February 2, 2009 No, I don’t think I *will* cheer on the ‘big boys’ thanks
A few things up my nose today:
The calls for ‘stick him in prison and let the *big boys* take care of him’ response to the father who threw his daughter off the bridge.
You’ve read my blog, don’t even come at me with ‘OHHH so you’re EXCUSING this sort of thing?’.
You KNOW I am absolutely not.
But no one actually knows what happened here. He may have been yet another father/husband who decides ‘if you’ve left me, kiss your kids goodbye’. It may have been violence and control. But it may equally have been mental illness.
Obviously the child is still dead either way. This reminder is not about ‘culpability’.
Masculinity produces all sorts of violences. Against men, women and children. In my opinion women and children bear the brunt of it in the end. But masculinity inflicted and continues to inflict its own violences upon men to produce subjects for whom control and domination is so important.
It doesn’t negate personal responsibility for choice and action, but our culture is so sick that it’s killing people. And vengeance is not going to stop that.
The prison system itself is highly flawed if reformation or societal protection are its goals, and the demands for harsher sentences are symptomatic of a bloodthirsty call for vengeance with little understanding of what prompts violent crimes, what might help stop them, what gaol time is really like.
And please, if you’re going to use the ‘let the big boys sort them out’ mentality, get the fuck off my blog.
Gang rape is ok now if its meted out in the name of righteous vengeance? Fuck off with your ignorant self!
I do not know what happened in this man’s life, I do not know what he was thinking when he did what he did. In many respects it doesn’t matter. A child is dead. A mother is greiving. Brothers are in shock and may never recover.
But HOW, please tell me HOW is it going to make anything better for anyone for him to be gang raped?
And WHAT sort of person are you if you’re cheering it on? What sort of society are you cheering on?
There are times in which I wish that rapists could *know* the fear and degradation of their victims. But rape is wrong. Flat out wrong. Like torture, you don’t utilise it when you think it might ‘help’ or for vengeance or punishment.
If you want the sort of society that doesn’t torture, doesn’t rape, doesn’t murder, then YOU DON’T DO IT and you don’t cheer it on.
Fuck.
Also – since WHEN did we decide that those imprisoned for violent crimes were society’s righteous avengers? These are people who’ve robbed banks at gunpoint, who’ve raped, who’ve beaten up their wives, who’ve beaten the crap out of strangers – excuse me if I don’t trust them to decide who needs a good gang-raping to ‘sort them out’.
It seems to me to go back to our worship of the masculine man. The worship of the Michael Corleone’s or the Chopper’s – those men who go by their internal rules and who dish out ‘justice’ and don’t let the law dictate their limits. We’re so goddamned hungry to throw ‘bad people’ in to be brutalised by these guys that it seems we think lawless men do after all have a higher moral code than the law, than society.
A related thought. I’m sick of people assuming that my feminism means I think women are superior to men, that they’re infallible and their behaviour is always excusable, or that men’s behaviour occurs in a vacuum and we can hold just the individual responsible and not the culture.
I’m sick of it being assumed that I care nothing for men’s experiences. Apart from my capacity for human empathy, I have a son. What masculinity may do to this lovely kid with a heart full of love terrifies me. Men and women police the boundaries of sex, gender, sexuality constantly, to the detriment of all…
It’s true that I think a large part of the problem lies in the construction and maintenance of masculinity (and the inevitably concurrent construction and maintenance of femininity which masculinity needs to eschew in order to define itself) – the argument ‘Oh men beat up and kill men more than they beat up/rape women’ doesn’t make gender equity real, it just makes it more evident how fucking fucked up and violent masculinity can be.
But for fuck’s sake. Why does pointing this out/wanting to look at it closely translate into man hating/women worshipping/dogmatism? That attitude? I’m not responsible for that, if you think it, it’s because *you’re* the fool who hasn’t questioned your own attitudes properly.
Anyway. I’m at work, I oughta do something I’m paid for now.
Tags: gang rape as 'justice' now?, masculinity as violence, prison, vengeance is not a thing to be desired, why do we condone prison rape as acceptable vengeance?
- 7 comments
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Fuck Politeness 
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Valerie
said
http://www.capitalismbad.blogspot.com/
Check out the post on “Othering Rapists.” This is what you’re complaining about. Basically, people will advocate for the harshest punishment that they can imagine in order to distance themselves from “bad people.” This distance then allows them to believe that neither they or their friends are anything like the “bad people.”
In fact, a man who cheers on prison-based gang rape is most assuredly one of the bad’ns.
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fuckpoliteness
said
To be fair I don’t know if it was a man or a woman cheering on the gang rape. And I’ve *definately* heard that shit from women before, like it’s some kind of ‘Natural Justice’.
Thanks for that link Valerie. Yeah…I do think that men particularly but also women need to believe that rapists are monsters and not normal men. I do think they cling to the belief that they don’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t know a rapist. And that this is an attitude that needs to give if women aren’t going to meet with hostiliity and defensiveness when they try to discuss their experiences.
Sigh. Well even though I’ve read it before that depressed the hell out of me.
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megpie71
said
The whole notion of “othering” people who have been accused of criminal activity is something I’m starting to find myself disturbed by. It’s only recently come to my notice, and it’s something which makes me feel uncomfortable about myself as a consumer of Western Social Values. We don’t hear about the background and history of people who are accused of wrongdoing; crimes occur “out of the blue”.
Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not saying there should be an idolisation of criminal types. I find myself slightly perplexed by the near deification of Ned Kelly in Australian folklore. But it’s bothering me that someone who commits a crime is labelled with the crime they committed, and nothing else. No family, no friends, no cultural surroundings – the nearest anyone will get to mentioning any background is if the person has a problem with drug addiction, or if they’re a member of a non-standard religion (including non-standard branches of Christianity). All people who committed the same crime are the same – all rapists rape for the same reason, all killers kill for the same reason, all robbers rob for the same reason – and they’re somehow detatched from our society and our culture, not a product of it like we “normal” folk are.
By dissociating a person who has been convicted of (or who has committed) a crime from the fabric of society, we’re denying our culpability as a society in how that person came to commit the crime in question. The man who threw a child from a bridge (and thus killed the child) did so because it seemed to him to be a reasonable thing to do at that time, in those circumstances, under the conditions he was in. It had all the logic to him of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Euphegenia did to the Greek culture and society of his day (in Agamemnon’s case, he sacrificed his daughter to the gods in order to gain a favourable wind to sail to Troy). Our culture has created a place (many places, in fact) where killing another human can be justified, and we need to look at our social mores and cultural values to deconstruct these and find out why we as a culture think this is so. We can’t do that if we regard a killing (or indeed, any crime) as something which happens in isolation, outside any cultural context, outside any social framework.
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fuckpoliteness
said
Yeah, Megpie, I’ve been a little concerned over that myself in vociferously arguing that ‘if you rape you’re a rapist’ and whether this contributes to this ‘othering’.
It’s a tricky thing. On the one hand the word ‘rapist’ I guess could be argued to feed the notion that there is a ‘type’ of person who does this. But on the other, the unwillingness of society, of media to label rape for what it is makes it important to say that a rapist is someone who has raped. Ugh. Dizzy now.
I don’t know if I agree it necessarily had a ‘logic’ to it for this guy, but yes, I do agree that we need to look at society, look at the patterns of violent crime, look at the patterns of violent crimes within families and start asking what leads to this, how can we prevent it *before it gets this far* not how can we most effectively brutalize the perpetrator afterwards.
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Linda Radfem
said
I’m definitely more for addressing the structural causes of “crime” than for punitive measures, and unfortunately it’s not usually rapists who bear the brunt of our society’s “let’s get tough on crime” chant.
It’s mostly the disadvantaged, the homeless, the poverty-stricken, the mentally ill who suffer for that (there’s the convict population in a nutshell).
It’s one of the more wildly perverse aspects of the white australian attitude that we will simultaneously idolise and ostracize The Criminal. Like we’re torn between wanting to stick the finger up at authority, and wanting to avoid falling foul of it; probably due to our cultural heritage.
I think, with the economic downturn, will come a greater inclination to point fingers as Bad People.
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megpie71
said
I don’t know if I agree it necessarily had a ‘logic’ to it for this guy
I should explain what I meant, since I think I may have missed a couple of steps in the working there. My own experience of mental illness (chronic endogenous depression) says while delusional thinking is something I can notice when it reaches extreme lengths, such as suicidal impulses, it’s hard to spot the early warning signs. This is because the internal logic seems absolutely accurate, and finding the one wrong turn can be tricky. It’s how I can progress from “the shirt I’ve sewed today doesn’t look right” through to “I have to kill myself” in the space of one evening. It’s how I can progress from “this job doesn’t seem right for me” through to “I am an utter failure because I cannot even slit my wrists” in the space of a few weeks.
In my case, it’s controllable by medication (although getting the medication was another case of getting past the unrealistic thinking – I was absolutely convinced I was going to be thrown into a locked ward and left there for the rest of my life because I admitted I couldn’t cope with my depression after living with it for sixteen years). If I keep taking the pills, I don’t have to double-check my thinking patterns against the rest of the universe quite as often. I still need to do it, just to make sure I’m still running on the same rails as everyone else, but it doesn’t have to be an hourly thing. I’m fortunate I didn’t do anything unchangeable as a result of this disordered thinking. I’m one of the lucky ones.
This experience is what makes me suspect for this bloke, things in his head were proceeding along a fairly consistent internal logic, right up to the point where he threw his daughter off the bridge and realised just how illogically he was behaving. By which point it was too late – he’d done something unchangeable.
[…] I do agree that we need to look at society, look at the patterns of violent crime, look at the patterns of violent crimes within families and start asking what leads to this, how can we prevent it *before it gets this far*[…]
Exactly. Central to this, I think, is a better understanding of what disordered thinking is, how widespread it is, how prevalent it is, and which bits of our culture reinforce it. We have to prune out some of the toxic memeplexes in our “make-a-human-being-kit” in order to help everyone. Maybe one of those is the notion of the stoic, silent, strong masculine figure, who can cope with everything, and doesn’t need help, and therefore doesn’t know how to ask for help. Maybe it’s the notion of mental illness being some kind of massive stigma, something to be covered up and hidden for life, something nobody must know about. Maybe it’s the notion of “normality” as a goal to shoot for, rather than a statistical creation.
Isolating and othering people isn’t working. Maybe it’s time to change that, too.
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fuckpoliteness
said
Thanks Meg, that’s the best clarification I’ve heard in a long time.
And a wonderful comment on disordered thinking and how ‘othered’ and ‘othering’ it is.
I’d actually like to write something on this: on people using words like ‘crazy’ and ‘evil’ to describe things (Su over at Hoyden who is I think foginthecloister on here raised her objection to the concept of ‘evil’) and i think they can both work to obscure the specificity of the situation, and the social implications for us all, that they can make it sound like one individual just ‘snapped’ in an incomprehensible way…but it keeps happening.