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?

I don't think it matters, in relation to the OP's point as I read it, whether the 'serious' violence being 'celebrated' is fictional or not. My point is that those who do not like watching violence are seen as, in some way, less than those who are not so affected by it - less serious, less grown-up etc. It is as if, by not enjoying the violence that society sets up as 'heroic', the viewer is somehow less heroic or even cowardly. It may not be a stance that is considered 'womanly', then, but it is certainly a stance that is considered less 'manly.'

Interestingly, picking up on callindana's point about death in warfare being deemed more 'serious' than death in childbirth, those who are not able to watch scenes of childbirth, or even life-saving medical procedures, are not considered unusual or 'less manly' - that s merely 'squeamishness' and is quite acceptable.

OneFlewOverTheDodosNest

I agree with your analysis. Plus we don't like to imagine humans losing. HG Wells deliberately ended the alien invasion with a virus, both as a symbol of how helpless humanity was and a comment on the arrogance of the invaders.

With regards to the more general discussion, perhaps negative reactions to violence are seen as being evidence of an excess of empathy. It is not inappropriate to have a degree of empathy for those who experience childbirth or accidental injury, but an excess of empathy on the battlefield makes you less combat capable and is therefore seen as undermining the survival capacity of the collective group.

Emmeline Pankhurst's entry in Wikipedia includes this:
With the advent of the First World War, Emmeline and Christabel called an immediate halt to militant suffrage activism in support of the British government's stand against the "German Peril." They urged women to aid industrial production and encouraged young men to fight, becoming prominent figures in the white feather movement.

Hearing about that "white feather movement" is pretty chilling. I suppose they might have been saying, if men want to run society, now's their time to go out and die for it! On the other hand, Millicent Fawcett's liberal group, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, kept on campaigning throughout the war.

So the militants became enthusiastic supporters of the war effort, and the liberals kept up their non-violent pressure. Maybe it's true that they all contributed to the first women getting the vote in 1918, while the war was still going on. In fact maybe with such a distraction going on, it was easier for the government to vote it in than in peacetime, and get the issue over with.

Active participation in a national war effort has usually been a precursor to greater social inclusion for marginalised groups. The Civil Rights movement during WW2 and Vietnam are good examples. More historically we have the Scots and Irish regiments in the UK, in antiquity the Host of Alexander and the Roman Legionary Auxilia. Civilisations where women participated in warfare, where records of such persist, tend to indicate far greater gender equality than those where they did not; The Romans found Brythonic women terrifying in battle and some contemporary historians see them as possessing legal status greater than Roman women were afforded; Scythian war maidens had the same social status and responsibilities as male youths, according to Herodotus. In the modern age, the insistence on participation by both genders in the Israeli Defence Force has seen a great progress in gender equality within those communities who undertake national service, while those communities which are exempt are becoming more entrenched in traditional patriarchal gender roles.

Counter intuitively though, after the World War II, in which women participated hugely, they were swiftly despatched back to the kitchen and motherhood and apple pie was the order of the day right up to the 1960s.

Governments do not like large numbers of militarily trained men being unemployed. When virtually the whole of the male portion of society has been weaponised it becomes crucial, from the perspective of the elite, for them not to think about alternate forms of social arrangement.

Of course, women had become industrialised and began to consider alternative forms of social arrangement. History sometimes seems a sequence of unintended consequences.

I just want to come back to this and point out that buffy sent me away to read Bourdieu on symbolic violence, and I read it thinking 'well, he's got nothing on MN, this is all very obvious and not quite as un-sexist as he thinks' ... and, er, then I realized (grudgingly) that it is of course possible the rest of MN is informed by Bourdieu and that's why it felt familiar.

But still.

I've never read Bourdieu, if that makes you feel better.

I am informed by Buffy though

Perhaps that is it.

But, actually, I remember a lot of this stuff being around pre-Buffy, too. I think we just, collectively, rock.