You know it’s bad when even a crime novelist has been sickened by the amount of violence against women in books. Jessica Mann, a well-known British novelist and a prominent book reviewer, has declared that she will no longer review books that feature “sadistic misogyny,” according to The Observer.
But before you jump to the conclusion about that all those disgusting things are “men’s” concoctions, think again—most of the authors who pen these novels are female. Apparently, women need to prove to publishers that they’re “up to snuff,” literally—a serious consideration for authorship in these publishing houses, since sex, or at least violent rape against women, sells.
Society’s obsession with violence against women is hardly a new development. One website, Women in Refrigerators (http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/index.html), catalogues all of the female characters in comic books that “have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator.” As a society, we’ve been enjoying the humiliation, rape, and slaughter of women for decades. Staid Victorian novels, for all their sexual repression and sanitization, seemed to have no problems with depicting violent murder of women, for instance the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist.
As popular media has become more liberalized, the amount of violence depicted against women has kept pace with other previously taboo topics. In fact, it has probably surpassed those other topics (such as “generic” sex and violence), which is not surprising considering that it started out with a much firmer base in canonical literature and culture.
What crime mini-series is complete without beaten, raped, or otherwise brutalized or killed women in at least a few episodes per season? (Good trivia question to ask: “What’s the one thing all of the many variants of CSI have in common?”)
In fact, few popular TV shows or movies eschew adding “suspense” in the form of threatened (and usually somehow actualized) violence against one or more women. There is a wide range, but it has been an increasing trend. After all, even Battlestar Galactica, a show that I rather like and respect, includes two fairly graphic cases of rape and abuse of women. Admittedly, these women are “cylons,” but when they look like women, act like women, and scream like women, it makes little functional difference in the portrayal.
Perhaps violence against women is an appeal towards the primal male’s “protective instinct.” But how can we label it “protective instinct” and not male “sadistic tendencies” which form the thriving market for torture porn?
But perhaps “protective instinct” makes a bit more sense than the idea of crime novels being “female wish-fulfillment,” which one publishing director stated in the same Observer article. Her statement isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. It is referring to the enjoyment from being frightened and fulfilling that “wish,” but it’s a rather questionable assertion to say that women enjoy reading about other women being dismembered and disposed of. Visceral fright is one thing. Graphic depiction of violence against women is most likely going above and beyond to achieve that goal, if it does at all.
Violence against women is an age-old concept by this point. This variant of violence against women in media is only slightly more recent. Attempting to eradicate it will undoubtedly take colossal effort and require far-reaching societal changes. With those considerations comes the inevitable question of whether we should do something about violence against women in media at all. After all, in previous social crusades, liberals and conservatives have been one nation united under pornography, protecting it under the auspices of either the First Amendment or private enterprise. Obviously, there is some worth that society puts on seeing chainsawed women. As a publisher once told Mann: “Dead brutalized women sell books, dead men don’t. Nor do dead children or geriatrics.”
But perhaps there is something wrong with putting worth, either social or economic, on the depiction of dismembered and disposed women or the process of putting them in that state. Maybe there is something deeper in our society that is wrong when it becomes a key, indispensable ingredient in best-selling novels and top-grossing shows and movies—a key feature that forces producers and publishers to continue to push the boundaries as their audience becomes increasingly desensitized to the bloody messages.
Voltaire’s assertion that, “I will disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it,” is fine when you aren’t in the group that is being socialized as the victim. When the line has been crossed from political and social discourse to an escalating fetishization of the brutalization, rape, and death of women, it may be time to consider putting aside some of our free speech concerns and take a hard look at the society being built on the tortured flesh, blood, and bones of murdered women in modern media.
