Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
#fairnessforrippers
Museum billed as celebration of London women opens as Jack the Ripper exhibit
- Thread starter Belushi
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Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
140 characters or fewer. don't worry, i don't think any the less of you.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
yeh but it would be full of pricks
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
fred west experience. ladies free.
8den
No I'm pretty sure that was 8ball...
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
i wasn't correcting your grammar.
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
“...exit by prior agreement only.”
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
"Please leave your bags at the Reception Desk and your jewellery with Primrose Shipman"
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wobbly
depends on how it was being discussed. the profession was an open subject of discourse, thanks to the campaigns over the contagius diseases acts and the 5 pound virgins. it can be fairly easy to slip into the mistake of accepting one particular thread of victoriana and take that as an overfall view. the campaigners aganist the CDA certainly believed that prostitutes could be raped. and openly condemned the forced medical exams of women as rape.
but the generally held belief is that the penetration with a knife was a substitute for penetration with his penis. because of impotence, fear of disease or being really, really, really fucked up in the head. probably a combi of all 3. and i think there was enough published on this that the public were aware that jack was fucked up in a very special way. the victorian press didn't openly lay on all the salacious gossipy details of people's sex lives the way our press do (unless it was a divorce suit), but they were also blunt and rude in far more detail than most of today's press. and sailed very very close to the wind of libel laws with easily identifiable and well known nicknames used for public figures so they could publish rumour, not fact and not be technically committing libel. i don't think it was until recently, with internet publishing that we have seen something more open and competitive and pushy and challenging to authority (within the mainstream) than the Victorian press. sometimes you have to read a lot of stuff to learn the codes being used, the jokes being made, what bits of gossip the cartoons refer to. but don't mistake it not being discussed openly with it not being discussed. anyone reading those papers knew the code.
and no, the fact that these women were brutally murdered was not enough. lots of women were murdered. it was the particular nature of jack's crimes and the fact he was never identified so could be the spectre haunting St Giles that made him infamous. the fear for many years that he would return, kept the myth alive until it's taken on a life of it's own. and it's left behind some of the original detail of the case. that jack was a sexual sadist, who sliced up his victims because he couldn't rape them. that murder was the side effect of his thrill (and the necessity to hide his identity), not the actual aim for him.
and it's not enough to know they were brutally murdered because it was so much worse. and knowing how much worse it was makes it even more disgusting that the myths are being sanatised and used in the way they are to make money. this is why we must talk about the details, to talk about what we are turning into a folk anti-hero. about how bad this is.
do we create industries arround other serial killers who used a knife as a substitute for their non functioning genitalia? we don't create fun mythologies arround Sutcliffe, Ed Gain, the green river killer, Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy. the idea is nauseating. the brutality, methodology and motive of jack puts him in that list. Do you know what you're celebrating? - that is the question that challenges the mythology and will attack the bullshit.
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wobbly
Dr Riddell is an expert on Victorian attitudes to sex. who could and probably has said all the stuff I said above better and with a lot more authority than me. She's also very nice and helped me out finding resources to learn some of the codes I mentioned above when I was trying to dig through them in relation to a late Victorian divorce case.
what she says is something I'd really really take seriously and listen to.
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wobbly
equationgirl - this is the point. not discussing the detail divorces us from the horror. forcing discussion of the detail will, I hope, sicken many of those who feed off the mythology.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
what i have long found strange is the number of people who do the jack the ripper tours, including a large number of young women. it's not like jack the ripper was some merry prankster like the joker out of batman, he was a vicious and depraved man who brutally murdered women - i don't know what the attraction is to tours about his killings.
Lurdan
old wave
Gender and class for sure. Profession - maybe. As far as I'm aware there is no actual evidence that Catherine Eddowes was a prostitute other than assumptions based on the fact that by Victorian standards she wasn't 'respectable', or the circular logic that 'Jack the Ripper' killed prostitutes, 'Jack the Ripper' killed Catherine Eddowes, therefore Catherine Eddowes was a prostitute etc. These murders have been mythologised, fetishised and sexualised to such an extent that I think it's worth testing every aspect of how they are presented, the victims in particular.
Rather reluctantly under the circumstances I'd say that extends to whether the crimes were sexually motivated. Perfectly reasonable to argue they may have been, ridiculous to argue, as this PR wanker does, that they were definitely not. But not all misogynistic violence is sexually motivated, and at the end of the day like much to do with these atrocities we can't know for certain.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
it wasn't so much the lack of detail, more the twitter quibbling that the ripper didn't sexually abuse the women when he quite obviously did, with a knife.
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wobbly
himself has gone to the phisio atm, but i think he could probably explain some of that better than i could. because he does true crime writing and knows his audience. what i do know is that he won't go near the one handed writing about sexual murders and finds it nauseating. but creating the sanatised myth of the ripper takes it out of that area. and makes it more acceptable to the mainstream of that genre. which is hugely popular.
but idk, safely touching evil, enough distance that it isn't real. a reasurance that it was a long time ago to women not like them. it couldn't happen here, to us? idk really. need to talk moe with him and think a bit more before answering more.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
It could happen to any of us though. The Yorkshire ripper thought he was ridding the world of prostitutes for example, but all not his victims were.
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wobbly
ok.
at the upper end of the profession was the professional mistress, who was full time, all the time. but at the lower end, women often drifted in and out of prostitution and other work depending on what was available and better for them at the time and there wouldn't have been much to differentiate them from Eddowes, if you saw them walking past you on the street. whether eddowes was a prostitute ins't the relavent issue when looking at why she was a victim and whether jack had a type, but whether jack picked her thinking she was because of how she looked and where she was. i think it's reasonable to believe that he made that assumption and that there was a pattern of picking women of that profession (or that he believed were).
and the belief in sexual motivation is largely from what he did when he had the safety to take more time.
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Absolutely right. Victorian prudery is a bit of a myth, they had no problem communicating explicit sexual detail, they were just less crude about it than we are. Think of Middlemarch's Dorothea gazing at nude paintings cos she's not getting any from Causobon etc.
Btw I'm surprised no-one's mentioned this:
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wobbly
which is why focuussing on a case that gives that safe distance between themselves and the victims. in time and in perception of themselves
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wobbly
The aforementioned Dr Riddell's book on Victorian sexuality is on my to-read list. but from her, i do know they were not necessarily less crude, judging by her descriptions of victorian porn in the british library. but sexuality was a private thing. the judgement for showing off your sexuality in public wasn't for having that sexuality, but for the public expression of matters that belonged in private. the coded discussion of matters allowed some public discussion and condemnation of other people's dirty laundry without becoming participatpry in the publicising of the private matters. it's all terribly convoluted, but in many ways, no less so than the public assumptions of our own society.
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wobbly
that is about the lack of detail in my view. he stabbed women. didn't rape them. them is the sanatised myth that is perpetrated by not knowing the details. knowing the penetration by the knife was the substitute for penetration by the penis so it was in effect a rape using the knife is the detail that is needed to make the mythologising unpalatable.
Attitudes varied widely with class. Sex was private for the bourgeoisie and the "respectable" working class, but certainly not for the aristocracy or the lumpenproletariat.
I assume you already know this book, it's still the classic study imo:
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wobbly
Attitudes varied widely with class. Sex was private for the bourgeoisie and the "respectable" working class, but certainly not for the aristocracy or the lumpenproletariat.
I assume you already know this book, it's still the classic study imo:
yes, and what we see as victorian values is largely what was in their press. which was expressing the mainstream middle class views, with only small variations from religion and politics.
Even with the bourgeoisie, what they said in public was very different from what they did in private. Check out this guy, he was pretty much the incarnation of the one track mind:
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