Judy Berman

On Steubenville, Jill Meagher and the enduring bullshit of victim-blaming

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:13:45 -0400

Just under a year ago, a girl was walking home along a deserted Melbourne street on a chilly spring evening. Her name was Jill Meagher. The details of what happened next will be all too familiar to anyone who’s read the news in Australia over the last year, but if you’re not from Australia, she was unlucky enough to encounter a man by the name of Adrian Ernest Bayley.

Bayley had a string of convictions for sexual assault and rape, and was on parole at the time he encountered Meagher. He raped her in a back alley and afterward, when she threatened to call the police, he killed her.

“They should have the death penalty for people like me,” Bayley told police when he was arrested. “How many chances does a person need? They should never have let me out.”

How many, indeed? Bayley just got sentenced to 35 years in prison; his tariff was reduced, apparently, because he was “remorseful.”

Meagher was unlucky, you might say. Unlucky to live in a world where a woman can’t walk home alone without the possibility that she might meet some murderous lunatic en route, unlucky to live in a society where this shit happens again and again and again.

Meagher’s husband Tom recently gave an interview to the ABC in Australia, wherein he railed against the fact that Bayley was ever on the streets to commit the crime in the first place. “He’s been let out, let off, too many times. He’s been let off by our justice system. He’s obviously a complete menace.”

So why was Bayley still on the streets? The most salient, depressing fact here is that most of his past crimes had been committed against prostitues. Specifically, he raped five prostitutes over a six-month period in 2000, a spree for which he was sentenced to eight whole years in jail. Eight years. It averages out as about 18 months a rape. And this for a man with two previous convictions for rape.

The message is all too disturbingly familiar: there’s rape and then there’s rape. If the victims were somehow seen to be putting themselves in harm’s way — if they were prostitues, or drunk, or wearing a short skirt, or whatever else — then the man can’t be held entirely responsible. If the victims of Bayley’s rape spree had been five rich women in a fancy suburb, he’d never have been on the streets to kill her. But he was. And he did.

“I’m still furious when I hear anyone say it,” said Tom Meagher of Bayley’s previous convictions, “Whenever I read it my blood boils. It sends a disturbing message.”

He’s right. It does. And it was a message echoed this week by Serena Williams, of all people, in an interview with Rolling Stone — asked about the notorious Steubenville gang rape, she said, “Do you think it was fair, what they got? They did something stupid, but I don’t know. I’m not blaming the girl, but if you’re a 16-year-old and you’re drunk like that, your parents should teach you: Don’t take drinks from other people. She’s 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn’t remember? It could have been much worse. She’s lucky. Obviously, I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t a virgin, but she shouldn’t have put herself in that position, unless they slipped her something, then that’s different.”

No, it’s not different. A girl can get as drunk as she damn well wants, in the reasonable expectation that a bunch of football players won’t rape her as she’s unconscious. Everything else is extraneous — whether or not the rapists “slipped her something,” whether or not she was “so drunk she doesn’t remember,” whether or not she “wasn’t a virgin.”

Williams went for the time-honored celebrity defence of claiming that she was misquoted: “What was written – what I supposedly said – is insensitive and hurtful, and I by no means would say or insinuate that she was at all to blame.” Rolling Stone, happily are standing by their story,

And let’s be clear: Williams is suggesting that the victim is to blame. That’s fucking well exactly what’s she’s doing. The victim wasn’t “lucky” that “something worse” didn’t happen, that she didn’t cross paths with another Adrian Ernest Bayley. She’s unlucky that she lives in a society where men do shit like this and get away with it all too often.

It shouldn’t need saying in 2013, but let’s say it anyway: fuck this. Rape victims are not to blame, and the “pragmatic” argument that they should “minimize risk” by not getting drunk, or wearing short dresses, or, y’know, being female is bullshit of the highest order, grounded in assumptions that women are somehow to blame for their mere existence provoking men who can’t control their hormones and their urges to rape.

Men who really can’t control such urges are potential Adrian Ernest Bayleys and should be dealt with accordingly. Bayley should have never have been in a position to rape Jill Meagher, and the two assholes who raped the poor girl in Steubenville — well, they’re the lucky ones, beneficiaries of a justice system that has cut them a whole lot more slack than they deserve, with one perpetrator getting a year in juvenile detention and the other two years, sentences that average out at pretty much exactly what Adrian Bayley got for his 2000 rapes.

And the rest of us — people who believe that we should live in a society where no-one is to blame for someone else doing something terrible to them — well, we just look on in despair. This shit has to stop. But it never, ever does.

"Now, there’s nothing wrong with taking a serious look at the political values implicit in music; on..."

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:25:00 -0400

“Now, there’s nothing wrong with taking a serious look at the political values implicit in music; on the contrary, it’s essential to be educated about and critical of the messages we passively absorb through pop culture — and especially through figures like Swift, whose songs are so popular as to be ubiquitous. The problem is that these conversations tend to conflate the work in question with the celebrity herself. When we argue that someone like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé is or isn’t a feminist, we’re mustering evidence from all corners of her life, personal and professional, to render a verdict on a case where there’s miles of gray area between “guilty” and “not guilty.””

- I finally got sick of all these black-and-white arguments over whether female celebrities (and particularly Taylor Swift) are feminists or not, so I wrote something about it.

X-ReSpects

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:30:31 -0400

amyrebeccaklein:

On June 30, I am playing in this awesome X-Ray Spex tribute band, X-ReSpects. We are going to play the entirety of the Germfree Adolescents album (all fifteen tracks) for your listening pleasure! Please come see our show! It’s an honor to play in a band with such talented musicians as Hailey Wojcik, Aileen Brophy, Brian Viglione, Carianne Murphy, Holly Brewer, and Ryan Weisheit. They are awesome, and a rocking night is guaranteed!!!

Facebook event page is here.

Dream tribute show!

lindsayzoladz: Hey Yeezus come here, sit down beside me,...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:35:45 -0400

lindsayzoladz:

Hey Yeezus come here, sit down beside me, there’s something I gotta ask you. I just wanna know, what are you gonna do for me? Are you gonna liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression?

Don’t be shy. I just want you to know that we can still be friends.

That is the question, isn’t it?

flavorpill: “…it’s the critics who will lazily use the recent...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:00:15 -0400

flavorpill:

“…it’s the critics who will lazily use the recent explosion of “teen girls gone wild” films […] to convince us that the current generation represents some kind of postfeminist dream, or nightmare. Don’t believe them.”

The Narcissistic Postfeminist Millennial Supergirls of ‘The Bling Ring’ and ‘Spring Breakers’

This is something I wrote about, basically, the dangers of using “The Bling Ring” and “Spring Breakers” characters as proof that teenage girls don’t have gender-related problems.

nevver: Rebel girl It’s cool how this blog is always...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:33:48 -0400

nevver:

Rebel girl

It’s cool how this blog is always posting pervy shots of women and then it posts these lyrics to a Bikini Kill song.

nyconversation: flavorpill: It’s like Middle America’s...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:31:28 -0400

nyconversation:

flavorpill:

It’s like Middle America’s nightmare made flesh, an articulate and angry black man first trying to live the American dream, then transcending it, then rejecting it. Rarely has a career followed such a compelling and coherent narrative arc, and if you think the guy following it is just a cashed-up egomaniac, well, you’re putting an awful lot of faith in providence.

“If You’re Laughing at Kanye West, the Joke’s On You”

I wrote this

This is really good. Also, people on Tumblr are angry that Flavorwire published something semi-positive about Kanye because he is racist against white people, so that’s funny.

johndarnielle: all glories to the teen werewolves the world is...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:09:12 -0400

johndarnielle:

all glories to the teen werewolves the world is yours

mootpoint: This is basically amazing, but I have to say I...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 20:14:40 -0400

mootpoint:

This is basically amazing, but I have to say I disagree with the filmmaker’s statement - I think Pretty Little Liars is very conscious of the paranoid-horror way that it deals with food.

Yeah, I had some conversations about this today and came to the same conclusion. PLL tends to depict food the same way it depicts sex — as something that is desirable but dangerous, that will ruin your life if you overindulge. That’s the way I felt as a teenager, and I don’t think that’s an accident; PLL is very good at magnifying teenage anxieties to make them come through on a visceral level for the audience, which is what everyone loved about Buffy. It always annoys me when people assume that media aimed at teens isn’t intelligently constructed enough to know that it’s depicting (not, by the way, endorsing) something disturbing.

Glad I’m not the only one having a version of this feeling...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:46:13 -0400

Glad I’m not the only one having a version of this feeling today…

tylercoates: I spent so much time yesterday looking at pictures...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:40:23 -0400

tylercoates:

I spent so much time yesterday looking at pictures of Prince. I’m not really mad about it.

Pictures of Prince Doing Normal Stuff

"Forget having the same rights as men, earning as much money as men, and having as much control over..."

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:15:39 -0400

“Forget having the same rights as men, earning as much money as men, and having as much control over our bodies as men have. Those were all boring feminist projects that haven’t been remotely relevant since that magical moment in the ‘70s when Gloria Steinem clicked her dowdily shod heels together three times and chanted, “There’s no political aim like equality.””

- So, I had no idea where I was going to start with this thing I’m writing about “Spring Breakers” and “The Bling Ring” (the latter of which I mostly liked), and here’s what came out. Guess that’s what kind of a ride this is going to be…

"Be warned: This read is not for the faint of heart. It follows Janey Smith, a 10-year-old girl who,..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:05:14 -0400

“Be warned: This read is not for the faint of heart. It follows Janey Smith, a 10-year-old girl who, among other things, has an incestuous relationship with her father, joins a gang in New York City, and gets sold into prostitution. But, its author is a seriously influential feminist who draws on her knowledge of gender studies to craft controversial tales.”

- I truly can’t decide whether I love or hate that there is a blurb about Blood and Guts in High School in a Refinery29 list called “The Smart Girl’s Guide To Steamy Summer Reads.”

"It’s sort of sad to see the show just drifting listlessly from shocking event to shocking..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:46:00 -0400

“It’s sort of sad to see the show just drifting listlessly from shocking event to shocking event. It points to a lack of actual things to say about actual human beings. Ostensibly, Mad Men is a show about “the ’60s.” But stories “about” particular times almost never work. Stories about people work. At any rate, it’s pretty clear that Season Six has almost nothing to say about the times beyond, “This guy called this guy a fascist, and some hippies were doing drugs, and that guy called that guy a racist.” As uninteresting as this season has been, it is at its least interesting when it is trying to “say” something—about the year, about the city, whatever.”

- Ta-Nehisi Coates on this season of Mad Men. This is something we talked about in the office today, and while I’m not as unhappy with this season as Coates is, I agree entirely with this assessment. I just wonder how we got here. Individual historical events used to be so tangential to Mad Men that people would remark upon how odd (and brilliant) it was to make a show about the ’60s that seemed so unconcerned with politics or historical events.

I don’t give Matthew Weiner as much credit as some people do, but I can’t imagine he’s oblivious to such a big shift. So why is he doing this? I keep wondering if he’s trying to make the point that, as the ’60s wore on, everything became politicized, and even formerly apolitical people were constantly being forced to pick a side. I did not live through that era, so I have no idea whether that is what it actually felt like, but knowing what I know about human creatures in general, it’s hard to believe that absolutely everyone can experience any time period as an endless series of social, political, and cultural imperatives to choose a side.

Maybe there were clues in earlier seasons that Mad Men was headed for trouble. For years now, we’ve known that Weiner has trouble with radicals and counterculture types. He portrays them as flakes and poseurs and hypocrites and assholes, and for a while there it didn’t interfere with the storyline. The heroes on Mad Men, even if they’re actually antiheroes, are the so-called “realists” — the people who realize the limitations of every extreme view and choose (because they have the luxury to choose) to observe the mechanisms of change from a detached remove. Maybe 1968 has thrown Weiner into some sort of crisis. Maybe, like Don Draper and Roger Sterling and now Jim Cutler, he just can’t relate to the people who shaped the era he’s trying to portray. Maybe he sees the late ’60s as a mess, all Joan Didion and no Woodstock, so the story he’s telling has become a mess, too.

There are endless Mad Men “conspiracy” theories making the rounds, and I’ve come up with some of my own. But we haven’t always talked about the show this way, like some kind of interactive puzzle game to be solved. We used to be so wrapped up in the characters and the storytelling that “figuring it out” seemed beside the point.

Flavorwire is hiring an editor for our books section

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:43:40 -0400

Flavorwire is hiring an editor for our books section:

The wonderful Emily Temple is leaving us at the end of the month, and we need a smart writer with experience covering the literary world to take her place. Feel free to contact me with questions.

popculturebrain: Trailer: ‘The Newsroom’ Season 2 (via Film...

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 23:33:19 -0400

popculturebrain:

Trailer: ‘The Newsroom’ Season 2

(via Film Thrasher)

I mean, who am to critique this trailer for being pretentious, silly, and meaningless? I’m sure the people who actually think this is a good show fucking love it.

I loved Frances Ha so much.

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 17:58:00 -0400

And I knew I would love it, because I love everything Greta Gerwig is and does. There is something about her that makes her so much more wonderful than actresses who are described the same way (“quirky,” “cute,” “self-aware”), although it’s hard for me to describe what it is. Genuineness, maybe? An ability to make herself vulnerable in a way that isn’t manipulative, so that it doesn’t seem like she’s constantly courting male approval?

Before seeing Frances Ha, I had heard two things about the movie: 1. It’s a love letter to Gerwig. 2. It’s a story about the romance of (non-sexual) friendship and what happens when those relationships start to come apart.

It’s true; it is both of those things. But for me, Frances Ha was the most familiar and optimistic — and least sensational — portrait of (privileged, well-educated, largely white) 20-something life in New York circa now. It is kind of about how the plans you make for yourself (at liberal arts college) are not going to happen — you’re going to spend too long as an apprentice at some established dance company, say, and you’re going to try hard and everyone is going to like you, but there’s still not going to be a real job for you there. Your friends, who were all on the same page with you about doing low-paid creative work when you graduated from college and moved to the city, are going to start getting jobs in finance or tech or marrying people with jobs in finance and tech. These people they marry will be the dudes you used to laugh at together, dudes who say things like, “I gotta take a leak.” You will feel like your social network is falling apart because everyone’s career is starting to get serious and friends are starting to move away for jobs and friendships aren’t anyone’s first priority anymore and everyone is getting competitive or defensive or something and everyone justifies it to themselves because it’s so hard and weird and impersonal here. You will start to wonder whether you’re more annoyed that they sold out or that the opportunity to do the same never presented itself to you. You will start to wonder why everyone has moved on but you haven’t, even though most of the people you think have moved on are wondering the same thing about you, because every life looks better from the outside.

And yet, all those small failures don’t have to end in one big, permanent life failure. You get to keep your friendships, if you can stop judging everyone you know and make yourself realize that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with shifting priorities, if you stop taking everything other people do personally. You get to keep your ambitions and dreams, if you can become practical enough to make the sacrifices you need to make to both pursue them and support yourself. You learn to see yourself with clearer eyes and realize you’re making some compromises and justifying them to yourself, too, and you don’t have to beat yourself up about that because the only people you know who don’t have to make compromises are the ones with rich parents. You realize that working hard and being nice won’t get you everything you want, but they will help. Basically, you learn to be independent without closing yourself off. I can’t say I’m always this optimistic, but I loved the movie because it reminded me that life can often be a lot simpler than we make it for ourselves.

believermag: Toni Morrison, age 18, with high school...

Fri, 31 May 2013 10:14:45 -0400

believermag:

Toni Morrison, age 18, with high school classmates.

Believer editors Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits, and Believer regular Leanne Shapton, are working on a book together titled Women in Clothes, about women’s relationship to style and why women wear what they wear. Contributors include Miranda July, Zadie Smith, Eileen Myles and others. If you would like to contribute by filling out a survey (the book is being built up from these surveys) please visit this website. You needn’t care about clothes, or be a writer, or consider yourself fashionable, or even think about these things often, to contribute.

First I’ve heard of this project — sounds amazing.

"Millennials don’t want to hear from brands. They want to have a conversation with them,” said..."

Thu, 30 May 2013 15:11:44 -0400

“Millennials don’t want to hear from brands. They want to have a conversation with them,” said [“millennial expert” Jason] Dorsey, who repeatedly and at great length described how millennials want to be unique: “They don’t want commitment. They drop in and out of experiences. They can’t wear a shirt or blouse if it’s photographed. The worst fear of millennials is wearing the same dress twice on two different [social networks].”

- Huh. So I guess it’s weird that my worst fears (and those of other millennials I know) revolve around the permanent collapse of the American (/global) economy, my seemingly insurmountable education debt, and the fact that either of the above may someday make it entirely impossible to support myself by means I don’t find abhorrent.

thisishangingrockcomics: snide observations about a certain...

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:50:51 -0400

thisishangingrockcomics:

snide observations about a certain breed of college boy turned into a game