Feminism and the silencing of women

[SheilaNaGig]

Just in case anyone wants to see and read about what Cloo has mentioned there:


Stop asking me ‘what about men?’



ETA I know a lot have already read this. It’s worth revisiting, and also there will be some who haven’t seen it before.

Men, if you’re thinking “this doesnt apply to me/mine/my experience” please read this link and consider that while it may well not be you individually, from a woman’s perspective it’s the background hum of everyday living.

Unless I know you personally and you've proven yourself to be trustworthy, your claim to be an ally doesn’t make a great deal of difference to my tendency to be wary.

 

[Cloo]

Thanks for finding that SheilaNaGig !

 

[SheilaNaGig]

Thanks for finding that SheilaNaGig !

It’s one of the top hits for “women mental health whataboutery” .

 

[8ball]

That’s true. But I seem to think that this particular case isn’t the first instance of something heinous being offered specifically as porn. How the fuck do that many men have a sudden interest to see it, and then actually go to a porn site?

It was the first time I'd seen such a thing.

It’s horribly depressing scifisam . It’s fucking miserable.

Yes, very much so.

Also wanted to say to scifisam - that last post wasn't aimed at you as such, aside from that first sentence where I snapped a little at you for which I apologise. I was still irritated by the "a bit sick?" comment.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

You’ve heard of snuff films though, right?

When I was a teenager, we heard about how rape was filmed and put out as snuff films.

I don’t care about the veracity of this claim. I believed it was true, and so did a lot of us. It was scary.

We live in a culture where it is said, and believed, that men kidnap, rape and kill women for sexual kicks.

It’s not a new thing. The media for disseminating this shit is new, not the phenomenon.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

You’ve heard of snuff films though, right?

When I was a teenager, we heard about how rape was filmed and put out as snuff films.

I don’t care about the veracity of this claim. I believed it was true, and so did a lot of us. It was scary.

We live in a culture where it is said, and believed, that men kidnap, rape and kill women for sexual kicks.

It’s not a new thing. The media for disseminating this shit is new, not the phenomenon.

I’m going to qualify this a bit.

Of course I do care about the veracity of the legend of snuff films.

My point was that even if they didn’t/don’t truly exist, it’s completely believable that they do, and as a teenage girl and young woman, I took on board the possibility that they exist. It seemed plausible to me. It didn’t feel to me as if it wasn’t possible.



ETA
Also, I'm not going to do a google search for “real rape on porn sites” but in a world where real life rape of children is posted online, where the real life rape and sexual assault of young women on American college campuses is widely shared on social media, my memory that rapes have been uploaded to porn sites is likely to be correct. And if I invented it, I did so whilst living with the background noise of the stuff I've mentiond here.

 

[Edie]

I dunno about snuff films but what absolutely is a thing is paying working girls to take a cocktail (benzos or rohypnol or gear or whatever) to knock them out.

 

[8ball]

I’m going to qualify this a bit.

Of course I do care about the veracity of the legend of snuff films.

My point was that even if they didn’t/don’t truly exist, it’s completely believable that they do, and as a teenage girl and young woman, I took on board the possibility that they exist. It seemed plausible to me. It didn’t feel to me as if it wasn’t possible.

Sure but they were clearly niche (for want of a better word), and the thought of them was unambiguously horrific.

What gets me is partly the sheer mundanity of this appearing as a search term option for anyone fancying a grubby self-fumble. That something so horrific is now commoditised by algorithm. That the searches existed for it to pick it up in the first place.
That some software code geared up to pick what in a certain realm are 'normal' searches has gone and spat this out.

That someone being raped, murdered and burned has left that realm of the nightmares that you know really happen (and wish didn't), and has taken up residence in the marketplace of cultural consumer content choices.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

But it’s on a spectrum. It’s the extreme (for now) end of a spectrum but all sexual assault and all extreme pornography is rooted in mundanity.

The mundane every day process of waking up and deciding to add to your wank back, going out and deliberately groping women on the Tube. It's an assault, and it’s horrible and has long term effects on the person who was groped, but for the groper it’s a normal part of their lived experience. Normal to the point of mindane. WHcih is exactly why this shit escalates, why they seek further and greater thrills.

Rapists in prison continue to enjoy the memory of what they did. It’s normal for them. They were thinking about rape before they did it.

It’s well known and documented that a great number of people who used porn tend to seek out stronger stuff. Where do you think the end point is? It starts out shocking and ends up being normalised, and then becomes mundane,

This disgusting and extreme rape * and the way it’s become part of an algorithm is part of the spectrum.

Please don’t be fooled by your sense of shock into believing that it’s not inevitable.




* ETA Actually, it’s fairly normal. Gang rape and murder. It happens. Meh. Burning isn’t normal here, but it’s pretty normal in some places. Gang rape is pretty normal. Murdering the rape victim is fairly normal. And as I’ve been been arguing, it’s also fairly normal to boast about the rape by showing photos, and not abnormal for men to gather round the boast for their own nefarious reasons (from curiosity through to thrills). Although I too found it very shocking to hear the story, on reflection there’s really nothing new in this particular event. And that is the really shocking thing.

 

[trashpony]

Men kill women for their sexual pleasure.

We Can't Consent To This

I’m sure there are many many more that enjoy hurting them but don't go as far as murdering them so I can’t see that it’s a massive stretch to think that even more get off watching other men do it. And it’s fairly well documented that you need ever more extreme violence in porn to get the same hit as you become increasingly desensitised

thanks for posting the link SheilaNaGig

 

[SheilaNaGig]

I understand the reluctance to accept that this shit is part of the normal background noise for half the population. And bear in mind that it’s hugely better here than it is elsewhere in the world.

Now please take that sense of shock, revulsion, reluctance, dawning and creeping understanding, and imagine you’re experiencing all that as a young person, as a person to whom this shit is potentially directed, in a whole huge world where it’s a major part of the status quo.

Please try to imagine that the process of really getting it, understanding that women are all at risk of stuff like this, try to imagine that becoming a part of your consciousness in your formative years.

We’ve being living with this knowledge since we were quite young, some of us very young. So please understand and forgive us for being maybe snappy, or impatient, or exasperated, or just plain pissed off with the way men (NAM) are going “Wait... what? You mean....? No, say it ain’t so! It can’t be! Okay so if it’s true, then here are aaaalllll the qualifiers.”

Alongside the sense of impatience etc. we’re also relieved, grateful and glad that the penny is finally beginning to rattle into the shute.

But fgs please try to fill in some of the gaps for yourselves!

 

[elbows]

Also, when it was said that this is a “new low for humanity” (not going to quote the post, it’s already been contentious) please be aware that this is not “new” at all. It’s a hideous frightening crime, but it’s far from new.

Someone else said (again, I’m not going to quote) - or seemed to be saying - that the world now feels a little sicker and nasty than it was before they’d learned of this particular story. I have to say that the potential for this level of despicable danger doesn’t feel like a new understanding to me.


This is not new. Nor is it a deeper depth.

Yes, this.

If there is anything new at all, its the response to these horrors. eg in some countries where such incidents were mostly buried or shrugged off in the past, there has been wider reporting, public outcry, protests, demands etc.

So yeah, not new, but the fact it is news to some people might, at best, mean there is potential for change being unlocked right now, by virtue of more people being unable to carry on blissfully 'unaware' of the horror.

I know that when momentum started to build in regards things like #metoo some people were not at all optimistic that it would lead to permanent, widescale, meaningful change. The lack of optimism was surely well-founded, based on all that had gone before. eg the ways opposing interests try to shut down this stuff, create a totally different narrative that turns concepts of victim and aggressor on their head, or at least attempts to contain the movement into some narrow dead-end where the exploiters can carry on, back to business as usual. I chose to take a more optimistic stance in spite of this, in part because the crushing of hope and the encouragement of feelings of futility are things the shitheads will encourage in order to preserve the status quo. But even with this optimism, the best I can imagine is still far too little, where even meaningful changes in attitudes will come too slowly, dooming more generations to suffer this shit.

 

[elbows]

As for this country, there is no shortage of disgraceful things happening here in recent years, a bunch of which are quite visible in articles like this one:

Why are rape prosecutions falling?

Some of that stuff is totally the opposite to what I would have hoped to see happening after #metoo, to say it stinks is not even beginning to do the topic justice but sometimes even I am lost for words.

 

[spanglechick]

I’m not sure if this is apocryphal- can someone verify? I remember being told that the Sport/Sunday Sport used to publish details of rape and sexual assault cases as little bite-sized filler around their page three photos.

 

[killer b]

I’m not sure if this is apocryphal- can someone verify? I remember being told that the Sport/Sunday Sport used to publish details of rape and sexual assault cases as little bite-sized filler around their page three photos.

We were told a story at uni (I did journalism) - that in the 1960s the News of the World did a big survey of their readers, sending market researchers out to speak to people in their homes about what they wanted to see more of and less of in the paper - but as they visited during the day, they only spoke to the woman of the house, who overwhelmingly said they wanted to see less sex crime reports.

The sex crime reports were duly dropped, and their sales went through the floor as the men of the house stopped buying it.

 

[spanglechick]

Regarding “all men”.

No one is blaming “all men”: women are complicit in the patriarchy, have a fundamental role to play in the socialisation of little boys, and those boys’ understanding of their own future relationships with women.

Things need to change for future generations and women are squarely in the frame in that regard, alongside fathers and other Male role models, of course. So no one is holding “all men” exclusively responsible for the changes our society needs to make.

But that’s a separate issue to those people committing violent and aggressive crime to both men and women now, in the present. Because those perpetrators are overwhelmingly men.

There’s a thought experiment, that if all men had a curfew of 7pm, how would that change the world. If you like, compare it to a 7pm female curfew. The first would transform society, the second would barely make an impact. Doesn’t that provoke some really big questions?


Look at all violent crime. Armed robbery, rape, terrorism, DV, child abuse... the overwhelming, crushing majority is perpetrated by men. If that majority belonged to, say an imaginary world religion I’m going to name Sudkrat, there would be an understandable social demand to examine the Sudkrat faith and practices, and systemically change them. Peaceable Sudkrats would exist as a majority, but you’d understand why people were concerned about their contact with Sudkrat people - after all, if anyone in your life is going to hurt you, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be a Sudkrat. Peaceful Sudkrats would have to accept responsibility for being a key part of that change.

 

[8ball]

In can see a situation where most of urban would be up in arms about the racist oppression of the Sudkrats, hidden (poorly) by the slender fig leaf of protecting the population from the crimes of a small fanatical sub-group, and that by expecting ordinary non-criminal Sudkrats to accept a kind of collective responsibility for the crimes of the few, expecting Sudkrat community leaders to be on TV when a particularly newsworthy atrocity has happened, etc. the Government is helping to propagate the idea that there is something suspect about all Sudkrats.

Sudkrat is a great word, by the way - where did you get it from?

 

[Pickman's model]

We were told a story at uni (I did journalism) - that in the 1960s the News of the World did a big survey of their readers, sending market researchers out to speak to people in their homes about what they wanted to see more of and less of in the paper - but as they visited during the day, they only spoke to the woman of the house, who overwhelmingly said they wanted to see less sex crime reports.

The sex crime reports were duly dropped, and their sales went through the floor as the men of the house stopped buying it.

went off to have a look into this and in 1964 the circulation did plummet for a couple of months, but haven't been able to find another explanation

Spoiler: circulation of notw 1963-65

 

[elbows]

There’s a thought experiment, that if all men had a curfew of 7pm, how would that change the world. If you like, compare it to a 7pm female curfew. The first would transform society, the second would barely make an impact. Doesn’t that provoke some really big questions?

I got all bogged down in details and questions when I tried this thought experiment. eg I look at society, work and social patterns in 2019 and I cannot imagine a 7pm female curfew barely making an impact, the impact would be pronounced.

And then I get tempted to attach specific things to this experiment that may not be the intention of it at all. eg I look at the amount of violence that likely happens inside the home, regardless of whether someone has been out on the piss or not. And some of the things that seem to trigger potentially violent men to engage in violence on a particular occasion, and whether removing some scenarios with violent potential will actually reduce the violence, or have unintended consequences of shifting it elsewhere, perhaps somewhere less visible but no less brutal and horrific.

Sorry about that, I think I ended up on the wrong track. Can you give an example of the sort of big question it was supposed to provoke?

 

[JudithB]

For the men on this thread, what have you practically done to address societal man's violent and abusive behaviour?

 

[ElizabethofYork]

For the men on this thread, what have you practically done to address societal man's violent and abusive behaviour?

Sudkrats - what have you done to address Sudkrat's violent and abusive behaviour?

 

[8ball]

For the men on this thread, what have you practically done to address societal man's violent and abusive behaviour?

Oh, arse. I thought the Sudkrats were meant to be Muslims. I'm rubbish at analogies.

 

[JudithB]

Sudkrats - what have you done to address Sudkrat's violent and abusive behaviour?

Men have come on here and NAMALT'd, have suggested women sort out their mess and therefore I am interested to know what they have done. For instance I know Michael very well who runs Men at Work. So it is not as if men cannot do something about this.

 

[8ball]

Men have come on here and NAMALT'd, have suggested women sort out their mess and therefore I am interested to know what they have done. For instance I know Michael very well who runs Men at Work. So it is not as if men cannot do something about this.

Have tried to type a more serious response a few times, but I'm not getting it right and have re-typed several times while trying to get some thoughts together. Probably need to sit on it and try later.

 

[killer b]

For the men on this thread, what have you practically done to address societal man's violent and abusive behaviour?

I challenge it, and sexist behaviour, when I come across it (and tbf if I feel up to it). Beyond that, it's a bit like asking what we're doing to combat the climate crisis: what's needed is huge, revolutionary social change, not recycling - and it's difficult to get to grips with what you, as an individual, can do that might actually make a difference.

 

[JudithB]

I wonder if conciousness raising groups would work. In the same vein as the second wave feminists. Instead of women learning of eachothers oppression, men talk about the way in which they are acting as the oppressive class and what could be done to remedy it. I am very unsure men would have the guts to do it. A class of people admitting they can be dicks as well as admitting they are the main (97% isn't it) perpetrators of sexual assault is a pretty tough ask.

 

[elbows]

For the men on this thread, what have you practically done to address societal man's violent and abusive behaviour?

Its not that likely that the times I spoke or listened in this context actually made any practical difference, despite my intent.

Probably the one time I made a practical difference it was a side-effect rather than my original prime intent. A stranger beat me up and broke my nose when I was 17, on a Friday evening outside McDonalds. I ignored the intimidation from some of his friends who ended up in the same ambulance as me (ugh), and societies mixed messages about being a grass, and engaged with the justice system to ensure he was convicted. Then, some years later when he was charged with beating up his partner and destroying their house, his prior convictions were taken into account when sentencing him. At most this probably just bought a little extra time where nobody could be a fresh victim of his violence, but nothing I did was likely to have broken any cycles of abuse even in just one man, let alone the wider problem.

 

[killer b]

I wonder if conciousness raising groups would work. In the same vein as the second wave feminists. Instead of women learning of eachothers oppression, men talk about the way in which they are acting as the oppressive class and what could be done to remedy it. I am very unsure men would have the guts to do it. A class of people admitting they can be dicks as well as admitting they are the main (97% isn't it) perpetrators of sexual assault is a pretty tough ask.

I think you might struggle to get many men to sign up to a discussion group where they talk to each other about how terrible they are, yeah.

 

[Pickman's model]

I wonder if conciousness raising groups would work. In the same vein as the second wave feminists. Instead of women learning of eachothers oppression, men talk about the way in which they are acting as the oppressive class and what could be done to remedy it. I am very unsure men would have the guts to do it. A class of people admitting they can be dicks as well as admitting they are the main (97% isn't it) perpetrators of sexual assault is a pretty tough ask.

I imagine the women at your feminism groups were there because they wanted to be and were broadly in agreement about sexism and patriarchy. The men whose behaviour you wish to change aren't imo likely to go, the men who would go probably already have to varying extents the views you wish espoused, but above all you're looking at people post-socialisation when what you want is to instil attitudes earlier on. So perhaps working on reducing societal othering by eliminating as far as possible single sex schools and teaching appropriate ethics at an early age.

 

[8ball]

I think you might struggle to get many men to sign up to a discussion group where they talk to each other about how terrible they are, yeah.

Kind of a group therapy thread...?