links for 2009-06-14
June 14, 2009-
We are none of us entirely free of prejudice. A wise man once said that “racism is the water through which we all swim”. But the idea is to swim against the current, folks, not get swept along with it. We challenge our racism whenever it appears in us. And we do so not because we’re being oppressed by political correctness, but because ultimately racism lessens us as individuals, it attacks the foundations of the society we live in and it’s no less than a direct assault upon the human soul.
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Punk ideology embraces anarchy and individualism, rebellion and free thought. The first fiction genre to adopt the -punk suffix, cyberpunk, featured political and social dystopias in which antiheroic hackers struggled against powerful megacorporations. The genre did evolve its own aesthetic over time — mirrorshades and black dusters, body modification and street fashion — but it never abandoned its central theme of individual struggle against an oppressive society.
Such sociopolitical commentary hasn’t been as prevalent in steampunk. Although the do-it-yourself ethic of punk has been retained by steampunk, which cherishes a literary history of mad scientists and crackpot inventors and attracts its share of engineers, designers, and costumers, there is less of a sense that the steampunk movement is innately oppositional.
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If the meaning of switch is that individual men can be switched by external circumstances then I don't believe in a rape switch. But if the meaning is that circumstances can make it easier for men to flip the switch between not committing rape and committing rape then I do believe in a rape switch.
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Rape and woman-hating is not a natural byproduct of guy culture, nor something that just happens any time you get all the dudes together in a room. Instead, he argues, what we think of as frat culture "is a product of time, place and cultural circumstance" — and in most cases, can be traced back to the good old gay panic defense.
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My decision to have sex does not constitute ‘risky behaviour’. Dancing on train tracks constitutes risky behaviour.
Rape is not caused by my decision to have sex. It is caused by the decision of a rapist to rape me.
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So yes, you might have seen me — a tall, slim, healthy-looking 20-year-old woman with no visible deformities who walks upright with a normal gait — carrying bags of groceries and walking a considerable distance with them, including up the flight of stairs to my second-story apartment. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t disabled.
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Early on in the first chapter of The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson has this to say [emphasis mine]:
Patriarchy is not simply another way of saying 'men.' Patriarchy is a kind of society, and a society is more than a collection of people.
That may be the most important take-home message from this whole first chapter. It's not about you, personally. It's not even about some particular bunch of d00ds. It's about a system, and how we all interact with it.
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Men, by and large, have a rape switch. All men are capable of rape. Most men are enculturated in a way that reduces rape, and in some societies it is probably true that most violent rape is carried out by individuals who are reasonably labeled as pathological. In other societies, this is not so true. In post war societies such as those described in some of these links, or any society in a state of war, rape becomes routine. The rape switch is flipped to the on position as a matter of course. Most men who were in combat in Viet Nam raped. Similar circumstances have been documented for other wars. I mention this not only to emphasize the depth and breadth of this problem, but to avoid what I fear will be an assumption as Silence Is the Enemy progresses that this is a problem exclusive to the dark skinned of the third world. This is a pan-human problem. None of us, none of our societies, are immune.
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Underneath the first level of explanation, there’s still a deeper problem. You can’t criticize Coulter or Obama for being “mannish,” for “not having much to flaunt,” or for failing at the game of being “pretty and feminine” without buying into the idea that you can and should grade people on these matters. For fuck’s sake, some of this “criticism” is about the shape of individual women’s skeletons: her jaw’s too square, she’s too tall and she shows off her arms! This is Feminism 101: the whole system of evaluation stinks to high heaven in the first place. If you choose to wield it as a weapon, and you won’t acknowledge the inherent problems even when you think your target is An Awful Person, well… you’re in the company of geniuses like Jay Mohr. Enjoy the gutter.
