Reproduced below is a really outstanding article by Bob Herbert that appeared in the op-ed section of today's New York Times. It was Kara who pointed it out to me and its opening paragraphs expertly skewers the media's seeming inability to ask the question that we both asked ourselves at the time when the news broke: Why was it the case that girls were the sole targets in both these horrific attacks?
I have reproduced it below in full because you need to be registered with the New York Times to read op-ed pieces online, and even then they don't always let you access the articles.
Why Aren't We Shocked? by Bob Herbert"Who needs a brain when you have these?" — message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women
In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls.
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. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.
The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. 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.
We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We've been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we're still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.
What have we learned since then? That there's big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it's never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.
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.
"Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible," said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women's advocacy group Equality Now.
That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like "Ravished Bride" and "Rough Sex — Where Whores Get Owned."
Then, of course, there's gangsta rap, and the video games where the players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"), and on and on.
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.
3 comments:
We should be aware of misogyny and not tolerate it. However, gender-based violence and blindness to it work both ways, and people of both genders are murdered and mutilated plenty.
So, I'm going to do something a little politically dangerous here and mention the flip side of this problem: In our society, men are traditionally considered more expendable. After mass murder or incidents in war, we are always expected to be far more shocked if women are included among the victims. During war, there are many instances where the men - that is, male civilians - are singled out to be slaughtered (which has happened in Iraq, and which happened very overtly in the Balkans), and nothing much is made of that either. And there are many more victims of murder, both proportionately and numerically, who are men.
Both the assumed expendability or lack of compassion with regard to the violent death of men, and the deliberate targeting of women, are products of sexism and ingrained gender roles which are very much a part of the system that we live under. They are also the result of our being conditioned to complacently accept all the violence in our society.
Probably, some people who would read my comments here might want to start screaming that I am some kind of misogynist or terrible sexist for pointing these things out. How dare I, a man, even say such things?
But the truth is, I just don't think it's as simple as the idea that when some disturbed individual goes out and murders grils it's because we have pornography and gangsta rap. (And by the way, yes, the misogyny in gangsta rap is disgusting, but think how casually the murder of men is also depicted in the worst gangsta rap - or in any cheap and expoitive, corporate-manufactured form of "entertainment," regardless of the subculture involved or color of the protagonists.)
Anyway, this is all to say, these liberal explanations simply do not go far enough by any stretch. That's a real problem, as far as I'm concerned. It's really easy and cheap, as far as I'm concerned, to blame everything on the women-hating qualities of pornography and rap music. Let's go deeper and talk about the capitalist system and start to explore the deeper ways that everyone is dehumanized.
But maybe it will take someone else to do that. Frankly, I am not very impressed by either the New York Times or Bob Herbert.
Hello Richard,
I thought what the piece was getting at - and it was why I admired it - was the simple fact that the underlying misogyny of what happened in Colorado and Pennsylvania hadn't been picked up by the media. It seemed such a glaringly obvious question to ask: why was it in both cases that only girls were targeted? and yet there was little or no reporting of this in mainstream media.
Living in the States for just over a year now, I have come to expect the closing up on debate in the media if and when the matter of the ready availability of firearms and the all pervasive gun culture is raised in response to such tragic events, but it didn't even get to that stage in the media on the matter of why it were that girls were targetted in this fashion.
I take on board your point about "men are traditionally considered more expendable." in war time, but isn't the case that what has happened in wars down the ages actually confirms the point that Herbert makes of a society which: "dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men."
What happened in Balkans? Women were systematically raped as a policy of war by the Serbs against the Bosnian muslims. Was this a one-off monstrosity? Sadly the same thing has happened through history and is happening in wars around the world today.
I agree also that we have to address the matter of the dehumanisation of everyone in capitalist society but where I probably depart from my comrades in the SPGB is that I think you do have to, alongside making that general point, raise the issue of those manifestations of violence in society that is perpetrated against women as a group, that are against children as group, that are against people on account of the colour as a group etc etc.
I think if we can't make the connection between what's going on in the here and now in our everyday lives, then it leaves us powerless in trying to effect that major change in society.
Whilst it may be the case that, in citing gangsta rap and pornography, Herbert was going for the obvious suspects, from reading the article I didn't get the impression that it was simply an exercise in laying the blame at their door. I think he was just pointing out the fact that they have penetrated so deeply into the mainstream that it is resulted in a situation where it doesn't even cross people's minds to raise the awkward questions that he posed in the opening paragraph in his article.
Herbert may be a liberal and the New York Times may be full of itself, but I welcome the fact that Herbert used his column to open up that little space of debate on the issue which will see that the question he posed will be discussed on blogs, on discussion lists, in people's homes and around the proverbial water cooler.
In this current climate, I think that is enough to be going on with.
[I had some trouble writing my comment first time around, so I'm going to have to redo it. Oh, well. Maybe this time, I'll do it better and more concisely.]
Despair to Where, please don't resort to the tired tactic of saying how I'm the perfect illustration of whatever straw man you want to create - in this case, the guy who always protests "What about men" whenever somebody writes about violence against women. (Do I really do that? No, I don't think so.) Maybe you should try to address my specific points, the way Darren did.
Regarding my example of men being singled out for murder, etc. I guess I was thinking of some stuff I had read fairly recently from Wendy McElroy, of the ifeminist page. Of course, if you know about the ifeminist page, you know that McElroy is herself a sort of pro-capitalist "libertarian," which makes her opinions kind of suspect to people like us. But she's good at dispelling certain myths, and she wholeheartedly attacked the common notion that women are singled out more for violence than men. This is not true, especially if we're talking about murder.
If we want to talk about why women are singled out for violence when they are, if we want to talk about misogyny, that's another matter. But then I think it would be nice to go a bit deeper than this guy Bob Herbert.
Yes, it's a good idea to talk about the problems faced by specific groups, but as socialists, wouldn't it be nice if we connected it to the overriding problem of capitalism? We can talk about why certain forms of sexism and gender roles developed specifically to satisfy the demands of capital. We can start with Engels and work our way to Sylvia Federici. All that material is so much more interesting than complaining about easy targets such as porn and gangsta rap.
Is it really because of Internet porn and gangsta rap that we have psychos going around mudering girls and women? That's strange, because I didn't know Internet porn and gangsta rap were influences on Jack the Ripper.
And Herbert makes easy, quite wrong generalizations regarding porn when he starts complaining about the most abusive variety. Because, most people who consume porn (including women) do not go for the kind of stuff in which women are severely abused. We can discuss the particular ways that porn turns women into commodities (while it would not be wrong, I think, to mention that under capitalism, we are also all turned into commodities in one way or another), but let's not make these easy generalizations so typical of the anti-porn crowd.
And how much gangsta rap do you think this guy Bob Herbert has really heard?
I just think his comments are, as I said, kind of easy and shallow. And actually, it was wrong to complain that he was being typically liberal, because his arguments play right into the usual campaigns of conservatives. (Talk about specific evil forms of pop culture that have sprung up just recently to illustrate our moral degeneration. As though society under capitalism never was degenerate before the Internet, rap music, or pick whatever other form of pop culture you want to choose (a while back it would have been rock and roll, wouldn't it?).)
But I really shouldn't have gotten so cranky about it on your blog, especially since my flame war days are really over. :) So, sorry about that.
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P.S. We can have another flame war about gun control. Because, you know, I don't think it's really an answer. And if we fully support gun control as the liberals propose it, this means giving the state a monopoly on (gun) violence as well as teling the state that we fully trust them to protect us. I find this approach to be somewhat problematical. Which is not to say the whole issue isn't somewhat complicated...
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