Elizabeth Smart Takes on the Deep Evils of the Purity Myth

At a recent panel at Johns Hopkins university, Elizabeth Smart asked us all to approach victims of kidnapping and human trafficking with compassion and empathy—imploring us to offer them safety and support, rather than merely gawking at the grisly particulars of their ordeals or getting lost in the callous, irrelevant question of why or when a given person did or didn’t run.

Her comments are especially worthy of our attention right now, given the horrible ordeal that just ended for those three women in Cleveland. It’s worth thinking about why people (mostly men) do these sorts of monstrous things to other people (mostly women), and why victim-blaming (of which the why-didn’t-she-run question is certainly a facet) remains so pervasive.

Smart talked very openly about her experience being kidnapped and held captive for nine months, during which time she was repeatedly raped:

I was raised in a very religious household, one that taught that sex was something special that only happened between a husband and a wife who loved each other. And that’s what I’d been raised [to believe], that’s what I’d always been determined to follow—that when I got married, then and only then would I engage in sex.

And so, for that first rape, I felt crushed: who could want me now? I felt so dirty, and so filthy. I understand—so easily, all too well—why someone wouldn’t run: because of that alone. I mean, if you can imagine the most special thing being taken away from you, and feeling like that—not that that was your only value in life, but…

Can you imagine turning around and going back into society, where you’re no longer of value? Where you’re no longer as good as everybody else?

Smart then immediately, explicitly traced her feelings of shame and worthlessness to abstinence-only education.

I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about—well, about abstinence. And she said, “Imagine you’re a stick of gum. And when you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And then, if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum. And who’s going to want you after that?”

That’s terrible. Nobody should ever say that. But for me, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m that chewed-up piece of gum. Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away.” And that’s how [easy] it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value.”

There are lots of problems with abstinence-only education. One problem is that it doesn’t seem to work at all. It doesn’t produce teenagers who are more abstinent, but only teenagers who are more ignorant. For another thing, then, children without sexual information are easier targets for sexual predators; how can they know what inappropriate or threatening behavior looks like when they have only the foggiest idea of what safe, healthy, appropriate behavior looks like?

But Smart’s comments also address something bigger than abstinence-only education, bigger than rape culture: the idea that a woman’s value derives from her virginity, from her purity—that whereas a man becomes incrementally more awesome (and thus more valuable) with each sexual conquest, sex renders a woman sluttier (and thus less valuable). This means that a woman’s first sexual experience markedly, massively, irretrievably reduces her value.

Let’s begin by agreeing about how fucked up that concept is.

We construe a woman’s virginity as, in Elizabeth Smart’s words, “the most special thing” she possesses. Smart stops just short of saying that virginity is a woman’s “only value in life.” If a woman isn’t a faultless sexual gatekeeper, then she’s nothing, whatever else she may have going for her. As Jessica Valenti outlined in The Purity Myth, sexual “purity” is held up as the cardinal virtue of female life, over and above actual virtues like kindness, intelligence, creativity, and integrity.

Now, this crap does make some semblance of sense, in an “evolutionary history” kind of way: before the emergence of birth control as a technology and genetics as a science, the only way that a man could guarantee himself children that were biologically his own was to exert total control over his reproductive partner’s sexuality. Even as women achieve greater measures of equality—and even as science strips old gender configurations of all utility—men and women alike continue to believe that female sexuality must be policed, restrained, reigned-in (and worse, that this inequity is somehow the natural order of things).

Peggy Reeves Sanday pinpoints this as the founding cultural myth of victim-blaming and female non-agency, expressed most succinctly in the work R.F. von Krafft Ebing and Havelock Ellis—who, following from Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection, attempted to find a “natural” explanation for rape. “Ellis conceives of human sexual behavior as a game of combat,” Sanday explains. “Playing the role of the hunted animal the female conceals her sexual passion by adopting a demeanor of modesty in order that the male may be more ardent and forceful.”

More specifically (and also more creepily), Ellis argued that female resistance is eventually, inevitably met with “an element of real violence, of undisguised cruelty,” and that this combativeness-unto-violence “[puts] to the test man’s most important quality, force.”

So on Ellis’ account, aggressive coercion is a valid tactic for men perusing sex, and female sexual gatekeeping is a performance: really, she wants it, but it’s her responsibility to withhold it, except that she won’t be able to, because she’ll find the sheer virility of her increasingly coercive paramour to be just that damn irresistible.

This tangled knot of misogynist non-logic helps to explain why we think of sexually active women as less virtuous, and why we think this even when the sex-acts in question occurred against their will—and also, why so many men who rape do not think of themselves as rapists. The cultural script tells us that women are supposed to resist, and that men are supposed to overcome that resistance. Nothing wrong here. Just sex-as-a-zero-sum-game, forever.

Succinctly and without exaggeration, this idea is one of the deepest and most pervasive evils ever to riddle the human psyche. This is what leads us to ask what rape victims were wearing when they were raped. This is what makes it possible to regard “honor killings” with anything other than open horror.

This is also what makes it possible to use a rape as a weapon of war. Rape is self-evidently monstrous in itself, but it couldn’t tear societies apart if the members of those societies refused to shun and despite its victims—if they reserved their disdain for the perpetrators of the crime, rather than those against whom the crime was purpotrated.

I’m not claiming that I know how to untangle this knot, but I do know that we won’t get anywhere while so many of us persist in beliving—obstinately, confrontationally, and against all available evidence—that the whole problem is fictional or long since solved. We need to begin by noticing these malignant assumptions in ourselves, and fighting them whenever they emerge.

I’m not claiming that’s easy. Just that it’s necessary. We stand to make the world an infinitely more humane place, if only we can all see sexual “purity” for the pernicious, corrosive bullshit that it is and supplant it (bit by bit, thought by thought, interaction by interaction) with a better and saner cultural script.

Religious Freedom Requires a Secular Government

This recent attempt in North Carolina to establish a state religion was a little too dumb and a little too doomed to actually be scary. It fails on its face, because it violates the very first line of the very first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America—”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—and much like Kansas trying to ban abortion in spite of Roe v. Wade, it was never going to result in anything more than a costly public spectacle at the state taxpayers’ expense.

But it does reveal a genuinely troubling strain of ignorance among our duly elected representatives, who apparently do not realize that devoutly religious people, perhaps more than any other group, need secular law. Secular law is not a decadent intellectual luxury, nor is it by any means an attack on anyone’s religious freedom. Quite the opposite, secular governance is a necessary precondition to the free exercise of religion.

Let’s assume that the hypothetical theocracy in question is an Abrahamic one (even though that’s not necessarily a given). Is the government Christian, Jewish, or Muslim? If Christian, is it Catholic, or Protestant? If Catholic, does it adhere to the principles set forth at Vatican II, or those that were in place beforehand? Even if we assume that the state religion is exactly your own, does it operate according to the teachings, interpretations, and rhetoric of your religious leader, or of someone else’s? You only have to have been to two houses of worship in your life to know that the differences between them can be substantial, even within the same sect/order/denomination/faith. And those particularities, so fussily esoteric to an outsider, are often intensely important to a practitioner.

In other words, if you’re devoutly religious, a theocracy would be far more likely to impede, disable, and criminalize your faith than to support it. As I’ve argued in past posts, religious people are demonstrably more free to practice their religion under a secular government than they are under a theocratic one.

If your religious beliefs align precisely with the those of the theocrats du jour, then you are in a certain sense free to practice the state religion, unpersecuted. But that’s not religious freedom. It’s merely a false and accidental approximation of religious freedom, a dart thrown in the dark that so happened to hit the sweet spot on the Venn diagram of your beliefs and your government’s. The moment that your conscience compels you to change your beliefs in any way, or that some new elected or appointed official changes the law of the land in the slightest, your illusory freedom evaporates and your faith has no protection whatseover.

Secular law protects all of us, whatever religions we do or do not practice, from falling into so precarious a situation. This means that you and your religious beliefs are protected, both from the tyranny of the majority and from the vagaries of bureaucracy. But it also means that your personal morality is not and can never be one-to-one with local, state, or federal law.

As Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion for Loving v. Texas (the case that established the unconstitutionality of sodomy laws), the United States cannot outlaw “private conduct not harmful to others” purely because one religion (or even all religions) might find that conduct objectionable (or even wrong).

If your religion forbids homosexuality, then the law protects your right to practice that religion, but those very same laws can and must (and will, sooner or later) protect gay rights. The opponents of same sex marriage have categorically failed to explain what harm committed gay relationships will somehow do to the institution of heterosexual marriage, or to adopted children, or to the stability of family units, or to anyone or anything else—so their moral revulsion is not a valid legal argument. (We all have the right to keep Kosher if we want to, but we also have the right not to keep Kosher, so however much we may want to, we can’t criminalize cheeseburgers).

We can believe in religious liberty, or we can believe that one particular religion’s morality should be the law of the land. But we plainly, clearly cannot believe both of those things, because they are mutually exclusive.

The Cost of Saying That a Given Game Is Not a Game

Richard Terrell recently argued at legnth that Proteus is a “cool digital musical experience” rather than a game as such. While I have tremendous respect for Terrell’s overall project—he’s “nobly wrestling with the limits of language,” as Michael Abbot once put it—I still can’t shake the feeling that he sometimes applies his considerable efforts to the wrong questions. Because in this case, the right question is, what do we actually gain by deciding that Proteus is not a game?

Proposing a narrower definition of games means making one of three statements:

    1. When I say game in the following piece, I mean x.
    2. Whenever I say game, I mean x.
    3. Game means x.

That first one is a valid, practical, and frequently necessary gesture. The second is potentially limiting, but also potentially liberating; if you can stop sweating the vocabulary, then you can move on to new, exciting, probably unmapped territory.

The idea of defining games once and for all, however, is completely unworkable.

Please understand, I’m coming at this as a former art history major. For about four years, I had the what is art? discussion more often than I had hot meals. And while it’s important to know how various critics and practitioners have defined art (just as it’s important to know that Sid Meier defines a game as “a series of interesting choices”), it’s a costly mistake to fully embrace any one definition or definitively drink any one theorist’s Kool-Aid. There’s always a cost, and that cost is never worth the benefit, even if there is a benefit, which there usually isn’t.

Say you decide that art has to exist primarily as art. It can’t be utilitarian, so a table isn’t art, even if it’s well made, expressive, and beautiful. Art for art’s sake, this idea is sometimes called.

The problem with this definition (or one problem with it) is that it manufactures a crisis of classification, wherein African art, for example, isn’t art at all—and not only because you’re dealing with so many tables, and water jugs, and textiles. More importantly than that, when viewed in the cultural context of animist traditions, medicine societies, and ancestor worship, representative sculptures can also be construed as functional objects. They’re at least considered ceremonial, and often considered magical. So their purposes are metaphysical, yes, but also utilitarian. Meaning they don’t count as art.

Oh, but it’s O.K. that African art isn’t really art. That doesn’t diminish it. It does mean, of course, that African art is worse than European art at being art. But it doesn’t follow that European art or European culture is better. Just that it’s more advanced and artful and—

See the problem?

You could argue that something isn’t art, or isn’t a game (or isn’t music, or isn’t literature) for an infinity of reasons. But whatever you’re trying to do, and regardless of whether you succeed at doing it, you’re also explicitly excluding those works that push hardest against the boundaries of a given medium. You’re leveling things off.

There’s no getting around the fact that this is an argument with a target, and that it naturally tends to target those who are least in need of being taken down a peg: it naturally and automatically targets marginal voices. That means denying someone a place at the table, and denying their work a place on the syllabus. Saying that’s not a game means putting forth a bold and dickish hypothesis about whose work is worth discussing and whose work isn’t.

And to what end? What’s the point? Well, the point is clear, specific language. Using a word, knowing what it means, and knowing that your audience knows what it means, too. It’s not hard to see why this goal is so appealing to Terrell, who is after all writing a freakin’ glossary.

But here’s the thing: when we use words with increasing frequency and breadth, it becomes increasingly foolish to try and pin those words down to singular, canonical definitions. In past posts, Richard Terrell has gone into great detail about his working definitions of games and gameplay, but when defining the word game in his glossary, he simply quotes Jesper Juul’s Half-Real and moves on. By contrast, Juul’s own “Dictionary of Video Game Theory”—in a gesture akin to the entry about the word is in the Oxford English Dictionary—provides eight separate and sometimes conflicting definitions of game. (Nine if you count Wittgenstein’s notion “that what we call games have nothing in common.”)

Which is the right approach. We should be cataloging and exploring, but not resolving. Because resolving the word game into a single definition, even if it weren’t completely impossible and a little dangerous, would still be thoroughly pointless. If we did somehow manage to agree on some unified definition under which Proteus is not a game, we would still want to talk about how it relates to games. So we would most likely need a broader term that could encompass all of these games and non-game gameoids we wanted to discuss, wouldn’t we? So hey, maybe that bigger, looser word could be something like, I don’t know, game.

It’s insufficient and unconvincing to declare, without qualification, that specific language is good and that unspecific language is bad. Games and art are open-ended concepts, so it’s not a linguistic crisis to describe them in open-ended terms. It’s acceptable, and maybe even preferable, to describe nebulous things nebulously. We do it all the time.

To use the squishiest possible example, love is an inescapably inexact concept. When you say “I love you,” to someone, your words are a contract currently being written. You are building an understanding, but always a provisional and contextually specific one. Other people say those same words and mean completely different things, and you know that, and knowing that diminishes the meaning and importance of your own words in precisely zero ways.

A word can be maddeningly vague in isolation, yet clear and powerful in context, is my point.

It’s fine and even necessary to use broad terms in narrow ways. But when you insist that your newly narrowed definition is the definition—when your goal is to pin the word game down to a single, universally applicable meaning, for example—then, nobly wrestling with the limits of language becomes tilting at windmills. It’s noble, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s productive.

The Head and the Heart of Song Choruses

“My songs are filled with hope,” Bruce Springsteen once told Terry Gross in an NPR interview. (Actually, I’m quoting Sarah Vowell’s transcription here, just to make the attribution a shade more complicated. But anyway).

“My songs are filled with hope,” [Springsteen] answered. And in ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ he explained, “The pride was in the chorus… In my songs… The hope part is in the choruses. The blues… your daily realities… are in the verses.”

That’s a pretty common configuration, in Springsteen’s songs and elsewhere. The verses do the thematic heavy lifting and go to the darkest places, and and then the choruses provide some relief. The verses inhale, the choruses exhale.

Macklemore’s “Same Love” employs a similar verse/chorus relationship, but does so for the sake of structuring an argument. The verses contain all manner of rational advocacy for gay rights—relevant personal anecdotes, pleas to social justice, clear examples of how prejudiced language can blunt our emptahy—and the choruses punctuate these intellectual points with a purely emotional appeal in the form of Mary Lambert’s sung lines: “I can’t change, even if I tried, even if I wanted to,” and “My love, my love, my love, she keeps me warm.”

In this case it’s less breathing in and breathing out, and more a one-two punch.

“Same Love” is a song that wants to convince you of something, but the verse/chorus relationship I’m describing is equally effective in the mouth of a character trying to convince himself of something. Think about most of Guiteau’s parts in Assassins, or more recently, “I Believe” from The Book of Mormon.

Or consider one of my favorite recent examples, Captain Ahab’s song “Pornography.” (As the title implies, we’re now officially in NSFW territory). This is a song about a guy trying to convince himself that a terrible idea is, in fact, the best idea he’s ever had. The choruses convey the questionable notion in question: that making porn with his barely-described significant other, and/or with unknowing participants via a “secret camera,” will solve all of his financial problems—and rather than repeating or embellishing a single melody, the verses shift and change along with the protagonist’s rationalizations.

He eventually loops back to where he started in the first verse, both lyrically and melodically, but not before working out the increasingly grandiose particulars of the plan and, with more pathos than the jokey premise initially seems to deserve, explaining the aspirations/desperation behind his present line of thinking. (Again, NSFW).

That reveal right before the repeat of the first verse—”I just want to treat you the way that you deserve”—has so much going for it. There is the aforementioned note of pathos, yes, but the protagonist of the song is also doubling down on his creepy, possessive, just-this-side-of-misogynistic attitude. Then a muted chorus, with steeled resolve (yes, this is a good idea!) and a final one with renewed abandon (yes, yes, yes, this is a great idea!) Then that wandering, noisy ending that seems to say eh, whatever. It was a dumb idea anyway.

In each of these examples, the chorus conveys a single idea, a single point, and each verse is a divergent path (direct or indirect) to that same point. These verses depict minds going miles per minute, while the choruses state a unifying theme that, whatever is in motion around them and regardless of the ideas themselves, somehow stay utterly fixed, reassuringly solid, endlessly convincing.

When that central, repeated idea is a beautiful one, you get an ode to progress and a plea for action. When the idea is shaky or absurd, you get comedy. When it’s a little of both, you get gallows humor (literally, in the case of Assassins). But what you get regardless is a viscerally, subliminally affecting mode of persuasion.

The whole verse, chorus, verse thing doesn’t just stick around because it’s convenient and familiar. It also sticks around because, in all sorts of ways we might not consciously realize, it works.

On Being Offended (by The Onion or by Anything Else)

I want to talk about The Onion, but first I want to talk about the boob song.

At last Sunday’s Oscars, there was this bit about Captain James T. Kirk traveling back in time to tell Seth MacFarlane how not to be the worst host in the show’s history. Among the fatal missteps that Kirk wanted to help MacFarlane avoid was singing “an incredibly offensive song that [upset] a lot of actresses in the audience.” On the off-chance you didn’t hear the song or read about it, dear reader, it’s called “We Saw Your Boobs,” and it catalogs the films in which Naomi Watts, Charlize Theron, and numerous others have appeared bare-chested—complete with shots of those actors looking grumpy and defeated, and of Jennifer Lawrence looking victorious because “we haven’t seen [her] boobs at all.”

Get it? Because she wins. Because you see, “sex is a contest,” and “men win and women lose when sex or nudity happens. It’s an archaic, prudish, creepy concept that derives from twisted notions about female purity and women-as-property.”

Plus, to celebrate the act of cinematic mammary-ogling while simultaneously slut-shaming the women to whom those breasts belong—in direct proportion to how naked they’ve gotten, and how often—is both manifestly regressive and spectacularly moronic. Besides which, MacFarlane was more or less daring the women he name-checked to do anything other than play along, because hey, they totally asked for this by being naked on camera, the dumb humorless floozies. (Headdesk forever and ever).

But what I found equally irksome, if I’m being honest, was the way the song was declared “offensive” first and foremost, as though that quality alone justifies its existence and assigns it comedic value. The mechanics of jokes matter, so I’d like to use this one, with its hoary premise and its lazy framing, as evidence that we all need to stop leaning so heavily on “offensive” as a category.

I’m not saying that we need to banish the word offensive from our vocabularies, exactly. Being offended is a valid reaction. It’s just that it’s not a particularly informative one. You can be offended by earnest, mean spirited hate-speech, yes. But you can also be offended by prescient, valuable satire. Or you can be offended by button-pushing attempts at incisive commentary that come up sort and thereby come out muddled. All of those things are equally likely to offend you, and the fact that you are offended will not help you to tell them apart.

In other words, nothing is objectively offensive, but lots of things are objectively problematic. And problematic things can spur useful dialogue, whereas all we ever seem to want from offensive things is a Big Old Apology (which all too often means very little and accomplishes even less). The time and effort we spend talking about whether something is offensive could, therefore, be better spent talking about whether it’s harmful, or immoral, or tone deaf. Even if the cultural object in question is all of the above, you can still like it—and you can like while still acknowledging that, in some respects, it’s kind of fucked up.

Which brings us to The Onion.

As Maryann Johanson points out, this joke is problematic for a whole host of reasons, “like how women of color come in for extra bonus disrespect and misogyny, and how little girls are inexcusably oversexualized.” Very, very true.

“But that’s not what this tweet was about,” she continues. “I didn’t see Wallis as the butt of this joke. It seemed completely obvious to me—to the point that I didn’t even have to think about it—that the butt of the joke here is people who say such things about women.”

Again, the mechanics of the joke matter. This is parody by exaggeration. Say that same bitchily misogynistic thing about Jennifer Lawrence, for exmaple, and it wouldn’t even register as satire; it would just register as the the kind of thing that people constantly say about women, especially but not exclusively on the Internet. Say it about an indisputably adorable and irrepressibly ebullient little kid, however, and the hatefulness of the sentiment becomes freshly obvious and sharply visible—which is supposed to make us ask why it’s OK to talk about anyone that way, if we can all agree that it’s not OK to talk about Quvenzhané Wallis that way.

Jonhanson concludes by conceding “that if you have to explain a joke, the joke has failed. So The Onion screwed up. Just not quite in the way that a surprising number of people seem to think they have.” We can appreciate that The Onion was taking aim at a valid target (that target definitely not being Quvenzhané Wallis), while also acknowledging that they missed the mark pretty severely (hence the widespread, perfectly understandable misunderstanding that their target was Quvenzhané Wallis, which again, was not in fact the case at all).

The Onion’s own apology calls the tweet “a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire,” but I think it would be a mistake to decide that this joke, because it is so problematic, has no value—and to some of you, that statement will mean that I am taking The Onion’s side, explaining away their error, and telling their detractors to shut up and stop being offended. The comments section of Johanson’s post (which, as with so many comments sections, I would strongly encourage you not to read) contains a whole lot of outrage along those lines.

But look, I’m not making excuses for The Onion, nor am I telling anyone not to be offended, and I don’t think that Johanson is doing any of that, either. Rather, I’m saying that it’s pointless to talk about who is and is not on the The Onion’s side, because everyone in this discussion, including The Onion, is on the same side.

That’s what we stand to gain when we stop using offence as our primary unit of measure. We can eschew the reductive, self-congratulatory fiction that the world is neatly divisible into an enlightened, empathetic Us and an ignorant, boorish Them. We can see that Seth MacFarlane’s shtick is fundamentally different from The Onion’s in terms of form, intent, and effect, even if both end up being offensive. And most importantly, we can move past the idea that being good is a fixed state rather than an ongoing process, and that it’s more important for offensive parties to seek absolution than it is for all of us to seek understanding.

Personally, when I’m offended by something, I try to approach it as the beginning of a potentially meaningful conversation, not the end of one.

Daniel Tosh and the Anatomy of One Particularly Tasteless Joke

Let’s begin with a big old trigger warning, as the topic at hand is a rape joke.

So, Daniel Tosh was doing standup last Friday. Depending on who you ask, he either did a bit about how “there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them,” or about “rape jokes always being funny.” Depending on who you ask, a woman in the audience either “heckled” Daniel Tosh during that bit, or simply yelled out that “actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

As far as I know, it is not in dispute that Daniel Tosh then said something along these lines: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?” Neither does it seem to be in dispute that the a fair portion of the audience laughed at that suggestion, or that the woman in question then quickly left the comedy club.

It seems to me that the important question is why is that supposed to be funny? Let’s put aside for the moment whether the joke worked—a tasteless joke that lands always seems less tasteless than a tasteless joke that doesn’t—and let’s take a look at how the humor is supposed to be operating. You’re supposed to laugh at the idea of this woman being suddenly raped by a group of men (1) because it’s supposed to be an ironic and precise punishment for a self-serious killjoy, like dropping a piano on the head of someone preaching against cartoon violence, and (2) because the image is supposed to be over-the-top; it is unlikely that five men would spontaneously rape a woman in the audience of a comedy show, and the idea is clearly intended to be absurd.

OK, now let’s talk about why the joke may or may not actually be funny. The first part (a killjoy getting her comeuppance) only works if you think that those who object to rape jokes are killjoys. If you don’t, then the element of retribution just comes of as unwarranted meanness at best, a misogynistic power-play at worst.

The second part (the absurd extremity of the image) only works if you believe that it is utterly impossible for a group of men at a Daniel Tosh show to rape a woman. So it’s worth mentioning that the “heckler” herself found the idea “pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place,” she says.

The really sinister undercurrent in the suggestion that this woman might be gang-raped is that it’s not particularly implausible. The only element in the joke that strains credulity—the only thing that makes it a joke rather than an actual, immediate threat, in other words—is the suggestion that the rape might take place right then and there, in the middle of Daniel Tosh doing his set.

But after the show? What in fact is absurd or implausible about that? In point of horrific-but-undeniable fact, that kind of shit happens all the time.

So it’s important to note that Daniel Tosh’s rape joke is not problematic because it’s “offensive.” I’m sure that some people are simply offended, and that they just want Daniel Tosh to apologize or do a public service announcement or whatever, but those reactions completely miss the point. The point is that this particular joke operates on deeply fucked up assumptions about gender politics—the feminists want to take away our toys!— and a gross underestimation of the real danger that real sexual assault poses to real women on a daily basis.

I literally could not care less whether you personally think the joke is funny, but whether you do or not, the mechanics of it matter. Because this particular joke is prodding at some extremely important aspects of gender, and is doing so in just about the stupidest way imaginable. That’s why it’s problematic. And also dumb.

We’re All Feminists Now

In case you haven’t heard, Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency decided to Kickstart a web series about female characters in videogames. She wanted to raise $6,000 for the project. She ended up raising $158,917. In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose I should mention that one of those dollars was mine.

On the way to her success, Sarkeesian encountered what could be generously described as a grand-scale Internet shitstorm. The substance of the backlash ranged from garden variety trolling to gendered insults laced with antisemitism to numerous at-least-semi-serious threats of violence. (Google it if you really want to know the details, trigger warning, trigger warning, trigger warning).

Unsurprisingly, some of the best coverage came from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. John Walker noted an emerging theme in the backlash, namely “that men are poorly represented in gaming too.” Walker agreed that indeed, “they are.”

Men in games are often represented as huge, muscled heroes, essentially weapons of war with biceps, gruff and focused and all-powerful. It’s not an accurate representation of men at large, indeed not. Because it’s a power fantasy. It’s aspirational (as much as very many men may have no desires to be anything like that). It’s about being big, and strong, and in control. Oh boo hoo. Yes, it is daft, and cliched, and tiresome. But to compare it to the default representation of women in games—either huge-titted, scantily clad sexual fantasies, or helpless, pathetic and weak—is deeply erroneous.

Walker answered the detractors’ implied question (Why are we even talking about this?) with a simple and sensible demonstration of male privilege. You wouldn’t know it from reading comments sections, but we’re talking about observable reality here, not some far-flung intellectual burg on The Island of Purely Hypothetical Feminist Wheel-Spinning.

One RPS commenter tried to refute a fairly straightforward observation—”I hear far more blathering about how crazy modern feminism is than I hear actual crazy modern feminism”—with another, weirder, considerably more confusing one: “The problem is that I hear far more blathering about how modern feminism isn’t crazy than I hear actual non-crazy modern feminists speaking.”

If most discussions of gender seem to crash into a brick wall of nonsense, then this is precisely that brick wall.

Look. Anyone who is speaking about gender in a non-crazy way is a non-crazy feminist. Feminism is, fundamentally, the act of looking at history, media, language, or anything else, and realizing that all subjects in all disciplines are gendered—and that gender has been rigidly hierarchical throughout human history, predominantly advantaging men while predominantly disadvantaging women. Most importantly, feminism reveals that this dynamic has frequently (though often quite subtly) shifted, and that we can and must continue to shift it.

The central, irrefutable insight of feminist thought is that gender operates through taught assumptions and learned behavior, and is therefore subject to revision and improvement—even though its machinations so often seem, as Simone De Beauvoir said in The Ethics of Ambiguity, “to be immediately given by nature, by gods, by powers against whom revolt has no meaning.”

And fine, she was talking about freedom in a more general sense there, but that’s sort of my point. Our responsibility to address and redress inequality goes beyond gender. It’s bedrock. Feminism is bedrock when dealing with other human beings in the same way that the Magna Carta is bedrock when forming a just, legitimate government.

To dismiss “feminism” as a fringe mode of thought, in other words, is reductive to the point of willful meaninglessness. Unless you think that gender roles really are (or ought to be) immutable, fixed, and unchanging, and that inequality between men and women is acceptable and/or unavoidable, you are a feminist.

That doesn’t mean we all agree, of course—who the hell would want that?—but it does mean that we’re all on the same side, or should be. Feminism is not so much an ideology as an event—an event that is already taking place, and from which there is no turning back, and which demands participation from anyone interested in fully understanding any topic. It’s too late to unsex the subject. We’re all feminists now.

Sexual Politics in The Witcher 2

So I’m planning to keep on writing about The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for two reasons. First, I question the productivity of having all writers everywhere write about a single game/book/movie for a few weeks before quickly and permanently moving on to something newer. Second, I’m a freelancer, and I don’t get review copies all that often. So when I do get one, I show my appreciation by being thorough both in my experience with the work and in my analysis of it.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about just how questionable the game’s sexual politics get toward the end there.

There are male mages in The Witcher 2, but all of them are minor villains—sexless area bosses who serve mostly to add some fireballs and such to important battles. Female magic-users are a different matter, uniformly attractive and, almost without exception, sexually available to Geralt.

When I say that they are uniformly attractive, by the way, I mean it: many of their animations, both for spell-casting and for flirtation or sex, are identical.

Come to think of it, most women in The Witcher 2 are uniform in that way, drawing from a handful of body-types and a somewhat shallow pool of movements. One sex scene late in the game (the one with that sexy spy sort of a sorceress) is little more than a palette swap of an earlier encounter with a recently rescued she-elf. The only action unique to the late-game sequence involves said sorceress slapping Geralt on the ass before diving into bed with him. Which marks her as—empowered?

In any case, the universal hotness and promiscuity of sorceresses seems innocuous enough—even if somewhat at odds with the “mature” or “grown-up” intent of the Witcher series—and certainly an improvement over the prudish, game-long courtships typical of Bioware fare.

That is, until the third act. Oh my, the third act. Men and women both get killed, but undeniably, the women fare far worse. Sorceresses are pretty much exclusively the ones to be shackled and imprisoned, beaten and tortured, and on and on and on. One unfortunate character gets blinded with a spoon.

In a game replete with choices and divergent paths, that rather grisly spoon-blinding business is inexplicably mandatory. And for God’s sake, it happens while Geralt is standing there watching. Geralt, whom the game has taken such lengths to establish as a man allergic to injustice—and who refuses to kill a war criminal literally seconds later—does not give the player the option to intervene and stop a then-defenseless sorceress from having her eyes gouged out. That’s bizarre, not to mention wildly incongruous.

My sneaking suspicion is that CD Projekt RED simply wanted to heighten the stakes of the plot and the grittiness of the world as the game drew to a close, and that the above was simply the most direct route to that destination. But that idea is more than a little upsetting. As Film Crit Hulk pointed out in the context of Arkham City, misogyny and violence against women are all-too-common go-tos for readymade videogame grit.

But whatever their reason, the game’s last few sections contain a hugely disproportionate amount of horrific and not-quite-necessary violence inflicted on attractive and partially interchangeable women. That’s a shame in a game that can and often does do considerably better.

Reviewing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

It’s been said that, if being a video game protagonist were a disease, its most prominent symptom would be anmesia. The second-most-prominent would, of course, be kleptomania.

Video game heroes forget things in order to preordain otherwise nonsensical plot twists, and they steal things because the people who play games—or the people who have been playing lengthy RPGs for years or decades, in any case—tend to be the kind of people who need to collect or complete all the things. For that same reason, we could add a third symptom, namely an unhealthy preoccupation with solving other people’s sometimes-petty problems. Hence side quests.

And from that same love of tidiness and acquisition and metrics, we get an obsession with reviews. So in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am one of the 1,000 bloggers to whom CD Projekt RED magnanimously sent copies of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in exchange for nothing more than a thoughtful review.

I don’t usually write reviews per se, but a deal’s a deal, so here goes. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is more engaging, more ambitious, and more interesting than most other games of comparable genre and price. The visuals are nothing short of gorgeous, and the newly-released Xbox 360 version (which was the one I played, as was the deal) pushes the now seven-year-old console as far as I’ve ever seen it pushed. The combat and character-building focus on the intricacies on one particular class (withcers, in case that’s not clear) rather than swimming in the vast, generic soup of knights/warriors, mages/wizards, and thieves/rogues. Witchers are kind of all three, and also none of the above, and it works remarkably well.

Fair enough? Cool, fair enough.

Though while we’re at it, full disclosure-wise, I should note that I never did play the original Witcher, nor did I ever get around to reading the series of Polish novels on which it’s based. So I’m playing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings as a double-amnesiac, compounding the gaps in Geralt of Rivia’s memory with significant, extradiagetic gaps in my own knowledge about the game’s fiction.

I’m sure that I’m missing innumerable little things—references to characters, places, and events of which I have no prior knowledge—but the overall effect is actually incredibly compelling. As I mentioned in my recent write-up of Dark Souls, I love hashing out a game’s meaning by diving head-first into its mysterious, and perhaps even inexplicable, imagined world.

So for starters, here’s what I’ve pieced together about witchers.

1. They’re mutant “warrior-monks” who live long (but definitively mortal) lives.

2. They hunt monsters for pay, using special silver swords that they carry alongside their standard steel ones.

3. They believe that the guilty must be punished and that the innocent must be protected.

4. They brew potions and cast magical signs, the latter running the gamut from shields to snares to Jedi mind tricks.

5. They’re incapable of reproducing sexually, but oh-so-capable of having super-sexy sex with sexy sorceresses.

Geralt suffers from a profound case of videogameprotagonitis. The mercenary monster-slaying aspect of his work lends itself well to his agreeing to solve people’s troubles, most of which seem, conveniently enough, to involve monsters. He labors throughout the franchise to regain his unsurprisingly spotty memory. And as for his kleptomania—well, there I’ll plead double-amnesia and say that, I don’t know, maybe witchers are culturally permitted to wander into people’s homes and places of business and take anything that isn’t nailed down? Or maybe the good people of Temeria are wont to leave out extra cups of iron ore, like winegalsses for Elijah, or something.

Also notable: The Witcher 2 features sex scenes that contain—I shit you not—actual sex-acts, a far cry from the sexless titillation of the first Mass Effect or, for that matter, the mostly-suggested action movie sex of the second Mass Effect. I wouldn’t call these sequences an unqualified success, and Geralt’s sexual itinerancy does have a potentially unseemly gotta-catch-em-all quality to it, but The Witcher‘s sexual encounters have some playfulness, some humor, and even some genuine tenderness. They’re a cut above, as game-sex goes.

When it’s not pausing to attempt sexiness or humor, the world of The Witcher is as dark and filthy and scorched as the Dragon Age games seemed to think they were. This is largely because The Witcher aims to make the player a participant, rather than a mere messianic tourist, in a fundamentally sick society. Dragon Age, for all its virtues, often drifts toward near-total ludo-narrative dissonance—why don’t Templars, who are tasked with hunting blood mages, care if I use blood magic right in front of them?— whereas The Witcher 2 does a remarkable job of putting the player in Geralt’s shoes. Activities that are eccentric or taboo in the narrative—from collecting herbs for potions to meditating in order to create and drink those potions—manage to feel eccentric and/or taboo during gameplay. I guess that I am indeed sort of a weirdo for stopping to pick flowers while being perused by giant crabworms, but don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.

More than that, by applying intrinsically binary (or sometimes, tertiary) choices to truly intractable ethical situations, the game makes it mechanically necessary to think in terms of Geralt’s straightforward, Quixotically consistent moral code. And by denying the player any transparent metric for determining his or her moral efficacy (no Paragon/Renegade slider here), the game aims at a sort of Žižekian hysteria that more closely mirrors our relationship to real morality than to the game mechanics we usually call “morality.”

Half of doing the right thing is figuring out what the hell the right thing is, and the other half is living with the consequences of your choice. The Witcher 2 obscures the former, and introduces consequences long-term enough to discourage quick-saving, thereby complicating the latter. Do you side with the brutal, racist powers that be, or with the straight-up terrorists opposing them? To say that there’s no perfect answer would be a considerable understatement.

Both whichever choice you make, you can be certain that the consequences will be compelling, and that there will be strangely compulsive new errands to run and inventive new monsters to slay. Also, there will be more junk to pilfer from unsuspecting and uncomplaining peasants. And new potions to brew, and new swords to forge. It’s a world worth getting lost in, and that’s what counts.

Where’s Evil?

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country—the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

-Rick Santorum

 

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“It’s that part of an imbecile,” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night