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Original poster

Can we talk about violence and culture?

87 replies

JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 12:18

I've just been reading a conversation where someone used the term 'symbolic violence', and it's got me thinking about the cultural roles violence plays, and why it plays those roles. This isn't a terribly groundbreaking post, but I wondered what you reckoned to the subject.

I keep noticing that, when we talk about certain kinds of violence on here, they're valorized, almost celebrated, when they have to do with Things Men Did Far Back In History: so, people will say that men evolved to be testosterone-fuelled fighters because historically we 'needed' war. And, in our culture, we respond to certain kinds of violence (world war I, for example) as needing a huge amount of ceremony and ritual, which is intended to celebrate the sacrifices of men in a violent context. And in my teaching, I have to teach my students a paper on Greek tragedy, where they read all about how literature turns violence into an art form, and this is somehow culturally hugely important.

All of these are slightly different things - evopsych about war, and ceremonies about it, and literary depictions of violence - but they all seem to me to be seen as 'serious' ways of relating to violence, serious attempts to historicize it or memorialize it. Right?

There is nothing I can think of that treats violence against women like this, at all. It's almost entirely invisible. There are things like Karen Ingala Smith's 'Counting Dead Women' project, but nothing with the huge scale and cultural impact.

Am I wrong about this? I think we are being encouraged to use memory and emotion differently (less!) when we relate to violence and women, aren't we?

OP posts:
Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 15:25

Yes, I think there is.

I'm sure both state-induced and personal violence are categories with a whole lot of internal variation.

But I think there is a script for seeing violent men as heroic, and it really bothers me. Romantic tropes in films like the man who hits someone who offends a woman, or slams his fist into the wall when he's frustrated.

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Yops · 20/03/2015 15:21

Jeanne, is there a distinction between state-induced and personal violence? I can see why a state might want to spin the heroic angle as it tries to justify aggression against other states. Do you think this is continued outside those parameters, down at a more personal/individual level?

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 15:20

Sorry. I am truly terrible at writing OPs.

I think battle can be a form of violence against women, though. I was reading about medieval battle pictures that seem to show that people directed violence against women's breasts and faces on the battlefield. It was disturbing.

I also read something interesting about how we see violence on/off the battlefield, along the lines you're talking, cailin. Someone said that violence against women (like rape off the battlefield) is defined as a war 'atrocity' and therefore it's outside the 'normal' violence of war. It struck me that this is similar to when people conceptualise rapists as monstrous 'others'. They think they are stressing how appalling rape is, but actually, the way they define it makes it harder for us to talk about how normal and commonplace rape is.

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cailindana · 20/03/2015 15:15

What the OP mentioned was violence against women. So soldiers who die on the battlefield are commemorated - it's seen as an heroic, wonderful death and the violence committed against them is worthy and of cultural importance. Women who die because 15 Russian soldiers who were supposed to be liberating her city gang raped her and beat her is entirely forgotten. Her death is unmentionable.

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 15:14

They're commemorated less, though, cailin. There's very little awareness of woman combatants, I reckon.

So even when women are doing 'men's work', it is erased.

yops - I was really trying to figure out why male violence is so much celebrated. Part of that is to do with women being erased, but also I find it really disturbing that people seem so fixated on these big, heroic, manly-man stories that pretend male violence is something really necessary to us all.

People write huge books about violence and aesthetics, and violence and art, and so on, as if it's something incredibly deep and meaningful that requires a huge amount of serious study.

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Yops · 20/03/2015 15:09

Oh, I see. I thought the OP was discussing why men are seen as heroic and noble when fighting, and yet women taking part were glossed over. My bad.

cailindana · 20/03/2015 15:01

Yes, women get commemorated when they do the same work as men. Where are they commemorated for doing the "women's" work Yops? Where are the statues of the women who created thousands of new lives while men ended thousands of others?

Yops · 20/03/2015 14:43

What about the narrative of female participation in war in other cultures? In the Soviet union in WWII, for example, 800,000 women fought alongside men on the Eastern Front against the German advance. Women had their own bomber squadrons in the air force bombing behind German lines. They were held up as heroines in the USSR. And what about women fighting in the IDF today in Israel?

We shouldn't judge every culture by what we are taught in the West - specifically in the UK.

YonicScrewdriver · 20/03/2015 14:26

And getting blown up too, on occasion, in the Blitz etc.

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 14:25

Oh, good point. Sad

Yes, that's terrifying. It's just occurred to me, presumably, though today the population is slightly higher in women, would it in the past have been higher in men in peacetime?

Because we hear a lot about that post-war generation of women who didn't get married because men their age died, but presumably there must have been times when there were fewer women?

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cailindana · 20/03/2015 14:24

It's worth remembering too that when all these wars were raging, and men were killing men (because of other men) women were at home keeping everything afloat so there was a fucking world for the ones who didn't get blown to bits to come back to. They weren't blowing things up, they were growing babies, and crops, and building houses, and running the world. But that's nothing, really is it? I mean who cares about the positive, life-affirming contribution women have always made and continue to make? Far better to lay endless fucking poppies to commemorate the wonderful glorious killing.

YonicScrewdriver · 20/03/2015 14:23

that number was from here:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836

this was interesting too:

Everyone hated it

Like any war, it all comes down to luck. You may witness unimaginable horrors that leave you mentally and physically incapacitated for life, or you might get away without a scrape. It could be the best of times, or the worst of times.

Many soldiers enjoyed WW1. If they were lucky they would avoid a big offensive, and much of the time conditions might be better than at home.

For the British there was meat every day - a rare luxury back home - cigarettes, tea and rum, part of a daily diet of more than 4,000 calories.

Remarkably, absentee rates due to sickness, an important barometer of a unit's morale, were hardly above those of peacetime. Many young men enjoyed the guaranteed pay, the intense comradeship, the responsibility and a much greater sexual freedom than in peacetime Britain.

(as you could be court martialled for faking illness, this seems a bit simplistic, but interesting nonetheless)

YonicScrewdriver · 20/03/2015 14:22

yup.

This is interesting:

In the UK around six million men were mobilised, and of those just over 700,000 were killed. That's around 11.5%.

NB - in 1913 the population of GB was around 41m so say 20.5m men, of whom 700k were killed, that's around 3.5% of men.

but if KE is right in Five Wounds that with each child you bore you had a 1 in 60 chance of dying (and I'm not sure if her numbers count childbed fever, which carried off many women post birth) - that's 1.67% of all births killing the mother and many had several children - admittedly that was in the 1500s but that was year in year out, not during a four year period and then nothing for 20 years...

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 14:18

Yes, and it's really creepy that it is so similar to that sexual power, isn't it?

I agree with you it puts women in a lose-lose situation.

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scallopsrgreat · 20/03/2015 14:17

"but these are actually implying women are pretty powerful (and malign)." It's the same kind of power that women are said (in certain quarters) to have over men sexually i.e non-existent. It is made up to give women the illusion of some kind of power. Also a cynical part of me, like Yonic, that it puts women in a lose-lose situation, damned if they do, damned if they don't which can only be of benefit to men.

BuffyEpistemiwhatsit · 20/03/2015 14:13

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

scallopsrgreat · 20/03/2015 14:06

And what cailin said too!

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 14:04

Yes, can see the cultural pressure. But it's implied they have more overt power than that, which is what I think is interesting. Male violence could be all about male power, but these are actually implying women are pretty powerful (and malign).

cailin - yes, I think that must be right. Sad I liked the statue of Alison Lapper in London, when it was on the fourth plinth, for that. But of course, it's temporary, and more complicated in what it meant.

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scallopsrgreat · 20/03/2015 14:04

Isn't it all about how having violent men ultimately benefits all men. That's why those narratives are maintained. Also it keeps all the 'others' in their place to remind them what happens if you know you get a bit too uppity.

I'm always amazed that we can't see past humans being violent, yet so many of us aren't. But I'm confident it is because of these types of narratives.

YonicScrewdriver · 20/03/2015 14:02

Women were involved in putting white feathers on men to up the cultural pressure.

cailindana · 20/03/2015 14:02

The way I see it, we value war because it's what men (traditionally) did. Anything men do is important and cultural and in need of discussion. Anything women do is incidental, embarrassing, emotional, unimportant, 'private' (in the shame sense of the word), not worthy of discussion. Hence we have statue upon statue commemorating men who've killed other men women and children but absolutely nothing commemorating the millions upon millions of women who have died while giving life to other people. Growing life in your own body, giving birth to a new being with great pain, risk and expense to yourself is seen as nothing, something you do in your spare time, something that interferes with important things like paid work, something we must grudgingly accommodate with the least amount of grace. There isn't a single official statue celebrating women and the fact that they create new life, all the time, at massive expense to themselves.
Yet, we hold ceremonies for people who held guns and shot each other in the head.

What a great world we live in.

cadno · 20/03/2015 14:01

Ok - as I mentioned initially I knew it wasn't.

YonicScrewdriver · 20/03/2015 14:01

Well, Kitchener needed to emotionally blackmail the entire country to throw bodies at the enemy. I think they had so many different slogans aiming at anything that might work.

Also - well, if the subliminal message to men is 'don't let your wife stop you' - that's a bonus, right?

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 13:58

Thank you! That's fascinating.

I do find it fascinating it's seen as 'selfish' - it's implying a female power over men, isn't it? I wonder how that actually played out. Because, presumably, the number of women who could actually have prevented their husbands from going against their will was tiny. It's making it sound almost like a love triangle - you're selfish not to let him go - and narrowing the focus down onto individuals.

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YonicScrewdriver · 20/03/2015 13:54

"Won't you help and send a man to join the army? These two posters tell women that their husbands are needed on the frontline and say they should not be selfish and stop them from going to do their duty"