Usually called the doctor. Or the caretaker.

So last night I went to a local rally held by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. They read a prepared statement by a local politician condemning anti-abortion violence, and there were several speeches by people in the abortion provider community and the local activist community praising Dr Tiller and the work he did. Doctors in BC often referred patients to Dr Tiller, I found. Canada doesn't allow third trimester abortions for any reason, so patients would have to go to the States.

The crowd was very positive and very polite, there wasn't a protest and in fact only one person showed up to heckle, which they did rather incoherently. I felt really good about the rally, and about my presence there. Dr Tiller's murder hit me hard, because it happened in Kansas, and I felt better for being able to come together with like-minded people, mourn his death, and celebrate his life and his life's work, even though I'm so far away. Dr Tiller was really influential in the abortion-provider community, even in Canada. Several of the people who spoke at the rally knew him personally and counted him a good friend, and I felt somehow comforted by that.

I was sort of amused by how, unconsciously, I really expected there to be Phelpies there and was surprised when there weren't any. But so, yes, it was fairly well-attended considering everything (fifty people, maybe), it was nice (though I have to say that I am not a fan of the standard activist singalong, but what can you do), and I think that it was not inappropriate in any way to Dr Tiller's life, work, or memory.

I'm glad I went.

Or, I Am Neither a Lever Nor a Place to Stand.

So here's a thing:

Our culture encourages sex crimes against women. It makes excuses for men who perpetrate them, it blames the victim rather than the rapist, it encourages habits of male-female interaction that are unhealthy for everyone involved. It also encourages the victimisation of men by upholding behavioural norms that are profoundly gendered, such that men who step outside these gender norms are rendered feminised and thus subject to violence just as women are.

It's pretty widely acknowledged that our culture is broken and has to be fixed. But something I see over and over again when men, rather than women, talk about our culture being fixed, is that women have to do it. The responsibility, the onus, is on women to "stop living in fear". The thing is, though, that half the world are not OCD freaks with a laundry list of phobias who touch lampposts and flick switches constantly like some kind of female Monk. Women who watch their backs, lock their doors, carry pepper spray, etc etc, don't do it because they have some kind of bizarre disorder. They do it because they have formulated coping mechanisms for living in a world that has been represented to them--and not without reason--as being fundamentally unsafe for female habitation. It's not ideal, but it's the best option a lot of women have: to live as though at any moment they might be under attack.

Our culture perpetuates this by telling women that, if they are attacked, they must have done something wrong, because good girls, safe girls, wouldn't have to worry. They'd do the Right Things™ and somehow magically the Wrong Sort of Boy would know that and go after a Bad Girl Who Deserves It.¹ It's a catch-22, because simply being assaulted makes you a Bad Girl. There's no escape, culturally.

The problem with telling women that it's their responsibility to fix things, leaving aside the idea that this is a deeply gendered view endemic in our culture, is that this instruction basically guarantees the perpetuation of the status quo, because this is something that women can't fix.

Let's look at an example I was given recently:

A man is walking down a street at night. There is a woman walking ahead of him. In order to make her feel safe, he slows down and gives her plenty of space. He may cross the street so she'll feel like he's not following her.

Why, the person I was talking to asked me, can't he catch up to her and say hi? Why can't he walk at a normal speed on the side of the street he always would? Shouldn't the burden be on her to feel secure at night on a dark street simply because violent stranger rapes are such a tiny fraction of overall rapes?

And I gave him the numbers: there's a 1 in 6 chance that woman (1 in 4 if she's a college student) has already been raped. She fears because she knows what she fears. Even if that woman is in the majority and has never been raped, she's almost certainly been harassed, catcalled, maybe groped by strangers. She may have been fondled on the bus, or stalked by an ex-boyfriend. She has a reasonable fear, despite the low rate of violent stranger rapes, that anyone on the street could be a member of that admittedly small group, and she has no way of knowing what would set him off. And the numbers, I think, speak for themselves. Yes, violent stranger rapes are a minority. But they are a minority over which women feel no sense of control.²

And so we get to the basic problem with telling women to fix the culture by acting as though it's already fixed: the price for being wrong is quite simply too high for most women to even contemplate. Women who behave as though the world is fundamentally an okay place to be a woman sometimes pay with their lives. And we all know it.

So what's the solution? I wish I knew. What I do know is that the solution will be slow in coming, because it is a fundamental sickness of our culture, not a single monolithic problem. You cannot simply find the rape tree and chop it down. It's an invasive vine. You can gain the illusion of control over it by yanking the starts when you see them, but it propagates underground, in the deepest fabric of our culture and in every individual's unconscious, and only concerted, determined, and long-term efforts can eradicate it. There's a word: eradication.

You cannot just stop it, you have to yank it out by the roots, and that takes time. It may take a fundamental restructuring of our culture. I see that restructuring starting to happen already; the things that women twenty years older than me took for granted are horrifying to people a little younger than me. We talk about rape now, and about rape as something other than violent stranger rape; I see that as a positive step. You can't address a problem until it's okay to talk about it--and we're getting there. The very fact that we can have a discussion on LJ in which people talk about their experiences and their anger in posts that aren't f-locked--in which women and men feel okay about exposing their status as survivors of rape--says to me that the situation is starting to shift to a place from which we can make real differences. Try not to be too angry that it's not happening quickly enough. This was never going to happen quickly. The key is to make the juggernaut so unstoppable that when culture throws itself under the wheels, culture is crushed as the juggernaut rumbles on.

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1. Cf. e.g., the rules for horror movies: you only survive if you're a virgin.

2. The sense of control that women feel over acquaintance rape is illusory at best (ask twenty women if they've been raped; ask the five that say yes if they thought that the man who raped them was a danger before the rape was already in progress--I think some of you will be surprised) but it is there. We have a sense that we "can tell" if a guy is going to be That Guy. Even though a significant fraction of the time we're wrong.

Being a Kansan expat means that you sometimes have to try to explain things that other Kansans have done. Mostly these are just stupid things (cf., e.g., the teaching of "creation science" in primary and secondary school science classes). Sometimes these are terrible things.

I'd imagine that, as the news trickles onto the Canadian media, I'm going to get a few questions from friends: "You're from Kansas, hey? So what about that doctor?"

And what do I say to those people? The simple answer never suffices: "There are evil people in the world. Some of them are in Kansas, and because Kansas is what it is, this is sometimes the form their evil takes: in the name of life, they terrorise the living. And sometimes they kill people, to show that killing people is wrong."

Maybe my answer is too simplistic, but it's the one I've got. Dr Tiller was a man who, in teeth of daily opposition of a kind that most of us will never experience even once in our lives, went to work every day and helped people. I have a friend whose life he saved when an allergic reaction to a bee sting later nearly turned to meningitis. Some of the people he helped, he helped by giving them access to a medical procedure that also happens to be controversial. That doesn't mean these women weren't helped. The ones who later regret their decision and wish that their free choice had been prevented legislatively or by someone not themselves, that they had been presented with, not a choice, but some inexorable fate, well... They think now that they'd be better off. Some of them might be. Many of them wouldn't. Generally speaking when a woman makes the choice to terminate a pregnancy she's not doing it lightly. Doctors like Dr Tiller know that. They know that some of the people they help will hate them for it. They know that some of the people they help will be back protesting the next week, because "the only moral abortion is my abortion". And these doctors keep helping people, because it's what they do.

Until, that is, some random shithead from Merriam, Kansas--a township where I do my Kansas grocery shopping, go to the movies, go out to dinner--guns them down in the lobby of the Lutheran church they've been a member of for dog's years, and then drives back to Kansas City doubtless pleased with a job well done: the murder of an actual living breathing adult human, who heals people for a living. Dr Tiller took over his father's practice when a plane crash killed his father, mother, and sister, along with the local university football team. I wonder who will take over his practice, and continue providing medical care to the people--particularly the women--of Wichita.

It's an intentional war of attrition, you know: selective violence on meaningful places and key persons in order to, first, deny people access to the places and convince individuals to leave the affected class of persons, and second, to frighten the population and change legal behaviours. We have a word for that. We call it terrorism. I devoutly hope that Dr Tiller's murderer is punished appropriately for the magnitude of his crime.

To a great extent, my opinions aren't needed, as so many other people have said so much more eloquently exactly what I would say, and I think the value of me-too-ism is fairly limited.

However, I would like to address something I see people saying in connection with race and racism. Here's how it goes: "I admit that I am a racist. I can't help it. I was raised that way. My parents were racists. I grew up without any positive models of other ethnicities present. My culture is racist. Now, I have a black friend, and he doesn't mind, and I try not to use racial slurs, but basically, I can't help it and even if I could help it, what would be the point? I can't change anything. I'm just one person, and it's a disease of my culture."

When I posted for Transgender Day of Remembrance in November, I said something about changing the culture that I want to echo and amplify here, now, about this:

One person at a time is the only way culture ever changes. Saying "I can't change the world" is a fucking cop-out. The only way anything ever changes is because one person stood up and said "No."

You're flawed? Fuck, so am I. Stand up and say "No" anyway.

I instantly communicated it to Ranj and Aurelia, to test it out: I start a lot of post titles with "So".

No, that wasn't it. It could have been, but it wasn't.

It's no secret that I've been doing a lot of thinking about that eleven-year-old girl in Milwaukee who was gang-raped by a crowd of older boys, ring-led by an older girl she admired. A lot of people have said--out in the open! where people could see them!--that they thought that it was her fault, or that it wasn't really a rape (Really? Tell you what. I'll come over to your house with a bunch of bigger, older men and orchestrate your serial oral rape, and then you look me in the eye and tell me it wasn't rape. Yeah. That's what I thought.), or that the boys shouldn't be punished too severely or have their lives and futures affected by their participation in a gang rape, because some of them might be good kids who made a bad choice.

I've been turning this over in my brain like a jumbled up Rubik's cube, turning it over and over and switching pieces around trying to figure out how someone could say such a thing, and I finally came up with something that I think might be it:

Deep down in their heart of hearts, a lot of people believe that the desires of the many should outweigh the needs of the one. I'm not going to get into why people might believe that, at least not in this post, but I really do think that's it. Otherwise rational, sane people look at the needs (safety, bodily autonomy) of one scared little girl and the desires of the many (freedom, a future untainted by their presence on sexual predator lists, perhaps the opportunity to go to college or to hold a professional job one day), and for some reason, they think that because there are more of them, the rapists' right to go on walking around in the fresh air is more important than that little girl and all of us who used to be little girls and boys knowing that justice was done and her rapists are being punished by society in the way that we have determined is appropriate for their crime.

The race and social status of the victim is also a huge factor in the public feeling about such crimes. If this little girl had not been black, HIV-positive, and living in poverty, there would be a great deal more outrage. Consider the recent Pennsylvania case of the obviously mentally unwell man who murdered several young Amish women and then killed himself, and contrast it with the Florida youths who murdered a homeless man for kicks. This little girl, that homeless man, had little in the way of social status, and their victimizers are seen as being "more valuable" than the victims. If the Pennsylvania shooter had done the same thing in an inner-city Pittsburgh school, would the reaction have been as marked? If the Florida youths had kicked a stockbroker out on his evening jog to death, would there have been so little fuss?

The thing is, though, it's not just the victim. It's the victim and all the other potential victims, and all the people who live in a little more fear now than they did two months ago. It's society. We are the many, and the criminals, the rapists--they are the few. Our needs outweigh their desires. They desire to walk around in the fresh air and go on making bad decisions, and we need to know that when criminals make bad decisions and hurt people, they aren't allowed to go on doing it just because they decided to organize.

If this had been one sixteen-year-old and a crowd of little girls and boys, no one would argue that the rapist needed to go to jail. Because it was one little girl and a crowd of teenagers, somehow people turn it around. They need desperately to feel that this could not happen to them or to anyone they know, and since they can't control the people around them, they exert control over the projected situation by making it the victim's fault. They have to build walls between this little girl and their own little girls and sisters and mothers and lovers and friends, and so they do it by pointing out the things she should have done, and by making the boys not rapists, but good boys who made a bad choice because a little girl allowed it, or cooperated in it, or enticed them to do it. It makes them feel safer to think that this couldn't happen to someone they know, because someone they know would never make the "mistakes" that force other people to victimize them. Well, I have news for you: if you are an adult and know six women, you know someone who's been raped. If you know thirty-three men, you know someone who's been raped. If you are a college student and have five female friends, you know someone who's been raped. And only three in five of those rapes will have been reported. (NCIPC) Partially because of the attitudes of people like this, who attempt to control the uncontrollable by making it the victim's fault.