Broken Bones: America’s Violent Indifference toward Women

A meditation on the realization that girls and women are fundamentally uncared for in this country.

“The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.” ~Elie Wiesel

When I became a parent, nearly five years ago, a dear friend sent me Maggie Smith’s famous poem “Good Bones.” I knew it. You know it. He knew that I would know it. (“Life is short, but I keep this from my children.”) But he wanted to make a point about how your perspective changes when you become the person in charge of showing someone the world. Like me, he works on dark topics, and has no patience with naïve optimism or political complacency. But he wanted me to know that I was about to become a realtor. “I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

This is not a beautiful morning. There is mourning in America. The election results were a stark and violent reminder of Smith’s take on what we keep from our children: “The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate… For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake.”

I wasn’t quite ready for my friend’s message when my daughter was an infant. I told myself that it would be important to prepare her early on for the horrors of the world, or more specifically other people. I told myself that she would learn early, and soberly, not only about the existence of systemic oppression but also the fact that people play a crucial role in making it happen. That, as Smith puts it: “For every kind stranger, there is one who would break you.” I wanted, above all else, to somehow give my daughter the knowledge that might protect her against being broken.

And then I inadvertently, against my best judgment, became a realtor anyway. I haven’t quite been able to bear piercing her trust in people or souring her sweetness.

As a result, I think I’ve become a more hopeful person. This is not my natural cast of mind. I am naturally inclined to think of hope as a scam, to be perfectly honest. It’s the mental state that, as the philosopher Katie Stockdale points out, in her otherwise even-handed treatment of hope, is cultivated and exploited to sell us jars of moisturizer. (“Hope in a Jar” is one stunning entry in this genre.) And it was the mental state that got me invested in believing women would save us—save ourselves, save the world, save American democracy.

So much for that gambit. To those I gave false hope: I am so, so sorry. I am so sorry in general.

This morning, this mourning, I am thinking about the ways that it’s not just the people who want to break us and hurt us and fuck us over who are terrible. I am almost more angry at the people who see all this happening, and see more of it coming, and are blithely indifferent. They don’t necessarily want women to go septic and die in parking lots, denied life-saving reproductive care in case it constitutes an abortion—a reality that Trump deliberately and proudly ushered into being. But if that’s the price of a cheaper tank of gas, or being able to afford a bigger house, or run a more profitable business, then they’ll willingly pay it. They are either willfully ignorant or actively shrugging about the fact that the bodies of girls and women were on the line in this election. This was, as Lyz Lenz put it, a single-issue election for us where the single issue was our living—well, tolerably well, or at all in some cases.

America truly doesn’t give a fuck, collectively, about the well-being of girls and women. And it actively wants to screw over the trans and non-binary folks who will similarly be deprived of gender-affirming and life-saving health care under the Trump administration.

A lot will be said about how Trump voters are wrong to vote for him out of their concern about “the economy.” And obviously, what they mean by “the economy” is their pocketbook, their bank balance. But even if they were right (and they’re not), this is a devastating realization: that so many Americans will shrug about the bodies and the needs of girls and women and gender-marginalized people because they want a little bit more money. It would be one thing if the folks voting in this manner were overwhelmingly poor, but I think most poor folks are all too well aware that Trump is going to royally screw them over. In any case, I reserve the bulk of my wrath and contempt for the many middle class and rich folks whose selfish indifference toward women was on stark display at the ballot box.

Many moral philosophers hold that moral considerations should be overriding. Which means, roughly, that if you have a moral reason to refrain from doing A, and a prudential (e.g., financial) reason to do A, then you ought to refrain from doing A. You ought to be prepared to make the sacrifice for the sake of morality. Instead, Trump voters were prepared to sacrifice women for the sake of their bank balance.

A lot will be said about whether this decision was about misogyny or about the economy. But this is a false contrast. Whatever the proportion of people who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris simply because she is a woman, this is a narrow and, frankly, antiquated conception of misogyny that I’ve been arguing against for a decade. Misogyny isn’t about hating or discriminating against women because they are women and thus attract suspicion and consternation. Misogyny is about exposing women to harm because our gender makes us beneath full consideration. Misogyny is primarily something we face, not something people feel in their hearts. Having to navigate a world where you can’t get a routine D&C after six weeks or obtain care for an ectopic pregnancy or have to carry a fetus to term as a raped ten year-old girl could hardly be one that is more hostile and hateful to women, girls, and indeed anyone who can get pregnant.

The misogyny of this election is not primarily about Kamala Harris, although that is certainly a real force, which I’ve been writing about from the day following the announcement of her candidacy. The main misogyny of this election is that many people will vote to line their pocketbooks at the expense of the basic health and safety of so many of us. Including me, the majority of my readers, my dear trans and non-binary friends, and my daughter and her entire female cohort.

And, oh, the young men. You are breaking my heart in your willingness to shrug about the well-being of your female counterparts in voting for Trump in droves. Even those who are not incels, or otherwise actively harming others, are showing yet again that there is violence in standing back and shrugging. Those of us who are shown to be uncared for may hence now be experiencing what Jill Stauffer calls ethical loneliness: the loneliness of being abandoned by humanity while subject to wrongdoing and injustice. People stand around glassy-eyed or averting their gaze or grinning slyly when they could do something, or at least bear witness after the fact. Stauffer focuses on this phenomenon in the context of atrocities, but I am convinced it is a much more everyday occurrence. It is being a bullied child who is beaten or belittled and watching your classmates shrug. And often, your teachers. It’s institutional betrayal; it’s betrayal by people. The former phrase shouldn’t obscure for us the reality of the latter.

I am thinking now about what to say to my daughter when she gets home after school. She knows that people die, but not that people kill people. She knows that people get sick, but not that others may refuse to help them. She knows that babies are born, but not that some people value this possibility over the actual life of their mother. Let alone that some people don’t truly value either party, and just want girls like her to be groomed to give, love, breed, and serve men in perpetuity. 

I may be done with selling her the world, or telling her about its good bones. (Does this place have good bones? I am seeing them smashed on the daily.) But I am still not quite ready to tell her about the people who would break her or watch others do it, and then just let her suffer.

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