There was a mass shooting last week. Statistically speaking, there have been two a month in this country for the past five years. That's pretty damn horrible.
It's horrible that we can't talk about gun control . . . because everybody always tells us that we can't talk about gun control? because of the NRA? because the gun extremists out there are too intimidating? because we've had the statistics in for a long time and nothing has ever changed, so why bother? because 20 dead kindergarteners couldn't force the issue, so why would 7 dead college kids? I don't know.
It's horrible how we treat the mentally ill in this country. It's horrible that 70% of these killers are white, but we act like violence is a "non-white" problem. It's horrible in all the ways that these shootings have been horrible since they became an issue.
But this one was horrible in a special way. This one included a lot of vitriolic language and direct, gruesome threats aimed at half of the world's population. Aimed at me. Aimed at every woman I know.
And the first public response was not to denounce the mass-murderer's manifesto. It was to preemptively strike at women's outrage by creating the #NotAllMen trend. At its best, the hashtag is about expressing male frustrations at being lumped together with violent misogynists. At its worst, it is a means of spouting violent misogynist quips while claiming victimhood. Because the real victims aren't the dead people in the street, or the people being slut-shamed into suicide, or the people actually being threatened with violence, it's the perpetrators . . . right.
Women responded with #YesAllWomen, which is its own form of horrible, knowing how pervasive the problems are, how violent they can be, and how casually we learn to accept them. The trend is encouraging, though, in that it is getting far more support and attention than #NotAllMen, and has developed a life of its own that I hope continues.
Of course I have my own stories, and I have my own fears. And I plan on tweeting them as they come to me, because honestly, this abuse is so mundane to me I'm rarely conscious of it. I am a woman, after all.
But I wanted to say something to the #NotAllMen crowd, even though it will fall on deaf ears, even though two comments deep after every article I've ever read that points out the fallacies in that type of thinking is some guy making all the same claims.
But when you are told by society that you are owed a beautiful woman, and reality doesn't live up to that myth, your suffering is a result of sexism. Not women. Women didn't do this to you. Women are just being people who may or may not be your idea of attractive and may or may not find you attractive. But I agree that you should be angry. Angry at the pervasive myth that screwed with your head.
If your knee-jerk response to women telling you their first hand accounts of being harassed on a daily basis, beaten, or raped by men is not to say, "holy crap, that's horrible, I didn't realize it was so bad, what can I do?" but rather, "hey, feminnazis, not all men are like that, you know," then you need to redirect your anger at what's really frustrating you, which is the same thing that's killing women.
If you don't want to be lumped in with the "bad" guys, maybe you should work on making sure the "bad guys" aren't so prevalent. And yes, I mean prevalent. Because they are not the minority that you claim. In fact, if you're the type of person who reacts to violence against women by making it about you, you're not in the "good guy" camp. You're in the camp of the male police officers who ask women what they were wearing when they got attacked. You're in the camp of the guy friend who tells his female friend it's wasteful and ridiculous for her to pay for a five minute cab ride home from work at 2am. You're in the camp of the guys that may not actively perpetrate violence against women, but work hard to ensure that such violence goes unaddressed because it makes you uncomfortable.
And here's the thing--even the actual good guys say and do some sexist crap sometimes, because the attitude is so pervasive that they don't even realize what they're doing or saying. But the difference is they listen. They don't get defensive. And they understand that "what you did was kind of sexist" isn't the same thing as "you're a sexist."They understand that just because they are privileged in this world, and their opinions are more readily accepted and legitimized by the public, doesn't mean that they know better than women what women go through on a daily basis. So they listen.
They listen when a woman whose job it is to critique movies points out that a lot of the "pervasive male sexist fantasy" that people are talking about is reiterated through film. I'm an artist. I get cautious, too, when someone starts making the whole "movies/video games/music made-them-do-it" argument, because that's an absurd conflating of correlation and causation, and an argument for censorship to boot. But if you took the time to actually read what she wrote, you'd find that she in no way said that Seth Rogen movies made anyone go on a killing spree. She just said that Judd Apatow movies are an example of popular, well-received films that perpetuate this incredibly corrosive myth. And I'm sorry if your feelings got hurt, Seth, but she's right. "Knocked Up" is pretty much a perfect example of the myth we are discussing: schlubby guy with not much going on (except, of course, developing a porn video game with his group of bros--not to deride porn or porn video games in general, but this side story in particular was pretty damn gross) has a one night stand with a super hot girl--who is intelligent, motivated, and successful--she gets "knocked up," and through the pregnancy, learns from her schlubby one-night-stand how to get that stick out of her ass and just be one of the guys, except, you know, hot--oh, and also she totally realizes that, even though he doesn't seem like much, and hasn't really done much to show he's more than he seems, he's a really nice guy and she loves him. Or to put it more bluntly: dude just hangs out being a dude, hot girl changes everything about herself to be with him. But citing Apatow films as an example of how this story gets perpetuated in the movies is "offensive?" Sure.
The thing is, it does absolutely no good to say "men are taught by our culture that they are entitled to 'beautiful' women" without actually discussing where and how this teaching takes place, and what it looks like. And that means talking about popular culture, e.g. movies, television, video games, and music. It doesn't mean that anyone is calling for censorship, and it doesn't mean that everything about the individual examples discussed is terrible, or that what is good about them is negated by their inclusion in this conversation. It does mean that we should educate our consumers on what this shit looks like so they can choose to participate or not. But the people that tend to care enough to point this shit out are women, and everybody knows that a woman discussing misogyny in a public forum is just asking for death threats and rape threats.
And if I had enough people care about what I write on this stupid blog, I'm absolutely certain I would get them, too. Which is why I'm trying to stay calm as I write. Which is why I've gone through days of thinking about and editing what I say here. Which is why I always try to parse out the logic of the thing instead of being as passionate as I am. Which is why this post isn't what I want to say.
What I want to say is this. What I want to say is that I've been shaken to the core these past few days reading through the #YesAllWomen posts. Not because they are surprising, but because they're not. Because they are an enormous stream of reminders of everything I should be angry about all the time. Because they are a reminder to me that I never tell anyone that I'm angry about these things, and I have feminist debates all the time. But the daily realities of being a woman aren't what we discuss. We discuss macro-feminism. Big ideas. Systemic changes. Because holding individuals responsible for their behavior is dangerous. Literally.
If you are a guy and have ever had the experience of being publicly insulted or degraded, not defending yourself, and then obsessing over coming up with all the things you should have said or done, then imagine having that experience every time you walk down the street. Every. Single. Time. And maybe you can understand what I mean when I say that sometimes, on the rare occasion that I'm feeling powerful, I fantasize about being harassed just so that I can--for once--defend myself. Which is sick. But it's true.
It's a silencing by degrees. It's psychological abuse. And I don't just mean the outright aggressive vitriol. I mean the constant experience of making a statement about a factual reality that you experience on a daily basis and then having to backpedal, inch by inch, conceding every single minute exception or alternate explanation until you're not sure if what you said was true anymore, or if what you ended up saying meant anything at all. Until you feel like the circumstances you described are only relevant to you. You are alone and imagining things.
Which is why #YesAllWomen is so important to me. Why it took my breath away, and why, in spite of the nature of the posts, it makes me feel almost optimistic despite myself. Because there is evidence that I am not alone. And I am not imagining things.
Video games are really bad about this. It's not quite the "schlubby guy get the girl" narrative because the protagonist usually has a body most gamers can only dream of having, but most of the time he's a stand in for the dude controlling him, a more idealized version of him.
ReplyDeleteBut even games I normally think of as being on the progressive side of things (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) reinforce this. ME and DA tend to get high marks for including gay and bisexual characters, giving the player the option of pursuing same-sex romance subplots, etc.
But they also present romance and courtship as a matter of persistence and correct input. Most of the things that matter when two people are attracted to one another (compatability, chemistry, mutual attraction, etc) the games don't even try to simulate. It's just a matter of deciding who you want your avatar to bed and talking to them until flirty dialogue options come up, then selecting those.
Sure, it's "just a game" but both of those series are/were really popular, and all they're really doing is making interactive a narrative that most games with storylines already incorporate. There's usually a love interest, and they usually end up attached to the protagonist as part of the ending "you won!" montage, sometimes with almost no setup or time taken to sell the notion that these characters are an item.
Don't mean to digress. But I think there's more of a connection than is ever acknowledged between the sense of entitlement in the gamer/geek community in particular, and the way most of our media portrays relationships.