Ostentantiver Sexismus und mimetische Gewalt: Ist Shitstorming gegen Frauen ein Opferritual?

Women − often successful and powerful women, such as prominent female politicians − are increasingly the target of verbal violence and insults, which are amplified in an echoic way by social media. The shared mechanism of offense makes the target a victim of a staged “sacrifice”, one in which the victim becomes a substitute target for a gamut of embodied processes, a scapegoat through whose sacrifice the community finds a sense of unity. According to Girard’s theory of mimetic violence (Girard 1972 and 1982), the scapegoat is chosen from among the possible victims in order to channel micro-conflicts that threaten the subsistence of the group, allowing the latter to get out of a cycle of “mimetic desire” and “mimetic violence”: the microdiffused violence can focus on a single arbitrary victim, around which the group gathers to perform the sacrificial rite. Of particular interest are the criteria for the selection of the victim, who is often the bearer of a difference, the “Other” who has no particular reason to attract the lightning of the violent, except that of being vulnerable. It is the elimination (expulsion, rejection, or killing) of the victim/Other that allows the violence to be channelled and the group to be saved. Women are therefore predestined targets for mimetic violence. On the basis of two case studies of verbal violence against Italian female politicians in 2014 (the first case Grillo-Boldrini being a sexual offense against an attractive female politician, the second case Calderoli-Kyenge featuring an animalising offence against a black female politician), I will try to show that there is a close and direct relationship between verbal violence against women, embodiment mechanisms, and group dynamics. I will try to shed light on how offensive language, when it is translated into embodied projective patterns and mechanisms, leads to relapses in social and identity terms. In the above-mentioned imagined collective rape and in the staged rite of animalisation, the male community tries to enhance an otherwise weak feeling of self-esteem and belonging. In this sense, it is not catharsy the key mechanism of (verbal) group violence, but embodied community devices.