Gender-based violence. A sentimental and amorous education

On the occasion of International Women's Day, our partners at the Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Reporting (MIIR) publish an investigation conducted in collaboration with the European Data Journalism Network and the participation of Voxeurop. This investigation aims to provide an overview, with data, of femicides and gender-based violence in Europe.

The analysed data takes 28 countries into account: “Out of the total 12431 intentional female homicides (EUROSTAT) for the years 2012-2022, 4334 women were killed by an intimate partner. This corresponds to 34.86% out of the total intentional homicides, which means that more than 1 in 3 victims of homicide are killed with intent by their intimate partner.”

The importance of quantifying a phenomenon and the use of words: after years of silence, ambiguity or sexist language, public debate in European countries is now filled with the term "femicide," a word whose history and usage is explained by the French historian Christelle Taraud in Voxeurop.

A sentimental education 

Some events mark a period more than others. The murder of Giulia Cecchettin (22 years old), which occurred on 11 November 2023, at the hands of her ex-partner, represented a turning point in Italy thanks to the stance taken by her family, who turned a private tragedy into a collective political issue. "Widespread sexual and emotional education is needed," said Elena Cecchettin, Giulia's sister, in a letter published by Corriere della Sera after her sister's death.

"Following the femicide of Cecchettin, there has been much discussion about how dominant cultural models encourage gender violence, and the topic of emotional education in schools has reemerged in public debate," writers and translators Lorenza Pieri and Michela Volante write in Il Post. "Sexism, gender biases and secondary victimizations are a constant in school anthologies," they continue, "for generations, we’ve absorbed, even at school, through literature, an 'emotional culture' devoid of balance."

The two authors, not without irony, rigorously review the great classics of Italian literature: "In chivalric poems, love is a central theme. In Orlando Furioso, the two main love stories are not only tormented by adverse circumstances but also stage a range of reactions that today would be classified as serious psychiatric disorders." (Spoiler: this reading could be applied to all the great classics of national literatures).

Love and sex

And love, in all its manifestations—the couple, sex, family—is central to solving the problem and repairing the structural role that violence plays in relationships, as discussed by the feminist scholar Lea Melandri in an interview with Voxeurop.

There is a problem with love. Love is in question. There needs to be a discussion. The traces are everywhere, in chiaroscuro, in the European press.

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Firstly: to release love from the cultural cage that confines it to a "women's affair": love concerns everyone, because its presence, its absence, its neuroses, traverse the lives of everyone.

In Eurozine, a discussion – "The ways we love" – addresses this issue, among others: "Lovelessness and growing resentment have produced a toxic online culture based on misogyny, where feminists are perceived as being the ultimate problem. (...) We talk love, incels, and why this couldn’t be any more wrong."

It’s enough to look at the columns dealing with intimacy in the European press: Love and Sex in The Guardian (which regularly organizes blind dates between two readers of the newspaper), "Gender und Sexualitäten" in the German Tageszeitung, "Amor" in El País.

I also want to highlight La Déferlante, a magazine that defines itself as the "first post-#metoo quarterly magazine," which has dedicated three monographs out of 13 to intimacy: "S'aimer," "Baiser" on sexualities, and "Réinventer la famille."

In Libération, a column – Intimités – discusses the sexual and sentimental life of the French, following a survey published last February, which suggests that, in a country that perhaps most typifies the erotic/romantic imaginary, people are having less and less sex. Not only has the percentage of people declaring to have had sexual intercourse in the last year decreased by 15 percent, among those under 25 only a quarter of respondents admit the same thing. "In an era of Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, and the like, where HIV tests are available to everyone, contraceptive pills and condoms are free until the age of 25, and abortion is still relatively accessible, these numbers seem counterintuitive," write Kim Hullot-Guiot and Katia Dansoko Touré, again in Libération, which publishes a series of contributions from people who have chosen to exit the "sex market," such as Ovidie, an actress, writer, and former sex worker who declares herself on a sex strike: "I don't know if people have less sex today; I think it wasn't dared to be said before. If you don't have sex, you lose your social value, especially if you’re a woman."

So sex is everywhere, but it is practiced less and less? Perhaps because sexuality, like love, has a “capital” dimension in a neoliberal society that imposes rules and standards on individuals, even in the sphere of intimacy.

In Usbek & Rica magazine, a conversation between French-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz and philosopher Alain Badiou tries to explain this contradiction: "We are witnessing a politicization of the love relationship: it is less and less accepted that it contradicts shared and public values. Love must now reflect the equality and freedom of each individual," explains Illouz, author of one of the most important texts on the critique of love under capitalism (“Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation”, Polity Press, 2012. The book was first published in German, in 2011: “Warum Liebe weh tut”, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2011).

Illouz, along with Dana Kaplan, is also the author of a text published in 2022 in English, and in late 2023 in French, that seeks to explain what individual "sexual capital" is, and the social pressures and exclusion that individuals face in this market (“What Is Sexual Capital?” by Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz, reviewed in English in Engenderings, and in Le Soir, "Le capital sexuel": quand la sexualité devient un atout professionnel).

Love must be relitigated, taken apart, reassembled, and perhaps, once liberated, re-evaluated.

In Krytyka Polityczna, Polish philosopher, researcher and psychoanalyst Agata Bielińska looks at love under the progressive lens, which usually critiques it as a bourgeois trifle, in order to place it in the sphere of emancipation, both individual and universal: "Few feelings arouse as much consternation in progressive circles as love. No wonder. Love is in any case ideologically suspect, and completely incompatible with the dominant imaginary. [...] It forces us into unnecessary suffering, perpetuates inequality, and distracts us from common goals." As Bielińska explains, love is classist, sexist, and not egalitarian. It can teach us one thing, though: to "recognize our dependence and uncanniness, and the fragility to which they are condemned."

In The Conversation this is echoed by Jamie Paris, in a text that looks at love as a tool for male empowerment: "Love can be a tool of anti-racist and decolonial education, but only if we encourage men (and women and non-binary people) to take the risk of expressing tender feelings for others. [...] Love cannot come from places of domination or abuse, nor can it be maintained through cultures of power and control." Because "if love is something we do, and not just something we feel, then it is something men can learn to do better," Paris concludes.

This recalls what feminist bell hooks (1952-2021) explained in All about love (2020) and in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, which, not coincidentally, have just been retranslated and reissued (if not translated for the first time) over the last few years across Europe.

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