Dead women and dogs
Writing about Sarah Everard, Gabby Petito and all the others whose names we don't know.
Over the weekend, I was sitting at the dog park, immersed in conversation with children, when I looked up and noticed that someone had taken my dog Dexter, a floppy seven-month-old standard poodle, and leashed him to the fence. At first, I actually didn’t recognize my dog because it didn’t make sense for him to be attached to someone else’s leash, unable to move. Once I realized it was him, I jumped up and began walking over. A man I’d never seen before spotted me coming, and bent down and unhooked Dexter. Then he straightened up, took a breath and looked me in the eye. Your. Dog. Has. Been. Sexually. Assaulting. My. Dog, he said, enunciating each word for emphasis. He did it repeatedly and so I tied him up.
Shocked into silence, I walked away and gathered my things and left. (For the record, while I didn’t see it, I’m sure Dexter was trying to hump the other dog. He’s a puppy and it’s a normal, though annoying, part of play behavior. If I’d seen him do it, I would have pulled him off and told him no.) But as I walked home, I couldn’t stop thinking about this man and the way he spoke to me. His face was smug and his statement seemed almost rehearsed, as if he had planned what he was going to say when he was invariably questioned about his choice to physically restrain another person’s pet. I wondered if he thought I wouldn’t be able to question his logic as I was a woman and women are supposed to care about things like sexual assault. Did he think it was funny to co-opt the language of sexual violence? Or did he really think rape was about as serious as dogs humping one another?
After feeling furious for a few hours, I started to get curious about my own anger. Why was I so upset, really? Why had what he said hurt me so much? Maybe it is because I spend all my days writing about murdered women, women who are raped and brutalized and forgotten, and this man was trying to situate himself as a haughty defender of a sexual assault victim — his dog. Maybe I was angry at how removed he must have been from the experience of sexual assault to feel comfortable making a comparison like that. Maybe his nonchalant attitude pierced something in me.
For the last six months, I’ve had a photo of Sarah Everard — a woman who was raped and killed by a police officer in London — displayed in my bedroom as I worked on a story about her. Today, the story is out in Vanity Fair. Please read it. It’s about Sarah and the international conversation on violence against women that her death triggered. But more broadly, the story is about how the feminist movement in the UK and abroad is currently grappling with its complicated relationship to the criminal justice system. In the wake of Sarah’s death, some feminist activists pushed for new laws, like the criminalization of street harassment, to solve the issue of violence against women. Yet, to quote myself, “there was an irony in using the murder of a white woman at the hands of a cop to push for increased policing that would undoubtably fall on Black and brown people also engaged in an urgent fight for equality.”
The story is coming out at an interesting time. In London, Sabina Nessa, a woman of color, was killed while walking alone, and some commenters have asked why her case failed to trigger as big of an outcry as Sarah’s did, questioning if her race was the reason. In the U.S., we’re having the same conversation about Gabby Petito, a young woman whose disappearance dominated the national news cycle before her body was found in Wyoming. I also wrote about Gabby and why cops aren’t always the best people to handle domestic violence calls for New York Magazine if you want to read that. To go back to the man in the dog park, I might still have been feeling raw after watching the body camera footage of the domestic violence incident that occurred a few weeks before Gabby died. I keep seeing her in my head, crying hysterically and apologizing. And then I see the men standing around, nonchalant.
My reading list while I reported the Sarah Everard story:
What To Do About Violence Against Women? by Elizabeth Wilson
We Do This ‘Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration by Aya Gruber
Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism by Alison Phipps
This is my first newsletter and I assure you they won’t normally be about my dog. But they will likely be about violence and trauma. Let me know what you think.