Picture this.\u00a0 A man, armored in tattoos, bursts into a living room not his own.\u00a0 He confronts an enemy.\u00a0 He barks orders.\u00a0 He throws that enemy into a chair. Then against a wall.\u00a0 He plants himself in the middle of the room, feet widespread, fists clenched, muscles straining, face contorted in a scream of rage.\u00a0 The tendons in his neck are taut with the intensity of his terrifying performance.\u00a0 He chases the enemy to the next room, stopping escape with a quick grab and thrust and body block that pins the enemy, bent back, against a counter. He shouts more orders: his enemy can go with him to the basement for a \u201cprivate talk,\u201d or be beaten to a pulp right here. Then he wraps his fingers around the neck of his enemy and begins to choke her.<\/p>\n
No, that invader isn\u2019t an American soldier leading a night raid on an Afghan village, nor is the enemy an anonymous Afghan householder.\u00a0 This combat warrior is just a guy in Ohio named Shane. He\u2019s doing what so many men find exhilarating: disciplining his girlfriend with a heavy dose of the violence we render harmless by calling it \u201cdomestic.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to figure out from a few basic facts that Shane is a skilled predator. \u00a0Why else does a 31-year-old man lavish attention on a pretty 19-year-old with two children (ages four and two, the latter an equally pretty and potentially targeted little female)?\u00a0 And what more vulnerable girlfriend could he find than this one, named Maggie: a neglected young woman, still a teenager, who for two years had been raising her kids on her own while her husband fought a war in Afghanistan?\u00a0 That war had broken the family apart, leaving Maggie with no financial support and more alone than ever.<\/p>\n
But the way Shane assaulted Maggie, he might just as well have been a night-raiding soldier terrorizing an Afghan civilian family in pursuit of some dangerous Talib, real or imagined.\u00a0 For all we know, Maggie\u2019s estranged husband\/soldier might have\u00a0acted<\/a>\u00a0in the same way in some Afghan living room and not only been paid but also honored for it. \u00a0The basic behavior is quite alike: an overwhelming display of superior force. The tactics: shock and awe.\u00a0 The goal: to control the behavior, the very life, of the designated target.\u00a0 The mind set: a sense of entitlement when it comes to determining the fate of a subhuman creature.\u00a0 The dark side: the fear and brutal rage of a scared loser who inflicts his miserable self on others.<\/p>\n As for that designated enemy, just as American exceptionalism asserts the superiority of the United States over all other countries and cultures on Earth, and even over the laws that govern international relations, misogyny — which seems to inform so much in the United States these days, from military boot camp to the Oscars<\/a> to full frontal political assaults on a woman\u2019s right to control her own body<\/a> — assures even the most pathetic guys like Shane of their innate superiority over some \u201cthing\u201d usually addressed with multiple obscenities.<\/p>\n Since 9\/11, the further militarization<\/a> of our already militarized culture has reached new levels.\u00a0 Official America, as embodied in our political system and national security state, now seems to be thoroughly masculine, paranoid, quarrelsome, secretive, greedy, aggressive, and violent.\u00a0 Readers familiar with \u201cdomestic violence\u201d will recognize those traits as equally descriptive of the average American wife beater: scared but angry and aggressive, and feeling absolutely entitled to control something, whether it\u2019s just a woman, or a small wretched country like Afghanistan.<\/p>\n Connecting the Dots<\/strong><\/p>\n It was John Stuart Mill<\/a>, writing in the nineteenth century, who connected the dots between \u201cdomestic\u201d and international violence.\u00a0 But he didn\u2019t use our absurdly gender-neutral, pale gray term \u201cdomestic violence.\u201d\u00a0 He called it \u201cwife torture<\/a>\u201d or\u00a0 \u201catrocity,\u201d and he recognized that torture and atrocity are much the same, no matter where they take place — whether today in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Wardak Province<\/a>, Afghanistan, or a bedroom or basement in Ohio.\u00a0 Arguing in 1869 against the subjection of women<\/a>, Mill wrote that the Englishman\u2019s habit of household tyranny and \u201cwife torture\u201d established the pattern and practice for his foreign policy. \u00a0The tyrant at home becomes the tyrant at war.\u00a0 Home is the training ground for the big games played overseas.<\/p>\n Mill believed that, in early times, strong men had used force to enslave women and the majority of their fellow men.\u00a0 By the nineteenth century, however, the \u201claw of the strongest\u201d seemed to him to have been \u201cabandoned\u201d — in England at least — \u201cas the regulating principle of the world\u2019s affairs.\u201d\u00a0 Slavery had been renounced.\u00a0 Only in the household did it continue to be practiced, though wives were no longer openly enslaved but merely \u201csubjected\u201d to their husbands.\u00a0 This subjection, Mill said, was the last vestige of the archaic \u201claw of the strongest,\u201d and must inevitably fade away as reasonable men recognized its barbarity and injustice.\u00a0 Of his own time, he wrote that \u201cnobody professes\u201d the law of the strongest, and \u201cas regards most of the relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practice it.\u201d<\/p>\n Well, even a feminist may not be right about everything.\u00a0 Times often change for the worse, and rarely has the law of the strongest been more popular than it is in the United States today. Routinely now we hear congressmen<\/a> declare that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world because it is the greatest military power in history, just as presidents now regularly insist<\/a> that the U.S. military is \u201cthe finest fighting force in the history of the world.\u201d\u00a0 Never mind that it rarely wins a war.\u00a0 Few here question that primitive standard — the law of the strongest — as the measure of this America\u2019s dwindling \u201ccivilization.\u201d<\/p>\n The War Against Women<\/strong><\/p>\n Mill, however, was right about the larger point: that tyranny at home is the model for tyranny abroad.\u00a0 What he perhaps didn\u2019t see was the perfect reciprocity of the relationship that perpetuates the law of the strongest both in the home and far away.<\/p>\n When tyranny and violence are practiced on a grand scale in foreign lands, the practice also intensifies at home.\u00a0 As American militarism went into overdrive after 9\/11, it validated violence against women here, where Republicans held up<\/a> reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (first passed in 1994), and celebrities<\/a> who publicly assaulted their girlfriends faced no consequences other than a deluge of sympathetic girl-fan tweets.<\/p>\n America\u2019s invasions abroad also validated violence within the U.S. military itself.\u00a0 An estimated 19,000 women soldiers were sexually assaulted<\/a> in 2011; and an unknown number have been murdered<\/a> by fellow soldiers who were, in many cases, their husbands or boyfriends.\u00a0 A great deal of violence against women in the military, from rape to murder, has been documented, only to be casually covered up<\/a> by the chain of command.<\/p>\n Violence against civilian women here at home, on the other hand, may not be reported or tallied at all, so the full extent of it escapes notice. Men prefer to maintain the historical fiction that violence in the home is a private matter, properly and legally concealed behind a \u201ccurtain.\u201d In this way is male impunity<\/a> and tyranny maintained.<\/p>\n Women cling to a fiction of our own: that we are much more \u201cequal\u201d than we are.\u00a0 Instead of confronting male violence, we still prefer to lay the blame for it on individual women and girls who fall victim to it — as if they had volunteered. But then, how to explain the dissonant fact that at least one of every three<\/a> female American soldiers is sexually assaulted by a male \u201csuperior\u201d? Surely that\u2019s not what American women had in mind when they signed up for the Marines or for Air Force flight training<\/a>.\u00a0 In fact, lots of teenage girls volunteer for the military precisely to escape violence and sexual abuse in their childhood homes or streets.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get me wrong, military men are neither alone nor out of the ordinary in terrorizing women.\u00a0 The broader American war against women has intensified on many fronts here at home, right along with our wars abroad. Those foreign wars have killed uncounted thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, which could make the private battles of domestic warriors like Shane here in the U.S. seem puny by comparison.\u00a0 But it would be a mistake to underestimate the firepower of the Shanes of our American world. The statistics tell us that a legal handgun<\/a> has been the most popular means of dispatching a wife, but when it comes to girlfriends, guys really get off on beating them<\/a> to death.<\/p>\n Some 3,073 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the United States on 9\/11. Between that day and June 6, 2012, 6,488 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for America\u2019s war on terror at home and abroad to 9,561.\u00a0 During the same period, 11,766 women were murdered<\/a> in the United States by their husbands or boyfriends, both military and civilian. \u00a0The greater number of women killed here at home is a measure of the scope and the furious intensity of the war against women, a war that threatens to continue long after the misconceived war on terror is history.<\/p>\n Getting the Picture<\/strong><\/p>\n Think about Shane, standing there in a nondescript living room in Ohio screaming his head off like a little child who wants what he wants when he wants it.\u00a0 Reportedly, he was trying to be a good guy and make a career as a singer in a Christian rock band.\u00a0 But like the combat soldier in a foreign war who is modeled after him, he uses violence to hold his life together and accomplish his mission.<\/p>\n We know about Shane only because there happened to be a photographer on the scene.\u00a0 Sara Naomi Lewkowicz had chosen to document the story of Shane and his girlfriend Maggie out of sympathy for his situation as an ex-con, recently released from prison yet not free of the stigma attached to a man who had done time. Then, one night, there he was in the living room throwing Maggie around, and Lewkowicz did what any good combat photographer would do as a witness to history: she kept shooting. That action alone was a kind of intervention and may have saved Maggie\u2019s life.<\/p>\n In the midst of the violence, Lewkowicz also dared to snatch from Shane\u2019s pocket her own cell phone, which he had borrowed earlier.\u00a0 It\u2019s unclear whether she passed the phone to someone else or made the 911 call herself. The police arrested Shane, and a smart policewoman told Maggie: \u201cYou know, he\u2019s not going to stop. They never stop. They usually stop when they kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n Maggie did the right thing.\u00a0 She gave the police a statement.\u00a0 Shane is back in prison.\u00a0 And Lewkowicz\u2019s remarkable photographs<\/a> were posted online on February 27th at Time <\/em>magazine\u2019s website feature Lightbox <\/em>under the heading\u00a0 \u201cPhotographer As Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence.\u201d<\/p>\n The photos are remarkable because the photographer is very good and the subject of her attention is so rarely caught on camera.\u00a0 Unlike warfare covered in Iraq and Afghanistan by embedded combat photographers, wife torture takes place mostly behind closed doors, unannounced and unrecorded.\u00a0 The first photographs of wife torture to appear in the U.S. were Donna Ferrato\u2019s now iconic images<\/a> of violence against women at home.<\/p>\n Like Lewkowicz, Ferrato came upon wife torture by chance; she was documenting a marriage in 1980 when the happy husband chose to beat up his wife. Yet so reluctant were photo editors to pull aside the curtain of domestic privacy that even after Ferrato became a Life <\/em>photographer in 1984, pursuing the same subject, nobody, including Life<\/em>, wanted to publish the shocking images she produced.<\/p>\n In 1986, six years after she witnessed that first assault, some of her photographs of violence against women in the home were published in the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, and brought her the 1987 Robert F. Kennedy journalism award \u201cfor outstanding coverage of the problems of the disadvantaged.\u201d\u00a0 In 1991, Aperture, the publisher of distinguished photography books, brought out Ferrato\u2019s eye-opening body of work as Living with the Enemy<\/em><\/a> (for which I wrote an introduction). Since then, the photos have been widely reproduced. Time<\/em> used<\/a> a Ferrato image on its cover in 1994, when the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson briefly drew attention to what the magazine called \u201cthe epidemic of domestic abuse\u201d and Lightbox <\/em>featured a small retrospective<\/a> of her domestic violence work on June 27, 2012.<\/p>\n Ferrato herself started a foundation, offering her work to women\u2019s groups across the country to exhibit at fundraisers for local shelters and services.\u00a0 Those photo exhibitions also helped raise consciousness across America and certainly contributed to smarter, less misogynistic police procedures of the kind that put Shane back in jail.<\/p>\n Ferrato\u2019s photos were incontrovertible evidence of the violence in our homes, rarely acknowledged and never before so plainly seen. \u00a0Yet until February 27th, when with Ferrato\u2019s help, Sara Naomi Lewkowicz\u2019s photos were posted on Lightbox <\/em>only two months after they were taken, Ferrato\u2019s photos were all we had.\u00a0 We needed more.\u00a0 So there was every reason for Lewkowicz\u2019s work to be greeted with acclaim by photographers and women everywhere.<\/p>\n Instead, in more than 1,700 comments posted at Lightbox<\/em>, photographer Lewkowicz was mainly castigated for things like not dropping her camera and taking care to get Maggie\u2019s \u00a0distraught two-year-old daughter out of the room or singlehandedly stopping the assault.\u00a0 (Need it be said that stopping combat is not the job of combat photographers?)<\/p>\n Maggie, the victim of this felonious assault, was also mercilessly denounced: for going out with Shane in the first place, for failing to foresee his violence, for \u201ccheating\u201d on her already estranged husband fighting in Afghanistan, and inexplicably for being a \u201cperpetrator.\u201d\u00a0 Reviewing the commentary for the Columbia Journalism Review, <\/em>Jina Moore concluded<\/a>, \u201c[T]here\u2019s one thing all the critics seem to agree on: The only adult in the house not <\/em>responsible for the violence is the man committing it.\u201d<\/p>\n They Only Stop When They Kill You<\/strong><\/p>\n Viewers of these photographs — photos that accurately reflect the daily violence so many women face — seem to find it easy to ignore, or even praise, the raging man behind it all.\u00a0 So, too, do so many find it convenient to ignore the violence that America\u2019s warriors abroad inflict under orders on a mass scale upon women and children in war zones.<\/p>\n The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had the effect of displacing millions from their homes within the country or driving them<\/a> into exile in foreign lands. Rates of rape and atrocity were staggering, as I learned firsthand when in 2008-2009 I spent time in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon talking with<\/a> Iraqi refugees. In addition, those women who remain in Iraq now live under the rule of conservative Islamists, heavily influenced by Iran. Under the former secular regime, Iraqi women were considered the most advanced in the Arab world; today, they say they have been set back a century.<\/p>\n In Afghanistan, too, while Americans take credit for putting women back in the workplace and girls in school, untold thousands of women and children have been displaced internally, many to makeshift camps on the outskirts of Kabul where 17 children froze to death<\/a> last January. The U.N. reported<\/a> 2,754 civilian deaths and 4,805 civilian injuries as a result of the war in 2012, the majority of them women and children.\u00a0 In a country without a state capable of counting bodies, these are undoubtedly significant undercounts. A U.N. official said<\/a>, \u201cIt is the tragic reality that most Afghan women and girls were killed or injured while engaging in their everyday activities.\u201d Thousands of women in Afghan cities have been forced into survival sex, as were Iraqi women who fled as refugees to Beirut and particularly Damascus.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what male violence is meant to do to women.\u00a0 The enemy.\u00a0 War itself is a kind of screaming tattooed man, standing in the middle of a room — or another country — asserting the law of the strongest. It\u2019s like a reset button on history that almost invariably ensures women will find themselves subjected to men in ever more terrible ways.\u00a0 It\u2019s one more thing that, to a certain kind of man, makes going to war, like good old-fashioned wife torture, so exciting and so much fun.<\/p>\n ___________________________<\/p>\n Ann Jones, historian, journalist, photographer, and TomDispatch regular<\/a>, chronicled violence against women in the U.S. in several books, including the feminist classic Women Who Kill<\/a> (1980) and Next Time, She\u2019ll Be Dead<\/a> (2000), before going to Afghanistan in 2002 to work with women.\u00a0 She is the author of Kabul in Winter<\/a> (2006) and War Is Not Over When It\u2019s Over<\/a> (2010).<\/em><\/p>\n Copyright 2013 Ann Jones<\/i><\/p>\n