Choice

As we now know, Cho Seung Hui’s madness and subsequent killing spree manifested itself in a deep hatred of women and their sexuality. As the facts trickle out, we are finding out more and more about the misogyny enmeshed in Cho’s paranoid fantasies. Cho’s roommates told their female friends to stop coming to visit them at their room because of his stalking behavior toward other women. He “saw promiscuity” in the eyes of one of his stalking victims. He stalked several women after meeting them online and through instant messaging and freaked one of his stalking victims out by leaving messages outside her door signed “Question Mark.” He tried to intimidate Nikki Giovanni and female students in his classes by taking pictures, many of their legs, during classes and meetings with his cell phone. Although Cho railed against “rich kids,” there is little doubt from his behavior and history of stalking women that Cho was focused on the young women of Virginia Tech when he railed:

“You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.”

He saw promiscuity in her eyes.

As a probable delusional or vengeful stalker and a paranoid schizophrenic with a dose of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Cho likely found it unbearable that the female objects of his interest did not return his affections and shared those imagined affections with other men.

When I heard that the killing began in a dorm room and then continued later in a separate building, I was sure stalking was involved–it sounded like he was looking for someone. In fact, a friend of mine (an expert on domestic violence) and I corresponded on the subject immediately upon hearing about the two locations. And while its not clear that Cho knew Emily Hilscher, his first victim, is it any wonder he choose a young woman as the first person upon which he would take his revenge against a society that he felt excluded him? Since 2005, he had been continually acting out aggressively toward the women around him. And although stalking is a gender neutral crime, in the United States, 78% of all stalking victims are women. I found it laughable that some bloggers were speculating about how Cho’s Korean ancestry might be a cause of his aggressive behavior–as if the United States doesn’t have a culture saturated with enough violence and misogyny for a young man brought up here since he was eight years old to easily absorb.

He saw promiscuity in her eyes.

Someone else who sees promiscuity in the eyes of the women around him is Justice Anthony Kennedy who authored the opinion in the 5-4 Supreme Court decision on the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003. As Dahlia Lithwick points out, Kennedy retrieves the literary trope of the ‘inconstant woman” and seems to be of the mind that late term abortions happen because women are either ignorant of the nature of the procedure or change their minds and decide too late that a fetus is unwanted. Amanda Marcotte puts it best:

Sometimes it takes the cast of paternalistic head-patting condescension. For your anti-choicers, women veer between loathsome objects that must be denied health care as punishment for some abstract wrongness and stupid little darlings, with brains too small to really understand much more than very smart chickens.

This SCOTUS decision has nothing to do with medical opinion, saving the life of the mother, saving her uterus, or fetal abnormalities. Kennedy and four of his male fellow justices seem to be of the opinion that they know more about medical decision-making than doctors, unbelievably referred to as “abortion doctors” in Kennedy’s opinion.

There is a connection between the manner of Cho Seung Hui’s madness and yesterday’s Supreme Court decision–misogyny and a fear of female sexuality. Promiscuity, well choice really, is the real problem with allowing women the right to an abortion–the choice to have and not have sex which means that women then have the choice to get married or not, to work or not, etc. Amanda Marcotte writes:

Today’s Supreme Court decision upholding the ban on “partial birth abortions” is the finale of a radical manuever by anti-choicers to strike at the heart of the issue and establish legal precedent devaluing women as human beings. It’s a smart move. The mushy middle on the issue of choice swings on the issue of women’s value—the mushy middle believes that women have value but they can also be wigged out by some sex paranoia. So you see a lot of “compromise” positions that pay lip service to the idea that women have an independent value as humans (rape exceptions, health exceptions) but still people tolerate the law putting a bunch of obstacles and headaches between women and getting abortions, because hey, who wants to stand up for the rights of Sluts Who Should Have Kept Their Legs Closed? In sum, we have a situation where a lot of laws like waiting periods and parental notifications establish the notion that having sex voluntarily should be a punishable offense for women, but not one that incurs a death penalty. (And that we can keep our hands clean by letting nature do the dirty work.) The problem with these compromises from the anti-choice view is that they are too soft and permissive with the daughters of Eve, and more to the point, if you allow that women have value and shouldn’t be forced to die because of pregnancy or shouldn’t be forced to bear a child because of rape, then you open yourself up for the argument that women have rights. Once you agree that women’s lives should be respected, it’s a downhill slide to agreeing that women are equal to men and should be free. We know that, because we’ve seen it happen over history.

So this bill skips the preliminaries of dismantling women’s rights one at a time and instead gets to the heart of the matter. Late term abortions are performed for maternal health reasons, full stop. Sometimes it’s a fetal health issue, that it’s dead or will die as soon as it’s born, but in the end, it’s still about not forcing a woman to go through labor and delivery, which are dangerous, for no reason. And sometimes they are performed because the mother will die, be crippled, or have serious mental health problems if she delivers. The concept of “choice” isn’t really part of this discussion so much. This is about the concept that women deserve to be treated as full human beings who deserve proper medical care despite their current situation of being in a state only women can be in. That is what was on trial and the answer is no.

It’s a strike at the concept that women have independent value. If you reduce a woman to a baby factory, then one who needs a late term abortion is malfunctioning in her purpose somehow, so if she dies, she’s scrap metal, I suppose. Or scrap blood and tissue, as it were. I hate to be blunt like this, but there it is. They skipped over the preliminaries about what kind of rights women should have and attacked the idea that our very existence and health matters if we’ve failed in our duties as fetal incubators.

We’ve seen some of the same reasoning by those who would deny the cervical cancer vaccine to girls because if girls know that they might not develop cancer and die as a result of having sex in the future, they will become promiscuous immediately. There are some parents who would rather let their daughters chance cervical cancer than allow for even the idea that their daughters might have sex (and we all know how feasible abstinence is). Just like for Cho, the freedom and choice the young women of Virginia Tech have is reason enough to punish them. Women’s freedom is their real enemy.

They see promiscuity everywhere.

The discussion should be about how to reduce abortions through access to birth control and sex education, not about eliminating the reproductive freedom of women (and their families) and the medical authority and decision-making of doctors. If Americans did not have enough reason to support the Democratic Party in the 2008 elections without this verdict, they certainly do now. William Congreve said that “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” although he was referring to love. In this case, we are talking about something much more important–freedom.

By the way, for the best analysis I’ve seen on NBC’s decision to broadcast Cho’s video tapes, read this searing piece by Cintra Wilson on Huffington Post.

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