On the question of violence: in which Buffy is applicable to every post ever

“She got all red-faced, which in Jas’s case is very red indeed. It made me feel much better. Violence may be the answer to the world’s problems. I may write to the Dalai Lama and suggest he tries my new approach.”
—the estimably wise Georgia Nicolson

In response to Z's v. good post (read it first!):

[Trigger warning; probably implicit.]

I’m all for getting rapists out of safe spaces, and, hell, most spaces in general. The benefits are too obvious to elucidate. Take the example of rape on a college campus where both survivor and rapist are students: for the survivor’s (and other students’) safety, one of them has to leave, and it sure as hell shouldn’t be the survivor. Because these are our goals, yes? Safety and prevention.

I have some thoughts on logistics and specific suggestions (because really, do I ever not have thoughts on a subject?), but I'd rather talk about strategy and philosophy more broadly. With oru primary goals--safety and prevention--in mind, I'd like to talk about violence.

Some of the violent measures Z described may appear purely punitive, but punitive measures are also preventive, or at least they’re supposed to be. We put rapists in jail because 1) while they’re there, they can’t rape anyone else, and 2) the fact that we put rapists in jail deters other men (and these men after their release) from committing rape. A memorable statistic from Michael Kimmel’s Guyland suggests that this works: depending on how you ask the question, about 15-45% of college men admit that they’d commit rape if they knew they wouldn’t be caught. And most of them don’t, apparently due to fear of punishment.

But we can’t discount the third, Old Testament-y reason we put rapists, and murderers, and thieves in prison. Imagine that we could sentence rapists to receive an injection that prevents them from ever committing rape again. (And don’t say, “Yeah, it’s called a lethal injection.” That’s a whole different post.) Would we be satisfied with just giving them the shot and letting them free, go and sin no more? My instinct tells me no. Because we have this instinct as a culture, perhaps as humans: Rapists/criminals/bad people should be punished for their crimes. (Other thing I will not be getting into: the gross cultural trope that celebrates prison rape as a rapist or other criminal’s just deserts, which falls under either Codex Hammurabi or Codex Sublime.) One term for this belief is “accountability.” Another is “revenge.”

(By the way, I’m sure S knows a lot more about the prison stuff than I do, and hopefully she will weigh in.)

And you know, I love all that Gandhi shit about nonviolence and peaceful solutions and “makes the whole world blind.” But sometimes you get sick of sit-ins and tertiary prevention and consciousness raising. Sometimes you want to get medieval on somebody’s ass.

Believe me: I get that. And it’s tempting, oh so tempting, to think that beating up rapists will fix the problem.

This brings me, improbably but inevitably, to Buffy.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is widely lauded as a feminist show, for many good reasons, partially because it’s grrl-power wish-fulfillment fantasy. Buffy is a petite blonde teenage girl who happens to possess superhuman fighting abilities. And it is so, so damn satisfying every time a few creeps corner her in an alley, leering and threatening her, and she ends up kicking the shit out of them. Get it? They thought she was a defenseless girl, they’re ready to victimize her like they’ve victimized so many before her—and this time, they’re getting what they deserve.

In general, Buffy (the slayer and the show) is firmly in the “Violence is, in fact, often the answer” school of thought. The show lampshades this constantly. Whether confronted with the season’s Big Bad or just another monster of the week, Buffy often cuts off librarian Giles’s lengthy explanation of the new creature’s habits and mythology with a blunt question: “How do we kill it?”

And in Buffy, this is literally the solution: the demons are slain, and that’s the end of it. Heck, when she stakes a vampire, it turns to dust—no clean-up required. At most, the school might have to be rebuilt, the furniture repaired, Willow sent to England for a few months. But the problem is not a culture that encourages, condones, and perpetuates violence, which is committed by individual humans. The problem is the such-and-such demon, the so-and-so vampire, the Master, Adam, Glory, the First—each an indisputably evil being. Once the creature is destroyed, the problem is solved, and Sunnydale is safe (until next episode).

The real fantasy in Buffy isn’t that the good guys are powerful. It’s that the bad guys are monsters.

Rapists, however, are not monsters. Rapists are men, women, boys, girls, human beings. It is our responsibility as fellow human beings to remember this.

I cannot accept that the solution to dehumanization is more dehumanization. I cannot accept that the solution to violence is more violence. We may as well be fucking for chastity, as a previous generation of idealists pointed out.

Should rapists be held accountable? Absolutely. Are they fully responsible for their crimes? Absolutely. Do we have the right and responsibility as a community to prevent them from raping again? Absofuckinglutely.

But our response to rape—our interventions, our preventive measures, and even, yes, our punishments—has to be grounded in the recognition that rapists are human. And if we’re fighting to end all violence against all people everywhere (and aren’t we?): well, you can follow the logic.

I have exactly zero sympathy for perpetrators of sexual violence, but I’m trying, really trying, to have empathy. Because I know we have to understand violence in order to prevent it. Because I am a human being, an anthropologist, a feminist. And because a nice, clean staking is not an option.

Buffy's Sex Life: Discuss!

So it was a toss-up whether to post this here or on LJ, but I'm putting it here because I'm betting a certain someone and I get into a gigantic Buffy/feminism tussle.  Yeah!

Anyway, Friday in my English class* we discussed an article** about Buffy.  The bit I had a problem with was where Rutkowsky, who portrays herself as a sex-positive feminist, described vampire foreheads as "swollen," "bumpy," "grotesque" stand-ins for sexual organs.  Ok, swollen, check, bumpy, depends who you talk to...but grotesque?  Did someone have a few too many abstinence-only sex ed classes?  In any case, wound up in a spirited discussion of how the state of people's sexual organs is, actually, my business, and everyone's business, in fact.  Oh, and about how Twilight sucks.

*Buffy spoiler alert*

The interesting bit was where the prof and I got into a wee argument on how sex is treated in Buffy.  There I was thinking how cool it was that Buffy and her buddies are allowed to have sex and be protagonists, but I guess the truth is I hadn't thought about it that much.  When you do think about it, Buffy is punished for having sex...kind of a lot.  There's the whole Angel deal, which I kind of put aside because Joss Whedon wishes he'd never done it, but then moving on from there: Buffy gets with Parker and is wounded and brooding for like five episodes because hook-ups will damage you emotionally.  She only recovers when she's allowed*** to smack him over the head a few times.  Then there's Riley...remember when their sex fed a whole house o' evil?  And how about him shagging Faith in Buffy's body?  Or how it ended, in a vampire whorehouse?  Conclusion: Joss Whedon, what happened to the horror-movie victim girl kicking ass AND having sex?****

*Which is totally fabulous in that I get to shout things like "Unpack your invisible knapsack!" and "Gender is between your ears, not between your legs!" the entire class period.  The rest of the class says things like "But where is the white male in television?"
**"Why Chicks Dig Vampires: Sex, Blood, and Buffy" by Alice Rutkowsky, apparently not available in its entirety online
***Buffy turns into a cavewoman.  It's complicated and involves beer and warlocks.
****Joss Whedon always hated how in horror films, it's always the interesting woman who dies first.  She's fun, exciting, and has sex...and is usually killed seconds after the act.  Buffy was him taking back that girl.