The Gendering of Anger, Vice & Violence

In 1929, Edward Bernays persuaded a group of women to break the taboo on female smoking by arranging for them all to light up during that year’s Easter Parade in New York City. Though cynically motivated – Bernays was acting on behalf of the American Tobacco Association – this capitalistic appropriation of the suffragette movement was wildly successful: rebranded as “torches of freedom,” cigarettes became both a touchstone for gender equality and a visible accessory of female defiance. The fact that smoking is an addictive, unhealthy and potentially lethal habit doesn’t change the fact that women were being denied access to it purely on the grounds of gender, and yet most people, on learning this particular historical tidbit, will probably feel uncomfortable – not just because Bernays was effectively manipulating the women’s rights movement in order to sell more cigarettes, but because he still had a valid point. No matter the many adverse effects of tobacco – none of which were known at the time – freedom of choice is a basic human right, and denying it to women on the grounds that smoking was a masculine pastime is fundamentally sexist, regardless of our views on cigarettes as a concept.

Similarly, I always feel uneasy whenever I see news outlets fretting about the apparent increase in violent crimes committed by women, and particularly young women. While social commentators are quick to blame the phenomenon on any number of causes – binge drinking, mimicry of “kickass” role models, a seemingly historical predisposition towards initiating domestic confrontations, family breakdown and ladette culture, a change in the definition of assault – their unifying fascination with the issues seems to hinge on the idea of women being corrupted by men; as though female violence is somehow the dark side of feminism. Well, yes, in the sense that violent crime is deplorable regardless of who’s committing it; but that’s a far cry from the view – seldom stated outright, but overwhelmingly implied – that such offences are somehow fundamentally worse when committed by women, not only in a moral sense, but as a perceived symptom of social malaise; as though violent crime as a whole must therefore have reached such epic proportions that even pure, sweet, innocent ladies are being infected by it.

Underneath such scaremongering lies a toxic view of gender essentialism: that because men tend to be physically stronger than women, violence – whether criminal or constructive – must therefore be an innately male characteristic; or at the very least, something which should be viewed with greater acceptance and sympathy when expressed by men. The idea that a certain amount of physical strength is a necessary prerequisite to possession of violent urges, or that maleness somehow excuses poor emotional control, is part of a sexist social logic that serves to validate male expressions of  anger and aggression as being both natural and powerful while demonising women who behave likewise as unnatural and weak. On some level, the cultural derision of female anger as hysteria seemingly stems from a belief in female physical impotence: if verbal disagreements are seen as either analogues for or precursors to physical altercations, then our tacit assumption of female weakness serves to characterise female anger as being somehow disembodied; as though our implied inability to (if necessary) take things outside means that our anger can never be physically felt, and is therefore  inadequate when contrasted with proper, red-blooded, bodily male anger.

Hence my suspicion that at least part of the disgust and confusion leveled at aggressive women stems from the fear that this logic no longer applies: that where before we could trust in angry women to neither hit first nor hit back and therefore discount them appropriately, now we might actually have to treat them with the same deference – or at least, the same concern – as angry men.

To be clear: violent crime is not synonymous with anger; nor is anger only, or even most commonly, expressed through physical acts of aggression. And I’m hardly coming out in support of female violent crime as some bizarre species of empowerment. What I am saying, though, is that our culture has spent so many years defending, downplaying or otherwise handwaving aggression, vice and violence as being integral to proper masculinity – or at least, the inevitable side-effects of same – that we’re now extremely uncomfortable with the idea of women entering those arenas, too. In the case of physically confrontational sports, for instance, like boxing and martial arts, one of the oldest and most universal defenses of their social utility has been as necessary outlets for male (and particularly young male) aggression. But let women into the ring – demonstrate that they can be just as skilled, combative, determined, aggressive – and suddenly that assumption comes under all sorts of scrutiny; because if the desire to punch someone can’t be solely attributed to possession of a Y-chromosome, then maybe – just maybe – all our boys-will-be-boys excuses have been less a rational defense of biology and more an irrational defense of culture. And that’s a truly frightening thought for many, because all of a sudden, centuries of excuses about why men can’t be expected to exhibit self control in any number of situations – why it’s always women who have to dress modestly, avoid conflict and not start fights; why territorial violence, or violence as response to supposed disrespect, is overwhelmingly justified – start to look like… well, excuses.

In a recent article, writer Jen Dziura contended that, contrary to the logic of gender stereotyping, men are just as emotional as women; it’s just that specific types of emotion more commonly associated with men – such as shouting, aggression and violence – are culturally viewed as positive attributes (or at least excusable ones) , whereas emotional displays that are viewed as feminine, like crying and getting upset, are interpreted as weakness.  To quote:

I wish to dispel the notion that women are “more emotional.” I don’t think we are. I think that the emotions women stereotypically express are what men call “emotions,” and the emotions that men typically express are somehow considered by men to be something else.

This is incorrect. Anger? EMOTION. Hate? EMOTION. Resorting to violence? EMOTIONAL OUTBURST. An irrational need to be correct when all the evidence is against you? Pretty sure that’s an emotion. Resorting to shouting really loudly when you don’t like the other person’s point of view? That’s called “being too emotional to engage in a rational discussion.”

Not only do I think men are at least as emotional as women, I think that these stereotypically male emotions are more damaging to rational dialogue than are stereotypically female emotions. A hurt, crying person can still listen, think, and speak. A shouting, angry person? That person is crapping all over meaningful discourse.

Note, please, that Dziura describes these particular emotions, not as being intrinsically male or female, but only stereotypically so. This is a crucial distinction to make, because without it, we miss the existence of yet another double standard: the fact that, on those rare occasions when women do manage to overcome their own socialisation and publicly express anger, rage or violence, they are still derided for being emotional. Once again, the creeping toxicity of our assumptions about who is entitled to anger – viz: anyone we think is capable of supporting their verbal aggression physically – causes us to conclude that, as women lack this ability – and particularly when ranged against male opponents – their anger must therefore be disembodied and hysterical rather than bodily and genuine. An angry man is a growling Alsatian: we listen because his bite could well be worse than his bark. But an angry woman is a yapping chihuahua: visible rage only serves to magnify her physical inability to express it seriously, and in the meantime, we laugh at how cute she looks when she’s pissed.

And then, of course, the issue is further compounded by both conscious and subconscious racism: white male anger, for instance, is viewed as restrained, civilised and righteous, whereas black male anger is viewed as savage, bestial, wild. In this metaphor, the violence of white men as expressed through verbal aggression is viewed as a holstered gun: we’re obscenely comforted to know that, if the argument came to blows, they’d be capable of defending themselves, but otherwise, we don’t worry that violent words are likely to translate to violent actions. The violence of black men, however, is taken to be overt, like a constantly brandished sword – even when their words are milder, we’re conditioned to worry that at any moment, they’ll forgo dialogue in favour of physical action, and to fear and mistrust them appropriately. That’s just one example; the stereotyping is endless. But for any intersectional group and their associated stereotypes, you can be sure that society has an opinion on how entitled they are to anger and violence, how frequently (or not) it’s perceived to be expressed by that group, how threatening this behaviour is to the privileged, and whether such expressions should be generally met with condescension, fear or outright hostility.

As a culture, we need to get past the idea that anger is sole and rightful purview of those with both the potential for physical violence and enough social privilege that their usage of it is always assumed to be justified; that aggression is distinct from emotion, and therefore a legitimate species of argument when employed by men; and that the aggression of anyone who lacks the protections of privilege or the semblance of physical strength mustn’t be legitimate anger, but either thoughtless thuggery or baseless hysteria instead. Like it or not, the right to anger is a cultural resource, and one the most privileged have been keen to reserve for themselves. Not only must we reclaim it, but – as Dziura says – we must also stop mistaking it for the only valid form of discourse; or rather, stop fooling ourselves that we haven’t embedded an unhealthy tolerance for aggression, and specifically white male aggression, in the heart of our definition of reasoned, rational debate. Anger in discourse can be justified, but we should always recognise it for what it is – an emotion – instead of only classing it as one when someone of lesser privilege is using it. That way, we can start to build a system where everyone is heard, and where legitimate expressions of outrage aren’t buried beneath a sneering weight of gendered, racist contempt.

Stop the GR Bullies: Consequences

OK, so a deeply problematic thing just happened on Twitter.

Here’s the basic jist:

Evidently riled up by information on the Stop the GR Bullies website (which I’ve blogged about here), author James Austen took to Twitter to call blogger Kat Kennedy a loser and a retard. Not unsurprisingly, Kat and several other Twitter users, myself included, confronted Austen about his ableist language, throughout which exchange he repeatedly stated that not only had Kat called him a headcase on Goodreads, but had attacked him on a blog post where he’d revealed his own childhood sexual abuse. Kat, meanwhile, was baffled, having no idea at all who Austen was.

When asked to show evidence of the incidents in question, Austen linked first to the Stop the GR Bullies main page, and then to this Goodreads thread – neither of which show any connection whatever between himself and Kat Kennedy. It then became apparent that Austen had confused Kat with two other Goodreads users, Ridley and The Holy Terror – an extremely bizarre mistake to make, not only because even the STGRB website states clearly that these are three completely different women, but because Austen has actually been in Twitter contact with Ridley before. By this point, he’d called Kat a retard or retarded eight times by my count, including a comment where, even AFTER his error had been pointed out, he claimed to be applying the term with “laser-like precision”.

Austen then made some motions towards apology (though not for his ableist language), but also added that Kat “could win good pr now by playing this right” – meaning, presumably, that it was in her best interests not to tell people about his mistake. Now, even though we’d established that Kat wasn’t at fault, I was still concerned about Austen’s claim that someone – whoever they were – had attacked him on Goodreads for talking about his own childhood sexual abuse, because, dude, that is NOT COOL, and if someone has actually done that, they deserve to be called to account. With this in mind, I asked if he could link to that incident; he told me it had happened on one of three Goodreads blogs.

Now: possibly, this attack did take place, and for whatever reason, evidence of it has been removed from the site. But having checked the comments for every single one of Austen’s Goodreads blogposts – and further checked the comment threads attached to all the reviews/discussions about his novels – I can’t find anything which even vaguely resembles such an attack. What I can see is that in January this year, Austen blogged about his abuse, and in March, Ridley left a status update (the one linked above) mentioning that Austen had sent her an abusive private message, and that the two were arguing on Twitter. Whatever occurred in the body of that argument, I can’t find any record of it, but at this point, it does seem fairly clear that, at the very least, nobody – least of all Kat Kennedy – has attacked Austen in the comments section of his GR blogs.

As soon as this was pointed out, Austen not only quit the conversation, but locked his Twitter account. The progression of the argument as detailed below is as correct as I could manage by reconstructed it from screengrabs, though doubtless some tweets and responses are out of immediate chronological order (it being extremely difficult to follow the exact chronology of a multi-branching Twitter conversation, even after the fact). Given the length of the conversation, I’ve tried to include only relevant tweets, but for those who are interested in seeing a wider range of responses, they can be found by looking at the individual steams of the other participants, including mine. I’m aware that one tweet of Austen’s appears twice, which is unfortunate, but I couldn’t figure out how to easily remove it, and so it’s still there as a duplicate: any other errors are my fault, but hopefully don’t detract from the overall coherence (such as it is).

I’m posting this for three reasons:

1. To establish on record that Kat Kennedy didn’t start the exchange with Austen, and has in fact never spoken to him before today;
2. To point out that information posted on Stop the GR Bullies has directly contributed to a public instance of vile and abusive behaviour; and
3. To stand as an example of exactly how fucked up ableism is, and why using the word retard as a pejorative is never, ever acceptable.

As for Austen: I’d ask of readers to please refrain from contacting him on Goodreads, messaging him on Twitter, or otherwise sending him negative, aggressive or abusive messages that detail his mistakes. Yes, he’s behaved appallingly, and that should definitely be noted, but further aggro isn’t going to help anyone – and if another Goodreads user really did attack him for sharing his own experiences of sexual abuse, then that needs to be brought to light and dealt with separately. Otherwise, let’s just acknowledge and learn from the fail, and move on with our lives.

Why YA Sex Scenes Matter

Trigger warning: some mention of rape

TMI warning: masturbatory themes

In Craig Thompson’s graphic novel Habibi (which is problematic to say the least), there’s a scene where Zam, a preadolescent boy, watches with horror as his female caregiver and sole companion, Dodola, is raped. As Zam and Dodola live alone in the desert – and as, through a strange twist of circumstances, Dodola is less than ten years Zam’s senior – his sexual awakening has thus far consisted of a burgeoning, awkward attraction to Dodola, who is quite literally the only woman he knows. But after he witnesses her rape, he starts to loathe his own sexuality. Because that single, awful, abusive image is Zam’s sole frame of reference for adult sex, it’s what he pictures whenever he tries to imagine himself with Dodola; instinctively, he recoils from it, but without any knowledge of what consensual sex might look like, he draws the conclusion that male desire – his desire – is inherently evil, not only because that’s his sole experience of it, but because that image has invaded his fantasies, turning them into something repugnant. He doesn’t know how to be aroused without linking that arousal to something vile, with the result that he ultimately comes to despise his own sexual identity.

This is both a fictitious and decidedly extreme example of negative sexual reinforcement, but one which nonetheless makes me think about a vastly different, non-fictional account of sexual awakening: that of writer Caitlin Moran in her hilarious, feminist biography, How To Be a Woman. To quote:

Coupled with the pan-sexual, freak-show silliness of Eurotrash – Lolo Ferrari, the woman with the biggest breasts in the world, bouncing on a trampoline; drag queens with dildos and butt plugs; gimps in harnesses; hoovering bored Dutch housewives’ flats – this is the sum total of all the sex I see until I’m 18. Perhaps ten minutes in total – a series of arty, freaky, sometimes brutal vignettes, which I lash together, and use as the basis for my sexual imagination.

Thinking back, my own initial exposure to sex scenes came from a similarly weird melange of sources. Like most Australian teenagers of my generation, I’d memorised the page-number for the bit in John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When The War Began where Ellie and Lee had sex, while my copy of Nicholas Evans’s The Horse Whisperer ended up with several similarly well-thumbed sections. Combined with a 1972 edition of The Joy of Sex I discovered lurking in a forgotten corner of my parents’ bookshelves and the bit in Money Train where Jennifer Lopez sleeps with Wesley Snipes, this constituted the sex-positive end of my masturbatory spectrum. Somewhere in the middle was a volume of archaic erotic bookplates (shut up) that was similarly liberated from obscurity, the sex scenes from Shakespeare in Love and the sometimes-positive-but-usually-problematic-and-occasionally-outright-rapey sex in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books and Sara Douglass’s Axis and Wayfarer Redemption trilogies. At the far end were the disturbing and numerous glimpses of aggressive sexuality, coercion and rape that constituted the bread and butter of my favourite crime shows, plus the aforementioned rape scenes from writers like Douglass and, much later, Terry Goodkind.

In other words, it was a mess, and one which left me with a mental sexual landscape dominated by male  aggression. It took me years to to understand that the dissonance between my private sexual fantasies and what I actually like in real life was, in large part, attributable to the fact that the overwhelming majority of sex scenes I’d encountered in my formative tweens and early teens explicitly situated male dominance as sexy, or at least as the default form of sexual instigation: I hadn’t realised I could fantasise without it. This bugs me less now that I’m an adult and can, up to a point, sort through it all rationally, but as Moran goes on to say in How To Be a Woman, most teenagers now don’t have to rely on strange, half-glimpsed sex scenes in adult books and TV shows: instead, they can just look up porn on the internet – and that’s a bit worrying, because as weird as all those pre-internet sex sources were, at least they involved some mystery and variety, to say nothing of everyday bodies, whereas the online porn industry is rife with institutionalised misogyny, fake boobs, vaginoplasty, airbrushing and contextless, unemotional grunting scripted solely for the male gaze.  And that’s bad for everyone: boys because they assume that’s what girls both want and should look like as a default, and girls because they’re taught to try and emulate sex-scripts and bodies that are anything but natural. (That’s for hetero boys and girls, of course; I can’t speak to the experience of LGBTQ teens browsing porn online, but by and large, and particularly given the wealth of lesbian porn that is in fact produced for straight men, I’m going to assume it’s not much better.)

And nor, by and large, are TV and movies. The fact that there’s more visible sex and nudity in a single episode of just about anything produced by HBO (Deadwood, A Game of Thrones, True Blood) than I managed to glimpse in my whole adolescence cannot help but bring this comic to mind; but more importantly, the current abundance of televised sex is not the same as an abundance of sex-positivity. Almost exclusively white women being grabbed forcefully, raped and abused, or else being coyly and passively coaxed into sex by active hetero menfolk? That, we have aplenty. Women initiating sex, lesbian sex that isn’t written with heterosexual voyeurs in mind, actual gay sex, loving LGBTQ encounters, men being passive in sex, sexiness being tied to something other than male dominance, and interracial or non-white couples having sex? That, we have not so much of, and in some cases none at all. Cinema is infinitely worse than TV in this respect, because television, for all its faults, is much less bounded by that peculiarly hypersexualised-yet-1950’s sense of  what sex sells, or ought to, that so toxically pervades Hollywood. But even so, it’s far from the full and well-rounded spectrum of tastes it ought to be.

Which leaves books: both adult works that teenagers find themselves reading and, more specifically, YA novels. And even though this is a post about the importance of sex-positive sex scenes for people of all orientations and genders, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that literary sex scenes are particularly important for girls, not only because of the staggering number of teenage ladies looking to YA for romance and sexiness in the post-Twilight period, but because when it comes to the representations of sex in other media – porn, TV and movies, to say nothing of magazine ads and sex advice columns – girls are almost universally the ones being grabbed and raped, the ones depicted as passive sex-objects, posed like dolls or lusted after as unattainable conquests. As things stand right now, YA novels are pretty much the only place a teenage old girl can go to find the image of someone like her receiving cunnilingus from a caring, considerate lover, and when you look at it that way, the power of sex scenes in YA novels should instantly become apparent. In a sexual climate where women’s wants and needs are so often painted as secondary to male desire, and where male dominance, instigation and aggression are seen as sexual defaults, any medium where girls can lash together their sexual landscapes from scenes of female desire, mutual respect and non-aggression is made fundamentally radical.

Not, of course, that this always happens: while Twilight, for all its many troubling failures, at least produced a heroine with sexual agency, one who knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to ask for it, some other prominent novels haven’t managed even that much. Others, though, have, and that’s the point – that sex in YA novels can and does do what sex in other media doesn’t, namely: focus on female pleasure, needs and desires. Which is, I suspect, why the merest prospect of it freaks so many people out: because if there’s one set of bodies that puritanical conservatism has always yearned to shame, contain and control, it’s young female bodies. It’s not even a question of how graphic (or not) the sex/sexiness might be, though as with all matters of personal taste, YMMV – it’s a question of who the audience is. And absolutely every time I’ve seen journalists, concerned parents or censorship groups get up in arms about ‘inappropriate’ sexual content in YA novels, it hasn’t seemed irrelevant that the books in question have overwhelmingly been aimed at teenage girls. (Not that gender is ever mentioned as justification for the complaint – heaven forbid!)

And maybe it’s just a consequence of the fact that YA is a genre currently dominated by women writers, women who perhaps grew up with few or no books to read whose heroes were in fact heroines like them – a problem they likely also encountered in TV and movies – and who subsequently have set out to rectify the disparity; and maybe it’s because society carries a tacit but biased expectation that teenage boys are inevitably going to buy magazines like Zoo and FHM and look at boobies on the internet, and are in any case less interested in romance than they are in pure, abstract sex, with the result that there’s less of a perceived market for sexy books for boys, and hence fewer books of that type and minimal objections to the ones that do exist. Or maybe there’s as many sexy books for boys as for girls, and it’s just that people are more freaked out by the latter than the former, perhaps because the raging, overtly romantic teen-girl fandoms outstrip in their sudden visibility the quieter teen-boy fandoms, because caring about stories and fictional couples and queuing for hours to see your favourite literary idols are all acceptable things for girls to do, but which for exactly that reason boys are likely to be stigmatised for doing, even though that sort of sexist double standard is, well, a sexist double standard. But the point, the point, is that whenever I hear someone talking about how it’s wrong to have sex and sexiness in YA novels, what I actually hear is this:

I’m terrified that the first fictional sex a teenage girl encounters might leave her feeling good about herself. I’m terrified that fictional sex might actually make teenage girls think sex can be fun and good, that reading about girls who say no and boys who listen when they say it might give them the confidence to say no, too – or worse still, to realise that boys who don’t listen to ‘no’ aren’t worth it. I’m terrified that YA novels might teach teenage girls the distinction between assault and consensual sex, and give them the courage to speak out about the former while actively seeking the latter. I’m terrified that teenage girls might think seriously about the circumstances under which they might say yes to sex; that they might think about contraception before they need it, and touch themselves in bed at night while fantasising about generous, interesting, beautiful lovers who treat them with consideration and respect. I’m terrified of a generation of teenage girls who aren’t shy or squeamish about asking for cunnilingus when they want it, or about loving more than one person at once, and who don’t feel shame about their arousal. I’m terrified that teenage girls might take control of their sexuality and, in so doing, take that control of them and their bodies away from me.

Which is also why I get so angry whenever I come across negative sexuality in YA novels: books where the brooding hero treats the heroine badly, ignores her when she says no, abuses her trust and feelings and slams her bodily against walls, and where she’s made to feel uncomfortable about and disquieted by her feelings, because not only do such romances fail at sex-positivity, but if that’s your bag, then every other form of pop culture is ready and willing to oblige you.

Sex/y scenes in YA matter because YA novels aren’t contraband. It’s not like sneaking a glance at the late night movie, then frantically switching channels when your parents inevitably walk in during the naked bits, or covertly trying to hide a Mills and Boon under your bed, or having to clear your browser history and check that the door’s locked if you want to look at porn or read slashfic on the internet. You can read YA novels openly – on the bus, at school, at home – and never have to worry that someone’s going to find your behaviour suspicious. Sex/y scenes in YA matter because, by the very nature of belonging to a permitted form of media, they help to disassociate sex from surreptitious secrecy: they make it something open rather than furtive, something that rightfully belongs to you, the reader, because the book was meant for you to read and remember. It doesn’t matter if the scene is detailed or not, if it’s only fiery kisses or much, much more: the point is that you’re allowed to have it, allowed to enjoy it, and that perhaps for the first time in your life, you’re viewing something arousing that doesn’t make you out to be a sex object in heels, but an active, interesting heroine who also happens to have a love life.

To quote one of my favourite ever YA novels, Laini Taylor’s utterly brilliant Daughter of Smoke and Bone:

‘I don’t know many rules to live by,’ he’d said. ‘But here’s one. It’s simple. Don’t put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles–drug or tattoo–and… no inessential penises either.’

‘Inessential penises?’ Karou had repeated, delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. ‘Is there any such thing as an essential one?’

‘When an essential one comes along, you’ll know,’ he’d replied.

No wonder the conservatives are terrified.