SuperWeed

The blogger known as umkahlil has posted an article entitled The Psychosocial Causes of the Palestinian Factional War by Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme in Palestine.

In the article, Dr. El-Sarraj seeks to identify the causes of the differences between the first intifada (uprising) of 1987-1991, which “was characterized by an overwhelming sense of solidarity, resilience and commitment to moral values,” and the ongoing second intifada, “which has been dominated by chaos, disintegration and division.” Based on what has been learned by the GCMHP in its work with the boys of the first intifada who have grown up to be the men of the second intifada, Dr. El-Sarraj locates the decisive difference in trauma.

Several aspects of this argument are especially interesting to me. In Aftershock, I discuss the ways that traumatized cultures become traumatizing cultures. While virtually all human cultures are both traumatized and truamatizing at this stage in human history, armed conflicts and other human-generated disasters can intensify and exacerbate the process. As Dr. El-Sarraj writes, “Psychological research worldwide has shown that ongoing armed conflicts result in what is known as chronic social toxication which makes people and children less sensitive and more ruthless, less rational and more impulsive, less conversant and more violent.” That appears to be happening within Palestine right now, where “bizarre acts of revenge, torture and killing” have been perpetrated “in the recent clashes between Fatah and Hamas.”

Dr. El-Sarraj shows how the psychological defense mechanism known as identification with the aggressor is hard at work in Palestine, thanks to torture, beatings by soldiers, and other atrocities committed by the Israeli authorities in response to the first intifada. First described by Anna Freud — the abused daughter of Sigmund who, despite the identification with the aggressor inherent in her own embrace of his malignant theories about female development and childhood sexuality, had many smart things to say based on her own careful and empathic engagement with children — identification with the aggressor is an unconscious maneuver wherein a victimized person copes with the unbearable feeling of helplessness by adopting attitudes or behaviors of the powerful perpetrator.

In Aftershock, I mention Israeli abuses of Palestinians as an example of identification with the aggressor in the wake of the Holocaust. Now, it seems, the victims of Israeli aggression are the next wave of victims to embrace the values of their violators.

Dr. El-Sarraj writes:

The commonest problem arising from torture is the violence which the victim directs to women and children, which in its turn makes the home a battlefield. The reason for such phenomenon is that the torture a young man is subjected to makes him harbor a desire for revenge by violent means and subsequently he unconsciously resorts to identify with the Israeli torturer.

And:

In our work at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program we conducted a research on three thousand Gaza children. The study has found that those children were subjected to several traumatic and violent experiences including beating, bone-breaking, injury, tear gas and acts of killing and injury, all of which experiences have left indelible effects on their psych. Yet, to many, the most excruciating experience was seeing their fathers beaten helpless by Israeli soldiers without resistance…. No wonder then that the Palestinian child will see his model in that Israeli soldier and that his language will be the language of force and his toys and games will be the toys and games of death.

But what I notice is missing from Dr. El-Sarraj’s analysis of the situation is a gendered perspective. Perhaps this is because he supports partriarchal values, as evidenced by his comment about “the phenomenon of social disintegration and disunity which is manifest in the decline of the father’s authority with all the moral values it embodies.”

Whatever the reason for its omission, the lack of a gender analysis in this article leads Dr. El-Sarraj to miss a key component of the problem: violent/violated masculinity. What we have here is not just identification with the aggressor but gendered identification with the aggressor: male victims identifying with the violent masculinity of male aggressors as a means of coping with assaults to their (or their fathers’) masculinity.

Torture is typically highly sexualized, with male captives deliberately made to feel shamefully demasculinized in the eyes of their male captors. This process only works when both men believe masculinity to be superior to femininity and assume that masculinity equals strength while femininity equals helplessness. Thus, torture tends to violate a man’s sense of his own masculinity while reinforcing his mistaken belief that masculinity is a superior identity that resides in the ability to overpower others.

Is it any wonder, then, that tortured men will, when they get back home, tend to turn to the time-honored method of elevating themselves by beating on women? And, when they come into conflict with other men, should we be surprised that they will use any means possible to assert themselves as “men” (i.e., people with power over others)?

It seems to me, then, that the only way out of this particular cycle of violence is to directly address gender, not by bolstering the masculinity of the victims of male-on-male violence but by challenging the social construct of masculinity itself. My guess is that, if this were done in the course of treatment of torture survivors, they would obtain more substantial relief while at the same time becoming less likely to violate others as a means of reasserting their violated sense of masculinity.

Before closing, let me note that despite the absense of a feminist analysis in Dr. El-Sarraj’s article, the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme that he directs does have a “Women’s Empowerment Project” directed by Shadia El Sarraj, who writes here of the dual oppression of Palestinian women who must endure both “the violent environment and a seemingly eternal victimization by our own authoritarian and patriarchal society.” Thus it may be that the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme attends more closely to gender than the article by Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj would suggest.

Yesterday was Youth Day in South Africa, so I woke up this morning with this song [mp3 expired] in my head.

Youth Day commemorates the 16 June 1976 peaceful student uprising in Soweto, to which the Apartheid era police responded with deadly force, shooting schoolchildren dead in the streets. Photos of the police riot awakened the world to the realities of Apartheid while the responding protests among black South Africans renewed the movement that would culminate, in 1994, with the election of then-imprisoned activist Nelson Mandela to the presidency of South Africa.

Soweto Blues [mp3 expired], here sung by Miriam Makeba, tells the story of that dreadful day. The verses are in English, the refrain in Xhosa/Zulu. Makeba was exiled from South Africa at the time, her songs having been banned since her 1963 testimony against Apartheid before the United Nations. If you’d like to know more about Makeba and other dissident jazz divas of that time and place, visit the Afropop Worldwide Southern Africa Archive and scroll down to the section entitled “South African Jazz Revival.”

If you want to understand the title of this post, you’ll have to listen to the song. If you like the music, support the artist. If you like the message, support the struggle.

While the era of legal Apartheid is over, the struggles against injustice and for decent education continue in southern Africa. David Johnson, a South African who, as a student, was inspired by the Soweto uprising to join the struggle against Apartheid, reports that the struggle for equality in education is not yet won. In neighboring Zimbabwe, conditions are far worse. Here, the Sokwanele Civic Action Support Group reports on the recent murder by police of Gift Tandare, the youth chairperson of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) local structure in a Harare suburb. As in Soweto in 1976, the Zimbabwe police in April of this year shot live ammunition into a peaceful crowd of dissidents. The best way to honor the spirit of the youth of Soweto, the authors of this article assert, is to stand in solidarity with the youth of Zimbabwe today.

You don’t have to go to Africa to do something about racism in education. Here in the USA, de facto Apartheid deprives many students of color of the education they need to pull themselves out of poverty and participate fully in the political life of their communities. I teach at an historically black university to which students come from some of the most impoverished neighborhoods on the east coast. Many students arrive unprepared for college even though they did well at the under-funded public schools they attended. The realization can be painful.

I recall a moment last winter when, following a persuasive speech by a student against mandatory attendance policies, a freeform discussion of grievances broke out in one of my classes. After getting some pent-up resentments out of their systems, the students began talking more reflectively about their frustrations. Several reported being lost in classes in which they had expected, based on their high school grades, to do well. Imagine coming to college thinking of yourself as a good student only to discover that you don’t have the skills to handle introductory math or first-year composition! One very smart and hardworking young woman captured it well when, struggling for words, she said, “I feel… tricked.”

Are the schools in your community betraying students in that way? What can you do about it? How are the schools in your community funded? Administered? Is the local school board selected or elected? Since the 1990s, Christian fundamentalists have made a concerted effort to use the inattention of most community members to get themselves onto school boards. Have they taken over the school board in your community while you weren’t looking?

What are the students in your community doing for themselves? How can you be their ally? In my hometown of Baltimore, high school students staged a three-day strike in March of last year and have launched a local Algebra Project. You can read all about it in this issue of the Indypendent Reader.

I’m glad to see that conversation is continuing within the comments for my post on pornography and global warming. I’m going to jump back into that conversation soon, although I am starting to worry that the thread has gotten so long that it may be daunting for newcomers to read it all the way through. So, I’m also going to start breaking out some of the questions that have arisen into separate posts.

An opportunity to do so arose today, when I became aware of the dispute between the Humane Society of the United States and Amazon.com concerning Amazon’s sale of dogfighting videotapes and cockfighting magazines. This case goes right to one of the questions raised by Diana Russell in Making Violence Sexy.

If it’s not okay to force dogs or birds to fight to the death, why is it okay to force dogs or birds to fight to the death in order to take pictures of it? And, if it’s not okay to force dogs or birds to fight to the death in order to take pictures of it, why is is okay to sell those pictures? Does taking pictures of an illegal or immoral act in order to sell those pictures for profit somehow negate the illegality of immorality of the filmed act? How?

This is the same question raised by many feminists about pornography. We know — yes, know — that many of the real sexual acts depicted are in fact rapes, whether or not they are portrayed as such within the fictional story depicted in the pornography. If it’s not okay to rape women, why is it okay to rape women in order to take pictures of it? And, if it’s not okay to rape women in order to take pictures of it, why is it okay to sell — or buy — those pictures? Does taking pictures of a rape magically convert the rape into an act covered by the right to free expression?

I said that we know that many, if not most, of the sex acts depicted in pornography are, in fact, rapes. How do we know this? As I reported in my original post, because the preponderance of women and men who have come forward from the pornography industry to testify about its abuses have said so. Since much of that testimony was collected, the problem of sex trafficking [google the phrase for more information] has become much worse due to the ease of border crossings associated with trade globalization. In the USA alone, tens of thousands of women are enslaved in brothels or forced to dance in clubs, under armed guard 24 hours a day and with legitimate fear of murder should they try to run away. Many of these women, including Eastern European women who will not look “foreign” to American porn consumers, end up in pornographic magazines and videotapes. When you buy porn, chances are you’re buying rape.

Let me deal directly with the problem of disbelief. I’m a pretty credible person. I’m smart and sufficiently educated in research methodology to read, assess, and synthesize research findings. When I say, in my book, that research shows that trauma has this or that effect on the hypothalamus or corpus callosum, nobody doubts me. But, when I say that the accumulated evidence shows that many of the sex acts portrayed in pornography are rapes, skepticism arises. Why?

When we don’t believe the sex workers who have come forward to tell the truth about the things that have been done to them (or we don’t believe the feminists who believe those women), aren’t we doing the same thing as the mother who doesn’t believe the daughter about what daddy did to her last night?

Just like that mother, maybe we don’t want to believe what the truth about pornography tells us about the men in our everyday lives. Maybe we don’t think we can bear to see the substrate of sexualized violence that infuses our culture. Maybe we fear that, if we let ourselves know — really know — about that violence, our everyday lives will become as nightmarish as that of the narrator in Ntozake Shange’s extraordinary poem, “with no immediate cause”.

And isn’t that the same fear that keeps many otherwise animal-friendly people from letting themselves believe the things that animal activists tell them about circuses and meat? That everything will turn upside-down? That the secondary pain of seeing the animals’ pain at every lunch counter and grocery store will be too much to bear?

I don’t believe what you say about what happens to those cows on dairy farms. I don’t believe what you say about those women in pornographic films. The reasons behind the disbelief are the same: (1) I don’t want to think about the implications of that pain; (2) I don’t want to feel my own empathy with that pain; and (3) I don’t want to give up whichever of my pleasures depend on that pain.

One more note about disbelief to bring us back to the dogfighting/cockfighting controversy that motivated this post: The only other topic about which I am consistently disbelieved is the rehabilitation of fighting roosters at our sanctuary. I regularly get email messages from men calling me a liar or a silly, deluded female for reporting accurately on what I have learned about roosters from my direct work with them and my reading of the scholarly literature on cockfighting.

Just like the men who watch and believe rape pornography in which women resist but then come to enjoy sexual violation — and, yes, we know to the level of certainty possible with ethical social science research that men who watch rape pornography do become more likely to commit rape — the men who watch contrived cockfights (or their filmed depictions) come to believe that roosters want to fight to the death. In fact, the roosters are acting under duress, legitimately fearing for their lives and often (like the women in pornography) doped up to increase the likelihood that they will act in ways consistent with the stereotypes men have of them.

I’ve spent much of the last year brooding about pornography and global warming. Last week, I read something that brought those two trains of thought together.

In the upcoming June/July issue of Satya Magazine, which will focus on “A-ha! moments,” I’ve got an article about the moment when I started thinking seriously about my personal responsibilities concerning climate change. Ever since, I’ve been routinely thinking, speaking, and writing about global warming. It’s a recurring theme in my book, Aftershock, in which I argue that we must heal the ruptures in our relationship with the natural world if we ever expect to heal our own traumatic injuries and that we must heal those injuries if we ever expect to repair the damage we have done to the the world.

(If you’re not sure what you can do about global warming, by the way, you can read Turn Down the Heat! now and then read that Satya article — in which I give some practical tips gleaned from the scholarly literature about inactivity on climate change — when it comes out.)

After turning in the manuscript of Aftershock to the publisher last spring, I found myself collecting articles and books on the linkages between pornography and rape. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to read those things but I’ve learned to trust that such tangents tend to lead to useful ideas if I have the patience to follow them without worrying about where they will lead.

It turns out that, somewhere below the level of conscious awareness, I was continuing to ponder the most vexing problem posed in Aftershock: the deep linkage of sexism and speciesism that leads to the use of sexualized violence as a tool of subjugation, as seen most spectacularly recently in the torture photos from Abu Ghraib. I’m still in the midst of what probably will be a multi-year project of reading, thinking, and writing about this.

(I just picked up a stack of books from the library, including texts on torture and on the sexualized fetishization of fascism. Let’s all pause for a moment of thanks for interlibrary loan, which is the #1 perk of working in academia.)

I call the project “unspeakable” because that’s what we tend to call the kinds of all-too-common violence that I’m talking about and also because we don’t have a word for the intersection I am hoping to illuminate. As I wrote in my recent post on what I’m reading right now, I am so deeply appreciative of Diana Russell and other feminists who have stood strong despite the double emotional assault of looking closely at pornography and being ridiculed for taking it seriously.

Which brings me — finally! — to today’s intersection. In her introduction to Making Violence Sexy, Diana Russell notes that the harmful impact of pornography is a well-established fact that is not recognized as such. A wealth of data — including extensive survey research, scores of experiments, testimonies of women and men from within the pornography industry, testimonies of rape and domestic violence survivors, testimonies of rapists, etc. — attest to the multiple ways that pornography hurts both the women who appear in it and women abused by the consumers of it. Application of the laws of learning to the question of the impact of literature consumed while masturbating offers further evidence that consumers of pornography do indeed take in, and may later act out, the messages embedded in pornography: Women are objects for consumption. Women like being raped. Degradation is pleasurable. Violence is sexy.

And yet, as used to be true of global warming, many if not most people consider the question controversial, unsettled, a matter for debate rather than a problem to be solved. Various strategems are deployed to keep this urgent and ongoing problem in the realm of the questionable. One study that purported to prove that pornography is a healthy outlet for, rather than an incitement of, sexually violent impulses is cited again and again, even though the data cited in that study has since been shown to demonstrate an increase in rape following the legalization of pornography in Holland. Scholars and activists who talk about the dangers of pornography are misrepresented as prudish censors or ridiculed as overly-emotional alarmists. The available evidence is portrayed as inconclusive even though it is actually weighted heavily in one direction. The personal stories of those who have experienced the danger directly are simply dismissed.

I’ll admit that I was fooled. Even though I knew about the dangers of pornography from personal experience and from the stories that women have told me, before I embarked on this research project I truly believed that the scholarly evidence concerning pornography and violence against women was inconclusive. I knew that the link was real but I believed that it had not yet been demonstrated and that was why we have such a hard time convincing people that pornography is problematic.

So, the question becomes: What led to the recent sea change in public opinion concerning global warming and is there anything we can learn from that to help us move the problem of pornography out of the stasis of false controversy?

Commentaries on the VA Tech massacre have rightly focused on the easy availability of high-powered weaponry but have tended not to talk about aspects of the tragedy that are striking to me.

Lots of people have wondered: How come the school didn’t lock down into a state of emergency right after Seung-Hui Cho killed his first two victims? The answer seems self-evident to me: The VA Tech administration initially believed that Emily J. Hilscher and the student who came to her aid were killed by Hilscher’s boyfriend. Just another woman killed by her boyfriend? Ho-hum. Nothing to get exercised about. In 2005 alone, 47 girls and women were killed in the course of dating or domestic violence in the state of Virginia. [Shout out to the radical reference project for that information.]

If the VA Tech administration had treated those first two killings as seriously as they would have treated any non-dating/domestic murder from which the armed killer had fled the scene, the 30 subsequent victims might be alive today. And so we see that the prevalence of violence against women ends up hurting everybody.

But — wait! — there’s more. Let’s look a little more closely at the gun issue. Why are there so many guns for sale, anyway? Who are the consumers that make the manufacture of weaponry so profitable? Police and armed forces, of course. And hunters. Those thrill killers in combat fatigues who roam the woods around here, hoping to kill a wild turkey or deer, they are a big slice of the gun market as well as among the loudest voices shouting that guns are good.

And so those hunters, with their machine guns and American flags, they helped to set the stage for Seung-Hui Cho to kill 32 people and himself. They stalk animals. He stalked women. Can we bring ourselves to see and speak about the connections?

And what about Seung-Hui Cho? What role did racist taunting and other bullying play in the development of his rage? Did his grade school teachers shrug and do nothing, as the administrators at VA Tech later would do when they believed that Emily Hilscher had been killed by her boyfriend? Ho-hum. Nothing to be done. Boys will be boys.

Bullying is natural among children, they tell us, conveniently neglecting to mention the child “care” practices that make such violence seem normal. We discipline children by hitting them, thereby teaching them that might makes right, and then hammer home the lesson by forcing them to supress their natural empathy for other animals. We feed the wings of birds to children as snacks and then are surpised when they grow up to believe that their pleasure is more valuable than somebody else’s life. Shooting a classmate over a pair of sneakers is just the extreme expression of the might-makes-right, pleasure uber alles principle implicit in the enjoyment of cheap consumer goods sewn by enslaved children in South Asia.

It all came together that day at VA Tech. Racism, sexism, speciesism, consumerism and the violence inherent in all of those ideologies of exploitation conspired to kill 33 people. What can we do, I wonder, to make these connections more visible?

Superweeds. That’s what they call unwanted plants that survive despite being drenched with herbicides. We who work for earth and animal (including human) liberation must be superweeds of hardiness and adaptability.

We’re all injured animals, walking around with lead in our brains and pesticide residues in our veins. Many of us also have endured violence, either elsewhere in our lives or in the course of our activism. And yet, like the superweeds, we survive to thwart the machinations of multinational corporations and their ideologies of exploitation. As Audre Lorde wrote, “we were never meant to survive”.

Like the superweeds, we also must be always evolving in response to changing circumstances. We can’t be content to keep saying what we’ve always said or doing what we’ve always done. We must always be asking: Is this true? Is it working? What else might we do?

Luckily, nature is stronger than all of the guns and governments combined. The same strength coiled in the genes of the superweeds lives within us.

This blog is dedicated to the memory of Virgil Butler, a true superweed, who survived child abuse and rural poverty to grow up into a generous and gentle man. Like many in his part of Arkansas, Virgil ended up working for the poultry industry while still a teenager. Like many others, he was disturbed and demoralized by the violence that his job forced him to witness and perpetrate. Unlike others, he summoned up the courage to walk away — from the job and from the ideal of aggressive masculinity he had been raised to embrace. Coming forward as a whistle-blower exposed Virgil to harassment and ostracism but he never gave up or gave in. He went from killing chickens to giving them sanctuary, finding his own sanctuary with his soul mate, Laura Alexander, and among the animal activists who appreciated him.

Virgil was big on blogging, using his blog, the Cyberactivist, to write about the cruelties he had perpetrated and observed. Among his most memorable posts were My First Night on Back Dock and Inside the Mind of a Killer.

Virgil was a man of both heart and mind. He felt empathy for others and also thought deeply about his experiences. His thoughts about masculinity deserve to be read by anyone who wants to understand how gender roles hurt everybody. For an example, visit his blog archive for August of 2005, scroll down to the series of postings entitled “my story,” and read upwards. Those postings were written during a 24-hour “blogathon,” during which he raised money for the Eastern Shore Sanctuary, even though he was living in rather desperate poverty himself. Asked why he chose to support our sanctuary, he said that he appreciated our efforts “”to show the underlying reasons this horror happens and the many parallels to it, like sexism, and why society allows something as horrific as factory farming to happen without questioning it.”

Virgil died in his sleep in December of 2006. I’ll always remember him as a comrade, as a friend, and as someone who truly understood the interrelationship of different forms of oppression. This blog will explore those intersections as well as the interconnectedness of the natural world, with which we must align ourselves and from which we must draw our strength.