Many laws are based on gender and still assume women and children are property, which is likely to be damaged or stolen by men other than the “proper” owner. This lingering attitude is reflected in both laws and behavior. Some men only abuse their own children because they “own” them. Some wives will accept this -- until they are murdered. Who owns the bones?
We are deeply ambivalent about each other’s physical bodies. Nurses, who now may be male, and doctors, who now may be female, have access to our most intimate functions. Modesty protocols which previously were in place -- things like draping, wearing gowns or white lab coats, asking permission, using formal terms of address -- have somehow evaporated. However, gloves and masks are as ubiquitous as for burglars. It used to be that women got a “free pass” when looking at any naked bodies because since the Civil War they have been the ones to give baths and change bandages. Women are not suspected of hurting children because they are the caregivers who gave birth to them, but what if they don’t care? Once patients were in open wards where everyone saw everything, but now it is considered desirable to have a private room. Resistance can cause you to be denied care.
An intractable social problem has always been the mixing of violence with sex, especially when sex is not a matter of mutual consent but rather an act imposed on someone, without consent, by force, and with physical damage. The question of resistance on the part of the receiver can not be an indicator, since some attackers consider overcoming forcible resistance to be arousing: it’s what they are really after rather than “sex” per se. The Fifties movies used to show “lover’s quarrels” and face slaps as legitimate foreplay.
By now many know that rape is a matter of power, not eroticism, and is imposed on males as well as females. Children but not dogs. People would be upset. It is a constant trope in cop shows: insisting that being incarcerated will automatically mean rape, possibly gang rape. Sometimes it’s a plot element and sometimes it’s only part of the dialogue, but everyone assumes that this is unpreventable in a prison setting and is even a legitimate part of the punishment, esp. when it is a matter of bringing a formerly high status person down, whether they were male or female.
When I was teaching twenty-five years ago, big boys routinely gave little boys “swirlies” by forcing their faces into toilets. This was rape: something revolting and dangerous done to a private part (a face is intimate) in a normally protected setting to a unwilling victim. If the problem is where to draw the line between horseplay and assault, between misbehavior and criminal behavior, I would put this on the criminal side. (The big boys were put on detention for a few days.) The consequences, aside from broken teeth and contagious diseases, was emotional damage. It is the kind of behavior that becomes “linked” over time from big to little, who grow up to repeat the behavior on the next generation of little, until no one challenges it. In fact, it is often cloaked by shame so that no one even finds out. Again, it shows up in screenwriting, sometimes as a means of murder.
Most people think of pornography in terms of “Playboy” magazine: nubile girls willingly teasing men who are undescribed. I’m watching “Deadwood” because it is a “Western,” but I’m hating it because women are consistently portrayed as sexually accessible -- the “good” women for free, out of “love.” The actresses are usually half-naked -- bosoms exposed -- but the men only flash their fannies very occasionally. The main villain wears long johns even in the throes of stimulation. Is this to protect the viewer or the viewed? The writers would say it’s meant to indicate the psychology of the character, esp. if he's suffering from childhood abuse. Huh?
Peeping “toms” are often defined as males who go around trying to peer in at women. These “toms” are described as boring holes in shower walls or setting up video cameras in bathrooms. Granted there have been fewer cases of women peering in at men, but there HAVE been men convicted of peering in at men and children. There are reports of “glory holes” between men’s lavatory stalls or even in confessionals, some of them big enough to push bits of anatomy through.
Yet these bits of anatomy which surely by now we’ve all seen (if you haven’t, go to Wikipedia which does not exercise any of the restraint that used to send kids circling through the dictionary -- no longer any need to look for porn websites) are exactly the ones the fundamentalists and super-conservatives try to eliminate from works of art, as though this will prevent paintings from presenting any unwanted thoughts about what goes where.
At present there is a growing denial movement coming from new immigrants to modern nations; they have been used to repression and censorship. But how can we explain condoms to them without reassuring them that American men don’t have bananas growing out their fronts. How can we explain that women have two places to put bananas (or other contraband) without them finding out by watching nasty cop shows? Snatch pockets and rectum storage are another fav way for screenwriters to show how hip they are.
Which brings us to another major dynamic as troublesome as violence: the idea that only “nice” people can make things civilized and that “nice” is a moral concept that involves more not-knowing than real understanding. If you go to a workshop for public health and AIDS outreach workers, part of the agenda will be teaching recognition of the practices and lingo that no respectable people would admit they know. And yet one of the markers of the sophisticated, whether cops or writers, is knowing all this stuff. Part of their stock-in-trade is telling it to you so you’ll be shocked and intrigued, impressed that they are such veterans of the war in the streets.
And that’s what it turns into. One of the rules of human beings is that if something is outrageous enough, it will be automatically denied -- never "seen". Therefore, when cops in Rio de Janeiro began shooting street kids as though they were rabbits, no one could get their head around it, anymore than they could comprehend the gas chambers of the Nazis. The stories seem like urban legends, like people found in hotel bathtubs with their kidneys removed for transplants. The kinds of taboos that used to shield the human body, like the belief in Sin or the Soul or the Devil or Divine Retribution, have dissolved in the modern world so that now our youngest kids gaze calmly at the most gruesome results of war and hear about cannibalism in our midst. (Great Falls, for instance, where a man killed and ate neighborhood boys, which no one could believe, so didn’t stop until too late. http://crime.about.com/od/murder/p/db_barjonah.htm)
After thinking about such extreme atrocities, which are certainly pornographic, the date rape, hazing rape, and rape of passed-out co-eds at universities, seem almost . . . well, not harmless, certainly distasteful and rude, but . . . well, how were they dressed and why did they drink? And top athletes have the same privileges as warriors, right? I need to state outright that these things are wrong because so many people think they are right. Or at least excusable.
If morality is so negotiable and religious rules are so easily ignored, where are the sources of restraint that can protect the vulnerable in our society? It’s got to be a matter of criminal law, but if those who enforce the laws have little respect or motivation to provide protection even in jail, what hope is there? Now we have a new factor in the equation: citizen observation. Smart phones and internet publishing are everywhere. Maybe a vulnerable person can turn the tables. Maybe photographing attackers and publishing their images is more effective than bear spray. There are other elements. DNA. HIV-AIDS. Molecular fingerprints. Let's hold hands.
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