by Molly Ivors
Wow, two posts in two days. But this one's been stewing for a few.
The Truth: I have never been struck by a man. Ever. I don't think that has so much to do with me (my sister, raised by the same parents, was beaten by her husband), but probably more with the men with whom I have chosen to surround myself, Thers included. Violence just isn't part of their nature.
Perhaps that's why I have been so deeply disturbed by this video, posted by three sites I admire very much: Hecate, Echidne, and Pandagon. The idea of someone dressing down their spouse like that, let alone on camera and in front of their children, horrifies me more than I can say. The physical violence, though not beside the point, is simply an extension of the verbal abuse. I don't know how one gets to that place: I've never been there. But I also don't know how he got to the place where this was not only okay, but admirable, something he wanted to document for posterity, to teach his son how to handle women, and to justify his own behavior.
The video was made in 2003, not so long ago. I was thinking of this while reading Judith Warner's blog in the NYTimes today. She opines here that Thelma & Louise, that bastion of early 90's feminist fury, is now a relic of an earlier time:
“Thelma and Louise” is primarily a movie about sexual violence. It’s
about all the myriad forms that sexual violence can take – from the
psychic violence done to Thelma, who at 18 married her boyfriend of
four long years, to the shattering physical violence of Louise’s
long-buried rape, to the verbal and gestural violence done to both
women by the endless stream of drive-by harassers who pollute their
road trip. It’s about the long-term effects of such psychic and
physical violence: the childlike Thelma, blindly drawn to men who
victimize her again and again, the raging Louise, shut down on the
surface but harboring a burning, ultimately self-immolating, rage.
..........
Yet in 1991 it was altogether understandable that a movie about sexual
violence would be turned into a fable about women’s general social and
political progress. It made perfect sense then to conflate sexual
violence – in all its verbal, psychic, physical and political forms —
with sexual politics. That year, the William Kennedy Smith rape case
went to trial, belittling and publicly humiliating the victim; Anita
Hill confronted Clarence Thomas and emerged besmirched while he reigned
victorious; and Roe v. Wade seemed destined for extinction.
All true, and yet we live in a world where verbal and sexual abuse of women is still, if not the norm, a regular practice for a significant subculture.
Many of the comments on the YouTube video blame the victim for her own abuse, either siding directly with the abuser ("haha that girl had it coming, she belongs in the kitchen./
i mean seriously look at how shes dressed, if your woman isn’t acting right, hit her easy as that./works for me.") or suggesting that by marrying a black man, she was asking for it ("A mentally defective women who defiles herself with groids got exactly
what she deserved. The same lesson should be served to the brain-dead
liberal twats who refer to honesty about negros as “racist”. "). Such responses are chilling, not only because they ignore copious amounts of research into the nature of victimization and abusive relationships, but also because they ignore the key point here: she did get out. Lucky to be alive, as the judge notes toward the end of the video, and late, but out.
The racism angle here is particularly galling, since this story follows so closely on the heels of this one, in which a group of whites kidnapped a young black woman for the sole purpose of sexual torture.
Deputies found the 23-year-old victim Saturday after going to the
home in Big Creek, about 35 miles southwest of Charleston, to
investigate an anonymous tip. One of the suspects, Frankie Brewster,
was sitting on the front porch and told deputies she was alone, but
moments later the victim limped toward the door, her arms outstretched,
saying "help me," the sheriff's department said in a news release.
Besides being sexually assaulted, the victim was stabbed four times
in the left leg and beaten, Porter said. Both of her eyes were black
and blue. Deputies said the woman's wounds were inflicted at least a
week ago.
During her capture, the victim was forced to eat rat and dog feces
and drink from the toilet, according to the criminal complaint filed in
magistrate court. The woman also was choked with a cable cord and her
hair cut, it alleges.
One of those arrested, Karen Burton, is accused of cutting the
woman's ankle with a knife. She used the N-word in telling the woman
she was victimized because she is black, according to the criminal
complaint.
Deputies say the woman was also doused with hot water while being sexually assaulted.
"We have called the feds," Chief Deputy V.K. Dingess with the Logan
County Sheriff's Department said Monday. "They may pick this up as a
hate crime."
You think?
What really impressed me about this case is that half the perpetrators were women--mothers, even--and some of the sexual violence included what was essentially female-on-female rape. That's relatively unusual, statistically speaking, and so notable.
Without excusing the behaviors, it's worth noting that in both cases, the abusers were economically and culturally disempowered: the husband of the woman in New York was an unemployed musician sure that she was sneaking around with men at work, and the rednecks live in a part of West Virginia where there is just, well, nothing. Once there was coal; now there's just public assistance, pretty much. In each case, they were looking for someone else that they could force to eat shit (literally, in WV). We live in an increasingly brutal and openly racist age, where hatred is as close as the tree outside your high school, and a woman with two infant children is castigated not for being a bad mother with substance abuse issues, but because she's not the same shape she was at 17.
And so no, Judith Warner, unfortunately the world of Thelma & Louise is not a relic of an earlier, less hopeful time. Yes, many young women today refuse to be victimized, and yes, we now know about date rape and domestic abuse. But knowledge is not the only thing that matters. Warner claims that rape claims, for example, are down 75% from the early 90's, but as several of her commenters note, these are dodgy numbers at best, and rape often goes unreported. From my own observation of young women, many feel that if they were along for part of the ride, they have tacitly consented to intercourse, whether it was their intention or not. This may explain the drop in numbers, if indeed there has been such a drop.
But as the two cases I note here clearly demonstrate, violence against women--whether intimate relations or strangers from the internet--is alive and well, and the fact that Thelma & Louise could not be made now is not a sign of progress, but of regression.
