May 20 2007
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
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 2007
