Can we talk about violence and culture?

[JeanneDeMontbaston]

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?

Right, and the fact that women historically suffered violence during war (rape by the victors) is often ignored by the "they fought for freedom! the heroes!" meme.

Predictably, buffy, not really. I have read a fair amount of the critiques but I've never sat down and successfully got through anything. Where should I start?

yonic - yes! Which is so infuriating. And even when we try to disagree with the idea that women weren't 'part' of war, we don't seem to have much language for memorializing their suffering in any organized way.

I would imagine being a male soldier in WW1, when you knew you'd be shot if you deserted and you knew you were fighting over tiny areas of ground with very little sense of their significance, must have been incredibly disempowering and terrifying. And I do agree those men were heroic, but it's a kind of heroism that is 'passive' in the sense of being suffering inflicted on people with very little choice or agency.

Yet, we describe them and female victims of war quite differently.

Well, if you might need to sign up/conscript without resistance, making soldiers into heroes, calling on patriotism etc however passive their true role was a way to do it

Yes, that's true.

But, how come women resisting isn't seen as heroic? In accounts I read, women are often the last lines of defence, but people generally don't seem to talk about that so much. There's a bit of it with the Blitz, but I can't think of earlier examples where women are represented as being capable of heroic resistance?

I know that this doesn't pertain to the discussion that your hoping to expand on, but when you say that 'men evolved to be testosterone-fuelled', bear in mind that the genes for testosterone go back millions of years before even mammals started to evolve from (presumably) reptiles. As I understand it from wiki, a variety of testosterone is found in fish - so unless this chemical has co-evolved twice (or more), our ancestors' journey through time with testosterone may have started with some common ancestor with those fish. Re: effects of testosterone - Was it Plato that said it was like being chained to a mad-man ?

cad, sorry, I was being faintly sarcastic about evopsych.

My general position is that it's dubious, because wherever it touches up with history, it invariably turns out to be nonsense.

It's the fact there's a narrative there at all that interests me, not whether that narrative is correct (cos I think it isn't). The fact we have these theories about why men go to war, suggests that it's seen as an important kind of violence to theorize about.

I think the evolution in question was how much testosterone fuelled war, not that testosterone didn't predate war.

HTH.

It would be perfectly possible for people to have theorized that oestrogen/progesterone fuel acts of holy rage, necessarily to the survival of the species on account that women must become dynamos of fury to protect their offspring.

We just don't, because we write of female hormones as having other, rather less noble and species-protecting effects.

You can guess that the testosterone/war theory is liable to be, if not bullshit, then delightfully fictionalized, because it grafts so neatly onto prior theories about manliness and war, which far predate our ability to name hormones.

Its been known for centuries that castrating male mammals such as bullocks, colts, lambs, kittens, puppies etc - makes them far easier to manage in terms of their aggression. I'm presuming (that what i recall from school) that testosterone is primarily produced in the testes - this gives persuasive evidence that between testosterone and aggression there is a major link.

I've never studied endocrinology but at the end of the day, all a hormone is, is a chemical messenger that's got a bit of a commute on its hand until it can get to its place of work - and that might mean having a positive or negative on other hormones - such as adrenaline - which in turn has other effects on other tissue in the body. I don't know how these chemical messengers react with different parts of the brain and other tissue - either directly or indirectly - but there is clearly some interaction. If testosterone is such an old chemical in our evolutionary tree, I won't mind betting it has some effect at least on old parts of our brain - maybe not (directly) the parts where our rational 'minds' are sited - but maybe there too.

Sorry, I didn't really make that clear - I'm not that interested in evo psych or hormones in themselves.

I'm trying to talk about the way we value some cultural narratives, and not others.

Does that make sense?

Yup

DM, sorry, but interesting exhibition

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2569145/Why-arent-khaki-Fascinating-archive-posters-urging-men-enlist-WWI-encouraging-wives-send-set-sell-20-000.html

"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"

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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. 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.

And what cailin said too!

"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.

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.

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...