Let’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.
— Joss Whedon
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This. This is just one of the reasons why I say Joss Whedon is a God. This is the reason why the "teeny-boppy" Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my bible.
