Rebecca Solnit on the habit of blaming women for “tempting” men:

The alleged murderer of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, reportedly said that he was trying to “eliminate temptation”. It’s as if he thought others were responsible for his inner life, as though the horrific act of taking others’ lives rather than learning some form of self-control was appropriate. This aspect of a crime that was also horrifically racist reflects a culture in which men and the society at large blame women for men’s behavior and the things men do to women.

See, it’s superficial to think men are responsible for the things they do to women. You have to dig below the surface to discover that it’s women who lure men into rape or punching or murder.

Sometimes men are written out of the story altogether. Since the pandemic began there have been torrents of stories about how women’s careers have been crushed or they have left their jobs altogether because they’re doing the lioness’s share of domestic labor , especially child-rearing, in heterosexual households. In February of this year, NPR opened a story with the assertion that this work has “landed on the shoulders of women” as if that workload had fallen from the sky rather than been shoved there by spouses. I have yet to see an article about a man’s career that’s flourishing because he’s dumped on his wife, or focusing on how he’s shirking the work.

Well, NPR – they don’t want to be seen as feminists, do they. That would be ick.

Behind all this is a storytelling problem. The familiar narratives about murder, rape, domestic violence, harassment, unwanted pregnancy, poverty in single-female-parent households, and a host of other phenomena portray these things as somehow happening to women and write men out of the story altogether, absolve them of responsibility – or turn them into “she made him do it” narratives. Thus have we treated a lot of things that men do to women or men and women do together as women’s problems that women need to solve, either by being amazing and heroic and enduring beyond all reason, or by fixing men, or by magically choosing impossible lives beyond the reach of harm and inequality. Not only the housework and the childcare, but what men do becomes women’s work.

I suppose some of that – maybe most of it – is inevitable, in the sense that reporters can report on A Situation a lot more easily and safely than Who Did What to Whom.

Down the page she suddenly forgets what she’s talking about and lurches into saying “people” instead of “women.” I picture an invisible activist creeping up behind her and shouting “TERF!!”

When it comes to abortion, unwanted pregnancies are routinely portrayed as something irresponsible women got themselves into and that conservatives in the US and many other countries want to punish them for trying to get out of. (You get the impression from anti-abortion narratives that these women are both the Whore of Babylon when it comes to sexual activity and the Virgin Mary when it comes to conception.) Though people who want to be pregnant may get pregnant on their own, with a sperm bank or donor, unwanted pregnancies are pretty much 100% the result of sex involving someone who, to put it simply, put his sperm where it was likely to meet an egg in a uterus. Two people were involved, but too often only one will be recognized if the pregnancy ends in abortion.

Whoopsie! In one paragraph, too. She starts with women getting all the blame for pregnancy, then she swerves to people who want to be pregnant and two people being involved in a pregnancy. She literally ditches her own argument in the middle of a paragraph.

After that she sticks to the muddle.

Katha Pollitt noted in her 2015 book on abortion that 16% of women have experienced “reproductive coercion” in which a male partner uses threats or violence to override their reproductive choice…

And of course anti-abortion laws with rape exemptions require pregnant people to prove they were raped…

It’s astonishing. She kicks the legs out from under her own argument in the middle of the piece in which she makes it.