Jo Cox, the British Member of Parliament, tragically murdered this week, has been praised as an MP, a mother, a campaigner for social justice – and rightly so. I can’t add anything to what’s already been said. I didn’t even know her, if I’m honest, didn’t even know she existed until this week’s sudden immersion into these heart-breaking events and into the main themes of her life.
Today we all know something about Jo Cox. And now that I do, I wish I had known her, she sounded great. Mostly I just wish she was still here, for her family.
What I want to do here today in this blog, is honour her, as a woman. A woman modelling an extraordinary power, one that I’ve seen in some of the most aware, mature and whole women I’ve met – and arguably one that most women display at some level, every day.
I call that power, that ability, that gift to all of us, ‘undefended strength’. What do I mean? Well let’s understand the context first. In series 2 of the cop show “True Detective”, Ani Bezerides memorably says: “You wanna know the real difference between the sexes? One of them can kill the other with their bare hands”.
Now that’s putting it in the most stark, extreme way and my purpose here is not to demonise men, or even to focus on the violent death of Jo Cox, rather, I want to focus on something that was a characteristic of her life: courageous, right action, from a position of vulnerability.
So I might prefer Detective Bezerides to have said “Women don’t win many arm-wrestling contests with men” – but you see the point we are both trying to make.
When a woman, any woman, leaves the house in the morning, she does so, not from a position of strength and superiority but from a position of inherent insecurity, inherent vulnerability – relative to a man. Now I know that men get beaten up, killed even, by bigger men (trust me, as a guy who weighs 140 lbs dripping wet, I know), but it isn’t, I suggest, the same thing. When I leave the house in the morning it doesn’t cross my mind whether or not I’ll make it through the day, physically and psychologically intact.
Jo Cox had received various threats in the weeks leading up to her death but she continued doing her work, fighting wholeheartedly for the good causes she believed in, making herself available to her people. She could have hired a bodyguard, cancelled her MP’s surgeries (walk-in meetings with the public in her constituency), or allowed herself to be curbed or intimidated in a dozen different ways but she didn’t. She didn’t change, she didn’t stop, she never took her eyes off what mattered to her. She showed us that love can overpower fear. I can only wonder at the kind of courage that carried her out of her front door that morning, armed only with her principles and her compassion.
Jo Cox, I salute you. Women everywhere, I salute you.
One Man's Eyes 
Not in any way detracting from this excellent article, but I do believe that probably either sex could kill the other with their bare hands under certain circumstances.
And the murderer of Jo Cox, who was surely a mentally unstable individual rather than a political protester, made use of tools which would be equally lethal in the hands of any woman.
I would say the issue is more that men have a greater propensity, rather than just a capacity, for violence, and that this is something that we’ve inherited as a former evolutionary survival mechanism, but which is now as unfit for purpose as the dinosaurs became. It needs to quickly become equally extinct, or at least overriden by an equally powerful need for cooperation and community. I think the key question for men more than ever now is, how can we nudge that evolutionary process forward as quickly as possible, to begin rid the earth of the remnants of our hard wired neanderthal instincts.
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Hi Steve, thanks for your response. Yes, perhaps men do also have a greater propensity as well as capacity. And yes, that poses a challenge for men – which most rise to every day of course. Those that don’t can do terrible harm and we, as men-who-never-would (hit or threaten a woman) must do all we can to shift culture, influence attitudes – and when all else fails, be willing to put ourselves in harm’s way, as Bernard Kenny did, stabbed trying to save Jo Cox. But my preoccupation in the article was to try, for a minute, to put myself into the place who women, who have to go out into the world everyday, not knowing if you or I have that capacity and propensity for fierce physical action under control and in service of higher goals – or not. And just to marvel at their courage and compassion, to not only face the world but embrace it and love it. Respect.
Good to have you in the conversation, brother!
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