The Weapon of Choice
By Richard Leader
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We live in an image-saturated world. We enjoy shocking ourselves
with statistics—spurious or not—regarding how many hundreds
of advertisements and product logos we view on a daily basis. And
we feign outrage over the supposed horror of it all without seriously
stopping to consider what would be left if it were not
so. After all, in a world without an overabundance of graven images
the rare ones that exist have an equal power over their audience,
not through force of numbers, but through the heightened effect
granted by their esoteric nature. Just as the images of the sainted
and the damned circling the doors of the medieval cathedral evoked
both awe and fearful obedience, the richly oiled hues of the pastoral
paintings of the 17th century stood as a catalog of wealth to their
collectors, distilling their worldly possessions into a form that
could serve as a constant reminder of their authority and thus their
inherently moral station.
The idea of powerful, singular images is not completely alien to
us today—burning crosses and swastikas are obvious enough
examples—and yet the very idea of that power strikes most
of us as a bit funny, flying in the face of our all important mantra
of “free speech.” Such power can even be seen as comedy,
the reaction of the African Bushmen to the presence of a mysterious
bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy being emblematic of our
mirth. Despite the ambivalence of the film regarding race, teetering
between myths of the noble savage and pitiable bumpkins, it becomes
obvious that civilization, whether it be good, evil, or merely banal,
is a professed and profound indifference to images. We transcend
them, surpass them, feast upon them and yet feel empty, unchanged,
still as ravenous as ever: or at least we pretend and hope that
we do, arguing against legislation to criminalize forms of hate-speech
while choosing to view any form of violence, racism, and sexism
in the media as satire—of what, we dare not ask—zero-calories
and no carbohydrates.
Interplay between image-saturated cultures and those that lack
such density happens far more often than many people would believe.
Rather than just the domain of anthropologists working in far flung
regions, such intersections happen all around us, everyday: gender
exists as a cultural division in nearly every area of the world.
Many forms of ideography are typically common to one gender, where
it is enjoyed, accepted, and thus eventually expected, allowing
the social grouping to which it is native to become inured to it.
This process allows members of that gender (especially so when that
gender is considered the normative one) the pretense of obliviousness,
despite the multitude of political effects the imagery could possibly
have, any deeper meaning can be negated through its ubiquitousness:
the imagery, in this case, is pornography.
Catharine MacKinnon’s 1993 book, Only Words, made
the argument that the images produced under the aegis of pornography
were not speech, nor even obscenity, but an institution that actively
works to transform the lived experience of human beings in a way
that results in the oppression of women. In a review for The
Nation, the writer Carlin Romano thought it would be cute to
test her theory by asking if he, and a separate hypothetical character,
both plotted to rape MacKinnon, only if at the last second the real
author “chickened out,” would they both be legally responsible
for the rape? While he had largely missed her point, he aptly illustrated
it by publicly transforming her into a rape-able entity, a woman,
while his own body and words remained inviolate: placing him in
a social position of power over her, even within the limited realm
of a book review.
The outline of that event is still retold on a regular basis, a
decade later, as the exchange remains a watershed moment for both
liberal and libertarian white males who privilege freedom of speech
over all other considerations—as that freedom tends to privilege
them above any other demographic given their access to presses,
pulpits, and professorships—and feminists who feel betrayed
that a supposedly progressive journal such as The Nation
would so utterly undermine them. The social effects of pornography
can indeed be difficult to quantify beyond the women who are harmed
directly in criminal acts, notions of causality always are, but
especially so because patriarchy refuses any form of subjectivity
but its own, which it often views as ‘objectivity’ to
a frightening degree (few of the male professors and journalists,
including Romano, who publicly took on MacKinnon’s book with
their own unbridledly confident criticisms had a tenth of her background
in law or philosophy, their identity as males clearly superceding
their status as mere dilettantes): thus, any challengers to the
status quo must present evidence that is empirical beyond the possibilities
of empiricism.
What Romano did not anticipate, however, was the arrival of the
internet where men have yet again learned to use pornography as
a weapon, where its use as such is direct and unmistakable—now
quantifiable and a matter of public record, no longer subsumed in
the complications of private interpersonal relationships where ambiguity
allowed proponents of pornography to discount the frequency with
which men have used it to control their female partners in one way
or another—and where the forms that are often employed rival
or even exceed the most horrific variety culled by MacKinnon for
Only Words, detractors having argued that she misrepresented
the industry with a few bad apples.
Pornographic images are used to disrupt discourse in online forums,
to silence political opponents without the appearance of political
action, and for basic puerile amusement that belies the existence
of the other two utilities: given the limited political consciousness
of mainstream male-culture which thrives on mock-ignorance, to whom
the word “politics” is often a boring expletive or simply
limited to talk about Democrats and Republicans, even when they
venture into feminist or women-only spaces on the internet to deliberately
‘troll’ through pornographic words or pictures the social
meaning of their behavior is allowed to remain as background to
their own entitlement to ‘fun’ which is held as a separate
sphere of human activity that must remain unimpeachable.
Women are not the only ones targeted for pornographic assaults.
Men enjoy turning the same treatment towards their peers as well,
often to achieve the same results. As pornography is frequently
an aspect of male life, only the most virulent images are used:
scenes involving fecal matter or deformity are common, as are images
of rape and violence, as well as sexualized medical or forensic
photos, the suicides and murders hosted by the ‘shock-site’
Rotten.com serving as a modern follow-up to John Alan Schwartz’s
1978 film, Faces of Death. Most twenty to thirty-something
men possess at least some memory of the film, whether they saw it
in whole or in part—the scenes of violence sometimes presented
to them by their fathers as a rite of passage, much in the same
way as the proverbial Playboy in the woodshed. Just as
many boys were acquainted with it indirectly through the hushed
retellings of the most gruesome moments in Faces of Death,
typically presented as real rather than cinematic embellishments,
that we often heard at the playground during recess or across lunch
tables in the school cafeteria, the grim stories bringing minor
fame and popularity to the boys who possessed them.
Indeed, as abhorrent as many men find these extreme images, whether
they fall under the domain of pornography in the strictest sense
or under a more liberal interpretation of the word that allows for
a lust and intoxication that eclipses the focus on the sex act itself,
men do tend to develop a soft spot for the images of their—or
the internet’s—salad days. Shock-sites were common while
the internet was in its adolescence, the period of mainstream migration
to the technology that followed the early days when it was an insular
community of professionals and college students: during this period
men would commonly misrepresent hyperlinks they gave, using misleading
headlines, to redirect newcomers to shock-sites that would fill
their screen with ‘pop up’ windows filled with pornographic
images of various sorts, effectively locking up their computer,
sometimes with audible cues to draw the attention of others at the
victim’s workplace or home in order to create even further
consequences. As web-culture developed and moved away from the old-pro/newcomer
dichotomy and began to recreate the same subcultures that exist
in real life, most of these sites fell by the wayside and the focus
turned instead towards deciding which pornographic images are or
are “Not Safe for Work” (the NSFW acronym can now be
seen as a logo on clothing), splitting hairs over what degree of
“nipple insinuation” is to be considered over the line.
One such shock-site was Goatse.cx (the “cx” country
code standing for Christmas Island, the Swiss-Bank of internet domains
that allows its clients an often excessive degree of protection
and anonymity, even when the server hosting the actual files for
the domain resides in the United States; having the additional benefit
of allowing the site to be phonetically pronounced as “Goat
Sex”) that, among other images, showed a photograph of a man
“stretching” his anus. Some claim that prior to 1998,
the primary image on the webpage depicted a sex act between a woman
and a goat. Whether or not this was true is highly uncertain and
ultimately improvable, more salient is how this example of mythology
is similar to all mythology in its ability to frame and
reify the culture that propagates it. To crib from Voltaire, even
if the image of the woman having sex with the goat did not exist
on the site, it was necessary for man to invent the myth of it having
been there to complete an idealized picture of history.
In January of 2004, a full six years after the launch of the site,
a female resident of Christmas Island lodged a formal complaint
with the CIIA, the authority responsible for the CX registry, citing
the fact that the domain did not give adequate warning to potential
visitors, often tricked into seeing the site’s contents, which
constituted an illegal act in the cases of minors and those residing
in locations where such imagery has been banned.
For her part, being that she was not at first given anonymity by
the CIIA until after she received a bevy of personal threats, she
herself became an overnight internet celebrity, where men linked
to an Archive.org (a site that catalogs and preserves web pages
on a periodic basis for historical reasons) listing of a webpage
that contained a picture of her, rendering futile any action to
remove the picture from her workplace’s site. Many online
forums populated by men started topics claiming that her image “raped
their eyes” and that her face was more offensive than the
contents of Goatse.cx—the direct quote “Not only is
she damn ugly, she looks like a goddamn Martha Stewart wannabe too,”
paraphrasing the bulk of their acrimony.
This did not just happen in the so-called “gutter”
regions of the internet, allegedly plagued by pubescent boys seeking
to emulate Howard Stern and other similar idols, but in the upwardly
mobile world of male dominated technology sites such as Slashdot.org
and Kuro5hin.org who also flocked to troll the CIIA’s website,
posting their own pornographic images in the defense of “free
speech.” The internet allows boys to behave as if they have
the authority of men and for men to behave as if they have the freedom
of boys. Males of all ages seemed to genuinely mourn the loss of
the site: the collaborative dictionary project, Wikipedia, contains
an outlandish 3,500 words detailing the rise and fall of Goatse.cx
in faux-academic detail, while nearly 12,000 supposed signatures
fill out an online petition demanding that the CIIA restore the
site. Though most of the reasons given by the signatories amounted
to juvenile banter, the more detailed accounts fell into a variety
of categories, beyond those advocating for unmitigated “free
speech.”
Many claimed that the webpage was of historical significance—the
numerous copies or ‘mirrors’ of it being present at
the same Archive.org that was used to terrorize the female plaintiff
were not deemed sufficient; to them, only the genuine article would
do. Indeed, since it was shut down, Goatse.cx has been cloned directly
by many other domains in order to keep the tradition alive, even
to the extent of so-called “tribute” pages that stockpile
imagery created as a homage to the pornographic pictures of the
original site: only now transposed onto carved pumpkins, the icing
of birthday cakes, and perhaps even a level in a best selling video-game,
the “AS-Junkyard” stage in Unreal Tournament 2004,
which necessitated a cameo in a competing product, DOOM 3,
as well.
Others claimed that stumbling into Goatse.cx was akin to a rite
of passage or coming of age ceremony, and a rather mild one at that,
compared to fraternity hazing and other potentially violent activities.
Because it happened to them, they wanted their younger peers to
suffer the exact same abuse before being admitted to a place in
the current social hierarchy—a common enough reason for such
kourotrophic rituals in patriarchal societies—and they were
willing to fight tooth and nail to continue the circle of abuse
in order to give reason and purpose to the cruelty which they themselves
endured, even if the extent of it was merely clicking on a disturbing
hyperlink.
The final reason given built off of that argument, summed up by
the 11,941th entry in the petition, “I thought it was pretty
gross... until I found out there was an actual following. Now its
[sic] funny as hell. We must not let it fall!” For all the
actual disgust it generated, Goatse.cx was a building block, a pillar,
of men’s gendered community, and thus deserving of protection.
The foremost result of men’s pornographic attacks on each
other is desensitization, an inuring that occurs, that makes such
attacks easier to commit on women (men have to look at the pictures
that they are using to harass others, at least once, after all)
and more increasingly effective, as it widens the gulf between men’s
and women’s culture and hence males and females.
Even if women were not harmed in the production of pornography,
even if it never reveled in women’s degradation, even if it
did not teach men to view all or even some women as sexual objects—and
even if it granted only half of all the great and miraculous benefits
to human society that its defenders continue to claim it provides,
even then it would still remain a vestige of sexism, given
that it works to create a separate culture for men (maintained by
men’s ritualized abuse towards each other) through the process
of image-saturation, one which works to the benefit of all males.
Certainly, women’s culture is also saturated with images—different
images—ones that feminists at least point out were often manufactured
and served to them by men, for men’s benefit, but when it
comes to pornography, especially the shock-variety that is commonly
used as a weapon on the internet, that women would have a greater
than “baseline” reaction to it becomes obvious, given
that men are the normative or baseline class.
Not all women react thusly—of course—some women, even
among those who consider themselves feminists, try to tomboy their
way into male-internet culture, but even then, it is only men who
are able to leverage their nonchalance when being faced with undesirable
imagery or speech into political power for themselves. Witness the
sadistic abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib: for all of the male
Left’s supposed outrage, they did not have much of a problem
circulating images of it, blurred faces or not, in the interest
of truth, justice, and electing John Kerry or even Ralph Nader.
This is not meant to conflate jailed prisoners with performers in
pornography, nor their comparative levels of agency, but to indict
male culture across the board—from the authoritarian conservatism
of the military that inspires by-all-accounts ordinary people to
commit heinous atrocities, to the American Fear Clothing company
who caters to “Disaffected Youth Culture.”
They sponsored an “Anti-Bush” computer game, hosted
at Emogame.com, which launched in June of 2004: the rudimentary
game begins with an extended opening which depicts Bush and Cheney
taking control of “Voltron,” a robotic cartoon character
from the 1980s that most twenty-something men remember rather fondly,
who then use it to graphically rape the Statue of Liberty, his very
un-robotic swinging testicles calculated to inspire mirth amongst
its audience before any sense of outrage at a political situation
that may or may not have warranted such a boorish allegory: once
again, a violent and sexist act receives protection under the blanket
of satire, when the primary reason for the creation of the so-called
ironic image is the male public’s nihilistic focus on ‘fun.’
Moments later in the game’s introduction, after the professional
wrestler Hulk Hogan is presented as the hero-of-the-people, the
rape continues, Voltron adding “Yeah Bitch. Say My Name. Say
My Name.” To the website’s intended audience, it suggests
a similar line in the 1999 film, American Pie, where it
was uttered by a female performer in the middle of a sex act. There,
the unexpected and ludicrous nature of the outburst, given her gender
and characterization, worked to inspire the laughter that followed
but not the enduring popularity of the line: a popularity that is
not at all concerned with context. It is now just as funny to male
audiences regardless of who voices it. Screenwriters might have
made the language palatable by so ‘politically-correct’
standards, perhaps even feminist in some people’s imagination,
by forcing it onto a female character, but that only opened the
door for the phrase to be spoken by anyone, indiscriminately, pulling
it inline with the sexism of the general culture.
Given the indifference of male society to rape in general, where
the word can mean everything from paying too much for gasoline to
looking at the picture of the woman who complained about Goatse.cx,
it is fairly disingenuous for one group of men to presume themselves
in the high ground and use Abu Ghraib as evidence of it. There have
even been cases in the workplace of male supervisors summoning female
employees—perhaps deceitfully—to computer screens in
order to make them look at the images of Abu Ghraib, the political
and presumably educational nature of the photographs and videos
somehow rendering them “Safe For Work”—knowing,
and more importantly hoping, full well in advance that
they will instantly be disgusted and avert their eyes: men enjoy
nothing more than rooting out some form of ‘weakness’
in women in order to self-justify their positions of social authority
over them. After all, the idea of ‘throwing like a girl’
goes back to texts from the fourth century BC, where it was used
by Aineias Tacticus.
What the flippant use of “rape” in our vernacular,
pornography, and even the images coming out of Abu Ghraib have in
common is their ability to bond men together as men, apart from
women, making each of them a potent weapon in preserving existing
social structures: those claiming to be on the Left, at least, should
have the grace to realize that anything that allows the confusion
of compassion with weakness is not speech—but madness.
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