Sharon's Muse.... Let's chat over coffee while I ponder some things
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Sharon's Muse.... Let's chat over coffee while I ponder some things |
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Name::Sharon Cullars
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Sunday, May 20, 2007 Whedon's eloquent plea In the wake of the horrendous public stoning of D'ua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl who dared to love outside her faith, Buffy and Firefly producer Joss Whedon speaks out on the need for the rest of us to speak out on the violence against women. I'd heard about the video of Khalil's murder making the blog rounds, but had determined not to watch it. I finally did over at Karen's and was rendered speechless and heatbroken. That her killers, mostly young men, murdered this woman so casually and without fear of reprisal is frightening. Of the murder, Whedon couldn't have penned anything as horrific as this even in his Buffyverse. In addition to mourning D'ua Khalil's death, Whedon takes vehement exception to the glorification of misogynistic violence in the American media, especially as represented by the new release Captivity which is nothing more than a shameless exhibit to titillate a male audience with the kidnapping, torture and murder of a young woman. Here is just some of Whedon's plea: 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.
PS: More Joss on equality
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