Esme Franklin: Column unfairly targets women

In response to Daniel Brown’s column, “Why are feminists silent about Oct.7?” Recorder, Jan. 4, the writer’s generalized accusation that feminists are committing violence against the Israeli women brutalized on Oct. 7 (or at the very least, that women are implying that those women deserved it — Brown’s assumption, not mine) because there has not been a widespread, public response on the part of publicly identified feminists in this country, especially spearheaded by Eve Ensler, is frankly embarrassing for him and for this paper.

The echo chamber of the male editorialist who quotes Ensler as asking “Why aren’t [men] driven to the point of action and madness by the rape and humiliation of us?” and then spends his time and energy penning a column wondering why Ensler and those same feminist-identifying peers aren’t prostrating themselves “on the Greenfield Common every Saturday” is tear-inducing in its narrow-mindedness and lack of forward-thinking.

Brown does a fantastic job of proving Ensler’s point. I would ask him again, directly: why aren’t you driven to madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us? That this column is Brown’s version of action and that that Greenfield Recorder chooses to feature it, underscores the very issue that all women — Israeli, Palestinian, American; Black, trans; victims of Harvey Weinstein, victims of husbands, victims of strangers — face every single day.

Instead of finger-pointing at women who have been raped, murdered, and mutilated for hundreds of thousands of years, a pattern of abuse that is evidently still very much occurring every day, I suggest the writer do something about it himself. Examples include donating to psych services for victims in Israel; volunteering for a local rape crisis hotline; writing in your local paper about what men can do to reduce the violence enacted against women in their daily lives. And if the writer is too preoccupied with the events of the world —  upcoming re-elections featuring a self-identified dictator, catastrophic climate change, and the mass slaughter of women and children in Palestine after the brutal murder and rape of women in Israel, for example — to consider the feminist perspective, perhaps he should spend more time listening and processing before speaking about that which he clearly does not grasp. I will say it plainly: women are not the problem here.

Esme Franklin

Greenfield