“I HATE HER”…..
Words by: Aubrey Shayler, IWI Founder & Executive Director
(Originally published 21 Dec 2022)
I’ve learned that this phrase has been heard, or felt, globally among most women and girls for thousands of years. No matter what part of the world we come from, it is visible in the eyes of more females than can be counted. It’s the look of someone who has heard these words shouted at them, or maybe just mumbled toward them under breath in a cowardly way… “I hate her. I hate you…” Oh, how it rolls off the tongue…that one phrase that seems to mean so much to the men who say it. If only they knew how little it means to us. When that term is uttered in our direction we know as women that it says more about the person who delivers it through clenched teeth than it does about us.
Second-rate British celebrity Jeremy Clarkson’s recent vitriolic words of detest regarding Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex have nothing to do with her relationship with the UK royal family, or the perceived control she has over her husband. It does, however, have everything to do with a man who feels it is his right and duty to obliterate the character of a woman.
Clarkson’s distain for Meghan Markle is not the issue. Clarkson’s writing about his distain of Meghan Markle is not the issue. What is the issue is his unabashed, entitled, kneejerk, disturbingly comfortable use of misogynistic rhetoric to not only describe his hatred, but to humiliate her and strip away her humanity. It has not been very long ago that women were dragged through the streets of England nude, while men within the community felt it their duty to hurl the excrement that Clarkson wishes to weaponize. Clarkson’s rose glass view of the past seems quite like the USA’s previous pussy-grabbing president and his fondness of his country’s past “greatness”. Regardless of Clarkson’s sadistic male-controlled view of women, his statements make me wonder how he views and treat the females in his life. I am quite curious as to what his reaction would be if someone took it upon themselves to globally publish their desire to see Clarkson’s mother dragged through the streets of London naked while having chamber pots of urine and waste hurled on her. Or if he has a daughter or granddaughter that he would be equally excited to know were compared to the sociopathic serial killer Rose West. In a call to LBC’s mid-morning host, James O’Brien, on December 19, a mother shared her daughter’s experience of having excrement thrown at her and the humiliation her daughter felt at having to wash it out of her hair. It’s already happening.
By the time of adulthood, women are forced to circumvent the hatred from men either through rape, domestic violence, verbal abuse, or via the written rancour directed toward them. Women are told or shown they are hated more times than can be counted to the point that it becomes grey noise, hanging quietly over the head of women — always there and always heard, regardless of her circumstance. All women can hear that low, anxiety provoking hum. But we still go about our daily lives, getting dressed, going to work, breathing in and out, taking up space, existing… We work jobs with that hum of hatred scoring everything we do. We hear it when we are at parties, meetings, laughing at jokes, dining at a restaurant, asking for a raise, sitting on the train, saying the wrong thing, saying the right thing, saying anything, saying nothing…
The hum of men’s hatred is always there, scoring our everyday lives. “I hate her. I hate you” is the chirp that fills the air during our night-time speed-walks to our cars with keys pointing out of our knuckles. “I hate her. I hate you” is one of the first things a girl, somebody’s daughter, may hear or experience when she is learning who she is in this world. “I hate her. I hate you” will be what our daughters face as they have the audacity to be visible and vocal like Duchess Meghan, who is widely regarded as either empowering or maddening. “I hate her. I hate you” is what girls and young boys hear from those who are supposed to be leading and making laws with dignity and regard for all constituents. “I hate her. I hate you” is the phrase that 12-year-old girls learn to say to each other because we understand, even at a tender age, that this is the most dehumanizing slur ever to be mindlessly slung at any girl who once thought she was anything more than an object meant to be the target of male rage. But as we grow, the term becomes unoriginal. It’s not creative, or even powerful. It’s pathetic. It’s an elderly, bigoted, chauvinist desperately attempting to hold onto the last remnants of his self-perceived great career, that will write whatever venom they can concoct to remain relevant, only to discover that he is not… nor will ever be again.
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