The Last Supper

--Cherish Perriwinkle, 
died 6.21.2013

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled
was convincing the world he didn't exist.
And like that, poof. He's gone. 
--The Usual Suspects (1995) 

So long as little children are allowed to suffer,
there is no true love in this world
--Isadorea Duncan

Bless the beasts and the children
for in this world they have no voice,
they have no choice
--Bless the Beasts and the Children, 
The Carpenters

It's a jungle out there
Violence and danger everywhere 
It's brother against brother
Pounding on each other 
--It's a Jungle Out There,
Randy Newman
_________________________

[In honor of International Women's Day.]

Funny how things come back around, sometimes with new meaning the second time. 

This time it is one of the harrowing and absurd tragedies visited upon the little people in life, in out-sized proportion to the rest of us.

RAW wrote in 2013 about the local rape and murder of 8-year-old Cherry Perriwinkle ["Prelude to the Finale"]. While in  Jacksonville recently, her story was back in the news Valentine's Day 2018, only adding to the grotesquerie of her story. 

To recap: the man who killed this girl predated upon her mother's indigence. His offer of food and a $50 Walmart gift card must have seemed like a small lottery win for the poor mother. Except, poor people do not often hit the jackpot.

Would you entrust your daughter to a stranger in the hopes that she might get her cheeseburger? While it is easy to say that her mother made a poor choice, the fact is undeniable: Cherry lost her life due to her family's economic insufficiency.  

The Jacksonville Times-Union devoted ran a four-paragraph piece (not online) of her killer's sentencing, offering some grim details offered by the public defender:

"He gagged her, he raped her, he sodomized her, and then he strangled her," State Attorney Melissa Nelson said in her opening statement. "He gagged her with such force her gums and her nostrils bled, he strangled her with such force her eyeballs bled. She did not die quickly, and she did not die easily, in fact, hers was a brutal and tortured death."

Please do not save all of your ire for the defective misfit who committed this crime, for if you do, any lesson is lost.  

People today have become too emotional and outraged at the drop of a dime. After the angst du jour is gone, it is off to the next fire. We might do better to stay rational in the face of what we might like to claim is "outrageous" behavior.

A simple thought: What people call outrageous happens with such regularity that they might lower their reactivity and ask simply and with deliberation, "This is factual, so, what now?" 

Cherry Perriwinkle's murder is monstrous, unspeakable. But too many people now become outraged over things against which they are impotent; worse, against things which are ill-defined, and sometimes, are not actually problems.

The hominid family contains myriad genetic freaks and perversions. Some members harbor violent impulses, and some act upon them; these are not concealed facts. Some might say that the most egregious behaviors result from genetic mutations, but more likely, we are all somewhere on a universal behavioral spectrum, and given the right circumstances are capable of things we don't want to confess.

To vent outrage upon a discrete actor like Cherry's rapist-murderer would be to tie a nice Hollywood bow around this actual story of want and depravity, and life is not tidy like that. The subtext to this murder trial is just as compelling as the actual crime, for without it, this particular murder could not have happened.

Lisa decided to conduct a perhaps macabre thought experiment: what does Cherry's story share with the accusers in the #metoo movement? Are the shared elements valid, and do they help illuminate any of the public angst being expulsed in all media outlets regarding female exploitation?

No disrespect is meant to any players, and this is not to victim shame or blame. And certainly, this girl's story and the cohort she represents is more horrific by orders by orders of magnitude than, say, any accusation against a Harvey Weinstein or Charley Rose.

We will consider only the female's who describe sexual predation. [Certainly males, albeit in fewer numbers, also find themselves in similar situations.] The challenge is to uncover the connections, connect the dots and to determine when and if the chain of connectivity breaks. 

Further, how should we define the problem? Does #metoo represent any cohesive cohort?  Do they present a clear platform, and is it actually a problem? If so, is it one of perpetration or perception alone, or both? Is it soluble?

The media has fatted us all winter on a glut of sordid exploitation tales of attractive females climbing the ladder of success on the coattails of powerful men. These "sexposes" exacted the requisite banal outrage of the viewing audience. 

The usual suspects were netted (predominately powerful older men). A social media movement was born (#metoo) and the media has been devoted to covering the "new" female outrage. Eventually, predictably, just like after Watts or Ferguson, the furore will die down.

There will be nor furor for the child in Jacksonville, though much like the actresses in Hollywood, her mother appealed to a more powerful male figure for assistance.  Certainly the perpetrator was a criminal in a way that the men of the #metoo movement are not.

One might also say Gwyneth, Salma and Uma also made poor choices regarding Hollywood producer Weinstein, but they were operating from farther along the power dynamic curve. At the least, they had transportation or cab fare, and could have left the scene of their reported exploitation.

But operating on a principle of charity, on a sliding scale as far as egregiousness, what is the commonality among these offenses?

Whether it is for want of a McDonald's cheeseburger or a part in a Hollywood film, the attempt to gain favor from a powerful male is the constant, and concomitantly, the desired liberation or power that comes with that. Because such transactions are entered from a position of a power imbalance, they must by needs end that way.

Maybe we are trained early on to pay obeisance to an all-powerful God the Father, and that is a hard archetype to smash. But if children like Cherry had economic sufficiency, and their parents were given proper education parenting skills, such children could at least grow old enough to face the next hurdle of potential exploitation, like those faced by their economic betters in Hollywood or Washington D.C.

Maybe men and women both would be served by a unit of moral education in primary school (reinforced later in secondary). Of course, values clarification is heretical to most public school boards who must honor and protect diversity. Further, who would be our Solomon?

For many of a more liberal bent, if a person who has achieved the age of consent and wishes to trade his or her body (much as we trade our mind-power in the workplace) for goods, who is to say otherwise? To them, the body is owned exclusively by the inhabiter thereof, and can be bartered into another fungible asset as long as all parties are on board with the terms. 

But for those who buy into that construct, there must be allowance made for the emotions entailed by a quid pro quo gone awry. This is where the disingenuousness and hypocrisy enters, for if one has economic security and the exchange is a discretionary one, who is to criticize either party? 

Moreover, is it that element of shame which makes the female in such a transaction "reveal all" at some future time? What is the impulse to both partake in the "crime" (for those who do so discretionarily), and then to condemn it? Is she seeking moral absolution via support groups, and the subsequent denigration of the male?

If you focus on the nugget, you cannot see the big picture. You cannot fight an effective battle if you don't know what you are fighting for. You can expulse your angst, if that feels good to you, but you will not accomplish much.

We are all somewhere on the green brick road: Cherry was at the beginning, and met her demise in her desire for a McDonald's cheeseburger. Gwyneth, Salma and Uma were a little farther along the path, their desires, a bit more lofty. 

The question is, how do you move along it, and how far will you go? Are you willing to use yourself, and how will you do that -- by creating something, or by trading yourself in a direct exchange for goods?

Humans have free will and often make poor choices. Some are up, and some down. And thus ends the lesson on why parity shall never be reached.

Submitted for your consideration.

Curious Yellow Boys

There's a sucker born every minute
--David Hannum

We're doing a series on the
ten most sordid social welfare cases.  
--I Am Curious (Yellow), 1967

____________________________

Subtitle: Stupidity Masquerading as Violence and Redemption.

Talk about turning rutabagas into sunflowers.

Our group think culture has taken a tawdry act on the part of all parties and massaged it into a cause célèbre. The incipient plucky heroine of the recent Stanford sexual assault case has a book contract and is well-placed for a Medal of Freedom.

Except, she is no heroine, and the story of this case lies in a place other than where the media shines its spotlight. However, everything is to be wrung dry for its entertainment value, or for its exploitation by vested interests, and "Emily Doe" is a "Citizen Ruth" for our times.

Vice President Joe Biden called her "courageous" and the Swedish passers by, "heroes". One of the ersatz news programs gave her 12-page manifesto one-half hour of valuable air play. Last week "House Members United to Read Stanford Rape Victim's Letter" (except in their passion they and the NYT got it wrong -- it was not rape but sexual assault.)

Representative Ann McLane Kuster, Democrat of New Hampshire said, “We are all Emily Doe,” a la President Kennedy's momentous, "Ich Ein Berliner" speech.

But no, we are not. Not unless you go to a frat party after drinking four shots of whisky and drinking two more of vodka and unknown quantities of beer and then go with a younger frat boy behind a dumpster, for that is who Ms. Doe is.

At the moment, she is an addict and possibly a sexual predator, most likely just wanting to get her kink on with a younger man. (The distance from 19 y.o. male freshman to a 22 y-o female graduate is great.)

The young man, Brock Turner, is nothing special in this regards, and neither is she. It is hardly the "night that ruined her life", as she began drinking her shots eyes wide open.

In reality, it will be the night that made her -- undeservedly -- something special in our culture of instantaneous stardom. She will possibly do the media rounds to capitalize and monetize her moment, and crocodile tears will be shed over the actions of the Big Bad Wolf.

She says she was "robbed of [her] worth", but she did that to herself before she went behind the dumpster to have sex with a frat boy three years her junior. (You didn't think they were going to read "Ulysses", did you?)

She calls herself "Everywoman", and why not? It's a heady moment for her. I suspect it is not her first rodeo, and an erstwhile skanky scene has been spit-polished into a story of true grit.

But she doesn't speak for me, not at any point in my life.

I don't care to talk of the young man, for he is a known quantity: 19 y-o male drinking heavily at a frat party. His role as an insecure and/or horny young male is to find the low-hanging fruit and schtup her; call it a night. He could be a necrophiliac in training, or maybe just a young American male getting ready for the sort of action he can anticipate after graduation when he marries a sorority girl.

But the female is the sticking point in this story, and we are not viewing it for what it actually is.

The obvious untold story is the substance abuse of the designated victim and her choice to be in a frat house party environment so drunk that she did not wake up for six hours after the act. The violence in this story is self-inflicted and issues from the same fonts which are now celebrating her victim-hood, who run flashy stories which depict drunken celebrity party-goers as having the time of their lives.

The violence may lie in having the misfortune to live an entitled and cosseted life as so many Santa Barbara residents do. In having a mother who would deposit you at a frat house party after you had already consumed four shots of whisky.

One subtext of this story is misogynistic. The press and politcoes are falling over the 12-page victim’s statement, but implicit in their surprise is that not all women who drink to the point of being comatose are illiterate hootchie mamas. In fact, they exist in number, but we are not interested. 

This is what passes for a "feel-good" story today. Predictably, we get up in arms. We act like we are shocked and outraged, like we actually care about the plight of women (and men for that matter.)

My guess is that the 12-page manifesto was either a compiled effort by a women's group who saw their moment in the sun, or the writer herself is a borderline personality, either of which was necessary to push this story into the spotlight, with a bump from social media. But beyond the uncovered substance abuse and misogyny lies yet another story, that of privilege.

This sort of thing happens every day of the week in most towns, but the participants are not often white frat boy potential future Olympians or UC-Santa Barbara grads. The privilege of the participants alone is what makes it newsworthy. It feeds our salacious desire to have the privileged white man atone, or for self-flagellation, depending upon your affiliation. 

The ultimate irony is that the outlets which are supposedly uber-sympathetic to this woman, couldn't give a damn that the same thing (and far worse) happens every day of the week to younger or older, non-white, non-Santa Barbara grads. What they dare not say is: those stories are ugly. This story is pretty, so it has legs.

We get to discharge more collective vitriol, hate the judge ("off with his head!"), and feel very smug, righteous and strac, for a bit.

Very probably, had the Swedish bicyclists not happened by the scene, we never would have heard about the matter; it wouldn’t look good for either party. (Wouldn't be prudent, as a Bush père might've said.)

What makes this a good story is that white male privilege gets a knock (and we will give a pass to the white female of privilege, ignoring the actual issues at hand.) Messy facts simply do not matter today.

The fact is, the press on this issue will change nothing, because the things which can be changed are not being addressed. But the folks on Capital Hill get some nice press and ensuing gravitas by leeching on to the non-story.

Here's a surprise: young men like sex, and if you put yourself in an extremely compromising position, you cannot cry wolf. For all our enlightenment, we may not re-engineer human brains or hormones. But what we could address is the culture of binge drinking, and to do so honestly would require both males and females to take responsibility for their actions.

You don’t get to wave the red flag in front of the bull and not elicit a reaction, or claim naivete when you do. (Drinking' til you're trashed does not provide plausible deniability.)  You may re-educate, but that training will go by the wayside once one’s executive functions have been overridden with booze.

Lesson: Everyone must be responsible. If you want to get wasted, have a designated escort to watch over you; better yet, do it at home, or among a group of trusted, platonic friends. Best -- don’t get that wasted, and choose your environments wisely.

Ms. Doe should not be book-worthy until she enters and successfully completes a course of rehab, and stays clean and sober for six months. She can then write from a position of understanding a cautionary "life of an addict" book, and it will be one of much too many.


Next: A Year of Inanity

Faster Than the Speed of Thought

--Extremism, Manny Francisco

 Surprise, surprise, surprise! 
--Gomer Pyle, USMC

 Life ... is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing 
--Macbeth (V, v) 

Oh foolish people, and without understanding;
which have eyes, and see not;
which have ears, and hear not 
--Jermiah 5:21
_____________________

RAW is on holiday now, but the news which rustles other feathers has entered our awareness. The responses we witness seem absurd.

[1] On beheadings by members of the Islamic State (IS):

Expected, totally. Go rambling about in their desert, and you can expect to be on IS's YouTube snuff favorites list sometime soon ... plan on it.

This is asymmetrical warfare at its finest. Didn't we just learn this in our most excellent adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq? Isn't this what Israel is experiencing vis-a-vis Hamas? It matters not the names of the players: the U.S. is confronting people who do not share her values-- in their backyard.

The photographer who lost his head was exploiting the situation, and the locals knew it. Professional newsmen or photographers are always looking for the scoop; it is their business. The word is, they want to "document history," but we have already seen enough beheadings and do not need to see more. This is an ugly historicity of our making.

We are exploiting them, and they, us; where is the surprise? Is this placing of ourselves in their grid square -- and the expected resultant sacrificial lambs -- an effort to re-ramp up a United State's military presence abroad?

This is not the first time religious fanatics have shed blood in the name of their cause. Why are we shocked?

Why this need to be horrified, and to jump through the predictable hoops of memorializing those beheaded? While it is a brutal death, to be sure, it is not without sense to those doing the killing. It is merely a method of gaining free propaganda.

If we do not support this lifestyle and their adjudication process, why are we present, creating it, and then documenting it?

IS behavior is not going extinct anytime soon, unlike the language of Wukchumni, which will become so when the last known speaker, Marie Wilcox, dies. So: what precisely is the purpose for the United State's presence in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the areas of IS control?

The press and we have a field day with every new outrage from the Muslim world, but to what end? For example, what of Boku Haram, the Muslim group that abducted the Nigerian school girls? Off the radar, in favor of the latest cause du jour.  New and more grotesque stories are demanded by the commentariat, all to no end.

Lesson: Do not be a part of stirring the pot in Islamic jihadist nations. 

[2] African disease Ebola cured by act of god:

A doctor, one of two U.S. missionaries who contracted the deadly Ebola virus in Liberia and recently cured at Emory medical center, claimed God saved his life in a miraculous direct reply to thousands of prayers. In fact, the miracle was being born white and Christian. If you wish to call this fortunate confluence which afforded Dr. Brantly access to the latest super drug that cured him, then yes, Brantly is the recipient of a miracle.

But if you believe that, you also believe that the prayers of the African victims and their families are somehow inferior, as infected Africans do not usually recover from the virus. Such belief of a favored religion is medievalism at its finest, so to return to point #1 -- why the shock at the power of conviction?

Dr. Brantly further asks his fellow believers to pray for the Africans that their prayers might be heard ... by an obviously Christian-favoring God.

Lesson: Do not go mucking about in Liberia when Ebola is ravaging the nation, and do not claim God favors you over them.

A Room of Her Own

 --"Safety Last!" (1923)

 It's physical
Only logical
You must try to ignore
That it means more than that 
--What's Love Got to Do with It?
 Tina Turner 

I don't know what you think I am
I'm not no magician I tell you no I ain't
Maybe I can open your pants  
But big fucking deal 
--I'm a Boy, I'm a Girl,  Johnny Thunders 
________________ 

When blogwriting, one has the tendency to expostulate, to grandstand and even proselytize (though we're neither Mormons nor Seventh Day Adventists), and Ranger was perhaps not fully exploring every aspect of the issue in a recent presentation, "Sex and Violence"; we may charitably chalk that up to a sin of omission rather than commission.

Comments to the piece @ sister site Milpub have provoked some dialog amongst the principles here at RAW. Friend FDChief is correct: our analogy does not quite hold. Moreover, he states the observation that a member of a democracy only obtains full citizenship when he or she may participate in every aspect of maintaining that democracy, which may mean full participation in the military, if not in the porn industry (though women's role there is guaranteed.)

The result will be several days of looking at the issue through different eyes -- both mine and Rangers -- seeking to clarify the problem, shore up the analogy and to explore any possible resolutions. No one installment will be complete, so we what follows will be a series of posts looking at different facets of the issue.

So let's define the topics and what porn and war share as far as opportunities, causal effects and requirements (of all players).

Since at least the Venus of Willendorf 20,000 years BCE, men have enjoyed viewing representations of the female body (head not always needed, thanks). Humans enjoy gaping at protuberances, the more grotesque, perhaps, the more fascinating. Ranger is amongst the crowd of his fellows who has enjoyed the same. However, he also recognizes the necessary objectification and frequent degradation often involved in these depictions; this is an acknowledged tension for perhaps many viewers.

His thoughts actually stemmed from what he sees as the evolution of porn from fairly innocuous early 20th-century blue movies to the more violent representations of recent decades. Crush films -- the brutal murder of animals -- is but one perverse incarnation in an industry that has few bounds on its impositions upon the human body. They, along with "snuff films" -- the human equivalent -- have ostensibly been banned, and represent probably the outermost limit of what has been achieved in this genre. What remains is often not pretty. 

(As an aside to the crush films, a Florida Representative even proposed a ban on the cruel practice of "cow-tipping" in 2004 [it did not pass], yet we may do the same and worse to our women, fat or otherwise, any day of the week. But that is a topic for another day.)

We know what is cruel and what is exploitative, but that does not slake our taste for such things. Most pornography, besides the actuality of the sexual representation, is an exercise in power, both that imposed by the viewer and the producer/exploiter (film industry; actors, etc.)

When commenter "ael" writes @ milpub, "This ability to empathize makes pornography inevitable. Watching people have fun is also fun", he is showing himself a man of compassion, but perhaps not recognizing the darker impulse behind porn. Is "fun" truly the thing sought? Perhaps in the way that self-gratification is "fun" to the narcissist (and with that comes the additional destructive resentment of his need for porn, but that again is another topic.)

A recent piece, "The Conspiracy of Pornography Exposed", indicts porn consumption as a narcissistic retreat from reality and a controlling experience of a simulacrum representation. As such, it cannot move beyond a physical response to the impersonal yet universal carnality spooling out before him. Viewing porn is a release into the libidinal free from the superego (unless mom breaks into your room, or your mind.) 

So porn is basically an avenue for self gratification, at the expense of having to actually engage with the sex partner up close and personal. It does not extinguish the libido of course; it is merely a temporary physical release. The partner used to achieve that end is obviously a projected objectification, a facsmilie of a woman who is used to self-gratify. 

But along with man's desire to own and expropriate the feminine is his strong drive for protection of the female, something which often fuels his lust to fight, presumably for his society's protection (as explained in books like What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II.") In fact, this is one of the main arguments against having women on the front line, namely, that man's protective instinct will kick in and he will act on those intrinsic impulses, ignoring good soldiering and endangering himself and his fellows in the process. 

Ranger spoke with a combat medic yesterday who said his biggest fear is that he would treat a less severely-wounded female soldier before he would a male, thereby violating his triage training. This favoritism on the basis of gender is a very real and indwelling impulse. 

Women seek parity with men when they seek equal pay -- Senator Elizabeth Warren is fighting now for a Paycheck Fairness Act (how many decades after the Equal Rights Amendment Failed?) -- and this is rightly so when one is thinking equal pay for equal work. But what about those domains in which men cut women a break due to their lesser physical capabilities, a reality for most women in strenuous, physically demanding work environment -- an environment like being an Infantryman on the front line of a fight. How would this play out on the battlefront?

When Ranger worked in a machine shop as a young man, he watched as the male workers lift heavy buckets of material for the female workers -- something which was the women's job -- even as this was in violation of union agreements. It's just the way it is. 

So let us summate the truths we have: Men watch porn, a media which is by necessity an objectification of women. Men also have an innate protective feeling toward actual women in their lives. Men are competitive, and excel in certain physical arenas against most women. 

Add into this mix Equal Opportunity measures which force the entrance of women into previously all-male domains (the first female SEAL is expected soon, for instance.) Many men, including Ranger, have enjoyed the combat arms as being the last bastion of male camaraderie; this will be gone once women enter their ranks. The time-honored protective impulse will be challenged, and the possible fall-back if uniformity in ranks is to be maintained will be for men to change women into the unfortunate object, a position which they themselves occupy in war.)

The conundrum: How to allow women to escalate through the military ranks sans combat or Special Forces experience, the traditional means of gaining respect in that world, but jobs in which they will not necessarily perform well, and perhaps not even due to their own shortcomings? Their success seems doomed from the outset, and there is no reality game simulator which will be able to definitively represent the actions of the players on the ground once actual fighting starts. 

Just because something can be done, should it? It asks the question, "Where is a woman's place?" The feminists say, "Anyplace she wants to be." 

Maybe, but stand on L street SE in Washington, D.C. at night and even G. I. Jane would be at risk.

More to come ...

--Lisa and Jim

Sex and Violence

Why is it always, "sex and violins"?
--Ruth Buzzi, Laugh-In

The new pornography is left-wing;
and the new pornography is a vast graveyard
where the Left has gone to die.
The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too
--Letters from a War Zone, Adrea Dworkin

I seen ev'ry blue eyed floozy on the way, hey
But their beauty and their style
Went kind of smooth after a while.
Take me to them lardy ladies every time!
 --Fat Bottomed Girls, Queen

Let them eat war
That's how to ration the poor
Let them eat war
--Let Them Eat War, Bad Religion

___________________

Not war pornography -- war AND pornography. Now that we have your attention ...

War is the specialized, systematic application of State violence, and it is a perversion of civilized values, yet it is an activity that few societies have extirpated. It is also an activity designated as a career track primarily for the disadvantaged of our society. But war is an exploitation -- if it were not, our politicians would seek active combat service (which they avidly do not.)

We all know what pornography is when we see it, and aside from those 5th Avenue feminists who have the luxury of arguing that women in the porn industry are empowered by selling their anatomy, porn has traditionally been but one realm of the exploitation and objectification of women. Yet we have now opened a new realm of women's exploitation, and we call this a good: putting women in the combat arms.

To allow women to participate in the perpetuation of the violence will raise their glass ceiling we are told, thereby facilitating their career opportunities. This is the bottom line for arguing for women on the front lines. But this "privilege" will only be seen as such by a certain segment of society.

--Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, 
Reich's Women's Führer

Why are women in porn seen as exploited, while sending them off to fight in war is well and good? Neither war nor pornography are held as social goods, yet our internet lives bathed in porn sites, and the acceptability and necessity of war are peddled as unquestionable. Hypocrisy, thy name is U.S.A.

Is this argument for sending women into combat a backlash to the feminist movement? While women have still not gained economic parity with men in the workplace, we are now fast-forwarding them to star in their own personal snuff films, while screwing them all the way there (20% of women in the military have been sexually harassed by their male counterparts, according to recent studies.)

Further, these women will be fighting and dying for the rights of women in foreign lands to be exploited at the hands of males, as they always have been. It is a historical Mobius strip, for the women who they die for may one day gain their rights to fight and die for some other women to be exploited, ad nauseam. This is presuming that these imagined future women will have the crusading American impulse to help the scapegoat. But few look beyond the present moment, to see the implications of their bravery or foolishness.

The same people who would criticize porn (overtly) are the same who would argue for (someone else's) women to kill, fight and die in the depravity and degradation of war. How is having sex with strangers and pretending to enjoy the encounter less socially acceptable than fighting?

Exploitation by any other name ...

--Jim and Lisa