sff_corgi_lj (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sff_corgi_lj) wrote2007-05-26 07:24 am
sff_corgi_lj) wrote2007-05-26 07:24 am
Entry tags:
'Let's Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death.'
(Tipped off by 
Ashavah
Qadgop
...and this is how Joss Whedon makes me cry.
AshavahQadgopLet's Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death. This is not my blog, but I don't have a blog, or a space, and I'd like to be heard for a bit.
Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron "honor killing", in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.
There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.
I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it's been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda. I like to think that in America this would be considered unbearably appalling, that Kitty Genovese is still remembered, that we are more evolved. But coincidentally, right before I stumbled on this vid I watched the trailer for "Captivity".
A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by "The Killing Fields" Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is "I'm sorry".
"I'm sorry."
What is wrong with women?
I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.
How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I'm no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn't buy into it. Women's inferiority – in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they're sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.
I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I'm sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they're also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they've also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, "If all we do is hunt and gather, let's make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let's make childbirth kinda weak and shameful." It's a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it's entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women's behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.
It's safe to say that I've snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I've looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I've shorted out. I don't pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I'm not for a second going down the "women are saints" route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn't that tradition eventually fall apart? (I was going to use ‘trees' as my example, but at the rate we're getting rid of them I'm pretty sure we really do think they're evil. See how all rants become one?)
Now those of you who frequent this site are, in my wildly biased opinion, fairly evolved. You may hear nothing new here. You may be way ahead of me. But I can't contain my despair, for Dua Khalil, for humanity, for the world we're shaping. Those of you who have followed the link I set up know that it doesn't bring you to a video of a murder. It brings you to a place of sanity, of people who have never stopped asking the question of what is wrong with this world and have set about trying to change the answer. Because it's no longer enough to be a decent person. It's no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. I've always had a bent towards apocalyptic fiction, and I'm beginning to understand why. I look and I see the earth in flames. Her face was nothing but red.
All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once. If you can't think of what to do, there is this handy link. Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you're all in it now.
I have never had any faith in humanity. But I will give us props on this: if we can evolve, invent and theorize our way into the technologically magical, culturally diverse and artistically magnificent race we are and still get people to buy the idiotic idea that half of us are inferior, we're pretty amazing. Let our next sleight of hand be to make that myth disappear.
The sky isn't evil. Try looking up.
Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron "honor killing", in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.
There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.
I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it's been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda. I like to think that in America this would be considered unbearably appalling, that Kitty Genovese is still remembered, that we are more evolved. But coincidentally, right before I stumbled on this vid I watched the trailer for "Captivity".
A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by "The Killing Fields" Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is "I'm sorry".
"I'm sorry."
What is wrong with women?
I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.
How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I'm no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn't buy into it. Women's inferiority – in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they're sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.
I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I'm sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they're also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they've also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, "If all we do is hunt and gather, let's make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let's make childbirth kinda weak and shameful." It's a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it's entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women's behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.
It's safe to say that I've snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I've looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I've shorted out. I don't pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I'm not for a second going down the "women are saints" route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn't that tradition eventually fall apart? (I was going to use ‘trees' as my example, but at the rate we're getting rid of them I'm pretty sure we really do think they're evil. See how all rants become one?)
Now those of you who frequent this site are, in my wildly biased opinion, fairly evolved. You may hear nothing new here. You may be way ahead of me. But I can't contain my despair, for Dua Khalil, for humanity, for the world we're shaping. Those of you who have followed the link I set up know that it doesn't bring you to a video of a murder. It brings you to a place of sanity, of people who have never stopped asking the question of what is wrong with this world and have set about trying to change the answer. Because it's no longer enough to be a decent person. It's no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. I've always had a bent towards apocalyptic fiction, and I'm beginning to understand why. I look and I see the earth in flames. Her face was nothing but red.
All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once. If you can't think of what to do, there is this handy link. Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you're all in it now.
I have never had any faith in humanity. But I will give us props on this: if we can evolve, invent and theorize our way into the technologically magical, culturally diverse and artistically magnificent race we are and still get people to buy the idiotic idea that half of us are inferior, we're pretty amazing. Let our next sleight of hand be to make that myth disappear.
The sky isn't evil. Try looking up.
...and this is how Joss Whedon makes me cry.
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And yes on Joss.
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Yes is a vast understatement for Joss.
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You can't half tell I'm bored, can you?
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(What on earth is that harpoon joke from? Somehow, I think it's from an Archie comic, but I could be way off.)
I'm finding myself being very non-eloquent lately. Both about this and also about Pirates reviews. I seem to be posting a lot of "yes" type responses. Obviously my thesis has eaten my brain and/or eloquence. So then I get bored and run around the internet declaring "YES!" There's a side-effect of honours I hadn't foreseen.
And to expand a little on the "yes" about Joss, I will say that I think it is marvellous to have prominent men noticing issues like this and taking a stance on them. Because, like you were saying on my lj the other day, there's often so little awareness and publicity about things that really should be brought to people's attention. (I realise that was a completely different situation, but I think the oppression of women fits into the same category in that there are just so many instances, and so many of them we hear nothing about.) The incident Joss was railing against was horrific, and I thought the perspective that he put on cultural attitudes to women was fascinating. I've never really thought about the what's supposedly wrong with women issue, and it's great to see it being brought into the public light to sort of make people question it a little. Because it's on assumptions like that that inequality and oppression are based.
Huh. Maybe I did have some eloquence left in me. ;-D
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Although I know some people would have objections to the idea that a man's word has more weight than a woman's, I have a qualification: I/we expect women to want to stand up for themselves (which is why I find anti-choice and neocon women so much more abhorrent); I/we don't expect to find men willing to acknowledge that women are getting the short dirty end, even - or especially - when it's sneakily covered in satin and frosting. And men who're also willing to admit it's their collective fault. Sad but true.
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[edits because I can]
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to yo uadn to him.
forthe rest? no comments.
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Our nation is supposed to be enlightened and so much better than everyone else, right? Yet its citizens are just as responsible, just as guilty of the behavior that it publicly criticizes when it happens in other countries. We may not stone our women for sex outside of marriage, or for being involved in interracial, mixed-religion relationships... but we certainly do punish ourselves. It is still at the back of a lot of people's minds that women are physically and emotionally weak, and I know women who cling to that image because it is easier than fighting against it or more appealing to gain sympathy.
I push myself so hard that inevitably, I break down in tears. Then I am accused of making mountains of molehills and not being sane. My family, whom I love dearly, worry about my emotional and mental health, since manic-depression/ bipolar disorder runs in the family. I point out that so does diabetes and high blood pressure.
(When my daughter was diagnosed with a complex seizure disorder, my family wanted to protect her and cushion her from the real world. I've tried to balance that by allowing her to ride bikes, scooters, rollercoasters, etc. and trying to treat her like every other child.)
Anyway, before I go too far down a shiny tangent, the point I'm making is that even I can be guilty of self-deprecation. It's easier for me to say I'm sorry for something that I am not guilty of, because I am sorry for the mess or inconvenience. It's easier for me to back down when someone raises their voice. It's more difficult for me to tell someone I love that I disagree with them, or that I may have more knowledge or experience in a certain subject... all because I do not want to hurt anyone's feelings. I tried to be the peacemaker, the voice of reason, the devil's advocate. I do not try hard enough to state my opinion or stick to my beliefs when confronted by an opposing view.
This is how I was brought up... how about you?
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Interestingly enough, a parallel conversation has been going on in Susan Shwartz's SFF Net newsgroup (will take considerable digging) (and I would swear she has an LJ but I can't find it). A couple of them, who are a wee bit older than me, were talking about what part of themselves they sacrificed to keep the rest. For Susan, iirc, it was math. She was doing so well in school in general she was a target - because girls weren't supposed to be that smart, you see. I'm probably not doing it justice, but it provokes very deep thoughts.
Me in a nutshell (help! I'm in a nutshell!)
Youngest Child/ Only Daughter
The Peacemaker
Overachieving Golden Child (i.e. Mom lived vicariously through me.)
Pretty much, my father is a glorified sperm donor. He beat my mom and drank, and controlled her every move. He is responsible for the back injury that is
slowly crippling her. (Of course, the doctors did not think she would ever walk, but she had three kids to support without a high school diploma. She sure as shit would regain full use of her body.)His family has a river in Egypt named after them. *rolls eyes* So, I do not know anyone from his family.
My mom and I were best friends. We did everything together. We rarely fought until I went away to college. The reason for this is that I did not dream of rebelling against her. First of all, I felt that Fate had dealt her a shitty hand, and I did not want to cause further trouble. Secondly, she was as lonely as I was. I wanted to please her more than hang out with friends. I kept my nose clean and studied my ass off. I received a scholarship for a private Catholic high school. I went to church every Sunday. I volunteered at the hospital. I sang in the choir and onstage. I worked afterschool jobs to pay for my dance classes.
Then, I was accepted into Tufts University, but I turned them down for a full scholarship to a different college... which was out-of-state. I had realized about two years previous that her love was suffocating, and so I had encouraged her to go back to school for her GED. I knew that once I left home, (and believe me, I needed to leave home)that she would be lonely, and that she needed something to do for herself. So, we ended up going to college at the same time, but in different states. She became an early childhood teacher, and I became a writer.
She had told me many times that singing and writing did not pay, and that so many peoples' dreams are dashed in Hollywood. (Maybe when she was younger, surrounded by twelve siblings, she dreamed of a Hollywood home and the starlet life.) Regardless, she disapproved of pursuing a career in performing arts and dissuaded me from trying to get published.
That was the first major disagreement.
It did not help my bohemian lifestyle's case when I came out as bisexual, vegetarian and Wiccan. (As one of the characters on Wonderfalls put it, "You're trying them all on for size, aren't ya?")
Of course, just when I had figured things out and began reveling in my newfound identity, I met my husband. Innocently enough, I asked him to spend the night since we became best friends. It was cold, we snuggled, and we kissed. I was surprised that we fell so hard and so fast for each other. I was more surprised when I got pregnant. He was the most surprised, when I told him that I did not expect him to marry me... I had to prove something to myself and to my family first: that I was not going to get married just because I got knocked up. Too many women in my family got pregnant and married right away, and I was scared that maybe we were not ready to be parents, let alone husband and wife.
Re: Me in a nutshell (help! I'm in a nutshell!)
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Joss is such a wonderful and unique man and I'm happy to be part of his fandom in some small way...
Now as to the other...
I just have no words.
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I get all tangled up with what I want to say, and saying it right, and then the moment slips far, far away. It's no real excuse for not acting, though.
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And my problem, too, is I have all these words but I can't get them to form coherent and logical thought to these monstrosities...it leaves me without words then. Argh.
But thanks for keeping us aware, Corgi.
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I haven't watched the original video, don't want to/don't need to, but what Joss doesn't mention is that they apparently also stripped her from the waist down by the time it was done.
They called this justice, and in Allah's name. Makes you wonder why more 'people' aren't struck by lightning for all the name-taking-in-vain.