NOTE: This contains references to violent attacks by men against women.
This is the first, abandoned draft of my newsletter. I wanted to celebrate a singer I wish more people had heard of – Mia Zapata – but I got derailed by the frustration that that comes to me any time I hear or read pieces about men attacking women.
After I wrote it, I realised it was kind of depressing to celebrate the life of a brilliant lost talent by talking once again about the tragic way her life ended. If I were Mia Zapata looking down from above, I’d be v peeved to have my legacy infected by this man’s ugly story.
However, I decided to put the original online for anyone who wants to read it. It’s unfinished and unedited.
Mia Zapata – a lost legend
On Saturday Mia Zapata, lead singer of The Gits, would have been 59. I first heard The Gits a few years ago, watching Hype! a documentary about the Seattle grunge scene. I could not believe it when I saw them on screen. Couldn’t believe it. How did I not know this band? I was kind of gutted for teenage me. I would have been absolutely obsessed with them if only I’d known they existed. Even worse, Google informed me that Zapata was murdered at the age of 271 walking home from performing a concert.
I won’t go into details here, but the story is pretty grim and her killer wasn’t caught for a decade. He did, however, eventually rot in jail.
In the wake of Zapata’s killing, while her attacker was still at large, women in Seattle, keen to do SOMETHING rallied around to organise self-defence classes.
“The women tried out the self defense classes they could find locally, and found them lacking. First, they were expensive; second, they offered restrictive rules that the women experienced as unhelpful and unrealistic. For musicians and artists, for people employed as bartenders or sex workers, for those without safe and reliable housing, it wasn’t useful to be told to dress conservatively and never walk alone at night. They realized that if they wanted relevant, affordable self defense training, they’d have to create it themselves.”
From that, a non-profit called Home Alive was born, which is still going today as a looser volunteer collective.
This seems like such a powerful response to a terrible tragedy, especially the recognition that policing women’s clothes and movement wasn’t the answer. And yet, here we are, all these years later, being told that, “Violence against women and girls is a national emergency in England and Wales”.
I wanted talk about Mia Zapata because she is so awesome and I wish more people had heard of her, but I also wanted to talk about something that bothers me every time I read stories like this. That is, how we respond to violence against women – and why we call it that in the first place.
I am really really tired of being told violence against women is a problem.
Violence against women is NOT a problem. Violence among males is a problem. Violence against women is not on the rise, MALE violence is on the rise.
Of course, semantically, these two things mean the same thing, but for me the first one completely AVOIDS the source of the problem. It reminds me of when members of my family say things like, “That needs sorting out” or, “Those shoes were left outside”– niftily escaping any responsibility via relative clauses and passive tense.
Urgent action against the wrong things
We don’t need to tackle ‘violence against women’ because when we take that mindset, we start teaching women self-defence instead of teaching men and boys not to attack and kill women and girls.
In the wake of the recent murder of Carol, Hannah and Louise Hunt by a man wielding a crossbow, campaigners called for urgent action against crossbows.
I listened on the radio as those campaigners spoke out and felt another pang. Sure, ban crossbows, sure teach self-defence, but the problem is not women not knowing self-defence. The problem is not crossbows. The problem is men. Male violence is what needs urgent action.
What is it with that age?