Left that such concerns were ill-timed and inappropriate,
tantamount to racism given the privileged positions of the white
women voicing them: indicating that they should instead concern
themselves with the plight of minority men rather than their own
selfish “special-interest” topic. However, self-avowed
feminists who support the sex industry, such as Dr. Susan Block,
were given free reign by white liberal male publications such as
Counter-Punch to write on “Bush’s POW Porn”
given that they did not threaten men’s general right to use
women in pornography and yet were willing to be used as a weapon
against their conservative peers and rivals on the Right.
This is similar to how feminists who claim that pornography (and
even drag shows) are the equivalent to blackface and minstrel shows
are routinely hushed, often with patriarchal apologists making note
of a feminist’s white status whenever applicable. These same
liberal white men have no compunction about speaking of racial matters
themselves, thinking their sensitivity and dutiful attention to
the topic frees them from the straightjacket of silence they would
prefer for less sympathetic and informed conservatives. Yet somehow
the most radical of Left wing women are equally restricted in their
discussion. Liberal white men often claim that sexism has justifiably
biological components and is thus infinitely more complex than the
cut and dry issue of racism—which is always wrong—making
any parallels untenable.
If all whites are racist, this discrepancy in society’s reaction
to feminists of various stripes must exist because of male power.
Indeed, the “Second Wave” of feminism (encompassing
the era of the 1960s and 1970s) as a whole is routinely painted
as racist, or at least more racist than the current era of “Third
Wave” feminism, even though it is hard to find quantifiable
evidence to support such a claim or even the necessity of the appellative
division into waves. While there have certainly been many improvements
in social justice over the course of the past three decades, both
within feminism and Western culture in general, it can often be
hard to discern if they are more than superficial given the heightened
level of fetish accorded to minority groups by whites and the increased
reliance on “Noble” caricatures.
Again, it is interesting to note that the most frequent occasion
for the citation of “Second Wavers as racists” is also
in the defense of white males; those who, in this case, consider
themselves to be women of a sort. The discussion of identity and
authenticity surrounding the medical transsexualism industry (and
the more nebulous transgendered or genderqueer designations) is
often defined by the relationship of those declared male at birth
and their subsequent right to enter into separatist space set aside
for women, making such arenas the ultimate test of “passing”
or presenting as a member of a sexed or gendered class. While such
spaces were politically carved out by the “Second Wave,”
charges of racism against the feminists responsible for the construction
and maintenance of these spaces (who often view efforts toward trans-inclusion
as a colonialist act on the part of those born male), not only tie
into similar indictments of “transphobia,” they work
on an ahistoric paradigm: good-feminism was literally born yesterday,
conceived by careful collaboration with the white males (“…to
females”) who have controlled the discourse on gender to suit
their own sensibilities and requirements.
In that vein, despite the liberal community’s angry response
to the media’s preponderance of coverage for missing and murdered
white women—never mind that these same liberal satirists and
bloggers have themselves next to completely ignored the hundreds
of Latina women murdered in the Ciudad Juárez region of Mexico,
the similar crimes occurring in Guatemala, and those against aboriginal
women in Canada—there have been other groups of women who
have also been overrepresented in such matters: women born with
penises. Even as Take Back the Night rallies have become passé,
endlessly occupied by males seeking to invisible their sex’s
perpetration of violence with the rhetoric of equality in victim
hood (or survivorship for that matter) through the same campaigns
of slander that forced even the Ms. Foundation to change “Take
Your Daughter to Work Day” into a blasé gender-neutral
event, Leftists in college campuses have readily taken to the “Transgender
Day of Remembrance.”
While literature cites a murder rate of one person a month (“Although
not every person represented during the Day of Remembrance self-identified
as transgendered … each was a victim of violence based on
bias against transgendered people.”), few have argued that
this is privileging the lives of male-women above that of female-women,
the life of a transsexual woman being of more interest than thousands
or even tens-of-thousands of females. One could even conclude that
the material conditions of the transwomen being murdered, often
of minority status, are a far cry from that of the largely white
(not to mention older, more educated, and post sexual reassignment
surgery) contingent who hold the services in their remembrance.
Yet white women, white female women anyway, are somehow to blame
for the media’s exploitation of violence against them.
Although “hierarchizing oppressions” is one of the
most maligned acts according to contemporary feminism—which
prefers a more multifaceted “web of oppressions” acting
upon a person’s subjectivity—such hierarchies inevitably
occur, and when they do, women lose. Patriarchy affords males (however
they might self-identify along a gender-spectrum) the right to define
the intersectional. This happens even within minority communities:
in an oft-transcribed 1999 “Thanksgiving/Day of Mourning”
speech at Plymouth, Moonanum James, Co-Leader of United American
Indians of New England, said, “We will not stop until the
oppression of our Two-Spirited sisters and brothers is a thing of
the past.” Two-Spirited, a designation that has been generically
lumped with “transgendered” by white people (who appreciate
the more mystical component as a fetish and treat it as a Pan-Indian
term, endemic to “red people” as a whole), typically
refers to those born male, even in historic indigenous societies.
While James refers to the earth as his “mother,” no
mention of sexism against native women is mentioned in the laundry
list of sins America has perpetrated against his people: instead,
he lists Mumia Abu Jamal alongside Leonard Peltier, uniting men
of color as his “true” people; those that he is speaking
for; his intended audience.
Even as white women often bear the children of black men, something
that might presumably put their interests in close alignment, it
is white and black men who typically believe themselves to have
a closer bond through the patriarchal ethic of male-competition
that requires shared notions of honor and valor; so Dr. Julianne
Malveaux argues in her “Why Are the Black Conservatives All
Men?” (Ms. Magazine, vol. 1, no. 5, 1991). “Urban
Culture,” as a capitalist marketing euphemism, works to unite
men across color lines but not women. Eminem and Dr. Dre might be
encouraging racial harmony under the guise of making money, but
male society is continually working to fragment women as a class
and play them off against each other. In a 2005 article for the
San Francisco Sun Reporter, Malveaux writes in “Jeers
for Katie [Kouric] and the Runaway Bride [Jennifer Wilbanks]”:
The Chicago Defender’s Roland Martin deserves
big props for putting a name on an amazing American phenomenon,
the missing white woman syndrome. All a white girl has to do
is cough too hard and the national media are camped on her doorstep
wondering what happened. Don’t let her come home from
work late.
….
So Jennifer Wilbanks, who needs to be serving time for using
up public resources, bolted from her 28 bridesmaid, 600 person
wedding, then lied and said a Hispanic man in a white van had
abducted her. She shows no contrition for her racism, nor for
her use of scarce public services. Instead, she finds herself
an agent who sells her story to Judith Regan to the tune of
half a million dollars. Then she gives Katie Couric an “exclusive”
interview to talk about her plight.
….
Why do I care so much about the missing white woman syndrome?
Mostly because words Sojourner Truth uttered more than a century
and a half ago still ring true. Ain’t I a woman? The media
shapes images of white women’s vulnerability and sensitivity,
but African American women are utterly ignored, whether we are
present or absent. This approach is an abomination to egalitarian
sensibilities and erosion on our public consciousness. It reminds
me of the way white women were perceived in lynching days. People
were obsessed with their “virtue”, and indeed, black
men were randomly killed simply to protect white women’s
virtue.
Ida B. Wells opined that if white folks had to worry so much
about white women’s virtue that raised questions about
the actuality of that virtue. These days, all these missing
white women stories make me wonder if these women are missing
or fleeing, and what vicarious energy or pleasure others get
from having these tales retold.
Wilbanks got a slap on the wrist—probation and a fine
that amounted to a fraction of the money her small Georgia town
spent looking for her. And she is getting paid, big time. But
she imperiled the well being of men of color with her wacky
and random accusations, and she sucked up public energy that
might have been sued for something else.
Malveaux’s invocation of “Ain’t I a woman”
is hard to contextualize: something that should be obvious given
the amount of interlocking factors she seeks to account for simultaneously,
being a woman of color. At once she seems to be arguing for a universal
female experience, one unfortunately normalized to whiteness, at
the same time she questions the meaningfulness of that whiteness—do
white women really belong to white folks, “folks” normalized
to mean males—and yet this is countered by her own, and perhaps
primary, allegiance to people of color, which is often normalized
to mean men of color; thus the quintessential anthology title All
the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: But Some Of Us Are
Brave (Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith).
While Malveaux inhabits a complex space, being pulled in two directions
by sex and race, her foregrounding of Jennifer Wilbank’s racist
act and Katie Kouric’s tacit acceptance of it invisibles the
participation of white men in that chain of events, the men that
run both the police departments and Kouric’s television network.
Indeed, she writes “It reminds me of the way white women were
perceived in lynching days” as if it were white women at fault
for being perceived in a certain way.
Missing white women were not the only category of soft news in
recent memory: the congressional obsession with steroids in baseball
and its subsequent media coverage certainly qualifies. Yet it was
harder for the male Left to grow outraged at its triviality. Jokes
were made, but the same amount of calculated malice could not be
infused into the humor. The same opportunities for misogyny were
not present, nor were there any intervening factors such as race
that would protect the expression of it from censure, spoiled white
women making convenient targets. Despite being ostensibly valued,
these women are so little cared for that the most despised black
male in the world of sports at the moment is not a rapist of white
women (Kobe Bryant all but admitted to it after the closing of his
civil trial), nor even a murderer of white women (the chips are
still stacked against O.J. Simpson), but a man who merely broke
the rules of male honor and valor, Terrel Owens (who badmouthed
his teammates), a salient point made by Malveaux over a decade ago.
 When
Bob Costas walked off of Larry King, refusing to cover
the Holloway case, the Associated Press likened it to Keith Olbermann
leaving his position at MSNBC in the late 1990s because he did not
deem the Monica Lewinsky story worthy of repeated coverage: it was
the original “news lite,” at least according to the
Left. As a result, white and black Democrats can now congratulate
each other over having a “pimp president.” Comedy Central
and BET have each decided that jokes about what object was put into
a white cunt are not only fair game but still uproariously funny
after all of this time. Wisecracks about “lies about getting
laid” are used as the counterpoint to lies about weapons of
mass destruction and are in turn printed as slogans that on banners
and billboards at protests. Freewayblogger.com, a website devoted
to affixing political signs to highway overpasses, offers the following:
“Nobody died when Clinton Lied,” “If we’d
gone after Bin Ladin the way we went after Bill Clinton, he’d
be dead by now,” and “We’re all wearing the blue
dress now.” A Norwegian “death metal” band, Thulsa
Doom, even has an album bearing the image of Clinton, a speech bubble
exclaiming “She fucks me!”
Yet for all of the liberal male obsession with an act of consensual
sex between the Leader of the Free World and a young intern (it
must be noted that men’s use of “consensual” does
not presume equal, given the consistent equation of the female role
signified by the “blue dress” with abject humiliation),
Juanita Broaddrick’s accusation of rape was allowed to fall
between the cracks, never to resurface. By focusing on Lewinsky,
capitalizing on men’s objectification of the white female
(desired, envied, despised), to the point of keeping the gaze upon
her years—years beyond reason—after her sex with Clinton,
an alleged crime against a woman of color could safely be dismissed;
the male Left closed ranks across color lines, simultaneously affirming
themselves peers, their own status vis—vis women, and protecting
their own interests against their conservative rivals. Thus every
joke told about Monica Lewinsky in 2005, or 2050 for that matter,
is part of the rape and virtual disappearance of Juanita Broderick,
a woman the “Where the White Women at” participants
are not keen on reintroducing to the public discourse.
As white and minority women, compared to men of all backgrounds,
have fewer opportunities for commercial cooperation—and thus
there is less of a need for the same sort of mythology that white
capitalists have used to unite men across color lines into demographics—white
women tend to be much more defensive about their contribution to
racism and are far more affected by accusations of it than their
male counterparts. Not only are men more able to readily present
the “My best friend is a minority” defense, one often
grounded in the above capitalist mythology, men are also far more
apt to receive accolades for racist speech, ironic or otherwise,
as in doing so they are standing up to “Political Correctness,”
credit for which is more likely to be bestowed upon masculine agents.
Conversely, women are recognized more for taking care of the feelings
of others. This can be seen in the customer reviews at Amazon.com
for Sara Cone Bryant’s Epaminondas and His Auntie,
originally published in 1926 but reissued by Buccaneer Books in
1976. The story is often referred to as a “Southern Nonsense
Tale” though any resemblance to African American folklore
is likely, at this time, itself folklore.
Told in wildly fabricated dialect, Epaminondas is a simple and
ill mannered boy who follows his “mammy’s” instructions
in a literal manner with disastrous results. While penned and illustrated
(Inez Hogan) by white women, it should be remembered that their
ability to enter into public discourse depended upon them both serving
as feminine agents in a feminine role, in this case as educators
of young children, and in aligning themselves with the racist beliefs
of dominant males. As abhorrent as their work was in many cases,
blame must be accorded in a way that reflects both those power structures
and those that exist today: reviews of the book by customers at
Amazon.com are split neatly across gender lines. Nearly all of the
women responding, currently with one exception, state that that
they arrived at the book’s page searching for a childhood
favorite only to discover its shockingly racist associations, indicating
that they would never recommend the book to anyone upon the realization.
Men align similarly in defense of the book, arguing it is part of
“Southern Culture,” that it must be forgiven for its
time period, and it is ultimately a great story speaking to universal
values and deserving of admiration.
As guilty as Bryant was of perpetuating racism, the men who published
her were more so, as are the contemporary men who seek to protect
its legacy: Stephen Roy Lewis views his British Empire themed website,
Sterling Times, as a project to connect conservatives in England
and the United States. To accomplish this, he relies upon the shared
vocabulary of racist memorabilia, using the art and literature of
imperialism (golliwogs, Epaminondas, and Sambo) to bridge the cultural
gap between the two groups of white men. Liberal men typically lack—though
not always—that same bonding agent and often rely on sexist
memorabilia in its place; this includes the less flagrant utilization
of masculine dialects such as the imagery employed by bigpicnic.com
to the outright use of pornography and gender-specific epithets.
Aaron McGruder took on the coverage of the Holloway case in the
July 29th, 2005 edition of The Boondocks, one that was
ultimately censored by the Washington Post. The three panels read,
“‘I haven’t watched the news very much lately.
It’s too much like reality TV.’ ‘Whatever happened
to that white girl in Aruba?’ ‘I dunno. I stopped watching
before the season finale.’” In an internet discussion
site for the comic, not run by or associated with McGruder, one
fan (a male University of Florida student and a member of a “Show
Your Boobs” internet site) commented on Beth Twitty’s
blame of men of color for her daughter’s disappearance, “And
not to discount her pain, but the girl’s mom is totally a
bitch,” that word being freely available in his vocabulary
for use against her. Others took occasion to make light of the situation:
an “I’m thinking it was Col. Mustard in the Library
with a Candlestick...” was followed by an “It was totally
a knife! A knife!”
White women, increasingly fragmented from their counterparts among
minority populations, often bear disproportionate responsibility
for their white privilege (continuously billed as the foremost benefactors
of the despised Affirmative Action, an institution that, as Malveaux
pointed out in 1991, that even many black men are against because
of its “dishonor,” an impracticality that black women
have little patience for) and are uniquely vulnerable to accusations
of racism. Furthermore, white feminists often have unreasonable
standards of perfection to live up to in order to “legitimately”
pursue their own objectives, standards enforced by the help of male
watchdogs, necessitating that they often put others before themselves:
thus they often endure the sexism of groups like People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and find themselves, due to
“white guilt,” sometimes excusing misogyny from black
men that they would readily object to from white men. The balkanization
of feminist groups has also been widely exploited by male interests,
who have worked hard to publicly promote esoteric feuds such as
“Mary Daly vs. Audre Lorde.” As such, the white men
behind the “Where the White Women at” phenomenon could
count on white women to partake in the festivities, even at their
own expense.
It is necessary to understand the contemporary masculine ownership
of satire as a speech genre and the location of white women within
“whiteness” in order to properly contextualize the “Where
the White Women at” phenomenon as an event-process. Any discussion
of motive, the phenomenon itself being driven by white men, is also
multivalent. There is the masculine umbrage at being doubly displaced
by media that is, first, not only catering to a feminine audience,
but is also—presumably—operated by political rivals
who are concertedly employing such programming to take the focus
off of an unjust war. Even beyond that there are additional facets
of identity at play. By shifting “whiteness” onto the
backs of white women, white men of the Left can imagine the white
men of the cable news networks as “the other.” Though
both sides of the debate have similar pedigrees and material situations,
it allows for the presumption that there is actually a debate occurring;
supposing that there are men out there who really believe that missing
white women are the hot ticket when it comes to news.
If there actually is a plebian fan base with an authentic desire
for programming about missing white women, especially conventionally
attractive ones with normative existences, the publicity furnished
upon personal dramas not only fulfills those desires but works in
a double capacity in order to satiate patrician needs: “Where
the White Women at” affords society’s elites—whether
they read Arianna Huffington or the conservative Matt Drudge—the
opportunity to look down upon their inferiors, real or imagined.
Those subordinates are preemptively gendered feminine by the content
of the material, the style with which it is presented, the sex of
the paraded victims, the presumed mental faculties of the imagined
audience who enjoys such content, and even the hostility of the
response against it, cloaked in satire, one of the most masculine
of genres.
Progressives, even white women, find themselves saying that it
is white women who “should not matter so much”—and
this is said about white women rather than white men. Whereas minorities
are frequently people of color before they are gendered individuals
(the classic example of a black man being “black” before
“man” even arrived on the scene), now all people on
the Left find themselves groaning “not another dead white
woman” whenever another is exhibited on television, actively
processing her racial identity in a way that white people rarely
do to each other, oblivious of their normative status. Through this,
not only do white males of all political affiliations become less
white, projecting their own responsibility onto women, white women
are forced to take a loyalty test to the kind of womanhood envisioned
by male power: they must be feminine caregivers, willing to put
others before themselves, or face the consequences of being called
a racist, shouldering the blame for racial privilege on their own.
Given the existence of patriarchy, it seems absurd to assume that
this confluence is an accident, rather than the intended result
of presenting those white women as victims for mass media entertainment.
Defending institutional patriarchy is a more fundamental goal of
corporate media than running interference for an unpopular war.
The focus on the illegitimacy of soft news is naively founded on
a particular conceit of liberal men: that the failings of their
own message to persuade the general public against the war was one
of medium and not of content; as if their own rhetoric was deserving
of direct translation to the nonstop forum of 24-hour cable news,
a single format the Left itself is now glamorizing as “the
media,” despite it still not possessing nearly the demographic
numbers that even the old television networks continue to pull,
despite their declining status. This supposes that the countless
“Bush Lied to Us” editorials published by liberal publications—endlessly
recycled to the point of plagiarism, often having more to do with
competition between pundits to win status and paychecks than honest
journalism—if writ large and in bright lights, would suddenly
have the desired effect.
It is ironic that the same parties who endlessly promote the power
of interactive forms of electronic communication, principally the
weblog, are so quick to believe the grass is greener on the side
of Rupert Murdoch. Undoubtedly, it is, and “Where the White
Women at” (one of the few instances where white male bloggers
are momentarily willing to deliberately undersell their own power
and influence) has to do more with that male jealousy than feminist
concern for women. That inter-male resentment is not necessarily
petty; rather it has been given the epic name of “class struggle,”
though framings such as feminism and anti-colonialism have revealed
how analysis of that struggle has historically privileged certain
parties and their interests.
The “Where the White Women at” phenomenon is designed
by white men, those who run the cable news networks, to privilege
white men: even those white men who protest against it. In fact,
they are doubly privileged. Not only are they more likely to have
their own wives and daughters featured in such programming if necessary
(on the increasingly remote chance that the men did not kill them
themselves), they are also afforded the possibility of receiving
acclaim—sometimes from other white men, sometimes not—for
their snide remarks about white women in peril, using their activism
to cement their own position within subcultures on the Left. And
for all of the talk about equal justice for women of color, “Where
the White Women at” is itself racist given that missing black
women are often treated as little more than chess pieces in a game
played between white men, not valued for themselves but useful only
as fodder in achieving “more important” goals like the
removal of American troops—mostly male—from Iraq.
As often as white liberal men object to conservative use of the
terms such as the “race card,” men on the left can often
be found dealing race cards of their own, appropriating things to
which they have no right in order to preserve the patriarchal status
quo. White feminists can be silenced using their own “privilege,”
just as the voices of minority women can be safely ignored or co-opted,
as when the State Department dispatched Lynne Cheney’s anti-feminist
“feminist” group, the Independent Women’s Forum
(IWF), to Iraq to train indigenous women in “democracy,”
hoping to cement public opinion that the war is being fought to
improve the status of women. Thus conservative men wish to position
critics of the war as sexist in the same way that liberal men require
their own critics to be racist, white males on both sides of the
fence enjoying the use of “isms” to frame their opponents.
Accordingly, black men are frequently used to spread sexist propaganda
enjoyed by white males, usually in artistic mediums such as music
and comedy that, like satire, are harder for feminists to object
to due to a measure of ambiguity. Humor about white women’s
weakness, pliability (especially to sexual acts such as anal intercourse),
and fragile emotional state are a common element employed by black
male entertainers, counterbalanced by mythology of black women existing
as tough, no nonsense beings who will visit violence upon any man
who looks at them wrongly; a pedestal that both requires black women
to have a superhuman countenance, unable to ever experience a moment
of weakness—allowing some measure of indifference to the pain
they do endure—while deliberately obscuring the physical abuse
that many women of color suffer in their daily lives from men of
all races.
White women are used to spread racist messages because it serves
to draw heightened attention for the cause, tapping into the misogyny
of men of color and their white allies on the Left. Most people
are much more uncomfortable with an overtly female racist than a
male one: not only has she abandoned her role of a care giver, she
has stepped outside into the discourse and upstaged male voices
to do it. One such example is Prussian Blue, an act comprising two
teenage sisters, Lamb and Lynx Gaede, the pair is often compared
to the “Olsen Twins” with a white nationalist bent.
The media circus around them has benefited white men of all political
persuasions, whether racist or not, as the focus has been shifted
upon white women, where bad mothers are equally to blame for the
perpetuation of racism as the family patriarch.
These women need not even be female, if one examines the case of
Chuck Knipp and his drag performance of “Shirley Q. Liquor,”
where he dons blackface and portrays the quintessential “welfare
queen.” Daniel Nardicio, a promoter for Knipp, defended the
act by grounding it in satire, saying “If Shirley is misogynist,
then every drag queen is,” taunting accusers with their own
hypocrisy in ignoring radical feminist complaints about the genre
of entertainment—where drag is seen always as “deconstructive”
even if its ubiquity makes it far more likely to reinforce prototypes
of femininity and masculinity—only to come out in droves to
protest a performer that, clumsily, does the same with race. (It
must be noted that Knipp intentionally works as a drag queen and
thus does not find the category, as defined by the capitalist marketplace,
to be problematic; he is decidedly not a political performance artist.)
While many white men work to reinvigorate mythology about welfare
queens, Knipp is seen as particularly dangerous because he functions
in a more unclear capacity, given his less than fully masculine
construction (whether Knipp is to be taken as a provisional woman
or a homosexual male), threatening to equally expose the internal
sexism of the liberal Queer community.
Thus black men are indebted to a system of white patriarchy that
allows minority males at least the privilege of domination over
“their” women (and in many cases, over white women as
well), while white women’s allegiance to a sexist society
is also grounded in their own subordination to white men, vicariously
benefiting from those men’s construction as white. While the
political concept of “divide and conquer” is hardly
unknown to liberal white men, as they are apt at accusing conservative
power mongers of it throughout history, they regularly employ the
same tactic themselves. As they believe themselves to have the best
interest of others at heart (not unlike those Rightwing men they
hold in contempt), such ploys invariably become “divide…
and reunite under our guidance.”
As it is always minority groups who are in danger of splintering
off from the main Leftist coalition (and never the white men who
benefit the most from their own participation), whether they are
tempted by some sort of deal from society’s elites—the
bad kind on the Right, anyway—or are disturbed at their own
lack of status within the progressive movement, unsubtle reminders
of the hazards of disloyalty are necessary: at the 2004 March for
Women’s Lives, a pro-choice rally in DC, white men with bullhorns
shouted out at the crowd, thanking the women for attending, only
to say that it would be all for naught if they did not go on to
vote for the white man the Democrats were promoting at the presidential
elections. As important as these messages of unity are, however,
they are underscored by a need to foster rivalries on the Left in
order to allow privileged white men the appearance of neutrality;
forever existing as objective outsiders above the fray who can fairly
referee and thus maintain control.
While “Where the White Women at” is ostensibly about
women of color, it is they who are absent from the equation that
informs it: white men fear both their minority counterparts and
white women the most. The solution comes in pitting the two groups
against each other, emphasizing the whiteness of white women and
the masculinity of minority men (despite differences in how that
masculinity is constructed around different ethnicities) through
the media, academics, and politics. Women of color exist as a third
wheel. As most liberal white men have a harder time conceiving of
their sexism, compared to that of their racism—often seeing
their intimate relationships with women as proof enough that they
are a good person—superficially more work, on both the personal
and political level, is done in obtaining alliances with minority
men. When successful, the imaginary of such “brotherhood”
is a powerful one. Although the trial of O.J. Simpson is commonly
explained as a triumph of socioeconomic class over race, taken to
mean that Simpson was accidentally given a pass by the legal system
of a racist society that did not anticipate the rise of powerful
black men, patriarchy is hardly considered: whether he was responsible
for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson or not, her life was sacrificed
in order to reinforce the bonds between all men as men. A patriarchal
legal system had no incentive to convict him as an individual black
man when through the trial all men of color were indicted as willing
coconspirators, if not equal ones, in the patriarchy occupied by
white men.
Less political work of a conventional nature is done in securing
the complicity of white women; instead, male culture finds it imperative
to prevent the public from discerning the political component of
such actions. What happens in the bedroom, even if transcribed from
an enormous pornography industry and its lexicon (one that works
to naturalize modes of dominance and willing submission) is required
to stay private and thus beyond criticism, even when reports of
various acts are continuously retransmitted back into the world
at large forming a feedback loop. Scratch the surface, however,
and white men are far more afraid of white women abandoning the
cause than men of color: while the benefits of patriarchy are still
seen as compelling by the overwhelming majority of males, the racial
privilege that white women enjoy is paradoxically being eaten away
as they become less subordinate to white men. Although even independent
white women often find a racist society to be to their advantage,
whether they are critical of that privilege or not, these gains
are far less indispensable as in the era of compulsory marriage
where many white women were categorically reliant upon the leftover
portions of their husband’s white privilege.
As such, it is now more important than ever for the patriarchy
to hype the privilege of white women at every possible opportunity.
Even publications typically esteemed as “liberal” contribute
to this process. The New York Times has run a number of
articles encouraging white women to feel guilty for working outside
the home, juxtaposed with a similar series describing their remorse
for “failing” at such work and returning to childcare.
Rather than feminist in nature, the arguments present the double-blind
solely as the creation of feminists, greedy and wanting to have
it all, and these largely anecdotal stories are made even more effective
by their extremely narrow focus on only the most elite of white
women, graduating from Ivy League schools, framing white women as
a class with a portrait of Paris Hilton. In an editorial about such
work, Susan J. Douglas writes, “the Times seems bent
on insisting there is an irrefutable ‘common sense’
out there among women that feminism has been bad for them. But women
do not want to go back to 1957, with its legally enforced gender
discrimination, its cultural misogyny and its insistence that women
should be subservient to men.”
This concentration on the racial privilege of white women works
to normalize white women as the face of racism, allowing men on
the Left to escape their own responsibility for such privilege by
ducking into the category of “other,” being able to
further embrace the brotherhood they seek to establish with men
of color: all equally disgusted by the selfishness of the spoiled
white woman. This can be seen in men’s recollection of the
“Where the White Women at” phenomenon, as witnessed
in reporting of the subject at wikipedia.org, a collaborative dictionary
project where masculinity rules; both in terms of what content is
posted—with absurdly detailed accounts for videogame characters
and the like—and in the pseudo-objectivity that is enforced
for and by its mostly anonymous contributors.
The website defines it as the “missing white woman syndrome”
and just as Dr. Julianne Malveaux desired to attribute the discovery
of it to someone, Roland Martin, Wikipedia credits Gwen Ifill, although
the largely liberal contingent of men behind the project also take
great care to point out that the conservative pundit, Michelle Malkin,
a woman of color, refers to it more neutrally as the “missing
pretty girl syndrome.” Thus Malkin is made to be more accountable
for privilege than the numerous white men shaping the text: in a
vote on whether or not the “syndrome” was worth including
in the dictionary, as it might violate the “no point of view”
(NPOV) rule, one respondent argued that accepting Malkins terminology
might be better than abandoning the article wholesale and that “citing
her as an authority makes my skin crawl, but at least it makes it
less neologistic.”
Wikipedia’s account of the trend states that reports of missing
white women “displaces reporting on other current events that
some people consider more newsworthy” and lists a score of
examples commonly given by “media critics” that breaks
down whether or not a particular woman was not just murdered but
“found murdered,” if her killer was convicted, and any
ensuing social consequences of the case. A short segment on LaToyia
Figueroa is appended, pointing out that the “major networks
did not aid in breaking the story.” A list of external links
about the syndrome are also given, including one to a white-supremacist
take on the subject at the National Vanguard. A debate on whether
or not that link should be supplied with a warning broke out, with
two respondants arguing that it was necessary in order to be responsible
to those harmed by racist rhetoric; it must be noted that sexist
content never receives such warnings, instead, it is judged on whether
it is “work safe” or not, in accordance with arbitrary
rules about what level of pornographic material is consider past
the line of good taste. Thus responsibility is to one’s employment
and not women as a class.
One person arguing for the warning was the initial architect of
the entry, one Lil’ Voka (or Gutta Boi from Dayton, Ohio),
who might also be the owner of whitewomeninperil.com. The site is
listed among the links on the entry’s page as a “tongue-in-cheek
look at a media phenomenon which has redefined what qualifies as
news.” While the response to the so-called syndrome vaccilates
wildly between worries about what is proper (and hence masculine)
news reporting and concern for women of color, the entry itself
doubly categorized under “Criticism of journalism” and
“Discrimination,” it would seem evident that the author
is more concerned about the former—though the latter serves
as an excellent justification. Whitewomeninperil.com’s frequently-asked-questions
page directs traffic to a rapdirt.com (which in turn links to a
rockdirt.com, popdirt.com, and rnbdirt.com, in addition to a paparazzi
styled abstracts.net for celebrity gossip), a page that mostly serves
as a portal for creating a brand-identity under the “dirt”
nomenclature while generating revenue from banner advertising, all
safely anonymous.
One interesting component of whitewomeninperil.com is not just
its statement arguing against the interpretation of the site as
racist, affirming that whites are indeed privileged by media coverage
and his commentary serves in defiance of that fact, but a further
declaration that the website is not sexist—against men—either:
I don’t believe so; I’d say it’s a reflection
of reality. It is safe to say there are aspects of media which
have a bias towards men, such as cable news commentators, political
analysts, military analysts, business analysts, etc., but a
simple review of those who have received coverage for being
missing would conclude the major media focus on women.
Thus all men, including white men, are underprivileged when it
comes to this particular scenario, a sentiment also argued at Wikipedia.
This bias against men is asserted both in the syndrome’s definition
(“while virtually ignoring missing men and non-white women”)
and in the margin notes (“Who knows, maybe someday in the
year 2525 someone will care when it’s a man who disappears,”
jokes one Antaeus Feldspar, a former Wikipedia editor particularly
proud of his use of the dictionary to promote Candida Royal’s
Femme Films pornographic company). Any critique of the missing white
women syndrome or the “Where the White Women at” response
to it must take into account white men’s beliefs about their
own disenfranchisement, typically cribbed from such sources as Warren
Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, as it supplies
the context for why white men are suddenly so concerned about racism
and the well being of women of color: it grants them the ability
to strike back against the women they despise. Yet as such speech
was packaged into an exigency (the emergency of discrimination against
women like Latoyia Figueroa) that did not allow for divisiveness
or fragmentation that would have detracted from the immediate goal
at hand, feminists—whose participation was taken for granted—were
forced to allow patriarchal apologists their fantasies.
Although relatively few white women, feminist or not, found attacks
against this sort of media coverage to be personally offensive,
the condescending and sometimes hostile treatment of the small number
who did underscores the precarious position that all women experience
in being forced to displace their own requirements and desires for
the benefit of others. Even as masculinity is supposed to be the
glue of racial harmony, at least for men, women of all colors are
not permitted to fight against sexism until the war against racism
is complete, lest they be portrayed as selfish and their struggle
illegitimate. This paradox, that women must abandon feminism to
support a goal that is thought achievable only through misogyny
(the one authority that can easily unify men as a bloc), is one
that can be seen distinctly in an analysis of “Where the White
Women at;” NPR might as well have called it their “Where
the White Bitches at?” program.
If the agents behind the media desired a misogynist outcome for
their coverage of missing white women—pitting women against
each other for the benefit of men—rather than resisting that
impulse, “Where the White Women at” instead resigns
itself to it, aiding in the fulfillment of that conclusion. As the
satire is rooted in its own cleverness and not anti-colonialist
feminism, it works to desensitize us further to reports of violence
against women, no matter their ethnicity. This can be compared to
men’s popular satirizing of prison rape, ostensibly against
it, though the authors of such content spend precious little time
using other genres of speech to affirm that message, thus reinforcing
its presence in male culture. Being that contemporary satire requires
a sacrificial victim, even though writers might genuinely believe
that they are setting their sites on institutionalized big-media,
their rhetoric is far more likely to harm women, people who are
far more vulnerable than Rupert Murdoch, even those white women
who believe they are along for the ride when it comes to the “Where
the White Women at” campaign.
Leftist men have had other opportunities to come out in opposition
to male violence against women, not only in Juarez, Guatemala, and
Vancouver, but also in a variety of cases that would serve in a
dual capacity in combating their peers and rivals on the Right—something
they seem far more keen on concentrating on than becoming reliable
allies of feminists. David Brame, the police chief of Tacoma who
abused his wife, Crystal Judson, before murdering her and committing
suicide, had an equally corrupt administration. Yet outside of local
politics no further parallels were drawn. When four wives of servicemen
at Fort Bragg were murdered by their husbands inside of a six week
period, liberal men were content to let the mainstream media state
the obvious and then abandon the issue, rather than sinking their
teeth into it and forcing the same amount of traction that the “Where
the White Women at” phenomenon has garnered.
Just as liberal male bloggers wish to imagine themselves different
in station and nature than the milquetoast Democratic leadership
that was browbeaten into going along with the plan to assault Iraq,
they themselves were unwilling to risk coming out against masculinity
in the case of Fort Bragg, preferring to support both “the
troops” and gender-terrorism. This myopia is also necessary
for them to treat the white men responsible for cable news programming
as creatures utterly alien to themselves and their own existence,
others, as if they are opponents and not brothers, when it is women
who are pitted against their sisters—and in many cases, against
their own personhood, as unpopular as the term “false consciousness”
has become today. Yet the “Where the White Women at”
phenomenon encourages this: both the agents behind the networks
promoting this form of news and the critics of it are actually working
in cohesion to achieve this effect; patriarchy does not need agreement
among its conspirators, only their action.
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