Rantage
Today I’m feeling an odd mixture of really relaxed, serene and happy and really annoyed and ranty. The ranty part came first, the serenity hit this morning but I think I still need to get the ranty part out of my system. I’ll be serene and happy in a different post. There’s two things I want to rant about. One is a particular little double standard common to most of the human race, the other is a really stupid idea that’s probably about to be made law. Yes, another one.
So, the first rant. This sort of started when I was in the newsagents on Friday and half-glimpsed the front page of a local paper sitting on the counter with some story about a husband who shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself. The wife, apparently, was expected to survive and the husband died. I don’t know about the circumstances that led up to it, I couldn’t really be bothered buying the paper and after dismissing it as something that would just annoy me I now can’t find anything about it on the net. Anyway, I did dismiss it until last night when I was watching CSI. There was a case where a woman was murdered and her husband was the obvious suspect. The wife had been having an affair, on discovering this Sara was all ‘Oh, if the husband found out, that’s motive!’ That simple statement annoys the living hell out of me. Why? Why, if a woman cheats on her husband/boyfriend, is that a reason for him to kill her?
Before anyone gets the idea that I’m saying no woman has ever murdered her husband for having an affair or threatening to leave her, I’m not. It’s just that women don’t generally tend to kill over things like that. Women take half. Sometimes that’s fair enough, but what it says about women isn’t great. But at least it isn’t bludgeoning someone you claim to love with whatever is to hand until you and everything around you is splattered with their blood and they eventually stop screaming when their skull caves in. That is an ugly thing to do, and I don’t happen to think it is ever excusable because a woman had an affair or threatened to leave. Whenever these things happen, someone somewhere will describe it as a crime of passion. Please, call it what it is. It is a crime of stupid, petty, childish, angry jealousy and has nothing whatsoever to do with love. Stop trying to make it sound romantic.
Someone else somewhere, in keeping with the bias of the criminal justice system, the media and Joe Uneducated Public, will shake their head and say that this sort of thing is ‘natural’ for men to do. I hate that word. That word that’s used to excuse every prejudice ever, it isn’t natural for someone else to do this or that thing I wouldn’t do. That word that’s used to make a fortune selling ‘medicines’ and ‘health products’ that haven’t been proven to be in any way effective or safe. Tuberculosis is natural. The way food rots and bacteria multiply in it is natural. Cockroaches are natural. We go through a whole lot of unnaturalness to protect ourselves from all these natural things. Anger and jealousy are natural things to feel, yes, but we can’t go around acting on them by battering people to death because they hurt our feelings. That is not mature or rational, and it’s so not this millennium.
I know this probably sounds like I'm in a man-hating mood. I'm not, really. I mean, the hand that rocks the cradle, right? Most of those hands are still female. Women raise men, nurture their aggression and reinforce the idea that these things are appropriate behaviour. As adults women put up with men, and love them, when they go around doing these things. We bring it on ourselves, really. I have an idea. Let's stop.
Ok, my second rant. This is probably old news to many of my lj friends outside the UK, where laws like this have already been passed. My government is currently reviewing whether to pass a law against what it calls ‘extreme pornography’. This term does not cover child pornography, which is already illegal. What is being proposed is to outlaw violent images or scenes involving restraints or infliction of pain which are also considered pornographic. The concern behind it is apparently that such images may have been obtained without the consent or willing participation of all involved, and that viewing these images is somehow going to turn normal people into violent criminals. That old line about them being ‘degrading to women’ also got trotted out, despite the fact that the law will also cover images of men and whether or not any women involved actually found the process degrading or not, because apparently women aren’t qualified to decide for themselves what they find degrading.
All well and good, you may think. But for starters, there are huge issues with what will and won’t be covered by such a loosely worded law. A violent film or image will be illegal if it's also 'pornographic' (if the people that made it intended it to be arousing), and if it contains a ‘realistic depiction’ of violent activity. Who is going to decide an image or film satisfies either of those criteria? Am I about to go to prison for owning a copy of Deliverance or Young Adam? Is Empire magazine about to be pulled for having features on horror films that feature scantily clad women being chased by some terrible creature, as all horror films must? What about television, will watching virtually anything after 9pm with the prerequisite content of sex and violence get you locked up? Are makers of music videos going to have to clean up their acts? What about journalists and people investigating criminal activity? Are people going to be locked up for photographing war crimes? How do you prove it’s not pornographic if the people in the picture are naked and being subjected to sexual assault?
Who is going to decide what constitutes ‘violent’ pornography? It’s not considered assault to consensually restrain a person and inflict pain on them, though it is illegal to cause serious physical harm to someone even if they do consent to it. Are the police trying to criminalise kinky sex here? That’ll be half of Westminster locked up for starters. Do not get me started on all the judges and senior police officers that are going as well. Not that the country wouldn’t get on fine without them. The idea that my government is trying to enforce their ideas about ‘normal’ sexuality on me is repellent. I thought we’d got past the time when sexual preferences that don’t harm anyone, like homosexuality for instance, were outlawed. One person’s idea of obscene isn’t necessarily anyone else’s. Personally I find images of excessively thin women with fake breasts, fake lips, liposuctioned thighs and every imperfection photoshopped out obscene, and I actually think the in-your-face nature of these images has a harmful effect on the self-esteem of many impressionable women and girls, but nobody seems to want to do anything about that.
How is looking at kinky porn harmful? It’s highly unlikely to make you want to do anything you wouldn’t have wanted to already. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support that often-used claim that watching standard Hollywood fare turns you into a violent criminal. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to suggest that violent pornography will do the same. A lot of people find it distasteful, fine, don’t look at it. There might be the odd bit of property damage from sticky keyboards, but hey, your keyboards, you do what you like with them. Strained wrists, same goes. Material can end up on your computer without you knowing it. What if you click on a link that turns out to be something other than you thought it was? What about pop-ups? What about how easily someone else can put things on your computer and then report you for them? How do you prove that somebody deliberately viewed or downloaded something? How is this law going to be policed? Are the government going to monitor internet activity? Are the police going to be granted powers to confiscate and search computer equipment (which they can already do without any evidence under current anti-terrorism laws)?
The UK already has some of the toughest censorship laws in the world. I’m not going to object to the ‘nanny state’, because I don’t think I need to here. I am going to question why this law is needed, what purpose it is designed to serve. If it’s a concern that the images were obtained without the full consent of all participants, that’s already covered by existing laws. Engaging in sexual acts, violent or non-violent, with an adult without their consent is called adult sexual assault (it used to be called rape, but that’s such an ugly and uncivilised word), and it’s already illegal, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the way the criminal justice system utterly fails to deal with it. I realise that it’s far easier to confiscate someone’s computer and look at what’s on it than it is to actually bother to investigate an allegation of rape and carry that through to trial, and that it’ll make clean-up statistics look really pretty, but does any of this actually stop crime being committed? Or does it just divert resources away from investigating crimes where people actually get hurt? This is really just another publicity-grabbing knee-jerk law that diverts attention away from the utter failure of the criminal justice system to fully enforce existing laws, coming from a government rapidly gaining a reputation for that sort of behaviour.
Anyway, I’m confident that the government will squash any opposition, however justified, to this one and force it through like they have with every other stupid idea of theirs. I’m sure we’ll all sleep safer in our beds knowing that the resources of the criminal justice system are being diverted away from policing the streets and investigating violent crime to protect us from the terrible threat of pictures on other people’s computers.
AJ
So, the first rant. This sort of started when I was in the newsagents on Friday and half-glimpsed the front page of a local paper sitting on the counter with some story about a husband who shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself. The wife, apparently, was expected to survive and the husband died. I don’t know about the circumstances that led up to it, I couldn’t really be bothered buying the paper and after dismissing it as something that would just annoy me I now can’t find anything about it on the net. Anyway, I did dismiss it until last night when I was watching CSI. There was a case where a woman was murdered and her husband was the obvious suspect. The wife had been having an affair, on discovering this Sara was all ‘Oh, if the husband found out, that’s motive!’ That simple statement annoys the living hell out of me. Why? Why, if a woman cheats on her husband/boyfriend, is that a reason for him to kill her?
Before anyone gets the idea that I’m saying no woman has ever murdered her husband for having an affair or threatening to leave her, I’m not. It’s just that women don’t generally tend to kill over things like that. Women take half. Sometimes that’s fair enough, but what it says about women isn’t great. But at least it isn’t bludgeoning someone you claim to love with whatever is to hand until you and everything around you is splattered with their blood and they eventually stop screaming when their skull caves in. That is an ugly thing to do, and I don’t happen to think it is ever excusable because a woman had an affair or threatened to leave. Whenever these things happen, someone somewhere will describe it as a crime of passion. Please, call it what it is. It is a crime of stupid, petty, childish, angry jealousy and has nothing whatsoever to do with love. Stop trying to make it sound romantic.
Someone else somewhere, in keeping with the bias of the criminal justice system, the media and Joe Uneducated Public, will shake their head and say that this sort of thing is ‘natural’ for men to do. I hate that word. That word that’s used to excuse every prejudice ever, it isn’t natural for someone else to do this or that thing I wouldn’t do. That word that’s used to make a fortune selling ‘medicines’ and ‘health products’ that haven’t been proven to be in any way effective or safe. Tuberculosis is natural. The way food rots and bacteria multiply in it is natural. Cockroaches are natural. We go through a whole lot of unnaturalness to protect ourselves from all these natural things. Anger and jealousy are natural things to feel, yes, but we can’t go around acting on them by battering people to death because they hurt our feelings. That is not mature or rational, and it’s so not this millennium.
I know this probably sounds like I'm in a man-hating mood. I'm not, really. I mean, the hand that rocks the cradle, right? Most of those hands are still female. Women raise men, nurture their aggression and reinforce the idea that these things are appropriate behaviour. As adults women put up with men, and love them, when they go around doing these things. We bring it on ourselves, really. I have an idea. Let's stop.
Ok, my second rant. This is probably old news to many of my lj friends outside the UK, where laws like this have already been passed. My government is currently reviewing whether to pass a law against what it calls ‘extreme pornography’. This term does not cover child pornography, which is already illegal. What is being proposed is to outlaw violent images or scenes involving restraints or infliction of pain which are also considered pornographic. The concern behind it is apparently that such images may have been obtained without the consent or willing participation of all involved, and that viewing these images is somehow going to turn normal people into violent criminals. That old line about them being ‘degrading to women’ also got trotted out, despite the fact that the law will also cover images of men and whether or not any women involved actually found the process degrading or not, because apparently women aren’t qualified to decide for themselves what they find degrading.
All well and good, you may think. But for starters, there are huge issues with what will and won’t be covered by such a loosely worded law. A violent film or image will be illegal if it's also 'pornographic' (if the people that made it intended it to be arousing), and if it contains a ‘realistic depiction’ of violent activity. Who is going to decide an image or film satisfies either of those criteria? Am I about to go to prison for owning a copy of Deliverance or Young Adam? Is Empire magazine about to be pulled for having features on horror films that feature scantily clad women being chased by some terrible creature, as all horror films must? What about television, will watching virtually anything after 9pm with the prerequisite content of sex and violence get you locked up? Are makers of music videos going to have to clean up their acts? What about journalists and people investigating criminal activity? Are people going to be locked up for photographing war crimes? How do you prove it’s not pornographic if the people in the picture are naked and being subjected to sexual assault?
Who is going to decide what constitutes ‘violent’ pornography? It’s not considered assault to consensually restrain a person and inflict pain on them, though it is illegal to cause serious physical harm to someone even if they do consent to it. Are the police trying to criminalise kinky sex here? That’ll be half of Westminster locked up for starters. Do not get me started on all the judges and senior police officers that are going as well. Not that the country wouldn’t get on fine without them. The idea that my government is trying to enforce their ideas about ‘normal’ sexuality on me is repellent. I thought we’d got past the time when sexual preferences that don’t harm anyone, like homosexuality for instance, were outlawed. One person’s idea of obscene isn’t necessarily anyone else’s. Personally I find images of excessively thin women with fake breasts, fake lips, liposuctioned thighs and every imperfection photoshopped out obscene, and I actually think the in-your-face nature of these images has a harmful effect on the self-esteem of many impressionable women and girls, but nobody seems to want to do anything about that.
How is looking at kinky porn harmful? It’s highly unlikely to make you want to do anything you wouldn’t have wanted to already. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support that often-used claim that watching standard Hollywood fare turns you into a violent criminal. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to suggest that violent pornography will do the same. A lot of people find it distasteful, fine, don’t look at it. There might be the odd bit of property damage from sticky keyboards, but hey, your keyboards, you do what you like with them. Strained wrists, same goes. Material can end up on your computer without you knowing it. What if you click on a link that turns out to be something other than you thought it was? What about pop-ups? What about how easily someone else can put things on your computer and then report you for them? How do you prove that somebody deliberately viewed or downloaded something? How is this law going to be policed? Are the government going to monitor internet activity? Are the police going to be granted powers to confiscate and search computer equipment (which they can already do without any evidence under current anti-terrorism laws)?
The UK already has some of the toughest censorship laws in the world. I’m not going to object to the ‘nanny state’, because I don’t think I need to here. I am going to question why this law is needed, what purpose it is designed to serve. If it’s a concern that the images were obtained without the full consent of all participants, that’s already covered by existing laws. Engaging in sexual acts, violent or non-violent, with an adult without their consent is called adult sexual assault (it used to be called rape, but that’s such an ugly and uncivilised word), and it’s already illegal, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the way the criminal justice system utterly fails to deal with it. I realise that it’s far easier to confiscate someone’s computer and look at what’s on it than it is to actually bother to investigate an allegation of rape and carry that through to trial, and that it’ll make clean-up statistics look really pretty, but does any of this actually stop crime being committed? Or does it just divert resources away from investigating crimes where people actually get hurt? This is really just another publicity-grabbing knee-jerk law that diverts attention away from the utter failure of the criminal justice system to fully enforce existing laws, coming from a government rapidly gaining a reputation for that sort of behaviour.
Anyway, I’m confident that the government will squash any opposition, however justified, to this one and force it through like they have with every other stupid idea of theirs. I’m sure we’ll all sleep safer in our beds knowing that the resources of the criminal justice system are being diverted away from policing the streets and investigating violent crime to protect us from the terrible threat of pictures on other people’s computers.
AJ