Sarah Harte: Social media is amping up the danger that women always faced at home
'Trad wife' advocates suggest a woman's place is in the home. But Femicide Watch shows that, of resolved cases, 63% of women who died violently in Ireland since 1996 were murdered in their own homes.
On a boiling hot drive back from Ennis, I listened to , the podcast on “the growing alienation between men and women”. Douthat sees it as “one of the biggest stories of our time”.
He’s not alone. Many commentators believe a new war between men and women has broken out.
Media hype? A millennial pal told me she has sworn off relationships as “a committed heteropessimist”. It’s a belief that straight romantic relationships are fundamentally flawed. Blame the unequal sharing of caring work, the impacts of porn on relationships, and the connected high rates of violence against women.
Impossible to gauge how widespread this view is. It’s a growing cultural lens with discussion around it expanding online, but is it an ironic identity marker rather than the lived experience of heterosexual people who continue to want long-term romantic relationships?
Douthat argues that a growing schism between the genders is warping our politics and culture, with battle lines being drawn between the masculinist right and the feminist left.
Depending on your age, you may be relatively immune to this schism, but younger people forming their attitudes online aren’t.
Our culture subtly directs behaviour. Attitudes are fed to us even when we are unaware that we are absorbing them.
Douthat’s guest, reactionary feminist Louise Perry, argues that our problems today are traceable to the sexual revolution, which she argues set us on a negative path where gender relations are concerned. Hmm.
I previously wrote about Perry’s book, . In it, Perry rails against the hook-up culture, casual, meaningless sex, and rampant pornography courtesy of capitalist tech, which she says disproportionately harms women.
She makes many valid points, including on what tech is doing to us.
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Perry asserts that a certain proportion of men are biologically primed to be rapists, so women should avoid premarital sex. She sees female chastity as the solution to male biological perversion (my words). I’m being necessarily reductive here, but that’s the gist of it. Hmm.
Perry is big on marriage.
Her solution is to send women back into the home to fulfil their biological destiny. I’m all for getting outside our echo chambers and entertaining contrary opinions, but no thanks to that turning of the clock back.
As an aside, it’s notable how often conservative women, including tradwives, proffer this solution, while they enjoy booming, lucrative, high-profile careers outside the home.
While I strongly believe that stable relationships are important for the functioning of society, the belief that marriage is a panacea is a major flaw in Perry’s argument. Douthat, who is a conservative Catholic, also seems sceptical of Perry’s solutions to the problem.
Social conservatives won’t like this, but the inconvenient truth is that home is the most dangerous place for a woman.
In its Femicide Watch, Women’s Aid has been recording the violent deaths of women in the Republic of Ireland since 1996. Of the resolved cases, 63% of these women were murdered in their own home, and 55% were killed directly by a current or former intimate partner.
This is aside from the high rates of domestic and sexual abuse that don’t end in domestic homicide.
Perry is correct about the problematic sexual environment young people are growing up in, and the eyewatering levels of violence against women and girls.
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Recent World Health Organization statistics confirm that one in three women have experienced physical, sexual, or intimate partner violence, or non-partner sexual violence.
Let’s take a bird’s-eye view of papers on just one day.
On arriving home from Ennis, I opened the , on Page 2, to be confronted with the headline, ‘Widespread image-based sexual abuse really damaging for women'. The Oireachtas higher education committee heard testimony from several organisations on how we need stronger policies to tackle technology-facilitated sexual violence, including deepfake pornography, image-based abuse, and AI-generated sexual imagery.
Why? Because online forms of violence against women are proliferating.
On the point of tolerating violence against women — which we do — on Page 5 of the , I read, ‘Hand welcomes criticisms of show hosting McGregor’. This refers to Nikita Hand, who won her civil case against Conor McGregor for sexual assault.
Last week, McGregor appeared on the popular American talk show . What does it say about mainstream society and the message it communicates to young people when the gurning McGregor is platformed and lionised despite a High Court civil jury finding that he sexually assaulted Nikita Hand and that damages were due to her?
It’s a question that some high-profile American personalities have raised.
Hollywood actress Christina Ricci commented: “Why the absolute fuck is this piece of human garbage being given a platform on Jimmy Fallon’s show? Shame on you, Jimmy.”
The singer Pink was more measured, saying “men still get platforms and are treated like celebrities” despite the civil jury’s findings.
Jumping to , the headline was ‘Women increasingly victims of assaults despite overall drop in serious crime, CSO finds'.
These statistics show that there is a fall in overall crime, but they also show how deeply embedded violence against women in all its forms is in society. Garda commissioner Justin Kelly has described it as “shocking”.
As RTÉ reported, an average of 27 attacks on women were reported every day during the first three months of the year.
Shrinking female freedom is not the solution.
It’s not women’s job to prevent violence by denying themselves agency. And are we just going to accept that sexual violence is treated as an unavoidable feature of being male?
One aspect of the challenge is to address societal attitudes and change the culture that shapes how we see sex, power, and relationships.
But young people are not forming their ideas about sex, relationships, porn, and identity in isolation.
They are being shaped by a digital environment designed by some of the most powerful companies in the world, whose business models have allowed harmful material and distorted ideas about sex and relationships to spread at an unprecedented scale. Perry is strong on this.
We grossly underestimated the power of tech companies, allowing them to advance faster than we regulated them.
Now we face the harsh consequences. A relatively small number of extraordinarily wealthy companies influence the culture in which our children grow up.
This socially corrosive tech ecosystem also sees content creators weaponising gender issues for clicks with polarising content.
There’s a thorny debate that needs to be had about strong content moderation versus free speech.
Ross Douthat argues that the growing chasm between men and women is a defining cultural conflict of our time. I would argue that if we want to close that divide, we must confront the forces shaping the next generation’s attitudes and beliefs.
All roads lead back to digital platforms.
We tackled Big Tobacco for harming public health. When monopolistic Big Tech harms our children, society, and democracy, it’s glaringly obvious that it’s time to rein it in.
• Women's Aid continues to record violent deaths of women in Ireland here on Femicide Watch.
• If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please click here for a list of support services.
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