It’s All Connected
On Amber Heard, abortion, gun violence, and the American right as a giant DARVO campaign
This was going to be an essay about art and monstrosity, and that essay will come eventually, but yesterday, 19 children and 2 teachers were gunned down at an elementary school in Texas by an eighteen-year-old male who first killed his grandmother. That news derailed me, the wheels have come off, as I think they should. This morning, I pulled apart that piece of writing and made this one. Most of what I was writing, anyway, remains urgently connected to this collective moment of rage, grief, anger, and frustration. I’ve tried to pull some of my thoughts together for you here, not as a take, but as an offering, a plea, an elegy, a hex, maybe a prayer.
You know the news by now. You know how the murder of these children folds in on the supermarket in Buffalo, the church in Laguna, the 27 school shootings so far this year, and all the violence that has come and keeps coming. This is not an essay about what happened in this one instance in Uvalde, but rather a meditation on how all of it—all the violence we are seeing, which seems to come at such a rapid pace it’s impossible for the body to process, much less hold—all of it is connected.
How often do we hear the term gunwoman? Dating back to 1966, The Violence Project reported 98% of mass shootings have been carried out by men. Two-thirds of mass shootings can be linked to domestic violence—that is, violence committed by men against women.
What all this data tells us is what we already know. Masculinity is killing us, but so is gun ownership, which cannot, in my mind, be disentangled from masculinity.
Women do own guns. They do lobby for the protection of gun ownership. As with many American ideologies, white women especially do a lot of maintenance work. But male power is a form of psychopathy, and we’re all living in a world created by and for white men. This is why America is failing.
We have normalized teaching children to throw things and run and not wear light-up shoes to school to protect themselves. We have made not dying in school, for both children and teachers, an individual burden—even as people complain that masks are traumatizing children and women are murderers of the unborn. This is what America looks like. This is where we fucking live now.
After I dropped my 7 year old off at school this morning, I lingered longer than usual, as so many tender, tired, confused parents did. I spoke with another mother. We talked about how young America is and how quickly we have collectively forgotten history, even though it is so close to our present moment. We talked about the failure of this country. That it simply isn’t working out. We talked about money hoarding, power hoarding, our bodies under attack. Because it is all connected. We talked about feeling as though we were living in an alternate universe. We made jokes about the metaverse with tears in our eyes, about wanting to figure out how to step into a better world, to leave this one behind. Because it’s all true. We are living in an alternate reality created by a small minority who refuse to see the world as it is and who refuse to care about the violence they are perpetuating and stoking every day.
I spent some time this week digging around the Twitter profiles of some prominent anti-abortion conservatives for research. Reading the horrible things said about women every day, I was reminded how comfortable many conservative pundits and politicians are calling women murderers. The language of violence and dismemberment has for decades been used to render abortion a horror movie, starting with the anti-abortion propaganda film “The Silent Scream.” Such representations of abortion are completely scientifically inaccurate, but they are a convenient distraction from the real horrors actual people live with in this country.
The narrative of women as murderers also distracts from the real murderers of the fully formed human lives killed by those who hoard gun money and white male power. Murderers like Ron Johnson, who says society isn’t responsible for caring for other people’s children, while he trots out his rhetoric that parenting is a choice, even as he and his buddies makes that choice impossible, and continue to take money from the NRA:
We are living in an era when women are routinely made into monsters in order to keep them in line. Okay, we’ve always lived in this era. But we are seeing it now projected on screens on a hauntingly massive scale, as with the Depp/Heard trial. This trial is certainly not the first time a woman has been publicly shamed for accusing a man of assault or domestic violence, and it’s not the first time women have been called hysterical or been burned at the stake. But the monsterization of Heard is something we need to be talking about. And it is not unrelated to the widespread shooting deaths, or the ongoing attacks on bodies that are not white and male, or the broader culture of masculine violence, aggression, and domination that is so foundational to American culture and politics—a culture of power-over-others that is far more dangerous to all of us than, for instance, women’s thoughtful and informed healthcare decisions about whether to have a child in such a hard world.
Ella Dawson writes of the trial:
“…the misinformation and turmoil around the Depp/Heard trial will insidiously damage the way we think about and talk about abuse and sexual violence for decades. It will indirectly hurt millions of victims who feel less safe getting help, speaking up, and seeking justice. There are already reports of victims ‘retracting or pulling out’ of pending cases because they are horrified by the way Heard has been treated.”
Though the trial began as a celebrity spectacle like any other, the widespread harassment of Heard is part of a larger cultural agenda. Jessica Winter wrote recently of the demographics of Depp’s fanatical supporters: “bots, shitposters, men’s-rights activists, women who were in middle school when ‘Edward Scissorhands’ came out.” Alice McCool at Vice also reported that the conservative site The Daily Wire has spent between $35,000 and $47,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads promoting “anti-Heard” rhetoric. Right-wing anti-woman groups have a clear stake in discrediting not just Heard, but women’s entire sense of reality.
A woman who makes people laugh when she cries.
Regardless of how the rest of the trial plays out, the pleasure so many are getting from the public humiliation of Heard will change how assault and domestic abuse survivors are treated in the legal system and in the public square for decades to come. Many are predicting more defamation suits against survivors. Some have called this the death of Me Too. The narrative and legal precedents the case is setting offers abusers a new way to exert power over survivors.
More far-reachingly, like the reversal of Roe, the Depp/Heard trial will codify into law the monsterization of women and the assumption that women’s understanding of reality is, more often than not, a false one.
Depp has treated every aspect of the trial, including Heard herself, as a joke. I’m not linking to the many videos of Depp and his supporters laughing uncontrollably in court. You can easily find them. The fact that the court of public opinion is less willing to accept that Depp is the “monster” Heard claims he was, despite his manspready public display—and his willingness to embrace without hesitation the trivialization of women’s claims of abuse—says a lot on its own. But Depp is not concerned with the cultural conversation he is steering. As Winter wrote, he has not only been “permanently excused from reality,” he has also chosen to make his false reality our own.
Sound familiar?
In her analysis of the Depp/Heard trial, Dawson writes that Depp is exhibiting DARVO behavior, a common tactic of domestic violence perpetrators, in which the perpetrator denies accusations against them, attacks the victim for making accusations, then plays the victim. It’s a kind of gaslighting—one that makes the victim of abuse out to be a monster.
Sound familiar?
This is how I think of the entire anti-woman, anti-science, anti-care, anti-life, pro-gun, pro-whiteness, pro-heteronormativity landscape right now—as one giant DARVO campaign. Male lawmakers are so rattled by the violence they carry in their bodies and commit in their positions of power that they have turned to painting women as murderers and painting men who embrace guns and masculine violence as evil sick godless monsters—all while groping around in the dark supposedly looking for answers that have already been handed to them.
White men have made themselves the victim over and over again in recent years, while making women and liberals and Dems and people of color and “pure evil” the alleged perpetrators.
Is it incidental that the backlash of Me Too is coinciding with the overturning of Roe and with a continued failure by American policymakers to provide basic policy supports for American families? That all of this is happening amid so much gun violence? Of course not. This is a massive, coordinated rollback on the treatment of women and people of color and anyone outside the gender binary as full citizens under the law, and it’s an attempt to exert control over American culture through the site of social reproduction—the heteronormative Christian family. It’s a fierce protection of white masculinity.
As Rebecca Traister has argued, one thing the right has done incredibly well is tell stories. “So much of their power has been built on compelling narrative, racist parables, xenophobic tall tales, sexist fables, pulled-from-the-ether fictions that they have committed to with every fiber of their regressive and punitive hearts and sold with gusto to an American public,” she writes. They have the fetus and poor Brett K, both of whom crazy women are attacking; they have sinister welfare queens and fraudulent voters, who endanger democracy.
For those who have embraced such stories—and those who are forcing us all to live in this alternate reality—the horror of the world we actually live in has faded from view. So has the monstrosity of male violence, the threat of which we are all living under, constantly. America is one big DARVO experiment, a twisted tale in which everything white men do is sensible, and everything the rest of us do is perverse.
I don't know how we escape this reality, other than to create an alternate reality of our own—one that is more beautiful, more caring, more loving, more rooted in what’s real, and more invested in the value of all human lives. I’ll just leave you with some thoughts:
Please feel free to share resources or calls to action below.
And a reminder that I wrote about hope, drawing on my interview with Angela Garbes, over on the paid side of this newsletter last week. My review of her book, Essential Labor, which is a crucial read for us all in this moment, is also up at Slate.
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the throughline between masculinity and the trauma inflicted on society needs to be talked about so much more--so thankful you wrote about this. We are all suffering from abuse at the hands of white men who cry foul. We do need a new world, a new country. We can't keep living like this, with so much hate and power in the hands of a few men.