You would have to be cohabiting with Patrick from SpongeBob Squarepants beneath his rock if you haven’t heard all the bikini business going on with the Presidential race as of late. Now, I’m not here to attack Trump or defend Hillary overtly… I’m here to discuss the underlying issue:

Society’s attitude towards women. Now, fellas, don’t get your boxers in a bunch (because first of all, ouch). If you don’t treat women as an inferior breed, and don’t plan on objectifying, sexually assaulting, or raping any of them in the future, then you are not under siege. Also, this is not about Hillary – because what I’m talking about, the general sentiment that women are controllable objects, has fuck-all to do with Benghazi or emails. It is pertinent to the fact that the potential leader of our country regards women as gropable objects and a majority see it as but a slight offense. The true danger his comments represented for women was incisive and dark.

In a stand-up routine performed by Louis C.K., he states that “the number one threat to women is men”, and sadly there are painful statistics to back that up. In the Unites states, a woman is beaten every 9 seconds. Men are the #1 cause of injury to American women, and of the 2 million domestic injuries accounted for annually, more than half a million require overnight hospitalization, according to the center for disease control.

Furthermore, 2/3rds of women killed by gun are killed by a partner or ex-partner, and 90% of gun crimes in general are committed by men. Oh, and here’s another fun one for your Friday – spouses are the leading cause of death for pregnant women. So, if you are going to shit a brick over abortion, you should be shitting the entire grand central station over this statistic as well.

But nobody cares, because, like ISIS!

The war on terror is raging all around, because it is unanimously agreed upon that a group of people should not be violently acted upon by another. But, since 9/11, the more than 18,300 corpses from domestic violence homicide between 9/11 and 2016 exceeds the number of deaths on 9/11 AND all the Americans killed in the war on terror since combined. In fact, this makes the likelihood of a woman being killed by her husband 147% more likely than being killed by any terrorist attack, seeing as a total of only 80 nonmilitary personnel have been killed on US soil since 2004.

This is not to say we should end the war on terror or to say that ISIS isn’t a horrific organization – this is to draw attention to the fact that there are cotangent wars occurring. One can be fought with drones, the other can be fought with knowledge, with a cerebral reprogramming regarding the role of women in society. The revolution against these statistics is to spread the idea that women are not controllable property. We can cry for gun control, mental health progress, anger management – but none of these will matter as long as the idea of women as inferior still exists. Silence will not fight the idea, it has to be a collective need for change in the hearts of both men and women. It is redefining what the media portrays, it is dialogue, discourse and diplomacy, that needs to spark the flame of reversing this notion. Our leaders need to keep it ablaze, not extinguish it with pardonable objectification. For Donald Trump to be excused in any way for his words and actions towards women is to send the Women’s Rights movement back to the Mesozoic era.

It is time to draw the undeniable line in the sand between respect and intimidation. Women and men have different human experiences, and if we lived in a perfect world we could understand these differences not as a hierarchal claim. Men have testosterone, women can carry a life inside of them. Men are innately stronger, women have better vision. Each gender has strengths and weaknesses, and it is futile to compare them – so long as you respect them.

What I’m saying is that violence, both sexual and otherwise, doesn’t have a race – but, statistically speaking, it has a gender. It is a slow battle to fight against this concept, but it is not pointless – as long as “woke” individuals continue to grow in their knowledge and perspective, as long as men continue to go to bat for women – and not bat AT women – then we are not totally lost. We need to work together, men and women, to ensure that both genders are empowered to be the best they can be, to be intelligent, successful, positive forces in society. There should not be two entirely different standards pertaining to men and women – everyone should be held to the same standard. The human standard.

And with that, I’m out.

Works Cited

Solnit, Rebecca. Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays. London: Granta, 2014. Print.

“Statistics – Domestic Violence Homicide Help.” Domestic Violence Homicide Help. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2016.

“The Terrorism Statistics Americans Need To Hear.” Globalresearch.com. Washington’s Blog Global Research, 19 May 2014. Web.