I watched Kirsty Wark's programme Blurred Lines recently. Like most people, I suspect, I was shocked by the situation it described: a casual and endemic rape culture, and one which access to the internet has apparently made significantly worse. I consider that item to be an excellent piece of journalism. It was important, urgent, and the problem being reported was calmly, clearly and systematically described. It prompted a lot of conversations. These thoughts have emerged from some of the conversations I have had.
The only part of the programme that didn't work for me was the very end, where the item concluded with note of hope that the fundamentally neutral character of the internet meant that women would be able to use it to challenge the rape culture it currently mediates. This felt to me like a mandatory but spurious positive ending added on to avoid leaving the audience utterly despondent after a clinical and highly effective description of a serious problem with no apparent solution.
The programme got me thinking about this problem and how to solve it. This is not indulgence in a frivolous academic exercise for me of course. Like most men I have a wife, a mother, sisters, a daughter, lots of women whose safety and happiness are paramount to me, and sons who I want to see grow up to be capable of fulfilling and respectful relationships with women. So the need to solve this problem is directly and personally relevant and compelling. For example I don't want my daughter exposed to the relentless, exhausting, degrading and demoralising abuse some of the girls on the programme had to endure just to participate in online gaming communities, and I don't want my sons being involved in this.
So I started to look at the evidence to see if the problem could be described in a way that makes a solution possible. I suppose opting for this approach is a result of my technical and scientific background. I decided quite quickly that a lot of the discussion of the topic in feminist literature was not helpful. For example, one key theme of the programme was the way in which rape culture prevails amongst "geeks". This is a community of people often marginalised from mainstream culture and society and so is not as conditioned by its norms, such as the patriarchal structures described by feminists. Members of this community often hold society and its problematic norms and values in as much disdain as anyone who is concerned with solving society's problems, and yet for some reason they are still subject to this specific societal problem. They can be and often are excluded or ostracised from society in a potentially brutal manner that would break the most insidious social conditioning and erase all of the tedious aspirations and attitudes convention requires of them and yet this problem still lingers, indeed thrives. So existing feminist criticism of social values and conditioning that this group has already rejected does not contribute to the analysis of the problem.
A lot of the existing discussion of the problem, such as the problem of patriarchy, seems to me to describe but not diagnose. There are lists of symptoms but no solutions. The underlying issue is eluding us somehow. Patriarchy may be implicated in other areas of the oppression of women, but there is something key to the understanding of rape that is not explained by it. Women are objectified in our culture, and objectification certainly correlates with rape, but it is not clear to me that this objectification is the origin of rape, rather than another consequence of a common cause. We are not describing the problem in a way is amenable to its solution.
Other observations I considered include the fact that we are talking about a behaviour that all men are capable of. We are not discussing the actions of a definable set of psychopaths. You can't test a man to see whether he will rape or not and then remove him from society. We cannot solve the problem by isolating rapists a priori. So in describing the problem in a manner amenable to its solution we have to look at circumstances that apply to all men. Also, most rapes are not premeditated. There will certainly be occasions where a psychotic or sadistic individual uses rape as an instrument for some premeditated outrage, but for the moment I am setting that to one side as a special category for which special measures and interventions should be available, rather than a widespread general social and cultural problem, which is how I would categorise the endemic casual unpremeditated rape or equivalent online behaviour perpetrated by "normal" men described in the programme.
In addition, access to the internet seems to have exacerbated rather than alleviated the problem. That is an understatement, as the programme clearly demonstrated. Somehow rather than being a forum which mediates a culture free from the problems of rape that exist in society generally, providing intercourse among individuals liberated from society's conventional patriarchal structures, the internet has massively amplified the problem. It is as though with the internet, with respect to rape culture, we have somehow inadvertently placed a brick on the gas and pointed the car at a wall. It is a disaster.
While thinking about this I found myself reflecting on one idea: our concept of beauty. These are imagined social constructs. Certainly they include biological imperatives such as indicators of health and reproductive capacity, but crucially, also include fantasies about routes to intimacy. I was thinking about the complicated narratives wrapped up in our ideas of beauty, the routes to intimacy which they describe, and whether incomplete or distorted narratives can alienate normal men in a way that enables them to commit rape.
Consider the small child who watches or listens to a fairy tale and absorbs the implicit set of trades, bargains, negociations and deals entailed by the fantasy it describes. For example, consider the beautiful princess rescued by the valiant knight, an easily recognisable and common motif. Her vulnerability and dependence is intrinsic to her beauty in the story, while endurance and capability are central to beauty of the male protagonist. The rescue itself is an exchange in which the knight and the princess both achieve validation of these attributes and acceptance of each other as a key to achieving a resolution which implies intimacy. This tableau represents concepts of beauty that are highly complex and offers connected sets of interrelated trades. The participants in these concepts of beauty are reliant on each other for fulfilling the requirements of these trades, the outcome of which is intimacy. Beauty is our way of negociating approaches to intimacy. What we find beautiful, in all its culturally specific detail, is a kind of map that plots our course towards each other, avoiding threats and hazards until our bodies and minds can meet through contact and conversation and profound understanding.
In all its complexity, beauty is a marvellous intimacy engine that can drive us into each other’s arms. However, if it’s is not operated properly, or if it is malfunctioning in some way, that beauty is transformed and twisted into something opposite and ugly. The tone of the dialogue is distored into something shrill. Attempts at intimacy end up on the rocks. Trades are thwarted and engagement becomes invasion. The engine is shackled and eventually tears itself apart. The risk of this is increased significantly when we consider beauty to be a passive attribute rather than an active process, when we don't consider our standards of beauty to be contingent and temporary terms in the negociation in which we slowly, gradually reveal ourselves to each other, and believe them to be absolute, to be demands that must be met without equivocation. We are then driving this intimacy engine blindfold. And the internet accelerates this journey and blindfolds us more securely than ever before by enabling greater emphasis on representations of beauty as a passive impersonal attributes that can be observed without direct involvement by the observer, and portraying standards of beauty as static, immutable and absolute, and something to be adhered to.
The way someone looks to you changes as you get to know them. Some people who you initially thought conformed to some ideals of beauty become less attractive if you find them to be selfish or shallow, while others whose first impression might have been less favourable become infinitely more fascinating as you discover their generosity and happiness . And we can all think of individuals whose physical beauty is not due to conformance to some ideal of perfection but rather to some odd combination of idiosyncratic features which we find intensely pleasing but don't know why. The key thing is to understand that beauty is not an impersonal attribute but a process, a set of rules, rituals and languages, a complex mechanism which we use to navigate that most perilous of journeys, the journey towards intimacy with each other, and it is a mechanism that we cannot operate alone. The internet however encourages the catastrophically flawed view that beauty is something we can steer single-handed, not to put too fine a point on it.
The portrayal of beauty as something one-sided, something that can be represented, observed, and appreciated, that can conform to artificial ideals of "perfection", rather than as an exhilarating negotiation of intimacy in which we mutually participate, perpetuates the problem. And the internet is implicated in the representation of beauty as an impersonal attribute rather than engine of intimacy. It restricts our ability to participate fully in the joint endeavour that is getting to know someone. These limited ideas of beauty blindfold us while we ride our intimacy engines faster and faster. Our abject failure to understand and maintain the delicate mechanism we are driving leads to catastrophic malfunction, and the result is an ugly twisted mess that no-one walks away from.
So as I try and find a solution, at the moment I find myself looking at ways in which we can equip men with narratives of beauty which are not incomplete or one-sided, ones in which they join in rather than feel left out, ones that are open-ended and ongoing. Perhaps we need to help men rediscover a sense of quest? Or is that just for fairy tales?
Or to adopt a more direct, phallic and macho analogy, help them understand that their intimacy engines require careful maintenance and expert handling if they hope to get anywhere with them. And maybe sometimes they need to sit in the passenger seat.
No comments:
Post a Comment