I just tried to argue effectively for the purpose of rallies like Take Back the Night. Now I'm going to do a little more musing about sexual assault awareness, especially advertising. And I'm going to start by talking about Eliot Spitzer.
Well, sort of. I'm actually going to mention Ashley Alexandra Dupré. I know it's old news now, but anybody remember the huge wave of articles talking about her music and her myspace page, how all this controversy was going to make her career? If not, here's CNN's take on the story .
So obviously, being controversial gets attention. It also gets a LOT of criticism. See the democratic presidential primaries for examples. My question is this: If controversy has a purpose, is it still a bad thing?
My thoughts on this matter are springing from some controversy I was indirectly involved in last week. It was my campus's Take Back the Night, and I am a member of the group that coordinates it. As standard practice, all student groups flyer campus spaces to advertise for events. As such, there are so many groups and so many events that many students are conditioned to ignore flyers. To get yours noticed, you have to do something bold with them, and that's what we did.
Our concept was to take images of women and couple them with stories of rape victims. The theme of the flyer was "End the silence," and provided information for TBTN. One image was of a woman looking into a mirror, another was of a woman shouting behind a pane of glass, another was of a woman with a piece of tape holding her mouth shut. The one that proved so contentious was of a woman, blurred but clearly naked, with red handprints on her body.
Bear in mind that these flyers were designed by members of a group that care passionately about sexual assault awareness and ending rape. Many members are survivors; the rest are closely connected to survivors in some way. None of us wished to be provocative for provocation's sake—while we may choose to use controversy as a tool, it is not our goal.
Those who objected to our flyers said they were demeaning, threatening, insulting to survivors. But every weekend, fraternities post flyers with unclothed women to advertise parties (one such frat carried the nickname "sexual assault expected"). Is this not threatening? Is that not demeaning? Those flyers are objectifying for objectification's sake—yet they are not torn down.
i have a theory for why people objected to our flyers and why people object to supposedly "feminist provocation." It's fear, and shame. Like it or not, whether we personally object to the mold or not, ours is a culture which teaches young girls to be ashamed of their bodies and afraid of sexuality. Think about the words "skank," "whore," "slut," and "ho." Why are these synonyms for women? Granted, men are called "jackass," "bastard," etc. But those unflattering epithets do not carry the same connotations of dirty sexuality. I don't know how many times I've heard rape victims say that they were afraid to tell someone about what happened for fear they'd be called a slut. Or even sadder, that they DID tell someone and WERE called a slut.
Furthermore, people are comfortable with forgetting that rape happens. After all, how often do you see rape in the public arena? Think court cases and rape—which do you recall? Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson, Catholic Priests, and Duke Lacrosse. Media spectacles that are turned not only into jokes, but often represent victims as money-hungry liars. If this is all that the media portrays of rape, what happened to the 20 to 33% of women who will be raped in their lifetimes? Where are their stories?
It's no wonder victims are afraid to speak out, if the idea of rape is either taboo or treated as a joke. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the uproar is caused by something else entirely. But it's something worth thinking about—because maybe if we could see the effects of rape, see the enormity of the tragedy that is sexual assault, maybe we could actually do something to change the status quo.
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Great blog.
I think some controversy can be a good thing, like those posters for Take Back the Night. That encourages discussion and puts it in people's minds. It has a somewhat good effect by letting people know of the event.
The Eliot Spitzer thing though...I mean, who cares? Sure, the info might be somewhat important, but we don't need the media to obsess over the case.
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I'm a little confused. What was offending about the fliers? That one of them contained an image of a nude woman? O.o Wait, since when is nudity a bad or "dirty" or "shameful" thing?
The main objection was that it was a nude woman, and that it was a nude woman in the context of rape. Some people claimed that the image would be offensive to rape survivors; while it is certainly a valid concern, hurting survivors was the last thing we wanted. I don't consider nudity to be bad or dirty or shameful, you've raised my point exactly.