Object Lesson

There's a photographer who posts on DeviantArt by the name of Marcus J. Ranum. His work is often simply amazing. Back in 2010, he took a stab at exploring the concept of obscenity. Specifically, what makes something obscene and when does it cross the line from "non-obscene." This was the result.

Do-It-Yourself Deviation. Marcus J. Ranum, 2010. URL: http://mjranum.deviantart.com/art/Do-it-Yourself-Deviation-150768428

Part of the question that Mr. Ranum expects that viewers would have asked themselves is: "A pretty girl... a meat slicer? Bananas, rope, and medical implements? How do they possibly go together?" And he points out that there's nothing inherently... anything about this photograph. Whatever it is to a viewer, banal, artistic or even obscene, it's all in what they bring to it.

I was looking at this the other day, and a thought occurred to me. It's entirely possible to decide that not all of the items in this photograph actually do go together. A least not all at once. After all, it would be fairly difficult for the model to wear all three pairs of shoes, or both uniforms, at once. So perhaps your Do-it-Yourself Deviation would remove one or more of those things. Of course, if you did that, you could just as easily remove the model herself. At which point I realized that this doesn't have to be a photograph of "a pretty girl and a pile of stuff" it could, really, instead be a photograph of a black beret and a pile of stuff.

And if it is, in addition to illustrating something about how we see obscenity, we can also use this to illustrate how we see objectification, as the model becomes simply another thing in this picture - no more or less important than any other thing. The main point that Mr. Ranum was making, that obscenity is all in your mind (or, if you prefer, your polka-dot undies) would be just as valid, not only with any other model in this picture, but without any model at all. The very interchangeability that is central to anything we encounter being "just an object."

Something Better

It's a common enough complaint: "Too bad [fill in the blank] can't think of anything better to do with the money." It comes up almost every time a wealthy person or institution spends what comes across as a significant amount of money on something that someone could consider frivolous or otherwise unnecessary. But implicit in that criticism is an assumption - that the people who receive the money for the goods and services provided are not doing anything constructive with it either.

One of the issues with many forms of charity is that they do nothing to reduce the need for charity. It's easy to complain that someone who bought, say, a large yacht, would have done the world more good if they had fed some number of people with the money, but does simply feeding people actually help to life people out of poverty? Especially given the fact that here in the United States, we often buy food from relatively well-off farmers (and large agricultural corporations) and have it shipped across the ocean, where one of its main effects is to make it more difficult for local farmers to make a living. But, of course, there is a trade-off - while the people in the area who grow food are hurt by the influx of free food, since many people are net purchasers of food (as otherwise, it's less like that food needs to be imported) the population as a whole may be better off. But, in the long run, if the local farmers had the financial means to become even better farmers, perhaps they would be better able to supply the food needs of the people in their communities.

This not to say that the relatively well-off employees of a company that makes what are effectively a luxury good are at risk of being immediately unemployed if a particular wealthy person doesn't knock on their door to have their precious cat copied. Or that the money they earn from their work will be immediately spent in ways that will benefit impoverished members of their communities. But I don't know that the apparent default assumption - which is that the money that goes most directly to the poorest person it can find is the best spent is necessarily accurate.

Raising the Volume

During both my morning and evening commutes today, I heard news stories in which people were talking about "having their voices heard," and "raising awareness." All of the issues involved were things that I was perfectly aware of and knew many of the major talking points for. And I suspect that I'm not alone in that.

As I understand it, the issue isn't that people don't have a voice, that the general public is unaware or that "the media" is working to distract them with sports and reality television - it's that it's difficult to get people to pay attention to someone else's problems when they understand that they have problems of their own that they need to be dealing with. People don't come home and turn on the "boob tube" because they've been manipulated into it by a shadowy cabal of business and media élites who are living lives of luxury by oppressing the downtrodden and who fear only the righteous anger of the masses. People come home and watch television because, as far as they're concerned, they've had a difficult/long/stressful day and they simply want to unwind or find out what's going on in the world. By the same token, people aren't uninformed about one issue or another because "the media" is constantly waving shiny things in front of them. People are informed about those issues that they aren't interested enough in to do any research on. (And this, of course, presumes that people are uninformed to start with - but in pretty much every single conversation I've had with someone who said "this information is being suppressed, but..." I've known exactly what they were talking about. It's a pretty poorly-kept secret when I'm in the know.)

People aren't "silenced" as much as the rest of us aren't listening. People aren't "unaware" of issues as they are uninterested in them. Given this, simply raising the volume isn't the answer. No matter what one does to drive attention, it's always possible to for others to simply ignore you.

Culture of Terror

• Video blogger Anita Sarkesian leaves her home after threats are made against her and members of her family by someone who knows where she lives.

• California Assemblyman Anthony Adams receives anonymous death threats, prompting the Highway Patrol to provide a protection detail, after he votes for then-"Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2009-2010 state budget, which included about $12.5 billion in tax increases."

• Rebecca Watson is threatened with being sexually assaulted after disputing the idea that male circumcision is just as harmful as female circumcision.

• Rhode Island student Jessica Ahlquist receives death threats after filing a lawsuit to have an overtly Christian "banner" removed from the wall of her public high school.

• San Fransisco technology worker Kevin Rose is threatened with mutilation by people outside his home protesting housing, transportation and income disparities.

• Members the United States House of Representatives who voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are harassed. While there are few outright threats of violence (after all, threatening a member of Congress, as opposed to an everyday citizen, carries the threat of prison time), the implication is often there. Angry people also target the siblings of lawmakers.

• Snohomish, Washington high school student Brett Karch is badly injured firing a cannon at a school function, nearly requiring amputation of his leg. Fearful that the cannonade tradition would be abolished, schoolmates and parents phone the hospital to threaten him with further harm, including the loss of his other leg, if he or his family cooperate with the investigation into the accident.

As I've noted before:

There's some broken bit of the American psyche that revels in the fear and stress caused by threatening to murder those one disagrees with. [...] We, as a nation, have become host to legions of craven bullies, seeking to frighten one another into conformity from the safety of anonymity.

Launching anonymous death threats at people who threaten something that one feels entitled to - or simply make one angry about something, is such a common activity in the modern United States that, in all honestly, it seems that they're hardly worth taking seriously. If the consequences for someone actually deciding to follow through were not so dire, it seems likely that we would simply ignore them entirely, especially given the fact that despite their apparent frequency, it's likely that most threats are made by a relatively small number of people. I, for my part, agree with Josef Joffe when he observes that: "Real terrorists don't write letters; they just kill you."

While the threats against Ms. Sarkesian have captured the attention of the circles that I move in, the fact of the matter remains that being on the receiving end of threats (of assault, rape or murder) is nearly par for the course for anyone with any level of public notoriety. Ms. Sarkesian's problem is not that there is a culture of threats directed at women in technology. Instead, she, along with Assemblyman Adams, Rebecca Watson, Jessica Ahlquist, Kevin Rose, Brett Karch and several members of the United States House of Representatives all have the same problem - that there is a culture of treating the making of serious threats against other people as trivial to everyone but the person(s) on the receiving end.

On one point Thursday, there was bipartisan agreement: No act of Congress - health care reform or anything else - merits threats of violence against lawmakers or their families.
The Seattle Times "Threats against lawmakers spread after health vote"

What we need is a national agreement: that no act of public life - being critical of the content of video games, voting for tax increases as a Republican, disagreeing with a member of one's own "tribe," insisting that the First Amendment be enacted in accordance with one's own interpretation of it, making significantly more than low income people who want to live in your neighborhood, being injured by a cannon made by students or anything else - merits anonymous attempts to cause feelings of fear, stress and helplessness in anyone, regardless of how seriously we consider the actual threat being made. For a time it was fashionable to sneer down our collective noses at the Moslem world for their rage, than the threats that it engendered, at the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. The incident was treated in many circles as proof of the backwardness and barbarism of Islam.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

When They Come Again

"First they came..." is a poem derived from a speech by pastor Martin Niemöller. We see it today as an indictment of those who stood by while the Nazis rounded up various groups and took them away to the concentration camps, and as a cautionary warning of the perils of being silent in the face of a clear injustice being done.

But in an early version of the speech, given in 1946, pastor Niemöller raises a point, that while not poetic, is nevertheless important.

Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. - I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]?

He follows this up with another important point:

We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

It's become fashionable to think that when "evil" triumphs because enough "good people" do nothing, the fundamental problem is that being a "good person" isn't enough to prevent people from being cowards. But the first quote of Niemöller's I presented reminds us - in almost all cases of injustice being perpetrated against a group, the silence of members of the group that perpetrated it is also self-interested. When Japanese-American citizens were interred in World War II, people may have very well be afraid to speak out. But they also saw themselves as safer with possible fifth columnists locked up and people in the areas that the Japanese-Americans had been forced to vacate saw, and in several cases availed themselves of, an opportunity to better their material condition through taking the property of the interned.

This tendency didn't end with the Second World War - people are still motivated to look the other way when it may benefit them to do so. And so when people fear that recent injustices, like the second-class citizenship of women or Native Americans, will rear their heads again, they aren't necessarily worried that a majority of White men will actively support such measures. Only that, secure in the belief that no-one will ever come for them, they'll remain silent and simply accept the advantages offered them.