Of course I have to start with the Amish girls. The horror continues to resonate, as in today's piece by New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert. His question is "Why Aren't We Shocked?" Actually I think we are. But here's part of what he says:
"Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.
"In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.
"There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.
"None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected."
The first time I read this the last sentence seemed wrong, but reading it again I think he's right. We may not LIKE violence against women. But we DO expect it. It's easy to find one reason why: it's so common. We may not like it but we're not surprised.
Or do we - that is, men - actually LIKE it? Herbert goes on to say that images of violence or domination of women help to sell stuff and thu must be popular.
"An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, 'When was the last time you got screwed?'
"An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman’s face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video."
" . . . A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men."
Herbert concludes by saying, "You’re deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It’s all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa."
I've cut some of his piece, but the flow is pretty much like this, reading backwards:
Mass murder of Amish girls (while Amish boys are spared)
men hating women (boys hating girls)
echoes of degrading sex in commercials
degrading sex in porn
society tolerating men's dehumanization of women?
men's dehumanization of women
But there are problems with this analysis:
Problem: murdering schoolgirls is in parallel with porn-like sex
Problem2: killing is similar to kidding (the ads)
Problem3: the degadation of women is so pervasive that it's hard to see what would stop it.
Still, Herbert is right about the different outrage around racial hate crimes. When James Byrd Jr. was lynched by being dragged behind a truck in Jasper, Texas on June 7, 1998, there was not only an outcry but the further resolve, "Never again." Do we think that lynching African-Americans is optional - not an intrinsic white need - and so can be stopped, but male violence against women is innate and can only be slowed down?
What do you think of all this?
Which reminds me that one friend of mine said, "you can think about the Amish girls but you won't learn anything. It's a MYSTERY, meaning that there's no explaining it."
5 comments:
I had to leave a short comment because my gut reaction is a sick knot in my stomach.
Women are brutalized. Brutalized. I had a series of conversations with my housemates about the recent killings and how scary it would be to be singled out as a blonde or a girl to be sexually assaulted/slaughtered. I don't understand. It doesn't make sense to me that I can walk down DP on a saturday night in the light of streetlights with quite a few people chillin' and even cops patroling the streets, wearing full-coverage clothing and a scarf, accompanied by a friend in similar clothing, also with a scarf, intimidatingly sober, and be cornered, verbally harrassed and even inappropriately touched by a series of groups of guys. What on earth makes it okay for guys to behave the way they do? Is it true that this kind of treatment of women is inate and only able to be slightly slowed down? Can we believe that? Girls are indoctrinated into this crazy world of double standards and ridculous treatment, and it makes me sick. It makes me sick because I feel powerless to stop it, globally, locally, or individually.
The scarf means you aren't getting any.
It's a disgusting mystery.
The Amish girls crime was headline news because it involved a large degree of exoticism, i.e. the Amish. It's true that it was a crime against women, but this fact was not as sensational as the fact that these were Amish people. Women are mistreated, yeah, we get that. Even if a large part of it is subconscious and caught in the groundwater of American society, artesian wells are not rare--sex crimes are not generally ignored. Race and religious crimes, I think, are given no more attention than sex crimes: in any case of prejudice, the big offences are exposed and the everyday ones are swept under the rug. Misogyny is no exception. Sexism is a sad and unfair prejudice, but it does not take precedence over any sort of prejudice as one of which we need to become more aware.
I want to talk a little about the question "Why aren't we shocked?". Of course we're shocked, but from the sound of the rest of Herbert's article that's not really the question he's asking. He really wants to know why we're not outraged. Outraged at the culprit, outraged at the circumstances, outraged at the society that allows violence against women to be seen as an inevitability. I know that when I started to read the articles I was pretty livid, at first at Charles Carl Roberts but then I started getting mad at the Amish for not stooping to my level and getting angry too. Which is perhaps one of the reasons why this particular crime is different. We have nowhere to place our rage. The killer is dead and is beyond the public eye, and the families prayed for him before their own daughters because they felt that he was more in need of their forgiveness. Beyond being angry at misogynism in society, all there is left is shock and sadness. So yes, we are shocked because there aren't many other options.
As a society we indulge in the sick and twisted nature of people. The media is undoubtedly the overwhelming facilitator of this obsession, unless of course you are unfortunate enough to experience an egregious crime first-hand, in which case you will indirectly be the facilitator for the rest of us. We see these atrocities being committed and we are inevitably drawn into them for the very reason they are horrendous. There is nothing exciting about a one-room Amish schoolhouse, and I mean nothing. Is this why we were so intrigued when we discovered this room had been filled with dead girls? Maybe. There are so many ways to view this crime, most of which are plausible. Was it the innocence of the girls, or the meticulously selective culprit, or his occupation as a modern day milkman that captivated us? Or all of the above? Who knows exactly. In that sense I agree that it may remain a mystery. But isn’t that why we are so interested in it? Just browsing through some headlines on cnn.com I came across countless articles highlighting the dark side of human nature. Ironically the only place I could escape the haunting headlines was under the category “travel” in which case I was able to read about the delightful prospect of LA’s Griffith Observatory reopening. We don’t want to read about everyday people doing everyday things. The headline, “Four U.S. soldiers charged with rape and murder” is much more appealing than reading about how those same soldiers completed their mission and returned home, just as the headline “Feds play down NFL dirty bomb threat” is more exciting than hearing the Feds talk about the success of our national security plan. It just gives us something to think about and talk about and type about. At the end of the day these types of events will still unfold and they will still fascinate me.
Post a Comment