Valeria Márquez was killedin one of the most horrifically public ways possible. On Tuesday evening, the 23-year-old Mexican social media influencer, who had built up a large following with videos about beauty and makeup, was recording a TikTok livestream in the beauty salon where she worked in Jalisco, a state in west-central Mexico. A man entered the establishment and, with her video still running, shot her dead.
Many details of the case are still unclear. However, Márquez’s death is being investigated as a femicide, according to a statement by the Jalisco state prosecutor.
Femicide isdefinedas the intentional killing of a woman or girl with gender-related motivations. (The term for killing males because of their sex, something that has occurred during war andgenocide, is androcide.)
While femicide is a universal and age-old issue, it is poorly understood. It is also sometimes wilfully misunderstood by some men’s rights activists, who like to argue that it is a nonexistent problem because men make upthe majority of victims(and perpetrators) of homicide. So it’s worth spelling out the parameters of femicide. If a woman is killed in a robbery gone wrong, that’s (probably) not femicide. If she is killed by an ex-boyfriend who views women as the property of men rather than autonomous human beings, that’s femicide. “Honour”-related killings are also obviously femicide.
We are missing a lot of data on femicide. “Too many victims of femicide still go uncounted: for roughly four in 10 intentional murders of women and girls, there is not enough information to identify them as gender-related killings because of national variation in criminal justice recording and investigation practices,”UN Women wrote in a report last year.
Naming the problem – understanding why femicide is different from homicide – is important, because it helps us solve it. If more institutions took misogyny and domestic violence seriously, we’d see fewer dead women. A report bythe World Health Organization notes, for example, that “stronger gun laws related to men previously cited for or convicted of intimate partner abuse are of particular importance in reducing rates of femicide”.
Justice for Márquez doesn’t just involve finding her killer and ensuring they are punished. If this was femicide, it means being very clear about the misogyny that led to her death. It means holding all the lawmakers and institutions that perpetuate this misogyny to account. Justice means understanding that her death wasn’t some sort of tragic one-off, but part of a far larger problem.
“If I die, I want a loud death,” the Palestinianphotojournalist Fatima Hassounawrote on social media shortly before she was killed by an Israeli airstrike this year. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time … ”
That quote has haunted me ever since I read it. So many women who die premature and violent deaths die quiet deaths. They become statistics. Márquez must not just become another femicide statistic. Let her death, which has shone a spotlight on femicide, be loud. Let it have an impact that will remain through time.
The president is obsessed with Swift and hasposted aboutthe pop star multiple times.
The big Viagra budget, which has beenwidely discussed for years, isn’t problematic in itself. The issue is that while the government has no problem spending this money on what is arguably gender-affirming care for cis men, it keeps yelling that trans people are a drain on resources. The issue is in the news once again after a judge in theTalbott v USA case, which challenges Trump’s transgender military ban, noted that the militaryspends eight times more on erectile dysfunction medicationthan on gender-affirming care for trans service members.
Liz Stead, 78, got kicked out of the military in 1969 when higher-ups sniffed out proof (a love letter) of Sapphic activity. She was also given a criminal conviction for “perceived same-sex sexual activity”. As the BBC reports, she only found outabout the convictionwhen applying for a scheme that awards financial redress for veterans sacked during a ban on homosexuality.
Due to the fact that Israelisn’t allowing international journalistsinto Gaza andmurderingthe Palestinian journalists and aid workers who are trapped in the enclave, it’s impossible to really know how many children have been killed orstarved to deathby now. But we know there aremore child amputeesin Gaza than anywhere else in the world and,by one estimate, Israel kills a child in Gaza every 45 minutes. We also know that young children who do survive will never recover from beingmalnourishedand traumatized in those formative years. While many people stay silent about agenocidethat has been funded and enabled by the US, UK and Europe, the children’s educator and entertainer Rachel Accurso (known and loved by parents of toddlers everywhere as Ms Rachel) has been speaking upabout children in Gaza. And, quite predictably, she’s gettingvile abusefor it – including a piece in theNew York Timesthat amplifies baseless, ridiculous and dangerous claims that shemay be funded by Hamas.
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A French study has found that menemit 26% more pollutionbecause they eat more red meat and drive more. Of course we all need to be cognizant of our environmental impact, but it feels increasingly futile when billionaires pop to the grocery store on their private jets and warmongers pollute the planet. Last year, the Guardian reported on a study that found that “[t]he planet-warming emissions generated during thefirst two monthsof the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations”.
In Jacobin, theanthropologist Kristen Ghodseeargues that “the tradwife phenomenon and the manosphere are two sides of the same coin, reflecting the shift toward authoritarian politics”.
Sometimes it’s the people youmost suspect.
Tayo Berospells out exactly how disturbingthis is.
“You can’t write a folk song – a folk song becomes one,”says Seeger. “And they have helped to engender change because the community felt they spoke for them.”
Chimpanzees are a hygienic bunch, anew study has found: they wipe their bums and even clean up after sex. Like orangutans, they also apply chewed plant material – which may have medicinal properties – to their wounds. In short, they are probably more knowledgeable about medical mattersthan the US health secretary.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist