Some reading on Norway

I'm working on a longer post on what happened in Norway in Finnish. I'll try to return to the topic in English later. For now, here's some recommended reading:

New York Times: Breivik and His Enablers

What has become clear in Oslo and on Utoya Island is that delusional anti-Muslim rightist hatred aimed at “multiculturalist” liberals can be just as dangerous as Al Qaeda’s anti-infidel poison: Breivik alone killed many more people than the four Islamist suicide bombers in the 7/7 London attack of 2005.

Guardian: Anders Breivik's chilling anti-feminism

Breivik's introduction is entirely given over to a half-baked history of political correctness, "no aspect" of which, he tells us, is "more prominent … than feminist ideology". The PC-project is bent on "transforming a patriarchy into a matriarchy" and "intends to deny the intrinsic worth of native Christian European heterosexual males". But more than that, it has succeeded. The "feminisation of European culture" has been underway since the 1830s, and by now, men have been reduced to an "emasculate[d] … touchy-feely subspecies".

The Nation: Europe's Homegrown Terrorists

Unlike Muslims in the wake of Islamist attacks, Christians weren’t called upon to insist upon their moderation. No one argued that white people had to get with the Enlightenment project. But the bombings—and the presumptions about who was responsible—suggest that the true threat to European democracy is not Islam or Muslims but, once again, fascism and racists.

New York Times: Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.

The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber.

BBC: Norway and the politics of hate

Back in 1985, I was in the US reporting on the emergence of right-wing militias. They were springing up across the Mid-West. Some were little more than gun clubs. Others trained men in uniform.

They believed that their idea of America was under threat. Many saw the federal government in Washington as the enemy, staffed with officials who were betraying America's core values.

A strong strain of paranoia ran through their conversation and publications. I recall a man showing me a grainy photograph, claiming it proved there were secret Russian bases in Michigan.

Most of this reflected the margins of a society and could easily be dismissed. But the idea that his government was the real enemy worked away inside the mind of a young man called Timothy McVeigh. Sometime later he packed a van with fertiliser and diesel fuel and blew up the federal building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people.

And, finally, The Colbert Report.

Richard Dawkins is an asshole

Richard Dawkins is someone I think very highly of. Or at least I used to, until he took a stand on the Internet to compare a woman's, Skepchick's Rebecca Watson's, that is, fear of sexual assault to his annoyance at someone chewing bubblegum.

Read Phil Plait's summary of events here. Finnish readers can also check out Kaj Sotala's blog here. Ms. Watson's own reply is here. Frankly, the only way I can describe this is that Richard Dawkins is not only being an asshole, but is adamantly refusing to acknowledge it.

This whole thing is just depressing. As I understand it, what Ms. Watson was saying, was that a dude was creepy to her in an elevator, and she thought it was creepy. Her advice to men: don't be creepy.

Of course, what with the culture wars going on, you don't have to go far down in Mr. Plait's comments section for this to start:

At this point you are basically advocating total segregation of men and women.

Men are not allowed to make even the slightest advance towards women.

And it goes on from there. On that forum, and on so many others, people are jumping on bandwagons, and the most popular one is dedicated to framing her view as an attack on all men everywhere. According to these feminazis, men aren't allowed to have a sexuality at all and aren't allowed to talk to women, and so on and so forth.

I would be intellectually dishonest if I didn't mention that a particularly obnoxious anti-feminist from my very own political party got on the same case, ridiculously summarizing this whole episode as feminists being enraged at a woman being asked to have coffee, because they think all men are rapists.

You can watch the video that prompted all this nonsense here, and determine for yourself that she says none of the things she's been accused of. Seriously, she doesn't. She gives men everywhere a very good, reasonable piece of advice: don't be creepy.

Most of the response to this is just astonishing. Not only is what she actually said being totally distorted to make her look ridiculous, but the whole point of this concerted attack is that she feels wrong. How dare that woman feel threatened! Why, it's an insult to men everywhere.

Read Ms. Watson's rejoinder to the whole thing here; it's beautiful.

So here we are today. I am a feminist, because skeptics and atheists made me one. Every time I mention, however delicately, a possible issue of misogyny or objectification in our community, the response I get shows me that the problem is much worse than I thought, and so I grow angrier. I knew that eventually I would reach a sort of feminist singularity where I would explode and in my place would rise some kind of Captain Planet-type superhero but for feminists. I believe that day has nearly arrived.

I, too, would like to say that this is exactly what makes me a feminist. From my point of view, the people attacking Ms. Watson live in an insane world. She felt creeped out in a situation where I, at least, consider that it was totally reasonable, and in response to her saying that, men from Richard Dawkins on down attack her. Clearly she's not allowed to feel creeped out!

What makes it quite simply sinister is that this fits in perfectly with the attitude that so much of our society takes to sexual harassment, objectification of women and even sex crime. The victimization of women in our society is real, but far too often any attempt to draw attention to it is dismissed and ridiculed. Feminist critiques of the gender system are totally misrepresented as ridiculous strawman caricatures, and things like false rape accusations are played up far beyond their actual numbers to suggest that all these women are just being silly.

I'm constantly surrounded by this. I already mentioned the ludicrous caricature that a fellow Pirate party member presented of this particular incident. Earlier, another fellow blogger dismayed me on the topic of rape. I have the greatest respect for him as a person, but it's just shocking when he puts together blog posts with such utterly ridiculous strawmen as "feminists claim rape accusations can never be false" and so on. Just last week, Finland's Aamulehti published a particularly idiotic article where the author claimed that in America, men can't even get into the same elevator as women without facing a rape charge, with no evidence beyond the woman's word required.

This stuff is completely moronic and untrue, and the people peddling it are being maliciously dishonest. What's even worse is that by doing so, they're actively trying to make claims of sexual harassment and rape appear suspect, overstated and false. Bizarrely, they often justify themselves by claiming that they're pursuing sexual equality: a lunatic definition of equality where men's sexual needs are paramount, and women simply aren't allowed to feel differently. The Pirate party member I've mentioned also authored a proposal for increasing sexual equality, which included using the school system to, frankly, teach girls to put out more. When it was pointed out that this kind of approach would almost certainly increase sexual harassment, in his response the proposer simply ignored this. To him, it seems, sexual equality means the satisfaction of men's needs, and the adjustment of women to conform to men's needs. And he, in all seriousness, calls himself an "equality activist".

By attacking feminism, and especially by attacking feminist critiques of sexual oppression, these people are quite simply enabling more sexual harassment and sex crime. The more we create an atmosphere where complaints of sexual harassment are viewed as frivolous, the more we make sexual harassment acceptable. It's absolutely unconscionable and immoral to participate in this kind of activity. Given my "criminal record", it should be obvious that I'm all for highlighting problems of gender and sexual equality for both sexes; what I don't approve of is this idea that it needs to be done through undermining feminism and women's rights. That whole notion is based on turning feminism into a ludicrous strawman.

The single most appalling reaction I've encountered to this whole business came from a wealthy white man, who was absolutely incensed that people like Ms. Watson are treating men as potential sexual offenders. He was hurt by this sexism! So somehow, Ms. Watson feeling creeped out is transformed into not only her being a sexist against the man who was creeping her out, but an attack on the rights of a man half the world away. Never mind that neither Ms. Watson nor Mr. Plait made any claims that "all men" are anything at all, or even the fact that this "all men are rapists" notion mostly comes from rabid anti-feminists who are hell-bent on regarding the SCUM manifesto as feminism's Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In my opinion, nothing illustrates how bad the situation is as well as a privileged white man coming away from this incident feeling hurt because women feel harassed and threatened, and somehow that infringes on his rights.

So really, when I see this kind of activity going on, it reaffirms my belief not only in feminism, but in the necessity of feminism. When someone like Richard Dawkins feels the need to speak up solely to belittle and ridicule a woman's experience of feeling harassed, it's obvious that we have a problem. When Ms. Watson regularly receives threats of murder and rape for speaking out, we have a problem. To far too many of us, women are still second-class citizens whose emotions and concerns can be dismissed, and even should be dismissed.

It's easy to think we live in a perfect world of gender equality, where feminism is no longer necessary. Then something like this comes along, and we're forcefully reminded that feminism is still very necessary. Sexual harassment isn't something to point and laugh at. It's especially reprehensible when privileged white men are the ones doing the pointing and laughing.

**

On the subject of response, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that this even made the front page of Conservapedia! You know, the Reliable Encyclopedia (tm) that's bowdleriz...erm, retranslating the Bible. What it said when I checked was this:

Boorish and uncouth atheist men are causing disharmony between the sexes in the atheist community.

Followed by a link to a ridiculous blog post on this very topic. Atheists: boorish, uncouth and fat. Yes, there is a Conservapedia page titled "Atheism and obesity", and even worse, somewhere there are people who think that that page is a reasonable argument.

And I'll finish with a humorous endnote: Skepchick also has a Swedish-language site, which I shouldn't have been reading in the middle of the night, because I genuinely misread the second item of this post as "Finskor har också känslor. Så även skaldjur."

The perils of a billowy dress

Time tackled the WTA's upcoming ad campaign in an article titled Game, Sex and Match: The Perils of Female Sports Advertising. I just wanted to make a brief note of this, as it touches on the same things I said about the recent movie Sucker Punch. I treated the subject more fully here, but here's a tidbit of what I mean, from the Time article:

Ultimately, the controversy surrounding the portrayal of female athletes comes down to the context in which the public is comfortable looking at women. With that in mind, it's harder to fault the WTA. In fact, in their 30-second commercials they blend the provocative imagery with details of the players' lives — and that elevates the ads beyond mere fluff. The spot featuring Ana Ivonovic is particularly stirring. "During the war in Serbia, they bombed us all day and all night," we hear her say as she takes a swing at a ball in slow motion. "But if I got up early enough, I could practice before the planes came." It's just a shame that her inner strength has to be wrapped in a billowy dress.

"A shame". I find it astonishing that the people who probably imagine themselves to be in favor of gender equality are judging the statements of women based on what they're wearing. As if what she says would have more meaning if she were wearing a burkha.

Pumping iron in the prison gym

I'll let Slate.com introduce the subject for me because I'm lazy.

Slate: Do Prisoners Really Spend All Their Time Lifting Weights?

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that crowding at California prisons constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and ordered the state to reduce the number of inmates by more than 30,000. An outraged Justice Scalia dissented, noting that many of the released prisoners "will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym." Do people really get super-buff in the slammer?

While the latent homoeroticism of Scalia's dissenting opinion reminded me of The Onion, I thought I'd take a moment on this topic. Slate continues:

Not anymore. It's true that most state and federal prisons had extensive collections of free weights and weight machines through the 1980s, and that inmates could spend significant portions of their days bulking up. But that all changed around 20 years ago. As stories about prison gyms spread in popular culture, they became an increasing source of public concern. Some shared Scalia's worry that muscle-bound ex-cons would be even more dangerous after their release, and legislators across the country responded. In 1996, an amendment to an appropriations bill expressly prohibited the federal Bureau of Prisons from purchasing "training equipment for boxing, wrestling, judo, karate, or other martial art, or any bodybuilding or weightlifting equipment of any sort." Many states, including California, made the same decision, either by statute or policy. These days, whatever free weights you'd still find in U.S. prisons are decades old.

(...)

Despite popular approval, sociologists and many prison officials have criticized the prohibition on weights in correctional facilities. Some research suggests that weight lifting decreases aggression among inmates. Wardens have noted that idleness is the biggest threat to order in a prison, and weight lifting gives the convicts something to do.

As a former inmate myself, I have a firm, hard, well-toned opinion on this topic, even if it is still a little bulky around the midriff. It's all the sugar in my diet, I know.

Judge Scalia's dissenting opinion isn't all that surprising: the eroticization of prisons and prisoners has been with us for a long time. I'm sure there's plenty of films set in mens' prisons, but frankly, I tend to notice these ones more:

Starring, of course, the inimitable Brigitte Nielsen.

Maybe they'll do one with Lindsay Lohan, now that she's actually been inside and all? She is kinda hot.

Wait, that wasn't my point at all.

**

This notion that prisoners can't have weights is based on two distinct ideas, one somewhat scientific and the other not. Firstly, the more scientific one is a claim that weightlifting and similar pursuits increase aggressiveness. It doesn't seem to be true. A similar one is the idea that pornography leads to more violence and "a hostile environment", which isn't true in society at large, so one wouldn't expect it to be true in prison. Nonetheless, South Carolina still bans pornography from its prisoners, which the ACLU has challenged and been criticized for by Radley Balko, which I thought was damned odd.

The latter idea is perhaps best exemplified by the Zimmer Amendment, quoted in the Slate.com article. The amendment was introduced by congressman Dick Zimmer and passed by Congress in 1995 "To amend the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 to prevent luxurious conditions in prisons." In Section 2, "Elimination of Luxurious Prison Conditions", the amendment demands not providing:

"(vii) any instruction (live or through broadcasts) or training equipment for boxing, wrestling, judo, karate, or other martial art, or any bodybuilding or weightlifting equipment of any sort;"

Although the amendment has since expired, it's left a legacy of Byzantine guidelines on what kind of exercise equipment is and isn't allowed in prisons. Most state and federal prisons still more or less abide by the terms of the Zimmer Amendment, and are phasing out weightlifting equipment by not replacing it as it wears out.

So one strand of the argument against weights is "prison luxury", a staple of the law and order platform. Prison, they insist, must be a punishment, and prisoners shouldn't be allowed "luxuries" because they're being punished.

The different views on the topic can pretty much be found in the New York Times article on the amendment. Here's the law-and-order plank:

Behind all these measures, supporters say, is the idea of making prison a less pleasant place for repeat offenders to come back to.

"To habitual criminals, prisons are resorts with televisions, weight-training facilities and libraries that some colleges would envy," said State Senator Gerald A. Cardinale of New Jersey, who has sponsored a no-frills measure called the People's Prison Act, which the Legislature will take up in the fall. "For a lot of them, jail time is just an extended vacation."

(...)

Mr. Zimmer said: "When you break the law of the land, you should pay the price for your crime, not be rewarded with a vacation watching premium cable on your personal television."

(...)

"Prisons have become mini-resorts and it's disgusting, and it's particularly disgusting to crime victims," said Mr. Deeds of the Law Enforcement Alliance, which enlists crime victims to campaign for harder prison conditions. "We strongly believe that prison is meant to be punishment, a deterrent and a prevention tool, not a resort experience."

So when it's a womens' prison, our society fantasizes about lesbians and Brigitte Nielsen, but when it's a mens' prison, we fantasize about fine physical specimens pumping iron and watching cable TV. Both those fantasies have one thing in common: none of the people responsible for them have ever been to prison.

For starters, the "women in prison" movies. I don't think the reality of a womens' prison sounds particularly sexy:

Wikipedia:

Sexual aggression and abuse by male prison staff is widespread. (...)

“In federal women’s correction facilities, 70% of guards are male,” reinforcing female inmates’ powerlessness. (...)

In 2005, “the Office of the Inspector General and the DOJ released a report documenting widespread sexual abuse by prison employees nationwide, noting that only 37% had faced some kind of legal action. Of those, ¾ walked away with no more than probation. It took all of this evidence for the BOP to finally criminalize sexual contact as a felony in 2006, so that guards can actually face up to five years in prison”. However, “when authorities confimed that corrections staff had sexually abused inmates in their care, only 42% of those officers had their cases referred to prosecution; only 23% were arrested, and only 3% charged, indicted, or convicted. Fifteen per cent were actually allowed to keep their jobs”.

Despite such legislative progress, women are fully dependent on the guards for basic necessities and privileges, and in many states, guards have access to inmates’ personal history files which can empower them to threaten prisoners’ children if the women retaliate. Female inmates who retaliate also face the loss of ‘good time’ for early parole in addition to prolonged periods of disciplinary segregation, and detrimental write-ups, which further deters acts of resistance. The fear incited by such threats as well as the concern that no one will believe them or that no one really cares can successfully silence women. Experience of sexual abuse in prison can greatly impede women’s capacity to reintegrate into society upon release.

That's how far the reality of womens' prisons is from the exploitation movie fantasy. Mens' prisons are about as far from being the luxury resorts these concerned citizens imagine them to be, and as Scalia's opinion shows, they're about as far removed from the reality of prisons as the people making "women in prison" porn. In general, none of the people who speak with this authority about how easy and wonderful prison life is have experienced it. I'm sure many of them have visited a prison once or twice. I remember a delegation of Finnish members of parliament visiting the prison I was in: they walked around the block for about ten minutes, had lunch in the cafeteria and left. I'm sure that gives them an excellent grasp of the day-to-day realities of prison life. It's been pointed out that Judge Scalia should, you know, actually bother to find out such minutiae as whether prisoners are actually allowed to pump iron at the prison gym or not before committing it to writing in a court decision, but really, the way he handled it is perfectly in line with most commentary on prisons.

While no-one familiar with the reality of womens' prisons would describe them as pornographic, I'm equally certain that very few people who've actually been living in correctional facilities would describe mens' prisons as "a vacation", let alone a "resort experience". Certainly, for some people, having walls and a roof as well as regular meals is a huge improvement on their living conditions, but not only are they in the minority, but they too suffer from the single biggest punishment prison inflicts. Even if it was a resort, it's one you can't leave.

The whole discussion on prisons and prison conditions has made me think that being deprived of your freedom is a punishment that most people simply don't seem to understand. Take for instance a closed ward in prison, around where I'm from, or one of those secure housing units or whatever they're called on National Geographic, where you spend 23 hours of each day inside a tiny cell. I've been locked up in one of those, and I assure you, it isn't a holiday. No sane person would willingly choose to go to prison over their everyday life unless that everyday life is truly horrible. Even in the more open wards, the constant reality of being locked inside a small space and being unable to leave is a very real punishment.

Having experienced it, it's somewhat bizarre for me to have to explain this, but the tone of law-and-order pundits everywhere makes it seem necessary.

**

By the way, here's a note of reality that crept into the NY Times proceedings:

Mr. Stout, who killed a man during a mugging in Newark in 1976, maintains that pumped-up prisoners do not stay strong for long.

"In here," he said, "you have all the time in the world, so you work out. Once they get back out, they've got other worries, and they don't stay big for long."

That's certainly true. A fitness or bodybuilding regime is fairly easy to adhere to when you're taken to the free gym regularly every week; when the gym costs money and takes personal initiative to get to, it's a whole lot harder...

And it's this interface between life in an institution and life on the outside that raises the biggest questions of all about prison as punishment. From Wikipedia:

Meta-analysis of previous studies shows that prison sentences do not reduce future offenses, when compared to non-residential sanctions. This meta-analysis of one hundred separate studies found that post-release offenses were around 7% higher after imprisonment compared with non-residential sanctions, at statistically significant levels. Another meta-analysis of 101 separate tests of the impact of prison on crime found a 3% increase in offending after imprisonment. Longer periods of time in prison make outcomes worse, not better; offending increases by around 3% as prison sentences increase in length.

This raises the question of what the point of prisons is in the first place. Do we just want to punish people? It's worth remembering that nearly all prisoners will be freed, sooner or later. The longer they're kept inside and the harsher their punishment, the more brutalized and angry they'll be when they finally get out. When one takes into account studies such as this one on how difficult it is for ex-convicts to reintegrate into normal life, it becomes pretty obvious how the prison system works: all it seems to reliably do is ensure that inmates will end up back inside.

There are alternatives to prison as punishment, mainly the much-maligned idea of rehabilitation. With such things as California's recent decision to release inmates due to overcrowding in mind, it needs to be remembered that not only is prison tremendously expensive, but the inmates aren't producing anything. Each prisoner is a twofold expense: they need to be provided for and their productivity is removed from the economy. The goal of rehabilitation is that a prisoner can return to society as a productive citizen, changing from an expense to society to a taxpayer.

Of course, there are some individuals who can't be rehabilitated, but they are the exception, not the rule. Several studies show that many prison inmates have life goals that are very similar to those of the population at large; where they fail is in realizing those goals. As the study I linked to earlier shows, our penal and judicial systems are failing to help convicts realize those goals and are in fact actively working to make it harder for them.

If what you want is punishment, it's worth reading this interview, where criminologist Peter Moskos quite seriously advocates the reintroduction of flogging as a punishment.

I’m deadly serious. Given the choice between five years and ten lashes, wouldn’t you choose the lash? What does that say about prison? And if flogging were so bad, where’s the harm in offering it as a choice?

Of course some people are too dangerous to release, but these people are kept behind bars simply because we’re afraid of them. But for most criminals, those we just want to punish, flogging is a more honest. It’s also a lot cheaper. Simply to bring our prison population down to levels we had until the 1970s, we’d have to release 85 percent of our prisoners. How are we going to do that unless we end the war on drugs or have alternative forms of punishment?

Ironically, once people hear my idea, often they say that flogging isn’t harsh enough. It’s good to move beyond the facile position that flogging is too cruel to consider, but if you think flogging isn’t harsh enough—that we need to keep people locked up for years precisely because prison is so unbelievable horrible—then you may be a truly evil person.

His point is excellent: if what you want from criminal policy is pure and simple punishment, then what's wrong with corporal punishment? Surely it'll have a deterrent effect! And given that we know prison doesn't, in fact, rehabilitate criminals, then why bother with it in the first place? As he points out:

So California now says they’re not going to release prisoners who are a danger to society. But if they’re not a danger to society, why are they behind bars in the first place? If we just want to punish people for breaking the law, there are better—and cheaper—ways to do so.

Yet somehow the idea of floggings as a punishment is repellent to us, but the idea of prison as a punishment isn't. I'll repeat myself by saying that I firmly believe that this is because everyone who is able to has most likely experienced physical pain, and so thinks they can imagine the pain of flogging; however, to those who haven't experienced prison, the simple reality of imprisonment doesn't seem to communicate itself at all. But to regard one as a cruel and inhuman punishment and the other as not smacks of hypocrisy to me.

The focus on prison as a punishment is actively hostile to prison as rehabilitation. In my mind, this is largely because of a mentality created by law-and-order politicians and Hollywood, who depict crime as the actions of a criminal class determined to exploit society's weaknesses. If one takes the view that all crime is committed by hardened professional criminals, and also adopts the strangely antithetical idea that they'll stop being professional criminals if they're punished hard enough, then it makes sense to rail against "prison luxuries" and demand tougher treatment. But this idea isn't based on any perceivable reality; instead it's part of the culture of fear our politicians maintain to frighten us into compliance.

As long as we make decisions on criminal policy based not on reality but on illusions, we're behaving irrationally. In this case, it means creating a judicial system that encourages and maintains crime. It's a worthwhile sociological question to ask whether this is, in fact, done on purpose, but that's a larger topic for another time.

**

To wrap up, I'll return to what kicked this whole thing off: prison gyms. We still have those in Finland, but rumor has it that they're considering getting rid of them. Martial arts equipment like focus gloves are banned. Focus gloves were, in fact, the subject of my only foray into jailhouse lawyering, when I trudged through the prison regulations and found that they were, in fact, prohibited.

As I said earlier, studies seem to show that instead of increasing aggression and violence, working out seems to do the opposite. What's more, simply banning exercise equipment won't stop prisoners from working out. There's always push-ups and all kinds of improvised exercises that can be done in the absence of equipment. Even martial arts training is easy; I've seen some impressive home-made focus gloves.

So the ban doesn't stop prisoners from working out, but that doesn't have the adverse effects it's said to have either. The ban on exercise equipment in prisons addresses a non-existent problem in an inefficient way, so it doesn't make any sense. It's pretty much par for the course in our criminal legislation.

Far from being a problem, I think exercise equipment in prisons is a positive thing. First and foremost, it gives inmates something to do. Prison is 99% mind-numbing boredom, and anything that you can spend energy on is basically a good thing. And fitness is a positive thing in and of itself, especially since I think the reason bodybuilding and working out in general are so popular is that the prisoner's own body is one of the only things they can control. A workout program is a long-term project, and I'd say getting involved in non-criminal long-term projects is only good for rehabilitation.

I'm beginning to think that the majority of our laws and regulations are coming about as nothing more than knee-jerk reactions to some level of moral panic, where it doesn't even matter if the problem is real or if the solution works, as long as the act of passing the regulation expresses our ethical view on the matter. This is basically the argument in favor of the war on drugs, for instance, as well as on prison conditions: it doesn't matter what the practicalities are, but we have to take a certain stance for moral reasons. It's a staggeringly irrational way to run a society.

**

I'll finish off with a reminder of how I ended up acquiring the personal experience that went into writing this blog post.


Tricky - Black Steel by Tricky

Sucker Punch

Just saw Sucker Punch last week. Of course, when I first heard about it, I thought it was a Tie Domi biopic.

My blog: your number-one shop for two-minute photoshops. Stay tuned for the sequel:

**

Now to the actual movie.

I can't believe the bad press this movie has got. You saw the trailer and the poster, and based on those, you should have been expecting an action movie with console game visuals.

Well, Sucker Punch is that, and it's seriously cool. I mean, look at it.

The action sequences are awesome, and I absolutely loved them. As an added bonus, the soundtrack is excellent. The narration is very crisp, with none of the usual repetition and beating us over the head with the clue bat that we're all getting used to.

There is, however, a sucker punch that you really don't see coming. Namely, that this movie has a real, serious, feminist message. Now, this is apparently too much for some critics. To quote Wikipedia for a particularly glaring example:

A.O. Scott of The New York Times described the film as a "fantasia of misogyny" that pretends to be a "feminist fable of empowerment" and found that the film's treatment of sexual violence was problematic.

Since movie critics are herd animals, everyone's jumped on this bandwagon. Ooh, it can't be feminist, they're wearing short skirts and they're objectified.

I mean, oh my God, you can see some of her thigh. Quick, call Andrea Dworkin.

As a feminist, this enrages me. There is a serious, powerful feminist message in this movie, but it seems that our movie critics go so bananas when they see Emily Browning in a miniskirt that they can't detect it.

Without spoiling anything, the central theme of the movie is the way in which men can use the structures of society to inflict violence on women. The film treats psychiatry as a charade to enforce proper gendered behavior and as a form of violence, used by men on women to make them conform. The plot of the movie is victimized women fighting against gendered oppression.

And because they do it while looking hot, it's suddenly objectification.

In many cases, including this one, objectification is in the eye of the objectifier. I can't think of anything more demeaning, oppressive and downright patriarchal as dismissing this movie by reducing its female characters to pure eye candy just because of the clothes they're wearing.

The film operates on multiple levels, kind of like Inception except that it doesn't suck. The critics seem to be totally fixated on the level that deals with sexuality, and can't see past that to the actual scope of the movie, which deals with psychiatry, lobotomy and patriarchy. Instead, the overwhelmingly male critics seem to be, quite frankly, thinking with their dicks. To me, and the people I saw the film with, characterizing it as pornography is appalling. That's seriously not far removed from calling Schindler's List a glorification of genocide.

But this is the world of movies. Had the same crew and cast made a dreary, depressing drama movie about a woman wrongly committed to a mental institution, the same reviewers would be hailing it as a wonderful paean to female liberation. But because it's a kick-ass action movie, it isn't allowed to have a real theme. If it has a woman in it, she must by definition be only a sexual object. The critics won't let her be anything else.

So in that sense, the film succeeds as feminist empowerment on two levels: not only is the story and theme itself a strong feminist message, but it very brashly exposes what radical feminism has turned into. The critics, in all likelihood believing themselves to be great feminists and doing a good thing, have taken a kickass feminist movie and in the name of feminism, condemned it for violating gender roles. The director is presenting women wrong! The radical feminist orthodoxy seems to currently be that women must not ever be presented as sexy, because that will always be objectifying.

So in other words, in the name of feminism, these "feminists" want to ban women as sexual beings from the movie screen. Female sexuality is only allowed to appear in strictly controlled, radical-feminist-approved contexts like a homemade porn movie shot with a cellphone camera that gets shown at movie festivals. If a female feminist director makes a movie about kickass women, that's great and empowering, but if a male director makes a Hollywood movie that's feminist and kicks ass, that's horrible objectification.

You know what? Fuck you. I thoroughly enjoyed Sucker Punch, and I think it has a very powerful and important message. That so many critics can't be bothered to watch it as a serious movie with a serious message but print their knee-jerk dismissal just confirms me in my belief that movie critics are among the lowest forms of human life to bedevil this planet.

So seriously, screw you guys. I'm going to go see it again.