Extreme images of violence against women. "Moral and edgy" or vile misogynist cliche?

[Eleison]

"The assumption is now ? and it seems to be correct ? that audiences are happy to watch their heroines being beaten and gagged, and to stare at explicitly rendered photographs of women cut and splayed and killed."

Great article by Natasha Walton in the Guardian today about the intense and lingering depiction of violence against women in films and TV programmes that habitually excuse their horrific images by presenting them in stories that are 'moral' because they narrate the investigation, condemnation, and punishment of the crime.

When Stephen Griffiths describes himself in court by the 'crossbow cannibal' tag that a newspaper gave him, don't we have to see that the conventional excited and graphic presentation of the murder of women in the media in news reports and in drama feeds back into reality, nourishing the fantasies and encouraging the actions not just of serial killers but of common-or-garden misogynists?

That is such a good point EandM -- the absurdity that we are presented as spoilsports for suggesting a brake on seeing women's corpses with lovingly gouged out eyes, etc.

I was also taken by your earlier point about the gratuitous violent scene replacing the gratuitous pornographic sex scene no that porn is so extensively available

I have been thinking about Mary Whitehouse lately (saw the beginning of that drama about her the other week). You can't get much less cool than her.
but like a lot of people (Joan Bakewell, apparently) I am beginning to think she was right about some things....

Can't remember which article it was (one linked on this thread?) but someone described her as being outraged that the space where women have cultural control was being invaded by swearing etc. I feel a bit like that if I switch the television on and see a woman being raped/lying on a slab - that my space is being invaded by someone else's violent fantasies.

but just knowing you can turn it off doesn't make it ok - it is disturbing that this stuff is being made & shown at all.

but censorship is bad, isn't it?

(apologies for lack of coherence of my post - 3 small children milling around)

one thing on another thread this whole thing reminds me of is the debate about the Glamour Model's Guide to Voting and the comment that if it gets boys out to vote it's worth it.

once again, the downside for women is completely ignored in favour of whatever male-based justification is decided on - either it's somehow vaguely 'deeply moral', or it tells an 'interesting' story about a man.... so we women have to just suck up the fact that it normalises violence against women and encourages us to live in fear

Prolesworth - DP and I grimace over film descriptions, going "oh at last, it's so refreshing to hear what it's like for white educated men in America trying to adjust to adulthood"

Speaking of which have a watch of "Waitress" if you want to see a film about a woman who is not happy about being married & pregnant, and whose thoughts on the matter you actually get to hear about.

Eleison - your post has made me see why the "spoilsport" thing gets rolled out. Surely it must have originally been used for people opposed to sex or funny rudeness on TV? (The Mary Whitehouse lot - not mother of Paul was she by any chance?) And now that violence is replacing sex as the shocking ingredient of choice, the label has just been shifted over. So we're left being depicted as "spoilsports" because we don't want to see a gruesome parade of terrified and attacked women, when all we want to do is a bit of televisual problem solving.

The other great put-down of course is the argument about how "artistic" it all is. No i don't want to see someone being raped in the name of entertainment, even if the lighting is wonderful or the music is powerful or the director is a "genius" - that doesn't make it any better. Possibly worse.

And the link between art and life is not tenuous. Look at Roman Polanski's life. He makes films showing women being hurt "artistically", then is defended by all and bloody sundry for his actual (admitted) rape of a child, on the grounds that he is a tortured "artistic" genius.

Amazing how often the genius label is applied to people who make very violent films isn't it? Clearly being able to depict extreme violence is what the predominantly male film industry and reviewers look for in their heroes. Small wonder the TV lot imitate them.

Was thinking of:

Martin Scorsese
Quentin Tarantino
Roman Polanski
Coppola

etc.

BTW meant to say that the other great put-down to the kind of arguments we are making is that it is all very "artistic" and we just don't get it

(and we're right back at Derailing for Dummies)

I think the thing is that we have to start accepting that freedom of speech/expression doesn't trump every other damned thing in the human sphere. Some hardcore misogynist's 'right' to depict sadistic violence against women doesn't trump women's 'right' to a sort of integrity of identity (if that makes any sense). Porn-consumers' 'right' to wank themselves silly doesn't trump the 'right' of the rest of us not to have this stuff shoved into our faces every time we enter a newsagent.

Western liberalism has got a hard-on for freedom of expression that has become entirely disproportionate IMO.

But the censorship/rights thing is surely a red herring anyway, isn't it?

We don't need censorship to supress this. We need a different TV/film/etc culture. Less driven to cliche by the pursuit of large audiences (which is a market notion of the success of a TV product)? Less dominated by men? Less pulled into tolerance of the intolerable by our porn culture, which itself is probably a consequence of consumerisation -- the drive to accessorise everything, including wanking.

So much more to do before censorship and the disruption of real or actual rights even comes into the equation.

I don't think there is a hard-on for freedom of expression, really. It is quashed often enough even in Britain when it suits the powers that be. The cases where it isn't quashed, and where it is spuriously invoked, are the cases where market operators whine for maximum freedom to turn a buck. Advertising online gambling, alcohol, etc.

You're probably right Policywonk. Of course we already accept limits on freedom of expression with regard to not inciting racial hatred.

Maybe I'm going off on a tangent by talking about censorship anyway - the main issue here is the way it's become so mainstream and you can't turn on your blinking tv without it. As with the porn debates, it's the ubiquity rather than the mere existence that makes it a problem on the scale it is.

x-post Eleison

Yes: ubiquity not existence is another reason why censorship not the solution. The pressures that lead to ubiquity are economic and structural, on the whole, and these can/should be tackled by economic and structural solutions.

I know I might be hated for this, but I DO want to leave open the possibility that very awful and troubling images can be shown in meaningful and challenging artisic creations. Which of course entails their being shown in creations which aim, but fail, at artistry.

My first sentence wd have been clearer if I had said 'Yes: the fact that it is the ubiquity and not the simple existence of these images that constitutes the problem, is another reason why censorship not the solution'

We could distinguish perhaps between regulation of the making of an image and regulation of its mass availability? The media through which images bcm massivley available are properly highly regulated -- in a way in which individual image-makers aren't.

Is perhaps analogous to our desire to stop supermarkets etc marketing filth at our children in the guise of food. We wouldn't want to ilegalise the production of such garbage; we would just want to massively penalise/regulate its mass marketing?

Sorry, posting rapidly while sausages cook so prob mis-stating in 1000 ways.

Or, rather, we wouldn't want to ilegalise the creation of such garbage -- just to illegalise its creation as a commodity, which is structurally defined in various ways.

That way, we aren't limiting expression and rights to expression don't come into the equation?

We do have censorship of television and film though. The film classification types say who can see a film, they can cut bits, they can ban a film. TV I'm sure has codes it has to adhere to. And there's the watershed (or has that gone now? Is it just the terrestrial channels that have to stick to it?).

Anyway it's that ideas of what is/isn't acceptable have changed. There are films with 18 certs 20 years ago that would now be a 15 (12?) and so on.

So why the erosion
Who is doing the eroding
Why
Will there be a backlash

Yes, and that curtails production-as-commodity rather than individual expression. So I was wrong to say censorship not the answer. I was thinking in terms of censorship of an individual rather than censorship of a broadcast commodity. So I should have said censorship of an individual not the answer. Censorship of broadcast product (or mass marketed porno mag ect)doesn't limit anyone's right to self-expresssion -- amd in that sense rights to self-expression are a red herring.

Sorry. Keep posting first and thinking too late.

Freedom of expression isn't a red herring in this context, because it's absolutely the first argument that gets flung at you when you step outside the confines of MN's Feminism section and propose the mildest possible adjustment to society-wide pornification. Propose, for instance, that lads' mags ought to be on the top shelf, and you will immediately be engulfed a bunch of hardcore libertarians opining that this is an outrageous breach of freedom of expression. (I know this from recent bitter experience.) See the pompous whittering of Guardian technology correspondent Charles Arthur on Apple's decision to make its iPad software porn-free (as far as they can); actions like this are met with a firestorm of free-speech fetishists, and they're not all impotent angry men confined to the comments sections of blogs.

x-post Eleison.

Actually, you know, if I ruled the world I would censor all images of sexual violence against women, and I'd police it with extreme prejudice.

Yes I think that's right. And it was the way that it used to be before this erosion. These images have always been out there, but people had to be in the know/seek them out/tune in especially at midnight.

They weren't on straight after Dr Who or family fortunes.

However with the internet, youtube, and so on, I don't know that it is possible to turn back the clock.

Thing is (thinking now about how there was a bit of a in the papers over one or two of the acts on britains got talent) there is often a hoo-ha, the public express their distaste, occasionally a broadcaster gets a slap on the wrist. And then they carry on as before.

I don't know what the answer is.

these acts on britain's got talent. I link, as I imagine you are all far too sophisticated to have heard of this show.

Essentially, these things are beign sold as family entertainment. There were complaints and from the press. Anyone want to wager that they will exclude acts of this type in teh future, or encourage even more. All publicity is good publicity, right?

I should have put a somewhere in my previous post.

For the record, I have never seen britain's got talent, but read about the acts in the papers somwhere. But not the mirror. Honest guv

policywonk, I think what I really meant was that the pro-porn people's invocation of freedom of expression is a red herring. The regulation, including their regulation totally out of existence, of porn mags wouldn't violate anyone's right to self-expression. It is a constraint on business activity, and businesses (plus all other collective agents in the market) don't have rights. Individual people have rights. And even more strongly, busineses/collective actors don't have rights to self-expression. The self in question would have to be a person.

Individuals do have rights that translate into certain freedoms to act as a business entity in the market, but since the market is a social artifact constrained by the rights of individuals and by the pursuit of the social goods, it is properly a regulated sphere. So individual rights don't just translate into a business entity's entitlement to act freely.

That would be my view. I am really concerned to state it because I don't think we need at all to talk about curtailing rights in order to secure a proper retreat from the consumerist free-for-all that has allowed the market to trample over very many values that we have. Rights are being curtailed significantly in Britain (eg demonstration, photographing buildings, due process for terrorism suspects) at the same time as being WRONGLY invoked by people opposed to the reasonable regulation of the market.