Ángel ’s Reviews > Age of Sex Crime > Status Update

Gynocidal themes and imagery have become commonplace not only in overt pornography, but have moved comfortably and ubiquitously into mainstream products as well.

Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

The hoary story of Adam and Eve is dragged in to legitimate what was the most disastrous campaign of blame ever erected against women.

Prostitutes were to the Victorians what the witches were to the Medievals.

In the patriarchal vocabulary, all sex killers are frightened, abused and terrorized little boys, victims of their mothers. Do any of those who so wholly subscribe to this logic ever pause to wonder why little girls - overwhelmingly the actual victims of abuse by fathers and father figures - do not grow up to enact wholesale slaughters against men?

When identity is unknown, legends can be fertilized which present the boy or man as anyone - a crown prince, the incarnation of a magical or eternal force, a son of the devil or a son of god.

Just as Jack the Ripper was cast as a mythic master criminal, a veritable archetype and repository for murder, so too are many of his followers. The gynocide itself is all too real, yet when such killings are so willingly charged to one, all powerful, ubiquitous, even supernatural criminal, it is phallic propaganda, not reality, that is being served.

Thus sex crime is lifted out of the historical tradition of gynocide and represented as some mysterious force of nature, the expression of deeply repressed "human" urges, a fact of life, a supernatural evil, a monstrous aberration - anything but the logical and eminently functional product of the system of male domination.

Mythicization (of Jack the Ripper) works to ensure that phallic violence will be considered an unavoidable fact of life, an inevitability of nature. It serves as a cosmic distraction, deflecting analysis from the actuality of the crimes and their meaning and fixing attention almost solely on the myth.

Now, nearly one hundred years later, the Ripper persona functions not only as the primary model for modern sex crime, but also as a mythic reminder of gynocide for women, a nightmare figure who has materially contributed to women's sense of vulnerability in modern urban culture.