Patriarchal violence: the multitude of struggles
To converge in a unique, immense revolution.
by Camilla Ponti
The origins of rape culture can be traced back to the very genesis of human society. Italian psychologist Roberto Sicuteri, in his essay "Lilith and the Black Moon", retraces the mythology surrounding the figure of Lilith—Adam's first wife, born from the earth just like him—in the oldest biblical versions, in the Sumerian-Akkadian tradition, in the Egyptian tradition, in the Middle Ages, and in contemporary Western culture.
Lilith has become a crucial symbol in the fight against rape culture because, according to various scriptures, she was the first woman to rebel against male domination—both sexual and social—and was punished with exile and eternal damnation.
Lilith represents the root of rebellion against patriarchy, female dissidence, and witchcraft.
"Adam's love for Lilith was soon disturbed; when they united in the flesh [...] Lilith showed impatience. She would ask Adam: [...] 'Why must I be overpowered by you? After all, I too was made from dust and am therefore your equal.' She asked to reverse their sexual positions to establish parity, a harmony that signified equality between the two bodies and souls. [...] Adam responded with a firm refusal: Lilith was subject to him, she had to remain symbolically beneath him and endure his body. Thus: there was an imperative, an order not to be transgressed. The woman did not accept this imposition and rebelled against Adam.” (Sicuteri, 1980, pp. 29–31)
Lebanese writer, poet, journalist, and activist Joumana Haddad writes in her book "The Return of Lilith":
"I did not submit. I, the first, never satisfied, because I am total communion, the fulfillment and the fulfilled, the rebel never consenting. I had had enough of Adam, and enough of paradise. I grew tired, I denied, I disobeyed. [...] They tried in vain to tame me.” (Haddad, 2009, pp. 6–7)
In the West, the discourse around rape culture entered the collective consciousness starting in the 1960s during the second wave of the U.S. feminist movement. While the first wave focused on equal rights—like the right to vote—between those socialized as men and those socialized as women, the second wave placed emphasis on the body, the right to abortion, and the right to a free and safe female sexuality. Within this framework, the issue of male violence—and how to combat it—became a priority. However, the second wave of Western feminism was characterized by a binary, trans-exclusionary view of subjectivity and gender, focusing mainly on the experiences of white, heterosexual, cisgender, bourgeois women. Thanks to the 1969 Stonewall riots and movements like Black Power and the Black Panthers, the 1990s saw the emergence of the third wave of feminism, which centered the concept of intersectionality. In 1989, jurist and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term to highlight the existence of countless social identities, each associated with its own forms of oppression. Thus, it became essential to analyze how hetero-cis male violence affects not just bourgeois white women, but also queer women, racialized individuals, sex workers, laborers, people with disabilities, drug users, and those with psychiatric conditions.
Writers Pamela Fletcher, Emilie Buchwald, and Martha Roth, in their 1993 book "Transforming a Rape Culture", offered one of the earliest definitions of rape culture:
"It is a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. This happens in a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to physical abuse to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as 'normal'. In a rape culture, both men and women assume that sexual violence is 'a fact of life', as inevitable as death or taxes.”
While violence is not exclusive to cis-hetero men, as it can exist in any relationship or situation, gender-based violence is an inescapable feature of life for those socialized as women. However, modern rape culture does not only affect them; it aims to suppress, erase, and exclude anyone who does not fit into the category of cis-hetero men. Indeed, among its core principles are not only all forms of gender violence and male dominance over women, but also heteronormativity, amatonormativity, the imposition of gender binarism, and the erasure and/or psychiatrization of trans and nonbinary people. According to global data from the Trans Murder Monitoring, a research project by Trans Europe and Central Asia, which tracks the murders of trans and gender-diverse people, 350 trans and gender-diverse individuals were killed worldwide between October 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. Of these, 94% were women or socialized as such, 93% were racialized, and of those whose profession was known, 46% were sex workers. The most recent horrifying transfeminicide occurred in Colombia in early April: Sara Millerey González Borja, after being brutally beaten, was thrown into a ravine and left to die in agony. Transphobia is an integral part of today's rape culture, as is the hypersexualization of racialized women and the stigmatization of sex work. Even cis-hetero men suffer—often unconsciously—under the chains imposed by rape culture. Toxic masculinity and machismo, which aim to suppress any form of emotional or identity complexity in cis-hetero men, are core values.
Culture is an infinite multitude of norms, values, traditions, beliefs, and customs to which we are exposed from gestation, and which we learn simply by existing within a given socio-political and historical context. On a micro level, the dominant culture is reproduced within the family and primary social circles; on a macro level, it is upheld by institutions, mass media, and art.
To give a concrete example, in Italy, journalism plays a key role in maintaining the hegemony of rape culture. According to Valeria Fonte, writer, linguist, and activist, interviewed by Voice Over Foundation: "For a phenomenon to exist, it needs to be narrated. Narrating a fact makes it real: anything left untold remains invisible to eyes and consciences. In the past, gender violence was not discussed. Now it is, and increasingly so. The point is: how? Telling a story isn’t enough to make it real; it must be told objectively and thoughtfully to avoid distortion. Today, how do we counter dystopian media narratives? With our new mass tool: social networks. Certainly censored and compromised, they’ve nonetheless allowed people to spread information (or misinformation) quickly and effectively, with massive media coverage. There's a major cognitive bias when it comes to media and information: we’ve assigned newspapers and television the official role of trustworthy sources. Yet, like social networks, they are instruments of both information and misinformation. The difference is, we’re more willing to question data on social media than in traditional media. That’s why it still makes sense to address what I call 'gendered journalistic violence': if a large part of the population believes certain channels are infallible, it is our duty to correct the narrative. Newspapers feed on the pornography of pain. By 'pornography of pain,' I mean the tendency to focus on and exaggerate tears, suffering, and sensational final statements in cases of harassment, rape, or femicide. This system avoids exploring the causes, consequences, and solutions to gender violence, instead framing each case as an isolated misfortune. For me, journalism’s inefficiency manifests in two areas: how it portrays the victim and how it portrays the offender. In the first case, depending on the victim, an image of saint or whore is created to outline her features. The holier she was, the more pregnant, the more chaste she seemed, the more she'll be mourned. Then come invasions into her private messages and last movements. There's even the vile trend of sharing murdered women’s private audios to generate engagement (and, let’s be honest, likes). Every aspect of 'her' becomes sexualized: looks, broken dreams, habits. Everything is made sexually exciting. Of 'him', on the other hand, we hear he was either a 'great guy' or a 'monster'. Neither version is exhaustive or true. The personal becomes irrelevant when facing a cultural system that shapes all men with a mindset of control and possession. What journalism today lacks is what makes journalism a tool to understand the world: ethics. Ethics know what is right and wrong, how not to crush those already suffering, how to defuse exploitation, and how to build dynamics for mass education. Isn’t that the goal of healthy, thoughtful journalism? To examine the holes in this reality and find precise, revolutionary solutions. I’ve never believed in journalism’s merely descriptive role. To describe without taking a stance is to be cowardly and complicit.”
Thanks to the spread of the principle of intersectionality and queer theory, a fourth feminist wave emerged in 2010, defined as transfeminist. One of its main currents, born from the activism of figures like Angela Davis, is abolitionism. Abolitionism is aimed at deconstructing and dismantling all forms of incarceration, while simultaneously working to build a community based on social justice, anti-capitalism, and transfeminist sex/affective education. Within transfeminism(s), theorizing what is now called patriarchal violence has gained importance. Imagine a matryoshka doll: gender violence is contained within rape culture, as one of its most extreme expressions; in turn, rape culture is a pillar of patriarchy. However, today’s Western patriarchy includes not just heterosexism and rape culture, but also capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, the economic/prison-industrial complex, islamophobia, and speciesism. The concept of patriarchal violence aims to expand the boundaries of gender violence—which affects only those socialized as women—to include all forms of bodily domination and control, and suppression of personal and collective self-determination. Thus, patriarchal violence includes border and migration-related violence, incarceration, colonial violence, labor exploitation, psychiatric and medical violence, violence against non-human animals, and environmental destruction. This (re)theorization of patriarchal violence conveys a universal message: the root of all oppression is one, and to defeat it, the multitude of struggles must unite in a single, immense revolution.
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