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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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:

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with “vital lies” or “the armor of character”. We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death. More than 300 studies conducted in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker’s thesis. When people are confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it, and increasing their striving for self-esteem.

One of the most arresting findings is that immortality projects can bring death closer. In seeking to defend the symbolic, heroic self that we create to suppress thoughts of death, we might expose the physical self to greater danger. For example, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that people who reported that driving boosted their self-esteem drove faster and took greater risks after they had been exposed to reminders of death.

A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult to repress thoughts of death, and that people might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armor but diminish our chances of survival. There is already experimental evidence that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

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:

It all felt wild and uncontained, like on the playground. I was the outsider kid, wrong jacket, wrong hat. Or maybe I just stepped out of my car at the wrong time. With a whoop they were on me, surrounding me, laughing. What great fun.

Then one of them shoved me and I was off balance, stumbling, and I felt more shoves and they were saying something to me. They wanted my money, I guess. They weren’t going to get it. But what fun. I remember big, white-teeth grins, laughter, especially from the kid in the white hoodie. He’s the only one who looked me in the eye. He was laughing as he swung and connected with my cheekbone and I went down on a neighbor’s lawn.

They were dancing. Well, not really, but there was an exuberance to their footwork as they feinted toward me, stepped back. [...] Two minutes of ruptured trust. I could still feel something deeply unpleasant in the air – could still sense the exuberance of the dancing boys, the wild playground glee of their assault.

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…