Behavioral tips for men
Elaina’s post below refs Kate Harding’s blog, Shapely Prose. This one is a guide for “strange men” approaching women, with an internal reference to something called “Schrödinger’s Rapist,” a clever bit of synthesis if ever there was one.
Gentlemen. Thank you for reading.
Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a good sort of person. You are kind to children and animals. You respect the elderly. You donate to charity. You tell jokes without laughing at your own punchlines. You respect women. You like women. In fact, you would really like to have a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know that woman—she isn’t working with you, nor have you been introduced through mutual friends or drawn to the same activities. So you must look further afield to encounter her.
So far, so good. Miss LonelyHearts, your humble instructor, approves. Human connection, love, romance: there is nothing wrong with these yearnings.
Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.
“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”
Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is. When I go on a date, I always leave the man’s full name and contact information written next to my computer monitor. This is so the cops can find my body if I go missing. My best friend will call or e-mail me the next morning, and I must answer that call or e-mail before noon-ish, or she begins to worry. If she doesn’t hear from me by three or so, she’ll call the police. My activities after dark are…
In view of what is explicated in this post, and further explicated by the link to Schrödinger’s Rapist (linked above) — big hat tip to Elaina for the Shapely Prose link — we might be able to talk about the responsibility of unearned social power, ie, how men can become responsible actors in the face of historic privilege. Part of it is become sensitized to how our presence is received in the semio-verse of women.
The liberal view is that no individual can be held responsible for what preceded him (the person in the liberal universe and semioverse began male, and remains masculine in spite of women being acknowledged… as honorary men). “I didn’t own slaves,” is a good example of the defense against taking responsibility for historical privilege. “I’m not a rapist,” is a version of the same.
Back in the real world, men (myself included) cannot comprehend — on an ongoing and intense basis — how the psychic world of women is a place where people are shell-shocked. We are sensitive to men who are literally shell-shocked, ie, with PTSD from combat, but we seldom think of what the omnipresent threat of rape might be like. Rape is the most common cause of PTSD in our society. I’d suggest that the everpresence of the threat of rape is a source of “sub-clinical” trauma. We don’t light firecrackers near a recent returnee from a war. We oughtn’t approach unknown women when the approach might be regarded as threatening — which is very often. Fear defines both the tangible and semiotic universe of actually-existing women in ways that are completely unfamiliar (and often culturally defamiliarized as part of masculinity training).
On the remark about men’s scary tattoos, which many men get to ward off the danger of other men, these displays of symbolic aggression might serve as a semiotic shield against men, but they are simultaneously signalling aggression to women — where this sign does not say, “don’t tread on me,” but “watch out for me.” Telling women to regard these signs with the same studied neutrality that men claim is an instance of effacing men’s historical privilege, and with it, women’s justifiable danger flags. It’s living the lie of liberal “truth.”
PS - The body mass index (BMI) link is as good a piece of flicker-crit as you’re likely to see anywhere.
Elaina:
The most interesting thing to me about this post- and about one before it- is the comment explosion that came after it. I think this one got over 1,000.
28 October 2009, 7:27 amSandy:
Re: “Back in the real world, men (myself included) cannot comprehend — on an ongoing and intense basis — how the psychic world of women is a place where people are shell-shocked.”
Nonsense! This is idiotic and patently untrue. As if women belonged to another species, and as if the existence of brutish men precluded the existence of non-brutish men–fathers, brothers, husbands, friends.
And I might add, any woman who “in an ongoing and intense basis” is “shell-shocked,” is is dire need of assistance.
28 October 2009, 1:52 pmStan:
Try this film on… it’s preview only, but the substance it there. It’s about codes, cultural codes, gendered cultural codes.
Feminity itself is defined as being helpless, fearful, dependent… even shell-shocked. Speciation is not responsible for the vast phenomenological difference between being male and female; cultural heirachy is.
If you visit a violent city, where the violence is ubiquitous, even when caused by oh let’s say a war, there are many non-brutish men–fathers, brothers, husbands, friends. That doesn’t mean you can afford to behave as if everyone is your friend.
We do not perceive the world, as you imply with this bad analogy, the same simply because we are physically in the same space, exposed to the same reality. Every single perception is inevitably filtered through a set of cultural signs, symbols, and meanings. Meaning is culturally separated by gender. No direct experience can escape these filters.
And the reality of women is more often than not one where they rightly fear strange (and often not so strange) men. Ask your well-adjusted (non shell-shocked) women friends if they don’t peek in the back seat of their car before they get into it at night. I don’t know a single man who does.
28 October 2009, 2:12 pmSandy:
“And the reality of women is more often than not one where they rightly fear strange (and often not so strange) men.”
No, it isn’t. On the other hand, maybe I lack “intense” friends.
Look, women aren’t wired like men in some respects. Agreed. They are two different sexes–body differences and “mental” or “soul” differences, although obviously the fact that they are both human is more important than the fact that humanity is polarized sexually. Women have certain vulnerabilities which certain types of males can exploit–and vice versa, of course. And smart men and women are aware of them and take the corresponding precautions. And yes, certain cultures in a state of degeneration can structurally accentuate this variety or other of abuses. Therefore…?
For me, vive la difference. I have no problem with “gendered codes” per se–they tend to result from the real differences in question–or with societies that sharply distinguish between sexual roles. Lots of arrangements are possible, and people can be happy and fulfilled in them. As for abuses, they are inevitable, people being the imperfect creatures they are. The scariest people in the world are those who simply can’t accept this simple truth and, so to speak, glory in their sense of being wonderful charitable, “idealistic” people.
And what bad analogy?
28 October 2009, 8:03 pmStan:
The analogy of differentiated species that you used to characterize my comments… one that doesn’t fit. Your own acknowledgment of difference (biological and cultural) contradicts your analogy, albeit with an appeal to biological determinism.
Now your abstracted men and women are “wired.” A point of agreement, you say, but I again disagree. The dualism that undergirds this point of view remains (along with a cyber-analogy), and that is exactly what I must reject… that there is some way — outside the analytical imagination — to split bodies and minds, masculinity and femininity (the historically/culturally-constructed behavioral expectations of men and women AS men and women), biology and culture (the old nature-nurture controversy).
At its foundation, your argument is ahistorical… a fatal characteristic of the the liberal cosmology. It sets up these actors as individuals making choices in the world without any reference to history or culture. Women were never girls, much less girls who were bullied, girls who were trained in conformity, girls who were bombarded with propaganda that told them they are in competition with all other girls for boys, girls who were abused — often sexually, girls who navigated the predatory terrain of adolescent masculinity all through school, girls who inherited a long standing system of gender hierarchy, girls who have multiple “close calls,” etc.
Women are sexually assaulted — according to reported cases — at a rate of 1 in six, with concentration among college aged women. Around 60% of assaults are unreported, because women know –without the statistics — that sexual assaulters/rapists seldom go to jail (around 6% of rapists actually go to jail for even a day), and defense attorneys tear victims apart in court.
This is not the reality of men, except in prison, which should tell us something right there.
By the way, 73% of rape victims know their assailant. Half a million women in the US every year report being stalked by a potentially violent intimate, which overlaps withthe half a million women in the US each year who are in some way sexually assaulted, but the rest of the assault overlap is women getting the shit beat out of them by partners. Again, reporting is believed to be very low. (92% of domestic assaults are men assaulting women.)
These casualty figures rival those in a war zone for a combat unit (an infantry platoon of 35-40 folks that has two, three, or four casualties is a tramatized unit), except they are not outside the norm for women… they are the norm. The hyper-vigilance and general anxiety (shell-shock) of people in combat units are acknowledged and now more frequently documented; but if one in three women is assaulted, then every woman knows another woman — with very very few exceptions — that has been assaulted, when its not herself. The perception of latent danger is not pathological; it is reality-based.
So saying that women who feel this fear are somehow in need of professional care, ie, pathological, is dismissive of the very real bases of this fear.
Rapists are not a different species either. You can’t spot one using morphology, leaving the only pattern-recognition for women’s self-defense to be suspicion of all males (an affront to liberal abstractions, but oh well). This real heightened probability of violence is a general characteristic of women’s reality (and the reality of gay and trans folks, who are also subject to the violent gender policing in the same gender regime); and it constitutes a very significant way-of-being in the world… one characterized by fear, fluctuating between low-level anxiety and outright panic.
Among my own acquaintences, including my own family, there is another common thread for a lot of women, and that is abusive alcoholic fathers who never went overtly sexual on daughters, but who terrorized and-or belittled young girls in ways that continue to accompany grown women for life, including the ways in which they relate to men to this day. (So we men express our wonder at why “our” women seem to be irrational.)
All these manifestations of male violence are facilitated by the fact of historically-constructed male-as-male social power, economic, cultural, and psychological.
In Carole Pateman’s book, The Sexual Contract, she traces the history of that “contract,” wherein this situation (female endangerment by males) sets up women to seek one male mate as protection against many potentially dangerous men. In its origins, and often to this day, that means protection (by the male) is exchanged for obedience (from the female). This is, as mentioned above, also a prison dynamic, wherein a vulnerable inmate (talking about males here for a reason) allows himself to be the sexual property of one “jocker,” in exchange for protection from the general population. The punishment for men, in many cases, is to make them women. Hello?
It’s a sexual protection racket, but it’s been around so long that we see it as normal, and even dress it up in bells and whistles and champagne bubbles and pop songs of infinite love. If this isn’t enough cognitive dissonance for the day, such that De once told me it made her head explode, let’s revisit the film and its gender codes and see just how this hierarchy is romanticized and eroticized.
BTW, men are operating out of a different kind of fear in pursuit of masculinity, the fear of being feminized (back to prison, eh), but that’s another thread.
29 October 2009, 5:35 amElaina:
I am shameless, I know. But I am going to post a link to another blog post of my own. http://heavyart.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/movie-maker-rapist/ Then I must look around here and see if anything was posted about this.
I get so frustrated when I hear “that’s how it’s always going to be” or other variations of that.
It’s horseshit. Even if it were true, and there were no way to absolutely change the way the world works, it would still be wrong not to try. I get frustrated when the people I know, even very close friends and loved ones, admonish me for getting angry about these things, or for staying angry.
Anger isn’t healthy, they say.
29 October 2009, 7:33 amMarcilla:
“As for abuses, they are inevitable, people being the imperfect creatures they are.” <— This, to me, sounds like what is at the crux of Sandy’s argument (humans being more creative than rational regardless of whether they are right or wrong).
So my question for Sandy is: should we take this line to indicate you find abuse acceptable because you believe you are powerless to stop it? Is this true only when the abuse is to others, or also when the abuse is to yourself?
I have known people so abused that they gave up trying to stop it, that they stopped caring if it happened, and eventually that they even denied its existence. I’m sorry if you happen to be one of those people =-(
29 October 2009, 10:17 amSean:
And I might add, any woman who “in an ongoing and intense basis” is “shell-shocked,” is is dire need of assistance.
I would agree with Sandy here. If a woman looks to “pop culture” for clues on what and how to be, she will feel oppressed, minimized, negated, berated, etc if she is anything other than what the current pop culture is exalting.
But I must ask why would any woman seek, for example, to compare herself to Paris Hilton or Angelina Jolie?
I don’t look to pop culture to tell me things. I look to myself. I look inside, I look at my capabilities.
Now, I suppose it’s easy to accuse me of ignoring a “reality” for women — that I am free to look inward because I’m a man. To that I say “hogwash!” because nobody ever told me anything about holding or gaining privilege because I have XY instead of XX as my genetic complement.
For as long as I have been an awake and aware human, I have looked at how humans treat humans, without reference to gender. The only way I can imagine seeing the world differently would be if I had gender identity issues, and had some compelling internal push to want to be female. But even there I would assume my outlook would be based on internal uncertainty, and not one that compelled me to look (again) to Paris Hilton or Angelina Jolie for what or how to be, and therefore yielding confusion if I were not identical to either of those two women.
I am fully aware that people have gender-specific expectations that can be perceived or displayed as sexism. What I don’t understand is how everything is laden with sexism. I don’t feel that way, I don’t see things that way. If there is unwarranted sexism in my outlook, it lurks well beneath my awareness, and I would like to be told precisely where it is displayed, for two reasons. The first is that I am skeptical, the second is that if I truly behave in an unwarranted sexist manner, I’d like to change that.
My ultimate question is, where do we draw such lines on self-regulation? Is it ever permissible to say or think that a woman accusing men of sexism is over-reacting, or mis-perceiving things? Or do we have a full accusatory (from the woman’s perspective), fully guilty (from the man’s perspective) situation? Is there room for permissible error of the sort that can be explained and then understood? Or are all men automatically guilty and all women automatically oppressed?
29 October 2009, 12:33 pmSandy:
Stan, it’s as if you can’t think in your over-thinking. I made no analogy. I said humanity was polarized into sexes–which if it isn’t obvious, well… By “wired” I meant simply that the polarization extends to the psychic aspect–the mentality–of human beings. It’s what is in front of your nose. Nothing abstract about it. Every single human culture exhibits it.
And Marcilla, you have a great imagination.
But now, I am leaving the forum, and I wish you all well.
29 October 2009, 2:44 pmStan:
That is precisely what I didn’t say. These categories are too glib, too simple, and too frozen. Two nouns with two modifiers. Culture and history, not dissection for analysis… culture and history.
Let me paraphrase to reflect that objection back to you: “Or are all whites automatically guilty and all blacks automatically oppressed?”
Somehow we get history…. some of us do. We get it on race, sometimes. Because we have at least had the discussions. It’s complicated, right? This relation emerged over history. But this gender conversation keeps getting strangled by misplaced defensiveness in its infancy.
29 October 2009, 3:23 pmSean:
I didn’t mean *you* said that, Stan. I didn’t say that *anyone* said that. It was purely rhetorical. But the idea did have origins in something I read.
I got the idea from the lengthy thread of comments following the linked essay. I read a lot of hostility in the posts. A lot of man-hatred.
I don’t know how to deal with someone who puts all wrongs done by men who are NOT me squarely onto my shoulders. I’m not answerable for the crimes of anyone but myself. I can’t be logically expected to understand a perspective that begins accusatorily. I don’t know how to get into that mindset of being guilty for doing something someone else did. It just doesn’t work for me.
Even if we switch to race and talk about blacks vs whites, I’m not understanding it. I can’t understand a black person treating me as culpable for the sins of whites who came before me. As long as that kind of accusatory perspective continues, I see division continuing.
The linked essay didn’t make much sense to me. It complained of women’s problems when men try to engage them in conversation, and the assumption *I took from the essay* was that every conversation is designed to gain access to a woman’s vagina. I can’t understand that kind of defensive anger and suspicious outlook.
The fact that rapists exist doesn’t mean that I carry the threat of rape, any more than the fact that pedophiles exist means every adult is harboring a desire to molest children. It’s just absurd to my way of thinking.
It’s the same mode of thought that is perpetuating the problem in Israel.
29 October 2009, 7:10 pmSean:
Stan,
I think you and Ms Harding (and her followers) need to make a distinction:
Cultural biases
vs
Personal biases
As long as the two get confused, especially in the heat of anger, you will find men get defensive when they’re told that every conversation with a woman is being used to angle for sex, and carries the threat of rape. I’m pretty sure that when I try to have a conversation with a woman, I know what I’m trying to do. I don’t need to be told that I’m angling for her vagina, nor that I am bringing a threat of rape to the situation. And I don’t for a minute understand how a woman can go through life assuming every man is trying to get into her pants, either by force or by slippery persuasion.
If the goal of this topic is to enlighten men, it would help to begin with information, and not accusation. Thus far you have attacked me by accusing me of putting words in your mouth when I did no such thing, and Ms Harding has attacked all men by accusing them of using force or slippery persuasion to try to get into every woman’s pants. I’m sorry, but I do not see that as information, nor as an open invitation to learn something new.
I think I’d like to know when you DID NOT find someone get on the defensive when his or her first encounter was one of being accused of something nefarious.
29 October 2009, 8:57 pmShaukat:
Sean,
Your reference to “the problem in Israel” at the end of your second post is rather telling. The problem is not being perpetuated by any mode of thought, but by the Israeli military occupation, the confiscation of Palestinean land, the settlements, the rationing of water, the checkpoints, closures and killings. References to “modes of thought” serve to mystify the reality of the occupation by putting up a smokescreen and shifting attention away from the dynamic of oppressor and oppressed which then allows people to claim that the real tragedy is the “circle of violence” or the “culture of hatred” on both sides.
This point is important because your comments, while concealing the reality of the occupation in one sentence, also serve to conceal gendered power. Social power is often naturalized, and the members of a priviliged race or gender don’t necessarily have to be directly involved in its maintenance in order to benefit in some respect.
30 October 2009, 1:57 pmSeb:
@Sean
>> I don’t know how to deal with someone who puts all wrongs done by men who are NOT me squarely onto my shoulders.
They’re not. ”It’s a system.” I can’t find Yolanda’s essay on this. I’m sure Stan or someone else can dig it up.
Until you figure that one out, you’ll be a bit lost. Just understand that it isn’t about ”you”. If any of this were personal, every moderator of every blog would ban every commenter and ”nothing” would get discussed.
30 October 2009, 3:21 pmSeb:
(those weren’t quotes, btw: double apostrophes mark italics on Wikipedia, and I sometimes get that confused with other places)
30 October 2009, 3:22 pmSean:
Shaukat, how can you presume to know what underlies my statements?
It would be more accurate if you asked me what I am trying to convey, rather than trying to TELL me what I am saying.
Please ask me whatever you need to, to clarify my thoughts. Please do NOT tell me, or others, what I am thinking.
30 October 2009, 6:47 pmSean:
Let me clarify that terminal remark for Shaukat. I said:
It’s the same mode of thought that is perpetuating the problem in Israel.
From there, Shaukat proceeds to tell me and others what I am thinking, and goes on to talk about problems in Palestine.
I specifically referenced Israel, not Palestine. I did so because a lot of Israelis, and especially the current government, regularly offer as public statements the view that Palestinians are trying to destroy Israel, and therefore Israel is entitled to self-defense. The argument can be continued further to justify anticipatory violence against Palestine, and I have spoken to Zionists who make that argument with a straight face and full sincerity.
If women assume that all men are trying to get in their pants, and carrying a threat of rape, that justifies some bizarre treatment of the whole male gender.
And that’s precisely what I saw in the comments following the linked essay. Man-blaming, man-hating. Broad-scale. Indiscriminate.
As with the way the Zionist perspective will continue fomenting trouble in the Middle East, the supposed feminism that assumes all men are rapists will continue fomenting a gender-based attitudinal division.
30 October 2009, 6:55 pm(Boer) Tom:
Sean, a little experiment: Go sit down in some public space (public transportation, a bar etc) and listen to the discussions) - it is not hard to tell when a man is talking to a women for sex, or for another purpose. If I talk to a woman who is a stranger, it usually takes about two seconds for her to realize that I’m not interested in trying to get (a) sex(ual relationship), and the blog post is not about non-sexual talk. It is about the ethics or morality of sexual talk: That is, if you are sexually interested in some woman who is a stranger, accept that you may be considered threatening, accept if no interest is reciprocated and then leave that woman be. The post does not condemn trying to initiate a sexual relationship with a stranger - it does ask that men who do that consider what they are communicating, and can communicate, about themselves. If you want to initiate a non-sexual conversation with a woman who is a stranger, still you must accept that that stranger might not be interested in talking with you, and unless it is a matter of particular urgency (’Ma’am, you dropped this…’ or the like), why force it?
Also, is it that important that other people not resent you? As an Afrikaner in North America, most (North American) Blacks, as well as certain liberal types assume that I’m some racialist creep, until they get to know me. If they don’t want to get to know me, fine, that’s their trouble. (Funny thing is that I don’t get that kind of thing back home, except from certain ‘liberal’ whites…)
30 October 2009, 11:44 pmElaina:
Unfortunately, Sean, we really have no way of knowing why a man is approaching us. Also unfortunately, we tend to have a collective, shared experience of men feeling perfectly entitled to approach us for whatever they feel like and feeling no real boundaries in that sense. We walk through life getting catcalled, harassed, grabbed, and yes, raped, molested, and assaulted. Quite often this happens to women often enough to make us brace for it.
Criticizing that trend, and suggesting to men what they can do to help be part of the solution as opposed to the problem, that’s not man-hate. That’s actually quite generous. And you are putting up a straw argument- the author of the post is actually quite clear that “all men” are indeed NOT rapists- but that women learn to respond to them as though they *could potentially* rape them (or otherwise assault their space.)
The male gender is already subject to some bizarre treatment, in the sense that they already receive benefits and privileges that they are blind to, apparently, that women do not. What this author is pointing out is that the bizarre treatment of women by men on a daily, re-occurring basis isn’t just a “hassle,” and when it reaches beyond the scope of “hassle,” it can, and often does, become lethal at worse and nerve-wracking at best.
1 November 2009, 9:08 amBen:
I enjoyed metafilter’s discussion of the same blog post. It’s a long read but some of the female perspectives are truly poignant and enlightening for men.
1 November 2009, 2:29 pmDeAnander:
The original post is very good, but what I find even more encouraging is the generally high quality of the discussions it has sparked in various fora. The crosspollination of geekdom and feminism (the girl-geekiverse) is a whole new thing (to me), culturally speaking. Quite refreshing and energetic.
[hope y’all will forgive a long rambling post; I’ve been gone a while so perhaps I may be granted some license to ramble a bit after a long silence?]
Also in trawling through the enormous volume of chitchat I found Feminism 101, a handy resource. I haven’t looked at much of the actual content yet but the concept and execution look good.
I always find it amusing that when feminists fume or mutter about “the generic ‘he’” or nouns ending in -man (policeman, fireman, etc), we’re often told (usually by men) that *statistically speaking*, such-and-such an occupation is held by males, so we shouldn’t get upset if people just assume that all fire fighters are male, blah blah; to insist on acknowledging the statistically rare exceptions by ponderous locutions like “flight attendant”, “police officer,” “fire fighter” etc. is Political Correctness, a kind of (feminised!) prissiness of discourse. However, if a woman (based on lifetime experience of approaches by male strangers, let’s say, in which more than 50 percent have had predatory intent and/or been rude/intrusive) assumes that a guy trying to chat with her on a train has predatory intent and may become rude/intrusive — but the guy believes himself to be perfectly innocent — he is (or tends to be, statistically speaking) full of self-pity and outrage at her assumption (that he’s statistically likely to be a jerk). She really should consider all cases individually from the git-go and not make assumptions based on experience!
[If Nice Men(TM) don’t like being assumed to be jerks, maybe they ought to start doing something to discourage all those *other* men from being jerks and hence spoiling their rep by skewing women’s statistical samples? Just a thought :-)]
The “Schroedinger’s Rapist” meme is brilliant. It reminds me — the ambiguity of the mental state it describes — of the state of mind one is in when a friend or loved one is missing for “too long” and worry starts to arise. Probably, or maybe, everything is fine; but during the period of uncertainty the person experiencing the anxiety is living in two timelines. In one of them, the missing child or spouse or hiking buddy (or beloved family dog) will show up any minute now and all is well. But in the other, there will be the call to the police, the search parties, and either the endless limbo of “Missing Persons” or the disclosure of life-altering and heart-breaking disaster. In one timeline the hiking partner has merely spent a little too long on a bluff admiring the view and is at this moment hurrying back to camp; in the other, s/he is lying at the bottom of a sinkhole or ravine with a broken leg, in pain, alone, watching the daylight fade and hoarse from yelling for help with no one to hear. Schroedinger’s cat is alive, or maybe not; but the person fretting over the cat is both grieving and hoping, second by second.
Until the situation is resolved one way or t’other, the person experiencing the anxiety is suspended between “normal” life and an abyss of fear, grief, pain. For women in a world of arbitrary, weirdly privileged, often predatory and unpredictable male behaviour, the uncertainty of interactions with untrusted (and sometimes even with trusted) men can be similar in the suspension between “this is a normal interaction” and “this interaction could escalate into violence, terror, even death.” In the “normal” timeline I go home tonight and have a bath and reflect on an interesting (or slightly weird) interaction; in the alternate timeline I end up in a hand-to-hand struggle to defend my bodily integrity. Or (worst case) dead in a ditch, or dumped stripped and bleeding beside a road somewhere to face godnose what further humiliations at the hands of police, med mafia, legal system, etc. In a sense both experiences are being lived at once: beneath the veneer of the ordinary and everyday, the terror or grief is being experienced in advance — in our mirror neurons perhaps. The woman meeting the relatively unknown guy for the first time (whether as a stranger, or on a first date, or first day on the job) is living in two timelines — both afraid and not-afraid, trusting in a normal social way and yet also, simultaneously, *potentially* annoyed, enraged, or terrified.
The footsteps behind me on the street are probably a “perfectly normal” guy walking to the bus stop, who just happens to be taking the same route I’m taking; but I also know that “perfectly normal” men (their neighbours are always saying to the reporters “what a nice man he was, I just can’t believe it!”) opportunistically or with careful planning do stalk, rape and sometimes kill women. I suspect that the degree to which the potential “bad outcomes” are admitted or felt varies widely from one woman to another, based on individual history etc. But given the frequency, ubiquity and consistency of predatory sexual behaviour among men, very few lucky women have *not* been the target of insult, injury, or just plain intrusiveness. Some degree of wariness seems to me absolutely normal and absolutely rational, as does variation in individual sensitivity/anxiety.
Perhaps the most interesting comment of all was Caitlin’s (scrolling down a short way into the long, long comment trail):
This gets us into some familiar territory: the Milgram Experiment and other scenarios in which, when abusive behaviour is normalised, a majority of people will go along with it; people are far more capable of doing harm to others when they are assured it’s acceptable. It also gets us into less-explored territory, i.e. the non-linear aspect of human behaviour… how does a crowd become a lynch mob? how does a minor confrontation escalate into “senseless” violence? why does the abuse of prisoners tend to escalate into full-blown atrocity? how do simmering tension and resource scarcity escalate into mass murder (Rwanda)? How does a rowdy gang of “normal” guys partying turn into a pack of gang-rapists? How does an ordinary Joe convince himself that bullying, insulting, or assaulting a woman is the next thing on his to-do list for the day?
My Mum told me when I was quite young, very bluntly, “Men are like dogs, especially when they’re in a pack. Never show fear.” This demotion of men to doglike animals seems to me in retrospect as a copout (poor dears, they’re just brute beasts and can’t help themselves), but the basic psychology of bullying and gang behaviour seems to be pretty well summed up. The extra wrinkle which Mum never admitted to herself or to me was (as Caitlin mentions above) the existence of men for whom the absence of fear in a woman is in itself an affront and marks her as “uppity” and needing to be taken down a peg or two, preferably by sexual abuse. (sigh). Alas, women are never quite certain (as some of the commenters to the original thread(s) pointed out) which behaviour will help extricate us from a situation and which will “only make it worse.” Statistically speaking, vigorous and loud self defence has been more consistently successful (in getting women out of such situations unraped and unmurdered) than begging, weeping, pleading or placating; but there are probably exceptions; and vigorous and loud rejection of the *preliminary* or “testing” overtures of a predator expose the woman to ridicule and/or reversals (she’s the bad-guy, he’s the victim) in public opinion. OTOH, if the preliminary testing intrusions are *not* vigorously repelled, then the intruder may be encouraged down his predatory or aggressive timeline.
Another double-experience (I can’t think of a better word) for women — one which for me happens far more often as I have reached middle age — is interacting with a man who may be perfectly safe for *me* to be around (verbally offensive in an oafish way at times perhaps, but well-meaning and no physical threat), but whom I would not trust alone with a younger or prettier woman. If you live in a small, connected community you will probably know what I mean when I say that women in such communities tend to keep “lists” (and compare notes) on which men are “OK” and which pose a threat (to themselves or to their daughters). It’s also interesting that in a small community there is pretty good agreement between women (even women of widely varying politics or belief systems, i.e. religious or atheist, feminist or apolitical) on the OK-ness or not-OK-ness of the local menfolk. The threat radar seems to work more or less independently of classical ideological categories… the maintenance of what we would now call “reputation servers” by word of mouth among women is a topic worthy of papers and lengthy discussions in its own right. If you added up the evidence on which women of widely different mindsets come to a consensus on which men are “not OK” (aka “he creeps me out”), it would probably be very similar to Sweet Machine’s original post content.
Meanwhile… following Caitlin down the path of potential outcomes conditioned by peer approval… it’s hard not to speculate on the role of normalisation, peer pressure, mirror neurons, etc. in the ghastly incident mentioned here:
What the article does not say — perhaps because all those present were juveniles afaik, their identities are not released by police or admins — is whether the “onlookers” were exclusively male, majority male, equally mixed or what. My suspicion is that it was at least majority male, and that any girls present were with their boyfriends… and were — consciously or not — receiving instruction in what could happen to them if they get out of line. So, at some level, were any boys who may have felt stirrings of compassion or outrage; the price of being labelled as “soft” or “unmanly” could be high — as in being identified as a “faggot” and (as one of the Muslim prisoners in Abu Ghraib said in his outrage, describing US torture methods) “treated like a woman”. A lynch mob (whether its victim is targeted by gender, sexuality, race, language, etc) carries with it the potential for refocussing its hostility on any of its own members who resist or critique the project. (And how does this tie in with the oft-remarked enthusiasm of partisan and sectarian groups for “eating their young” in purges, putsches, character assassinations, and more literal physical violence?)
[An aside: the media may not be commenting on the gender makeup of the crowd at this gender-lynching party for reasons other than the protection of juvenile offender identities. The mass media in general censor the gender aspect of many hate crimes; they were reluctant, iirc, to discuss Marc Lepine’s particular singling out of women to shoot and his history of hostility to women and feminists, and have been similarly mealy-mouthed about other fairly obvious hate-crimes against women. They tend to report lavishly and sensationalistically, however, about gynocides and rapes that fit the mythic profile: the lone attacker, preferably a stranger, preferably psychotic, who rapes and/or abducts and/or murders the perfect virtuous victim — preferably young, pretty, and blonde. The mass media, despite decades of feminist effort, still prefer to tell stories of rape and gynocide *as crimes against fathers and husbands* — the “theft” of a wife or daughter by a marauding stranger.]
Anyway, speaking of mirror neurons and normalisation, we could go on at some length about the quite frankly awful video game called “Rapelay“. Like a lot of commercial porno, it’s basically a rape training simulator. (At bottom of the brief news clip is a link to a more detailed review, if you have the stomach for it). Lots of popular video games involve rape and/or abuse of women, but this one’s egregiously nasty. [Perhaps the most telling cultural comment here is how very nasty it has to be, to qualify as “egregious.”] One has to wonder (I do, anyway) about the brain activity going on not only in the designers and “authors” of such a game, but in those who play it. What kind of self-programming are they doing? What kind of normalisation is being done by the mere “legitimate” existence of such a product, shrinkwrapped and ready for purchase?
A dear old radfem friend of mine used to say that “rape” — and “f*ck” as it is commonly used to indicate anger, contempt, and threat — to her ear were the same word as “lynch”, just in a different dialect. I’ve written elsewhere on the mirroring of pornography (trophy pictures of sexualised dominance over women) in the existence of trophy postcards from lynchings and from big game hunting; someone, surely, should explore further connections between mob violence (lynch mobs, gang rapes, etc) and the illusion (for the consumer) of a supportive “mob” offered by e.g. porn, racist propaganda, etc. I note that in the odious RapeLay game, as the player progresses to “higher levels”, an advanced feature is that he can invite “friends” to join in — as spectators. A part of the fantasy, perhaps an essential part, is not only showing off the rapes to admiring friends (trophy behaviour) but also being reassured that a quorum of peers approves, that this behaviour is acceptable — that the Stanford Prison Experiment is still running. The simulation provides a synthetic “approval quorum”.
What kind of approval quorum is suggested by these forms of misogyny as interior decor? Several studies in urban form conclude that public behaviour is strongly conditioned by the design and maintenance level of public spaces, i.e. that people are more likely to drive carefully, or not to litter, or to refrain from vandalism, in spaces that reflect, in some way, respect for those who inhabit them. An opinion-quorum is established, on some level, implicitly in the design. I think it would be hard to deny that an opinion-quorum contemptuous of women is pretty strongly established in both high and lowbrow media (and as shown here, even in some bathroom fixtures) in Patriarchy 3.0, or whatever you want to call our present industrial civilisation… and that this opinion-quorum is being carried consciously or subconsciously by e.g. jerks on trains and buses who fly into a rage when any randomly-selected woman doesn’t want to chat with them. And that this opinion-quorum is strongly-to-weakly felt by women, as a background level of hostility or threat.
I realise this is rather a random spray of ideas and associations, but I hope it suggests other directions in which discussions of male privilege and violence can take us — in other words, perhaps by pointing out the ways in which male privilege and its associated violence *are consistent with* ideas of entitlement and associated violence not so directly coded into gender (though gender memes always inflect race/national supremacy memes!). The oddity is that we do not, as a culture, automatically associate the gang rape with the lynch mob, or the overbearing/intrusive “entitlement” behaviour of males vis-a-vis females with other caste or entitlement behaviours such as those centred on race, class, nation. Why we don’t — why such an obvious association is so seldom made — why the entitlement-behaviour of men towards women is not immediately recognisable as standard hierarchy stuff and hence directly comparable to class or race bullying — seems a rich topic in its own right.
I’d like to say something more about entitlement, but it’ll have to wait… too tired to rub two neurons together, and this post is way too long and incoherent already.
2 November 2009, 3:28 amCurt Kastens:
I just read about the gang rape of the 15 year old girl outside the school dance and the 20 onlookers who took pictures but did not call 911 yesterday.
2 November 2009, 4:16 amI think that there are many countries in the world that have not reached such a level of depravity. I would hope that there are still parts of the US where this could not happen, but I am not sure. But if you throw ethnicity in to the picture, I suspect such a thing could happen pretty much anywhere that there is ethnic tension.
Michael Anderson:
For me, reading the Shapely Prose post, comments, and a couple of other linked posts on Roman Polanski (and the comments here) was a reminder that us menfolk all have some baggage we carry, and don’t open the suitcase to look at a lot of the time. It was (and is) a bit uncomfortable looking at it, a lot like reading “White Like Me” last year, except that gender includes ALL of us, whatever color we are. That Japanese rape game REALLY sucks BTW—
Speaking only for myself, I think it’s a growth process–we are all at different points in it. The point is to keep growing, get humble (or you’ll stumble), accept what IS in spite of thoughts we may have to the contrary as men, and leave that baggage behind…
2 November 2009, 3:21 pmJames:
In Spain–I can’t speak for other countries–the worst assaults on foreign girls have been by girl gangs. That aside, my impression is that the situation of many women–particularly in the less fortunate sectors, globally speaking–has worsened in virtue of several aggravating factors. The hyper-sexualization of youth is an important factor, the explosive growth of pornography, as well as the romantization of violence generally in the media–even to the point of featuring “Rambo” types of women, are included. The corporate media are very guilty in all this, and it has led to a great degradation of the general mentality, to the point of real barbarism. The ongoing urbanization of humanity, with the tremendous strains it implies, is also a very important factor, especially when you consider the conditions of the poorer sectors and the prevalence of drugs. If you talk to teachers who have been teaching many years, they seem to concur that the youth generally is getting progressively more unruly and crude. Then too, one notices a rise in all kinds of crimes which formerly were quite rare: killing of children, and the like. In general, humanity is under assault, so to speak, like an organism being attacked by viruses, for which it has few or no defenses. For all these material and psychological factors, I am afraid that philosophy is not very effective remedy.
2 November 2009, 3:32 pmJeremy:
This post really hit home when, right after reading it, I went to class and the women were discussing a recent rape in the area. They were talking about bars on doors - how they might protect you, but might also block an escape. One women said that a group of teenagers came by trick-or-treating late on Halloween, which scared her and caused her to stop opening the door the rest of the night.
2 November 2009, 10:48 pmI live in the DC area now, and I’ve become much more conscious of the potential for crime. I’ve become more concerned about my own security on late nights coming home or walking through questionable neighborhoods. But this is the first time I’ve ever really felt that kind of threat - women, even those in Lawrence, KS, the white, bourgeois town with fairly low crime that I come from, think about this stuff all the time. That’s trauma! Collective Trauma. And it’s tragic.
DeAnander:
Followup on the Richmond hate crime: my initial hunch about the gender of the “onlookers” turns out to have been accurate. The girl was lured into the “killing field” (an all-male clique hanging out in the relative isolation of the parking lot) by a so-called friend (male), while she was on her way home.
(my emphasis) footnote
footnote
footnote (my emphasis)
All the social/emotional elements of a lynching are there: the party atmosphere, the bonding/solidarity/consensus of the aggressors, the trophy pictures.
When men ask why women are mistrustful, defensive, “unfriendly,” etc., they might do well to reflect on the depth of betrayal involved in this story — and in all other stories where a male “friend” either assaults a girl/woman, or delivers her to his buddies to be assaulted. The majority of rapes are committed by men who are on a first-name basis with the targeted woman; the majority of rapes are not the random violence of perfect strangers, but profound betrayals of trust, collegiality, family, community.
3 November 2009, 2:01 amRichard:
It’s nice to see you back DeAnander. I always get a lot out of your writing.
I’ve always thought of myself as feminist, but only recently have I taken it upon myself to look into the feminist literature, including the blogs that have been linked to here. My general approach is to take it for granted that the women speaking know what they’re talking about, and I find it incredible–though I know I shouldn’t–that so many refuse to do that. The comments that people make…
There is a tendency, I think, for the well-meaning liberal (even the well-meaning conservative), to assume that all that bad stuff (racism, sexism, homophobia…) is in the past. Or, rather, even though they know it really isn’t all in the past, people should still nevertheless only be judged according to the purity of their own intentions or past actions, as if we already live in some perfectly egalitarian, non-patriarchal, non-oppressive society. The complaint about a historically informed criticism being “unfair” is ridiculously common.
3 November 2009, 10:19 amJames:
Horrific crime. It should be punished as severely as possible.
But why is dehumanization of women getting more pronounced? One thing is certain: among the greatest influences on the youth is their music. Have you stopped and listened to some of this stuff? And then there is television and MTV. Have you stopped to actually analyze some of the more popular programs? And have you seen some of the stuff that circulates on the internet? I believe there is something deeply subversive and culpable in the corporate media. It’s like an open sewer. It is the media that today forge the public mind. Frankly, I believe that de facto criminality and sociopathy run rampant in the media and among media executives–they are getting away scott-free from what could well be termed soul-murder, and which a normal society would not tolerate in the name of “freedom.” Look too at the behavior of American soldiers. Shameful and barbarous–Okinawa, Iraq, etc. This has become a very sick and violent culture (with honorable exceptions to be sure), and the youth in a way are the worst of all, because the most formed by the media–not to mention a a ever more miserable public school system. Of course, parents are greatly to blame in much of this–no principles, no personal standards, no communicating values of respect for other humans,self-control,good character; no understanding even of the “why” for such principles and standards. If the planet is being murdered, that could only be because it is an exteriorization of what is in today’s humanity. First soul murder, then planet murder. Barbarous humans mean devastation.
3 November 2009, 6:38 pmMichael Anderson:
@ James;
Your comments about music and media are right on the money! As a musician who is growing older now (and hopefully wiser), I have noticed, since the 80’s especially (that being the decade of official Reagan Neo-liberalism’s start), the deterioration of popular music—interesting on two fronts, because, while technical achievement-what we call the “P.I.T.” (Prodigious Instrumental Technique)school of playing, has become a mantra (the “Science” of music, perhaps?), the absolute deterioration of the spiritual content of the music, and separation from any kind of meaningful emotional content is the other pole.
In the present, and this is my own pet peeve also— we have “death” metal being played by mostly young white, male, sometimes in uniform humans, and the use of this music in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and elsewhere to dehumanize and drive insane prisoners–Hieronymus Bosch’s levels of hell come to mind.
One can definitely argue that it has driven its practitioners insane, also. You cannot divorce the raw, naked inhumanity of this stuff from its effects….and many people (mostly male) have tried (sic).
But, as a musician, I CAN say that there is a lot of really GREAT music out there, too, full of high technical achievement and spiritual content—-but it DOESN’T get the media play in front of society at large. It’s working in other places—between the powers’ toes, so to speak.
Granted. popular music has long been used for political and economic ends—look at WW2, for example, but I think we have entered into a new era of media integration that the recent post here on Nazi film is an early example of.
This was a bit of a rant—thanks!
4 November 2009, 1:23 pmxenia:
Recently I read a statement in an interview which sounded very true and ran something like this: Since the 1970s and the rise of punk music, the perspective of the *victim* is completely absent in popular music (search the German die junge welt for this, if you want). We need that perspective to return if music is to revive.
Very true. Musicians are on their own little power trips, with barely anything to show for it — for instance, see the pathetic Bono Vox and his friendship with Bliar.
4 November 2009, 4:02 pmmark:
One of the links to the news stories on the Richmond gang rape was to a site called “popcrunch.” I have to believe that DeAnander has done this on purpose - there are surely many sites that have posted news blurbs about this crime. I was almost as disturbed by that popcrunch website as the gangrape itself. The website seems to me to be a shining example of gender identity, and female objectification. It basically represents for me nearly everything that is sick and wrong about our culture.
In regards to Michael and James:
5 November 2009, 12:39 pmI am also a musician and I would say that what we are witnessing in terms of pop music and its banality or depravity or lack of depth is a direct result and parallel to the rise of the corporate state. There is hardly a more appropriate example for corporate America - in every aspect of the term - than the music industry.
DeAnander:
yep, I noticed the irony at popcrunch: serious reporting of a serious incident of misogyny, framed in trivialising, hypersexualising, commodifying imagery of women. the cognitive dissonance is awesome, innit.
5 November 2009, 3:33 pmJames M:
I’ve been held rapt by the conversations here lately … tons to digest … and I’ve been wanting to comment, but there’s a 2-word summary for why I haven’t had time: It’s called “Grad School.”
But I’ll jump in on the musical / lyrical front, which is easy pickin’s for me. As someone of the “younger generation,” who grew up with the kind of music (misogynist hip-hop, etc.) that’s being rightly critiqued here, I feel the need to point out that this stuff — shockingly woman-hating and vulgar as it is — seems really like nothing new to me. The only difference is the level at which it is blatant, and less and less cloaked in metaphor and innuendo.
E.g., when I’ve put on Rolling Stones records lately (o.k., iTunes playlists,) as desensitized as I am by years of MTV, etc., I’ve been absolutely aghast at some of the lyrics. Have you ever paid attention to the words to “Brown Sugar,” for example? Feel like rocking out to romanticized slave rape, anyone? Maybe it seems more excusable somehow when it’s coming from Mick Jagger’s pen, but it’s the same sentiment. I have an attachment to many of their songs, but I can’t listen to that one … or “Stupid Girl”, or several others. And y’all probably don’t need me to tell you that the Stones aren’t the only people of their generation (and ones before and since) who trafficked in this kind of lyrical content.
I think these latter-day musicians might be doing us, in some small way, a favor by dropping all pretense and just laying it bare for us to critique. It’s a lot harder to hide behind “poetic license” when the poetry aspect is all but stripped away. The misogyny is less insidious, less disguised, and more above-board. Which maybe makes it more of a bad influence in the culture, but at least we’re not having to deal with the artists’ denial about it.
Re: Xenia’s “victim” content — what seems missing from lyrics today, imo, is not victimhood in the larger sense, but the recognition of others’ victimhood. SO intolerably MUCH of music today is about one’s own supposed victimization — the cult of the whiny misunderstood oppressed artist is the dominant paradigm, for white rock’n'rollers, at least. Blame it on Kurt Cobain … and the lack of originality that’s followed in his wake.
Back to the books.
5 November 2009, 9:24 pmJames M:
Follow-up: After re-reading Michael Anderson’s words about Death Metal, my take on music’s role here is expanding, and I’m seeing a common link (surprising as it may sound at first) between that genre and contemporary hip-hop: Both are the result of a chronological progression of macho one-ups-manship among their respective subcultures. (And please be patient with me if it seems like I’m going on my own music-historical tangent here for a minute … it does lead back to our larger themes.)
The first inklings of death metal began in the late 60’s with groups like Black Sabbath — singing lyrics meant to shock, but mainly in the form of this kind of cartoony, adolescent brand of Satanism / neoPaganism that was hard to take very seriously. But soon the urge to go one beyond — bigger, louder, EVIL-er — inspired darker strands of heavy music, and you had bands like Slayer spouting incredibly gory lyrics that seemed like they were cribbed from medical encyclopedias. The next logical progression was Black Metal, which led to kids in Norway murdering each other, digging up graves and carrying skulls as souvenirs, and burning down medieval churches. And the misogyny is there too … one Black Metal album cover I saw depicts a band member simulating (we hope) the rape of a woman at knifepoint in a graveyard.
The first surfacing of the gangsta / deep-misogyny meme in hip hop was with NWA and 2 Live Crew in the 80’s … and has followed a similar trend of getting baser, more violent, more exploitative … all in the interest of proving oneself “harder” than the previous rapper.
The underlying motivation in this deepening darkness and ever-escalating violence is something I (and I think De) have gotten into here before … the “boyshit”, and possibly especially American, meme of “tougher, meaner, harder, more extreme = better.” The Richmond Horror (which happened a couple of towns over from me) is probably, as others in my neighborhood have noted, a not unexpected outcome of a culture where displaying sensitivity and caring is seen as the least permissible option among boys in a group setting … and yes, I think the music we’ve been talking about has played a part in shaping that culture.
My only hope is that maybe this meme has been taken as far as it can go … certainly in Black Metal’s case, it’s hard to imagine the music or the attendant culture getting any more extreme … and maybe soon the pendulum will start to swing back, the fever will have passed, and this boyshit will finally fall out of favor.
5 November 2009, 10:44 pmmark:
As James M. outlined above, examples of rather beastly lyrical content can be found in every generation. The lyrics from the 1929 song “Without A Song” contain this delightful phrase:
That field of corn would never see a plow
That field of corn would be deserted now
A darky’s born, but he’s no good no-how
Without a song.
What’s different today is that we have an industry with enormous monetary resources and professional cadres of marketing and promotional executives who make boatloads of cash peddling finely packaged musical rubbish to (Mostly) white teenage suburban boys. That pretty much covers the “Gangsta Rap” and “Death Metal” genres of music. Without the corporate marketing and promotion people who spend every working hour of their professional lives creating demand for their “products,” I don’t think there would be much of it around.
The modern marketing and public relations industry is all about “creating” demand. The professional literature is very clear about it. I’ve seen marketing executives interviewed on tv talk about this matter of factly. When a marketing exec from Abercrombie & Fitch talks about being on the “leading edge” of a new fashion trend it means A&F ‘created’ the trend and is now poised to ‘capture’ the market. The music industry does the same thing.
Of course now with the US consumer economy imploding - probably never to recover - things are getting interesting. The pendulum has begun to swing - only it’s in the form of all the (imaginary) money being sucked out of the entire society. This could result in a qualitative shift in regard to “boyshit” falling out of favor. My guess is that it will be the result of an economic shift - nobody having money to buy the corporate financed boyshit music.
6 November 2009, 11:05 amWaldow:
Does Deathmetal exercise demons, or does it exorcise them? What may be constructive and fit for the private contemplation by a few is often destructive when unceremoniously taken out of context. Or when copied by lesser artists for corporate consumption.
Some of what you might call Deathmetal is spiritual; for example, the growling signing style that baffles some, leaves behind for a moment the language traps that get us nowhere. The people at these concerts are gender balanced, peaceful, and thoughtful.
In my experience, the Betamonkeys that beat and raped in Junior High were big fans of second-rate pop music. The school authorities allowed their behavior (Our Vice Principle in charge of discipline was a former Dallas Cowboy third stringer) and running to the library and occasional retaliatory violence were the most ready recourses to protection. Drop one of these Betamonkeys into a “Trees”, or “Sleep”, or “The Better to See You With”, or “Black Dice” show and they’d almost certainly think, “What a bunch of Fags”, and they would most certainly think, “What a bunch of noise.”
Which is all history. Good Deathmetal looks at horror, reacts to it, consumes it, and makes something out of it many sensitive people find beautiful, which is where I look to find the future.
6 November 2009, 2:40 pmDeAnander:
@james m — nice to hear your virtual voice
and yes, the misogyny of the Stones was pretty stunning. “Under my Thumb”? and how about the Black & Blue album cover, which feminists protested to the usual response of “jeez can’t you chicks take a joke?”
more random wafflings…
I’m mulling over Monbiot’s recent howl of frustration which offers some interesting new research in people’s responses to existential threat:
I’m going to go out on a familiar limb and suggest that there may be a strong gender component in this “immortality project” — that a hostility to women, women’s bodies, the physical reminder of birth and by implication mortal frailty and death — is, for men, part of the flight from mortality and a bid for male exceptionalism. Are acts of contempt and savagery against women part of some kind of immortality project? a reckless or defiant response to perceived existential threat? is this part of the persistent connection between soldiering and misogyny? and is the brutalisation of youth culture, the intensifying misogyny, some kind of cultural response to (a) individual precarity as wealth is concentrated/enclosed, (b) civilisational precarity, as myths of national supremacy get shakier and resource scarcity and economic instability are felt?
Or maybe not. Another possibility is that the tendency often called Dionysian (and glamorised or valorised) is actually far scarier than we like to admit. I referred above to the “party atmosphere” of lynchings, in which I’ll include gang rapes such as the Richmond atrocity. The same party atmosphere was clearly visible in the photos from Abu Ghraib and from earlier racist lynchings in the Deep South. R Koehler describes something rather similar in a mugging attack:
The tendency of a gang of males to experience a kind of transcendent bonding, glee, joy in the humiliation and destruction of another person — often a woman — seems pretty well documented across many different cultures, traditions, langugage groups. Sometimes a gang or mob of mixed genders seems to experience the same exhilaration, a celebratory excitement, over an act of collective violence — especially one that cements some kind of solidarity, destroys an outsider or scapegoat, etc. I don’t know how common it is for an all-female mob or gang to get into this kind of “intoxication of violence” mood.
The Dionysian rites in some of their older forms culminated in the sacrifice of an animal (goat or bull), which was torn apart (bare hands, so the literature suggests) by the revellers; there are hints that in some traditions the man who cut the animal’s throat was himself then stoned to death. Getting drunk or stoned, dancing around in high excitement, and finding catharsis/completion in an act of brutal violence seems to be an old tradition (at least in the wheat/beef culture which Anglos like me have uneasily inherited).
It seems to be a human modality, a resonance of feeling and brain chemistry into which widely varying groups of people can fall, momentarily or for extended periods. I wonder if there was grinning, laughing, and gleeful dancing among the mass (in every sense) murderers in Rwanda. We are told by the historical record that Euro crowds at public hangings and burnings were in festival mood (except for those who sympathised with or knew the victim personally)… I wonder what on earth triggers this celebration and joyful embrace of destruction and cruelty. But whatever this brain-mode is, we now seem to have powerful engines of culture and media deliberately provoking and stimulating it.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the hunting side of our gathering-hunting past; a group of humans ganging up on a prey animal, tracking or driving it, surrounding it, then closing in for the kill. It would have been an exuberant moment for early hominids — a big protein hit, a feast, a party. Deprived of this proto-human experience by millennia of confinement in civilisation, do we occasionally snap into a warped version of it, turned on our own conspecifics? A pretty good chunk of misogynistic propaganda from the porn noise machine uses hunting metaphors to describe sex, and animal metaphors to describe women.
Some anthropologists have suggested that hunting and warfare are deeply related; that in our time, both hunting and warfare have become exterminist, liquidationist; but in earlier times both were ritualistic and “sustainable” in the sense of showing respect for the “tribe” or “family” of the hunted creatures or the neighbouring band. The object was not to wipe anyone out but to engage in the Dionysian rituals of risk, danger, daring, transgression, nihilistic liberation, and celebration. Perhaps the exterminist flavour of modern warfare (Cartago delenda est) is a feature of resource scarcity and/or insatiable resource greed: We wipe out Them, so that We can take all their land/water/trees/fish.
At any rate, we are left with the deeply disturbing knowledge that people who commit mob violence — gang rapes, lynchings, etc — enjoy it, that they experience bonding, exhilaration, a kind of collective joy and party-animal excitement. In other words, it’s “fun”. This is a kind of shameful fact about ourselves as human beings that our culture struggles with — we project this wickedness onto the Other, the “savage”, the “Sinister Jew”, the poor; but as our literature and history illustrate, we civilised (living in cities, no moral superiority implied) humans are as vulnerable to the party-animal spirit of violence as earlier humans. I wonder at times if the startling amount of violence in our entertainment media doesn’t provide a surrogate experience of the Dionysian rite: no longer as participants but as observers (like audiences at a bullfight or moer elaborate Roman Games), we collectively attend rituals of extreme violence.
If we had something like a sane system of law and governance, perhaps it would be illegal to provoke or stimulate this dangerous aspect of human nature — much as it is illegal in “civilised” nations to run about waving a loaded gun or to shout Fire in a crowded theatre. We might recognise the party-violence brain wiring as similar to an addiction, and deal harshly with those who deliberately stimulate or trigger the addictive behaviour. We might warn our children as they grow up, about the compulsive and contagious quality of gang violence, try to teach them introspection and self-awareness.
The research above suggests that consuming/acquiring is one response to perceived existential threat. The “need” of Mad Ave to drive people to buy and spend more and more and more, might be related to the media’s consistent editorial policy of Fear, Fear, Fear…
6 November 2009, 2:59 pmStan:
Interesting radio program today about newborn cries exhibiting accents that demonstrate imitation of aspects of the language spoken aorund them. French babies and German babies vocalize their cries differently.
Mimesis is a stronger enculturator than reason (by whatever definition) in most human behavior, I suspect, including that of adults, even older folk. Girard called mob violence mimetic violence; and having seen riots (food riots, no less), I am very willing to accept this notion. There is a spirit that emerges in a crowd that is contained in smaller venues, and it ain’t pretty.
Before reason, there is also the pyschic makeup of individuals that the psychoanalysts have been seeking all these decades, and Jessica Benjamin as well as Nancy Hartsock make pretty convincing arguments that in patriarchal society, women are placed in the position - during the development of male children - that set mother and male-child up for a psychic break that becomes like a revenge motif for the male child… against all women.
I think Becker is onto something (I read his book Denial of Death many years ago) with regard to death… this is part of our existential terrain as Homo sapiens. But De’s point goes deeper with regard to how this existential situation actually plays out in social systems characterized significantly by domination-subordination… more specifically, gender.
Violence has become essential to most masculinities. That’s why pacifism always gets gender-baited.
Male participants in this kind of mimetic gendered violence feel compelled to escalate their brutality out of perverse desire, to be sure, but they are simutaneously motivated by the fear (Thanks De) of being seen as weaker than their fellows - strength being equated with brutality in this kind of probative masculinity. It’s an arms race dynamic that spins out of control very quickly.
I’ll just note some other recent episodes of violence, folks going postal as they say, mass killings by freaked out men. Just add an economic crisis, tens of thousands of nutty ex-soldiers and ex-mercenaries, then shake well and serve. I live in the burbs, but what I see coming there now is razor wire and attack dogs… not yet, but it’s easy to imagine now. It’s in people’s faces, this creeping Hobbesianism (a Man’s idea if ever there was one!).
De’s socio-political ethos, outlined above, as much as it might offend libertarians, sounds pretty good when compared to my distopian suburban fantasy.
6 November 2009, 5:51 pmWaldow:
Culture creation through ideas outlined by Girard, exemplified by religious rites around Dionysus, are tools better suited to the tempo of the tasks many perceive as demanding humanity’s full attention. This must be balanced by dialectics and philosophy, but not post-poned.
In my personal experience collective action, to start a community garden for example, is better served and more quickly enacted if conscious attention is given to that which is fun friendly and festive; whereas philosophers and dialecticians run amok seem to turn away most people who–unlike me–are not fond of arguing all day.
6 November 2009, 6:28 pm(Boer) Tom:
I’d like to point out two problems with what is said above - 1. such violence tends to be self-limiting and sporadic (which of course does not help much with matters like rape, as there are millions of small groups of men who occasionally get their kicks that way), and as such, state-based violence is rarely based on such violence now. Another thing - have the rapes by Tutsi royalists in Rwanda been studied much? There is evidence to suggest that the bulk of the murders were committed by them rather than by Hutu nationalists…
6 November 2009, 7:09 pmm.c.:
“Crowds and Power” by Elias Canetti, a nobel-prize winner is worth looking at. I don’t remember a lot(it’s been a while) but nuggets like the differences between the British & the Dutch with respect to their psychological connection with the Ocean is insightful. North America isn’t an Ocean but maybe we’re similar to the British in that Asia and Africa, even Europe are ‘Other’ and not geographically close, excepting Latin America. He’s too theoretical for my taste but a few really good points.
7 November 2009, 1:26 pmlatte lenya:
Here we go…while I liked the Harding piece, she shouldn’t have to justify no meaning no based on elaborate statistics of rape. For a man, no means no, or he is entitled to use force to defend himself. I wonder if we haven’t been socialized as children to expect to be trespassed. Adults are incessantly giving children unwanted attention, and their ‘no’ is hardly ever taken seriously. They are chucked under the chin, turned upside down, and the fact that they might scream in protest is part of the merriment. This is not to deny the gendered nature of unwanted attention. I just think there’s a lot of oppressive treatment we wouldn’t put up with if it didn’t have deep roots in childhood.
As far as men having responsibility for the history of male oppression of women, I don’t buy that. It doesn’t make sense, unless you want a bunch of guys paralyzed with guilt for the past 10,000 years. What does that prove? A case could be made that males are equally but differently oppressed by sexism. Think of how brutal the training is to be men, and what the stakes are. No worse than for women, but certainly no better. And the benefits don’t nearly make up for the staggering loss of humanity masculinity entails.
No, the only way forward is for both genders to take full responsibility for ending sexism. Why should men have all the fun?
9 November 2009, 11:06 pmElaina:
The training involved in becoming male might be pretty brutal. I don’t buy into the whole “we’re all equally oppressed” theory, though. Sorry. Males taking responsibility for what is happening doesn’t have to result in paralyzing guilt. This is why I use the term “male supremacy” as opposed to “sexism.” And while the benefits may not “make up for” a loss of humanity in an abstract sense, in a material sense they lead to better access to resources and for crying out loud, some kind of AGENCY that isn’t dependent upon their relationship to a member of another sex. This is huge. So male supremacy “dehumanizes” males by over-humanizing them and cutting away at the humanity of females.
And the stakes are worse for women. You can do your own research on that.
Women do INDEED have a great responsibility in ending male supremacy. We have to stop being gate keepers for one another, for one thing. We have to stop buying into the system in all the ways that we are able to do that.
I’m going to come back and comment more later, since I have to go to work now.
But I did want to point out that the oppression that we learn in childhood isn’t gender-neutral, either. Gosh. So much I want to talk about! I a day-job that lets me stay home and fart around on the computer.
11 November 2009, 8:49 amStan:
Gotta love the competing oppressions model, a competition for legitimacy through status.
Comparing men-women-others to determine a level or quantity of oppression, when the differences in socialization are qualitative and interdependent, is a confusion of quantity and quality. Comparing the experience of this system between collective categories of people (male, female, other,e.g.) is a mismatch in that direct experience resides in individuals, not in categories, even though there are obviously shared experiences within whatever categories of people you are looking at. My experiences, for example, as a male, while I can identify with many other males on the issues of our emotional armor and desensitization, and while I share the contingent unearned privileges of males within patriarchy, are not the same as every other male, and in many ways are personal and unique.
Men’s socialization is brutal. It takes brutality to make brutes. And men need to understand how much we have lost in exchange for what we gain in patriarchy. That is an essential bit of self-interest. But that’s different than a comparison.
Women are rightly piqued when men adopt a stance of self-pity and self-righteousness in response to feminist critique. The request from feminism has been simple: stop doing those things you do to lessen and embitter women’s lives. If you’re not doing (as an individual) those things that feminists are asking men to stop doing (and doing some of then things you don’t do as a consequence of cultural privilege), fine. Don’t take it personally. If our sisters are asking us to do the right thing, defensiveness is not the appropriate response to their stated needs. Empathy and cooperation is. This is Friendship 101. C’mon.
In the same breath, I can attest that the empathy of individual women to my own gender struggles - as many women seem to be gracious enough to exhibit - is a priceless act of friendship itself. The more of us who can rise above the enemy-paradigm to join hands across these cultural boundaries, the better. That’s where exemplary community starts.
Spiky subject, no?
11 November 2009, 11:24 amlatte lenya:
You’re right…”equally oppressed” between any two groups implies some quantifiable property and would be impossible to prove and pointless to attempt.
12 November 2009, 12:00 pmParticularly concerning gender–anybody of either gender who has ever existed is a pretty large control group, statistically.
Michael Anderson:
The influence of the the military/corporate state (The Power Of The Machine) in the rape culture:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/13/republicans-franken-shocked/
Last month, 30 Republican senators voted against Sen. Al Franken’s (D-MN) amendment that would punish defense contractors “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” His amendment was inspired by Jamie Leigh Jones, who was gang-raped by her co-workers while working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad in 2005, and then had to fight her employer for justice.
The GOP senators who sided with defense contractors at the expense of women — such as John Thune (SD) — have been facing an intense backlash. David Vitter (LA) refused to give a rape victim a straight answer when she confronted him about his vote, claiming that he is “absolutely supportive of any [rape] case like that being prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.”
Politico reports that Republicans are now scratching their heads at why the public is so incensed about their “no” votes:
Privately, GOP sources acknowledge that they failed to anticipate the political consequences of a “no” vote on the amendment. And several aides said that Republicans are engaged in an internal blame game about why they agreed to a roll-call vote on the measure, rather than a simple voice vote that would have allowed the opposing senators to duck criticism.
As BarbinMD writes, “Seriously? They voted against an amendment that was prompted by the brutal gang-rape of a young woman by her co-workers while she was working for a company under contract for the United States government, after which she was locked in a shipping container without food or water, threatened if she left to seek medical treatment, and was then prevented from bringing criminal charges against her assailants. And they failed to anticipate the political consequences?”
Thune is also claiming that Franken doesn’t really care about Jones and other rape victims whose employers have blocked them from seeking justice; he and other Democrats just wanted to “create a vote which they could use to attack Republicans.”
So basically, the only lesson they learned is that next time, they have to hide their votes when they decide to screw over women’s rights. That way, they can support their allies in the contracting business and the public will never find out.
14 November 2009, 2:17 pm