I have long been enraged by the term, concept, and defense ‘Crime of Passion,’ as well as its same-sex corollary, ‘Gay Panic.’ Both simultaneously weaponize and exonerate the very tedious malevolence of straight male sexual violence. A woman’s killing a man is seldom deemed a crime of passion (even & especially when so many women kill to escape ongoing abusive violence). A cultural tolerance for certain violences allows the hiding-in-plain-sight obviousness to pass unquestioned. Yes, certainly because straight white male landowners were the originators and intended beneficiaries of most of our bedrock legal principles, it can’t be a surprise that men’s endless homicidal aggressions get low-balled and their victims dismissed as collateral damage to the whims and impulses of the powerful. When marital rape wasn’t illegal until two generations back, and many of (again) both the arbiters and beneficiaries of this inequity remain in positions of power, we mustn’t waste time in shock or incredulity that these attitudes persist. (Quick; Harvey W., Matt L., Bill C. (* Clinton or Cosby? Trick answer: yes.), Drumpf, Jeff E., Roman P., as a quick shit list of powerful rapists.) The list is endless, in length of perpetrators, victims, and decades/centuries.
We ought instead challenge the false fabric of legal standards. Murder is murder. Killing a woman because she rejects you or is uninterested or tries to leave: that’s aggravated murder, arguably a larger act of terrorism under the color of patriarchal oppression. Projecting one’s own rapey impulses onto the insecurity that arises if I even think/fear a man is hitting on me, because a. I might be attracted to a man, or b. that the man might ‘top’ me, and thus I must kill what I fear: that is also an aggravated murder, also under the flag of heteronormative chauvinism. The amount of smoke & mirrors of legal ‘confusion’ about actions, intentions, cause-and-effect have allowed far too many murderous assholes their freedom and deprived the dead and their loved ones a smidgen of justice. When it’s a bunch of dudes who shrug and say/think, ‘Well, she rejected him…’ or ‘I don’t blame him for smacking that lippy bitch,’ or ‘He did what any guy would do if another guy grabbed his ass,’ is it any wonder there isn’t objective investigation or jurisprudence. Because the precedents and language/understanding is absent. We (*we) cannot see the murder for the lack of a limited accepted narrative.
I want to add here another phenomenal opinion piece by Rachel Louise Snyder. She is brilliant and brave, and writes with depth and nuance about hard things. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/14/opinion/menendez-brothers-abuse.html
When the police have killed unarmed man after unarmed man (insert: primarily Black/brown), we have accepted that there must have been some justification or cause, despite the abundant footage to the contrary. For decades, absent video, we simply didn’t question the narrative. A man experienced a medical issue while being detained by police. He was declared dead at the hospital. Or A man resisted arrest and fought officers, who shot him 41 times to protect themselves. Even with a slight shift in understanding and video to challenge if not refute official versions, we as a culture still cannot wrap our heads around the What and How of these deaths/killings. The absurd legal uncertainty about the MPD officers responsible for killing George Floyd came in large part because there have been so damn few instances of officers actually held accountable. There literally were scant precedents for lawyers to use. Literally inconceivable. When Aurora, Colorado authorities were pressured to reopen the ‘oops, too bad he died’ non-indictment of the police and medics who caused the death of Elijah McClean, the results were clear: we cannot talk about actions and consequences outside of very narrow, limiting-to-point-of-negating legal minutiae. The police officers whaled on, pinned, crushed, choked the young man for over 20 minutes, sending him into severe respiratory crisis. The medics arrived and took the cops at their word (He’s crazy and out of control! We need help subduing him!) and their own biases (they thought they saw a big, violent, aggressive man, instead of a frail, small hypoxic young man in severe distress). They over-dosed him with a sedative.
What was most striking is that the medics were found more guilty than the police. Our culture fails to understand what happens when people are choked and crushed. And in that misunderstanding, we open the door for the killers to walk away. Part of this is our tolerance for state-sanctioned violence. Part of it is a default trust in the system (a system designed, again, for the comfort of white male landowners to be free of harassment by the state). Part of it is incomprehension and ignorance about medical issues and human biology. ie, George Floyd certainly had drugs in his system. He was clearly high on the body cam footage. He was not about to drop dead. Had the officers not pinned him beneath their bodyweight, he would not have suffered positional asphyxia, hypoxia, and respiratory failure. Over and over, though, the toxicology reports get cited as if the person who was high up-and-died, ignoring the choking or crushing by multiple large officers.
Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely on a subway car. He put him in a chokehold and took him down and ‘subdued’ him and maintained the choking submission until after Neely went unresponsive. The defense was unchallenged: that Penny was ‘protecting the other members of the subway car.’ From what? Neely was experiencing a mental crisis, another one. He was a mentally ill person. Daniel Penny knew nothing about Neely’s history, his long and problematic history with NYC authorities, his bench warrant (that had been unserved despite interaction with NYPD soon before his death), none of it. In the moment, he was an unhinged loud and dirty irritation on a subway train. A disturbing disturbance. And Penny took it upon himself to choke him to death. And the legal system shrugged. Mind you: in the state court case against D. Chauvin, the police chief testified that Chauvin violated MPD rules when he didn’t get off Mr. Floyd once Floyd went unresponsive. Spoiler: the man was dead when he went unresponsive. But had Chauvin directed the other officers to get off Floyd, too, they all would have operated within their rules and would have been exonerated. At no point has anyone suggested that kneeling on someone until they expire is a good plan.
One might reasonably ask, How in fuck can we watch the footage of these calls and be all right with an official designation as not-crimes? How can we watch people murdered—by agents of the state—and shrug, Too bad, so sad? How can we pretend this is justice, or that this reflects a just system? There are so many people unbothered by dead women, dead gay men, dead people of color, that the system is greased by indifference if not outright hostility toward the temerity of those who petition for recognition or equal rights—and goddamn if they demand equality.
We have seen the seething resentment of the formerly unchallenged, the great white whales of our default culture. Men upset at being told that our history is less glorious than what we splatter on the elementary school books and plays, upset that women don’t like being reduced to fuck-toys or secretaries (and definitely not fuckable secretaries), that queer people have existed for eons and are fine and normal, that telling jokes that punch down isn’t awesome or necessary or justified. We’ve launched some horrible wars, killed millions, exploited our country and many others; we raped and pillaged and conned our way to a very selective ‘greatness’ here. It isn’t so hard to cop to it and look for ways to improve our sense of self. But instead we are entering a furious, futile spasm of denial and resentment—a vicious, violent death spiral that will cause oodles of harm in the short term and get the whiny wounded white boys exactly six inches further down the road. Drumpf will pardon the criminal seditionists who stormed the Capitol. I expect him to commute Chauvin’s Federal conviction. States are passing batshit petty laws that are deliberately spiteful and ignorant. The furious white male rage at—what, exactly? Not being king? Having someone not-white-and-male-and-straight point out the emperor’s new clothes are shite? And now, we have all the shitty shenanigans: Make saying ‘gay’ illegal? Treat critical race theory as a violence against frosty white kids? Legalize the war on women? It must feel so good to the desperate, the petty, the insecure—and certainly to the vicious and the hateful. Eventually, the frail scaffolding of deceit and lies will collapse under us & we will eat ourselves.