Fuck Politeness

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?