Apples and... Round Red Fruits That Grow On Trees?

[botias]

Remember I was talking about how Joss Whedon is no stranger to eroticizing torture, for all that he gets his panties in a bunch if the torturee is a woman. Because he's a feminist and thinks women should be equal to men in all things. :|

Here's someone who looked at Whedon's record more closely: Torture in the 'Verse (from the su_herald)

And the FLDS thing got me thinking too. Within the last couple of years I've read at least two National Geographic Articles describing the marriage practices of African tribespeople that pretty much are equivalent to the practices of the FLDS. Pre-pubescent girls are available sexually to the young warriors-in-training until the girls start to menstruate. Then they are married off by their fathers to older men they don't know. The articles were presented without condemnation of any kind. It's just a different culture, right? Imagine the outcry if they had done an article on a FLDS "tribe". So, why the difference in perception? Is it a race thang?

Comments

[mere-ubu.livejournal.com]

I read that torture article. Interesting stuff. (I'm still processing, so I'm not exactly sure what I think about it yet. It's definitely there to think about, though.)

What the foo? Do you think it's some kind of "prime directive," no-interference policy on the part of NG? Fear of ethnocentrism? I wonder what, in their minds, makes it okay to present a practice that's clearly a gross human rights violation without comment. *sigh* It's been a very depressing week, news-wise.

[botias.livejournal.com]

I think it is fear of ethnocentrism. And also racism. I think their fear of ethnocentrism might go out the window if they were taking pictures of little blond girls crying as they are about to be sent off to their new husband's village.

Sorry to be depressing. :( It's a mad, bad world out there. I feel fortunate everyday to be born when and where I was. I luxuriate in my hot, running water; my effective birth control; my children whom I have every reason to expect to outlive.

[botias.livejournal.com]

that would be 'outlive me'. gah!

[mere-ubu.livejournal.com]

Hahaha! Yeah, that first version had me raising an eyebrow for a moment there.

I tend to agree with you--it's racism masking as cultural tolerance.

Oh pish, you don't depress me! It's all these Bad People. *grump*

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

Imagine the outcry if they had done an article on a FLDS "tribe". So, why the difference in perception? Is it a race thang?

Yes. And no. Sort of.

1. There is sort of outcry about our sisters in different cultures. But it's hard to not be utterly racist about it. So we focus on education and opportunities rather than OMg UR LIEK SO OPPRESSED.

1b. See campaigns against female circumcision and older campaigns against foot-binding. Education for girls campaigns in Afghanistan. Gynecological medical help for young women in Iran. Radio soap operas in Africa that raise these marriage issues. Preferably grass roots so we don't get our Western Imperialist bootprints all over it, but largely (I think) funded by donations globally rather than locally.

2. Erm. Insert thing where I complain we only really get outraged about white girls because everything else is too far away/too large to comprehend/too black.

3. Within the US, this is a fairly unusual situation that society can disapprove of and fix within existing laws. But in all honesty I've been reading about the FLDS thing for *years*. And actually first came across it wrt the boys that were surplus and exiled. That doesn't suggest outrage so much as... finally the media in general got round to scandalising it enough for people to care en masse.

4. Also in all honesty, FLDS - not so unusual. Intense, localised, ritualised and you have someone to blame, but check out any closed religious community and you will find this behaviour.

4b. About fifteen yrs ago I read an article (unbiased and non-accusatory) on Kentucky mountain women and really aside from the religion aspect can't see much of a difference.

Wow, that is too long already, sorry about that.

I agree with the JW thing, he does eroticise male torture. I do have lots of thoughts about that but mostly I think fictional male torture can be quite hot. So nothing too deep.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

Interesting that I feel differently about polyamory and polygamous communities in general.

And there's a definite gap between abusive cults and cultural freedom. Not so huge a gap between cultural freedom and abusive societies. It's all about availability of choice.

(I will stop typing, it's just I've been thinking about it and it's your bad luck you happened to post on it :D)

[botias.livejournal.com]

Polyamory and polygyny are really different animals. The former... I don't want to try and say much about it because it is such a varied practice, other than that the people involved seem to have the resources to choose something else if they want to. The latter seems to be all about men with power taking advantage of men and women/girls who don't.

Which... is exactly what you said in your much shorter paragraph. :|

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

I have mixed feelings. For example, friends of mine in (insert religion that allows limited multiple wives here) are rich enough and educated enough that it's a very definite choice for them to be a second, third wife.

They'll tell you it's advantages - less sexual pressure, more freedom, ability to choose a love marriage where an arranged marriage exists.

OTOH, two of my friends in the same religion had horrible experiences with it. One was made to marry her childhood rapist at age 13 because he got her pregnant and it was considered the best all round solution. Another thought she was buying into the situation above and it turned out not to be so.

So I don't think entire cultures can be generalised but I do see how the situation could do with being... scrutinised?

[botias.livejournal.com]

Probably the way to go is to say that statutory/child rape is BAD. Abusive relationships are BAD. How many people the abuser is married to or having relationships with is kind of beside the point. Certainly abuse/rape is hardly unknown from singleton relationships.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

Yes. Although I sincerely disagree with the age of consent in the US. It's just ridiculously high.

[botias.livejournal.com]

So, yes to all that stuff. :) I've also been aware of the FLDS thing for years. I think part of the reason they are only now getting the attention they deserve is that they were originally in Utah where apparently the political will to crack down on these folks is not what it would be in say, Texas. But, eventually, enough was too much even in Utah (or was it? Maybe it was the Feds that cracked down on them there) so they went to other places that turned out to have a much lower tolerance level.

Yes, fictional male torture can be quite hot. :) I have to admit that fictional female torture makes me a bit fidgety, but I have to just bite my tongue on the matter.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

There's a general unwillingness to investigate Amish communities too, people get all antsy about culture and whatever.

The whole thing reminds me of a sketch on a comedy show that has an Asian (Indian) woman running into a women's crisis center begging to be saved from her abusive husband and the hippy woman calmly and Zen-ly explaining to her that she couldn't possibly interfere in her cultural norms.

Female torture has such a different context. Although men *are* tortured frequently in real life, it isn't a cultural trope that leads to more frequent RL violence against them, I think.

Unless you believe all violence brutalises society. But that's vague, and hurt/comfort Spike is *specific* in it's hotness.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Female torture has such a different context. Although men *are* tortured frequently in real life, it isn't a cultural trope that leads to more frequent RL violence against them, I think.

See, this is where female equality seems to fall apart. No matter how I come at it, the notion that fictionalized torture of women is reprehensible and fictionalized torture of men is not worthy of note always seems to come back to: men and women are fundamentally different such that women should be protected from men by their society.

I see what you are saying in that the notion that female torture might be OK is a cultural thing that could be reinforced by fictional torture, but clearly the notion the male torture is OK is pervasive as well, as it is so darn frequent, and could certainly be reinforced by entertainment. Am I missing something?

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

No, you aren't missing anything. If you reduce the logic even a little bit it's patronising and un-feminist, and you have to be careful with it.

It's a really fine line, with nuances beyond what I'm ever going to type in a comment. But pretty much:

Society is male dominated and historically serves to abuse women in order to reinforce sexual, emotional and physical subservience. Everything in it, from work to advertising to architecture needs to be seen through this gaze to ensure that we don't continue to build our castles on sandy ground. (in all seriousness, I'm not particularly radical and I feel the same about race)

This is especially true in the media.

Given the thousands of ways women are treated unequally already, anything that reinforces that needs examining for a)motive and b)perpetuating what already exists.

It's like... why do we need black history month? because the other eleven are already white history months. Why do we need to examine torture of women in the media? because our entire society is *based* on subtly reinforcing womens lack of agency already.

Men on an individual or community level are tortured and society agrees this is correct (Guantanamo, gay-panic lynchings). And this is also Very Bad and you can argue that brutality in fiction exacerbates that. And I'd agree, actually, to a certain degree.

But pornographic violence is treated differently and has different results for men and women. I don't think, though if you disagree I have no stats to prove it, that *sexualised* male violence begets sexualised male violence or a shift in attitude towards men in general.

I'm very pro-porn by the way, even women-in-bdsm-situations. And sexuality is so complex that I don't have as many issues with women writing rape or non-con fic.

But I do have an issue with constant, blatant, everyday, sexualised violence against women in the media.

[mere-ubu.livejournal.com]

Although men *are* tortured frequently in real life, it isn't a cultural trope that leads to more frequent RL violence against them, I think.

YES. And I think that's about who has the institutionalized power. I personally don't think you can really have "reverse sexism"; sexism is a systematic framework of institutionalized oppression. I can stand on a street corner all day and say I hate men, but without that power behind me, I'm just going to come off as a crazy bitch who's prejudiced towards men.

Holy crap! Did that make sense?

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

Yes, it made sense :D

The only exception I can think of, off the top of my head, is 'terrorists'.

Torture of terrorist suspects in the media, I do believe leads to a)acceptance of such in RL and b)an increase in racist attacks.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Yes, but sexism is not a systematic framework of institutionalized oppression. That framework exists because of sexism. It's my understanding that sexism is having a prejudice against someone because of their sex.

A person can say that we need to oppress fictionalized female torture in our culture in an effort to reduce widespread sexism and misogyny in men. Presumably they would be able to express these fantasies openly again when/if the misogyny situation improves?

It may be that the shaky intellectual foundations I wonder about are just different. Do men torture women more often than other men? If they torture other men more often, and have always historically been more violent towards other men than women, why are we more concerned about violence against women? Isn't the whole idea behind feminism that all people are of equal value regardless of their sex? Do we believe that women should receive greater protection from violent men than other men?

You defend this greater concern as being a antidote to inappropriate lack of historical concern, and to counteract the fact that men have institutionalized advantages. But, does the assumption that women have historically had things so much worse than men bear real scrutiny? While positions of power have almost always been held by men, that is a very small slice of the population. Entire generations of men have nearly exterminated at the command of a few men in power in the pursuit of more power. I honestly cannot think of similar acts of such astounding violence and magnitude perpetrated against women. I may be that 99.9% of women have been historically powerless and oppressed, but it seems like that may be in comparison to 98% of men.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

Just to get a clearer idea of what you're saying, which I think is that if we want sexual freedom we cannot restrict men's sexual freedom.

Which is fine and I agree, except that men *have* sexual freedom in a disproportionate amount in the media all the time already.

I wouldn't argue that male sexuality is irrelevant, but that a particular *type* of male sexuality is way over-represented, to the extent that it is reinforcing a negative state in society in a disproportionate way.

And the other thing you seem to be saying is that feminism somehow is sexist because it accepts that women need protection. But your idea of feminism does not seem to be mine, or the zeitguest of modern feminism. So I'll have to just leave that because I can't see where you're coming from.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Happily I think the internet is changing this for the better. :) Though I wish I could say more women actually wanted to shout their torture porn from the billboards.

And the other thing you seem to be saying is that feminism somehow is sexist because it accepts that women need protection.

So modern feminism has embraced this, that women cannot be expected to protect themselves from men? That they absolutely must rely on nice men to protect them from mean ones? That women are equal, except kinda not? I just... don't know if it works that way, though people have always wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

I don't think it is. A small amount of the planet is online, and we are overwhelmingly rich, white and out-of-synch.

It's great that women are writing porn. But men are making films, and selling us shampoo. And Joss Whedon has more pull on the subject of feminism than Dua Khalil Aswad ever could have dreamed.

That they absolutely must rely on nice men to protect them from mean ones?

Nah. That we must have a say in the law, in the media, in everything, so as to protect *ourselves*.

[botias.livejournal.com]

A small amount of the planet is online, and we are overwhelmingly rich, white and out-of-synch.

Well, yes, but isn't concern about the portrayal of women in mass media also somewhat confined to that rarefied zone?

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

No, the mass media is pretty much everywhere you look. I include adverts in that and even very very poor countries have some media widely available.

Restricting it even to the UK so as to make it not about global issues, 42% have some sort of internet access at home while over 50% have accessed the internet 'at some point' (figures are old but we reached a plateau of access some time ago)

100% of us have access to advertising and slightly less to television.

The internet has not turned out to be the revolutionary social tool it has become for some of us and was expected to become for all of us eventually.

TV on the other hand is still a massive influence despite all other technology that should have overtaken it by now.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Nah. That we must have a say in the law, in the media, in everything, so as to protect *ourselves*.

I can sign on for that.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

Yay :D

We don't ask big manly men for protection. Joss can kiss my bum.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

HEY LOOK I can use my Joss icon!

\o/