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?

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)

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.

Oh, good point.

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Does the romantic hero use violence indiscriminately, though? Isn't it reserved for someone who 'deserves it'? I know the alpha-male characters you are referring to.

We were watching some Hollywood trash the other day - Die Hard 33 I think - and the trail of destruction the hero left through the city as he carved through traffic and pavement was incredible. And yet - no dead bodies, no broken bones, no blood even. Because the big action hero doesn't impact upon the lives of innocent bystanders. He only gets the bad guys. It was preposterous, and yet it's repeated in every Hollywood blockbuster.

I think it depends on the context. Some romantic heroes don't discriminate very well, or very obviously; others do.

I know what you mean about the 'good men only hurt baddies' thing. But I think it slips at times. There's that really disturbing 'I don't want to hurt you but I am so dangerous and passionate' guff that comes over with teen fiction - Twilight, Buffy, etc. And I do know teenagers who buy that, and buy into the whole 'he loses his temper because he loves me' thing.

I think what we're seeing isn't that the violence is discriminate and kept to 'appropriate' targets, but something more like what cailin is talking about, that we simply blank out those bits of violence that are directed at women. We don't even really see them as violent because they're normalized as romantic.

It seems to me that they're normalised as what's known now as "collateral damage" - the unfortunate consequences of war. Men die doing important, glorious man-things, while women die just doing the taken-for-granted shitwork of keeping the entire world in tact while men are trying to destroy it.

Is it part of the whole "history is written by the victors" thing, where the victors will excuse>justify>glorify their means of achieving that victory (and silence anything that detracts from it)? Or is that over-simplistic?

(I often find with such threads that I am many steps behind the thought process that got the OP to their own opening post, and it takes me a while to catch up(

Yes, I think it is partly that, chopper ... but then, I also think, we're living in a world where it's already known that the 'victors' will be men. So when men write as if women don't matter, while male violence has to be celebrated, it's not an 'after the fact' narrative like 'history written by the victors'.

I think?

This is sort of what I am getting at - that people act as if the narratives that celebrate or memorialize male violence must have happened after the specific incident of violence and they must be, in some sense, coincidental, dependent on that violence for their form and character. So, we had WWI then we developed a cultural way of coming to terms with it, by memorializing. And you can't take issue with that cultural way of coming to terms, because while it's imperfect, it's also a product of grief and shock and a specific historical time.

But, looking at it, I think actually, we keep on making up the same narratives that oh-so coincidentally memorialize male violence in this serious, important way. I don't think they do just spring up after the fact, do they? So what is the relationship between the violence, and the way our culture relates to it?

I think we have to give it a reason don't we? We (generally) struggle to cope what we see as "senseless" violence, so perhaps when it is done by people we love or identify with as "one of us", or violence is done in a way that benefits us (generally), we have to frame it as something bein done for good reason. Like excusing a man one loved for raping a woman - he wouldn't have done it without a good reason, ergo there must be a good reason.

Am I talking crap here? I expect I'm a few paces behind you still. But it seems to relate in some way to the cogitive dissonance we were talking about a few weeks ago

Violence is bad
These men are good
So their violence must be justified before, during and after

Um so... We are uncomfortable with bad things happening to others that benefit us and we have to justify it?

When I say benefit I mean on a wide (national) scale - it benefits those in power

So, a sort of psychological coping mechanism? I wonder if that means lots of women through history have been existing in a sort of semi-traumatized state because there was nothing like that for them? I could find that very plausible, actually.

You are not at all talking crap. The problem is that I am really bad at writing clear OPs. I get so much out of talking to people on here (and yes, I think I am still thinking about the same thing as with the cognitive dissonance), but I find it really hard to ask the right questions. I am really impressed by people who can start threads that make everyone think 'ooh ... yes, good question'.

Yes, it would be interesting.

But, I bet you if it has been done before, it hasn't been done with a gender-flip. I can believe people have written or imagined 'what if ...' stories though I can't think of one right now. But I would love to read about a woman in history seeing these men as violent and awful, and then revealing that he's someone considered heroic.

Actually, I wish Hilary Mantel had done that, instead of showing us the world through Cromwell's eyes. I'd love to see Alice More's story.

Jeanne, it is a thought-provoking OP. I have a question re you referring to the ancient Greeks and their portrayal of violence. Here was an incredibly advanced civilisation - democracy, law, medicine, mathematics, science, art, philosophy. How did their portrayal differ from ours?

Also, there are movements against violence, aren't there? Protests against conflicts carried out in our name. Concern about no-combatants being injured by drone strikes for example, and the march against the second Gulf war. Going back to the 60's there was the protest movement against the Viet Nam conflict, and people calling for peace and an end to hostilities. Do we as a society still have a tacit acceptance that it's okay for civilians to be blown to bits, or has that changed since WWII?

Well, I don't know all of it, but I know bits about tragedy. They don't show violence onstage (I heard that's where the word 'obscene' comes from - something that can't be shown on stage). So you get these incredibly violent narratives, and then someone will wheel on a cart full of gory body-bits and describe what happened.

Violence is quite strongly gendered - you get very violent women, but they are unnatural and there's often an implication that violent women are anti-maternal too.

There's a theory that all of this ritualised violence is a way of sort of dissociating yourself from the emotions in you that want to be violent (this is just one of lots of theories). So you watch something appallingly violent, and it makes you a better person/a better citizen, because instead of going out and being violent, you experience it vicariously.

I actually find that really disturbing. And people have all these theories about how noble and important tragedy is, and how these are amazingly serious emotional/cognitive processes that we must all think hard about. I sometimes wonder if that would be the case if they hadn't originated in such a male-dominated society.

I don't know how literally violent they were (and I'm realizing I'm talking only about Athens here really. Sparta different, I think). They did celebrate the people who killed the 'tyrant' with one of those heroic-looking statutes. But I don't know much about what you might call routine violence - punishments for things.

Interesting about protests against violence. I need to think about that.