Yesterday: visited an exhibition on crime called "The Dark Side"!
A description from their site:
The exhibition looks at street crime. Past and present, criminal and victim come face-to-face. Visit the dangerous parts of town of myth and reality. Meet witches, murderers, thieves, victims, madams and ex-criminals. You might even meet yourself.
X and I accidentally managed to show up just as a guide started a tour, so we joined. It was interesting to see stuff like timelines and a wheel-of-misfortune where crime and punishment was compared, today with back-in-the-day. Spoiler: sentences were a bit crude back in the day.
Gender-based facts were really interesting to see and hear about, for example where an "honourable woman" was not supposed to stay, how she was supposed to talk ((I.e. definitely not shout at people from open windows, among other interesting and bizarre facts.)), et cetera. I even learned that the main difference, nearly a couple of hundred years ago, between an "honourable" woman and one that was not "honourable" mainly seemed to be how they physically moved. Hey you, honourable woman! Don't move them hips too much! Yep. That's it. Move them honourably. If a woman travelled straight to Stockholm from the countryside, the guide informed us, and moved in the wrong way in the wrong side of town, risk was she'd get picked up by the police and forcibly get her genitals examined for STDs. Oh, the bad old days.
I haven't heard too much being said on the years that witch hunting was conducted in Sweden. It was, indeed it was; some kids accused a bunch of women of being witches which ended up with the women being killed, naturally. One of them was even burned alive. The accusing kids then started accusing nobles, which led to witch hunting being outlawed. Naturally.
Even though I may sound like a total gripe, I think it's really important that we keep certain facts in check: even though women may not get picked up by the vice squad because of how they walk, or whether or not they're swinging broomsticks anywhere, women are still subjected to violence from men in many a way. And men are, in Sweden, passively considered by loads of legal courts to be slaves under their own sexual urge, not able to not rape women, clobber women, murder them and wreck homes and lives in a variety of ways, none of which are comparable with the violence that men are subjected to by women. And seldom are men the focus for how the violence being reported, but the women. Today, women who report rape are still being asked questions like "How many sexual partners have you had?" and "Why were you wearing so little?" when questioned - this is, if the case ever makes it to court.
It'll be interesting to see the rest of the exhibition which takes place at The Museum of Medieval Stockholm, where crime from the Middle Ages up till today is brought up.
Later after the exhibition, X and I saw "Män som mördar kvinnor" ((Translates to "Men who murder women".)), a TV series that highlights murders of women as committed by men. The good thing about the series is that it highlights how common this is in Sweden, but the bad things are mainly that it's a complete sob package, while not focusing on the men - not nearly enough.
The men are the ones committing the crime. The ones murdering. Women are subjected to it, and it's men, not women, who have to be fixed. Women shouldn't even hear shit like "Stay away from dark alleys" or "Wear more clothes". That's just insane. We don't go about trying to fix floods by handing out buckets to store away water - we get rid of the source of the problem. Naturally. And preventing gender inequality should come just as natural, until we merely have to care about sustaining gender equality.
How do we stop this shit, or at the very least, lower the number of violence-related deaths? Why does the Swedish government spend millions every year on trying to keep down the number of traffic-related deaths (i.e. on the roads) but doesn't spend nearly that amount of money on trying to prevent male violence towards females? ((Of course, it's not only male-on-female violence that's costing our society hundreds of millions of monies every year. Check this out, which I just noticed in my Twitter feed.)) Another fact that should be brought to day, is that there's a hell of a lot of work being done by nonprofit organisations that rely on individual contributions to exist; these organisations pull so much weight for women who are under men's violence.
I may be "damaged" by my wife, who's studied gender and criminology, but I know that we need well-informed people talking about what makes men do these things, and what we males need to do to prevent it. In Sweden, joining Män för jämställdhet and contacting ROKS are a couple of good ideas among many.
And, as Noam Chomsky once said:
