In "Supremacy Crimes," Steinem looks at the alarming trend of violent crimes being committed by what the media calls 'our children,' which deceives us from seeing the real perpetrators of these horrific crimes - white, heterosexual, middle-class males, or what we would call the average guy. Steinem asserts that most of these crimes, including ones that have no motive other than to kill, are committed by these individuals so they feel powerful over other people. She says that "[w]ite males--usually intelligent, middle class, and heterosexual, or trying desperately to appear so--also account for virtually all the serial, sexually motivated, sadistic killings, those characterized by stalking, imprisoning, torturing, and "owning" victims in death," throwing out as examples women-murderers Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz. The reason that these killings are so monopolized by this "average white guy" group is due to the fact that these men are "most likely to become hooked on the drug of superiority," or in other words, they are addicted to feeling powerful especially when controlling other people's fates. They wish to create this feeling of superiority in more extreme ways because our materialistic, racist, patriarchal, heteronomative society tells them they deserve this power, that it is right and normal that they have and use it. They first settle into and revel in this awesome power they were just handed without any test or conditions - they see their having power as the natural order. Therefore, when they feel powerless in their lives, they see it as an abnormality or that their God-given superiority was wrongly snatched away from them - killing is an appropriate way to express their anger at this loss and regain their rightly-held power. Steinem argues that covering up these perpetrators' crimes and hiding behind their life experiences ignore a real cause of their behavior so society's "drug-murder" connection is never addressed; this act also marginalizes men who have rejected violence, which is possible for this stereotypically aggressive sex to do. She concedes that people of color and women do commit murders, but not nearly as many as white men do; when they murder or get murdered get dissected in terms of gender, socioeconomic status, and race, but not when this disproportion of white, male, middle-class murderers commit crimes. Why do people ignore all these factors when these more common scenarios of white men killing people - be it other white men, black people, women, gays and lesbians, transsexuals - happen in society? By ignoring the patriarchy in society, "[w]e will never reduce the number of violent Americans, from bullies to killers, without challenging the assumptions on which masculinity is based: that males are superior to females, that they must find a place in a male hierarchy, and that the ability to dominate someone is so important that even a mere insult can justify lethal revenge." Steinem concludes that until this view - namely, that males must show their power and superiority over others, especially women, and that they have the right or even the duty to restore this power to themselves through violent means - supremacy crimes will not stop.
In Enloe's "Whom Do You Take Seriously?," she delves into the meaning of silence and how the silencing of certain groups or people feeling silenced affect society and politics. She asks why certain people feel silenced - fear, indifference, valuing listening over contributing, etc. But "[r]egardless of the cause, silences rob the public of ideas, of the chance to create bonds of understanding and mutual trust (70)." These silences then transmit over to the political realm where we all need to speak as and be seriously listened to as citizens to build up and maintain a healthy political life. She uses current or recent democracy rallies in Southeast Asia as examples of peoples trying to make more voices heard and taken into consideration publicly. However, within these movements, some people or groups still feel and/or are silenced just by leaders' behavior and ideas. She then applies these ideas to how Asian-Pacific women are victims of violence. Summarizing the views of Hannah Arendt, Enloe asserts that Arendt and other political scientists believe female domesticity and sexuality are still considered "private" affairs that do not have a place in political and public debates. However, these and other female "private" matters must be discussed openly if we ever hope to overturn patriarchy and male dominance in politics. This dichotomy between public and private - and how women belong naturally in the private sphere and thus away from political life - is the first tool in silencing women's voices. By keeping women in the private sphere, violence and abuse against them is also regulated to this sphere and rarely talked about; government has been slow to catch up on laws and officials to protect women and female victims become doubly silenced with this threat of violence against them. "Together, these two silencings have set back genuine democratization as much as has any military coup or distortive electoral system (73)." Since women in these Southeast Asian countries are now challenging the violence they endure, democratization is now feasible since true democracy cannot flourish wherever rape or violence against women is ignored, denied, tolerated, or trivialized. Trivialization of a seemingly untrivializable occurance can occur in four ways - it can be explained as inevitable, so rare as to not merit state resources or time, unimportant compared to other concerns, and incredible because of the deficiency of the messengers. Enloe says that one tool used to silence women and trivialize violence against them is the idea of "respectability" because publicly speaking out against this isn't something a "respectable" woman would do, so anything she says about this violence is unimportant and not taken seriously. An example of women breaking this silence was in factories located in the Asian Pacific in the 1990s - they spoke out against sexual harassment, something that risked their "respectability" since male owners depended on selling the idea that single women working in factories would not jeopardize their respectability, dishonor her family, or reduce her chances at finding a husband, thereby being able to pay these women lower wages. However, all the main factors affecting factory women - wages, filial responsibility, consumer trends, marriageability, and political activities - determine the level of silence these women's experiences of sexual harassment are put under. Speaking out as a woman - about sexual harassment, no less - is a serious risk to these women's, not their abusers', reputations; people think that being abused and talking about it doubly lessens a woman's femininity and purity. Because of this stigma around sexual harassment, women have had to get creative in expressing their political sentiments publicly because conventional ways have been imbued with masculinized respectability and ideas (men should be involved with politics, not women, etc etc etc.); CAW in Hong Kong is one such example of this creativity. Enloe includes by saying that violence against women has been used as a rallying point for pro-national movements because it is seen as the government's inability to protect its weakest citizens, but more often violence against women has been interpreted as an insult or weakness to a nation and its regime, which "marginalizes women's own voices. their own political interpretations of that violence (80)." Therefore, "[w]omen's experiences of violence then have become politically acceptable only if those events could be converted into the dishonoring of the 'nation' (81)." If a woman's experience of violence does not feed into this view, her sharing this experience is destabilizing and should be discouraged. Sovereignty of a nation has also been used as a tool to silence women by preventing violence against women to be established as a violation of international laws protecting human rights. Finally, Enloe concludes by saying that just the fact that violence against women can and does win public recognition is not a good barometer for if that recognition is positive, authentic, or contributing to democratization and the end of patriarchy. She offers some questions as a barometer - are all forms of violence against women allowed public recognition, are women at risk for losing their respectability or credibility by speaking out, how important is this issue for the state, and if and how does the threat of violence continue to silence women?
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