The movie Forbidden Lie$ examines a woman who first wrote a story about a victim and then presented herself as one.
That is, Norma Khouri composed what turned out to be the fabricated tale of an “honour killing”, and later informed the filmmaker making a documentary about the saga and the literary scandal it inspired that she’d survived incest and domestic violence.
Anna Broinowski, director of Forbidden Lie$, told the audience after a screening of the movie during the Melbourne Writers Festival that Khouri made the claims of abuse after it was suggested the film needed a “redemptive” ending.
Broinowski also pointed out that Khouri’s very much a product of our time.
A browse at the autobiography/biography section of a bookstore in Collins Street, Melbourne revealed that placed near the books about British comedians and other celebrities are several works adorned with images of frightened children (see, for example, Don’t Tell Mummy: A True Story of the Ultimate Betrayal and Daddy’s Little Girl).
Although authors like Augusten Burroughs have detailed their dysfunctional childhoods with considerable skill, and also demonstrated an ability to acknowledge their foibles as grown-ups, the “misery memoirs” fad seems partly to be populated by non-writers who’ve got a simple account of woe from years ago.
Writing in Slate about Dave Pelzer’s lucrative career as the “professional victim” known as The Child Called “It“, David Plotz maintained that:
Pelzer’s fame certainly can’t be explained by literary merit. Unlike Mary Karr and Frank McCourt, fellow serial memoirists of terrible childhoods, Pelzer lacks prose ambition. His writing plods. “A single tear” is always rolling down someone’s cheek, and he never tires of the “unconquerable human spirit.”
Even if Plotz was persuaded that “misery memoirs” had cathartic potential for writers and readers, at least one person began their response to his piece with the debate-stopping statement that he’d “obviously and fortunately…never known what it was like to be a child abuse victim.”
Such observations don’t leave open the possibility that some adult survivors might find such books distressing, an obstacle to psychological growth or just not their cup of tea.
What would “mis-lit” readers – 80% to 90% of whom are women according to an article on BBC News in April – make of social scientist Frank Furedi’s scathing critique of this literary trend on the spiked review of books?
According to Furedi:
This is the pornography of emotional hurt. Book publishers often claim that misery memoirs are popular because they provide life-affirming stories of survival. In truth, the reason why they sell in millions is because they give permission to the reader to enter into a supposedly private world of intense degradation, appalling cruelty and pain. These memoirs confess to so much that they take on the character of a literary striptease. They provide titillating and very graphic accounts of traumatic pain which actually turn readers into voyeurs. And, as in real porn, there is a lot of faking going on, too.
Given the vagaries of memory and the paradoxical power of victimhood in today’s culture, it’s likely a few “misery memoirists” haven’t been entirely honest in their publications.
English barrister Constance Briscoe’s mother is suing her daughter over accusations that appear in the book Ugly, while it’s hard to believe Pelzer’s mother ever said; “You gave me no pleasure, so you were disposed of”.
Sounds like a line from a soap opera.
Whether “mis-lit” is therapeutic or pornographic or a bit of both, it’s clear bookshops will continue to be well-stocked with tales of real-life woe.
Forbidden Lie$ will be screening in cinemas from this Thursday.
I LOVE Norma Khouri! All these tedious sanctimonious bluestockings (like Robert Manne) can just choke for all I care. Yo Norma! You da bomb, You Go Girl!
I’m afraid you’re going to have to do better than that, John.
I retrieved your comment from moderation in the hope that you’d elaborate.
Why do you love Norma Khouri?
What do you know about Ms Khouri?
And, lastly, why have you mentioned Robert Manne in reference to Ms Khouri?
PS – If anyone has problems seeing the post in its total goodness, please let me know.
Darlene
I love intrigue, theatre, a to-do. I take the Helen Demidenkos over the Robert Mannes of this world.
That’s a hell of a note from Furedi, isn’t it. Very jarring, and possibly true. I also think these books alleviate boredom in the same way as soap operas, and then you have to factor in the people who like having their tears jerked, which to me is an inexplicable taste. Reading misery memoirs is also a way of acknowledging the sorrows of the world without feeling as though you should do something about them, since in these cases there is clearly nothing to be done.
There’s also a weird sort of Schadenfreude happening in these readerships — a sort of cross between ‘Oh look, my life’s not so bad after all’ and ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’
(I can see the post fine in Safari, Darlene. Whatever browser he’s using, JG obviously can’t, as he has clearly not read it.)
JG must use a browser that blocks or distorts every post, I think.
We all love a bit of theatre, a bit of to-do.
That doesn’t really answer my question, nor does it relate to the issue of “misery memoirs”. Don’t tell me you haven’t read the post, John.
Tsk, tsk.
It is a jarring comment, Pavlov. He might be overstating the case, but….
When I saw all those books in the shop, I just thought, “no thanks”. It felt really uncomfortable.
Having one’s tears jerked by fiction is a different kettle of fish, perhaps. Readers of “mis-lit” like the Dave Pelzer fan I have referred to bother me because they seem to assume that “survivors” all think the same. It’s arrogant thinking.
Incidentally, take a look at Constance Briscoe’s website:
Constance Briscoe.
The woman is a barrister, but she seems to be re-inventing herself as a celebrity via “mis-lit”.
Mis-lit seems destined (hopefully soon) to go the same way as ‘repressed false memory syndrome’ (copyright Edina Moonsoon, the desire to wallow in blaming someone/anyone for ones own inability to function.
Is it just a product of (white western)life being too easy that so many people have to construct problems?
MORE misery…
“Is it just a product of (white western)life being too easy that so many people have to construct problems?”
Perhaps. I’m not convinced that it’s going away soon though. Some people find the whole thing too enticing.
It’s quite awful that some people revel in being a victim, while kids this very moment are being victimised.
A man can not be a bluestocking. By definition, a bluestocking is a woman with considerable scholarly, literary, or intellectual ability or interest. So Robert Manne can’t be one.
Perhaps JG was teasing: does Manne (in his view) behave like an ever-so-precious “bluestocking”? I’m ver happy that ladies are academics, but supposing JG has detected certain tendencies amongst bluestockings,… might he be trying to tar Manne with the same brush?
Or de-Manne him?
I think it was meant to be a a quip.
Why are you so unkind to JG?
He is an ironist. We need more ironists. He’s not quite Karl Kraus yet, but he’s working hard on it.
We need more lerts, too.
cheerio
Sure. And bears shit in the Vatican too.
I am sure Robert Manne is quivering in his boots.
“…Some people revel in being a victim…”.
Listen, do any folk here ever watch a thing on commmercial TV relegated to the wee small hours; a sort of parody of American day time soap-operas, called “Passions”.
Honestly, if you want to absolutely wallow in utterly king-size tubs of victimhood, none do it better than these people. China-smashing, snit-fitting, flouncing, hysteria, plate-throwing, whammy-chucking, tears to drown for, glass-hurling, special pleading, blouse-ripping, koala-bumming, hair- tearing verballing galore and sulks more numerous than grains of sand on Bondi- the sheilas do it with absolute gusto, well-accompanied by botoxed blokes drilled in robotics, who like good ballet partners head for the shadows when the divas do the
overwrought stuff.
Love the Latinas and black sheilas, but have a special soft spot for the blonde snoot who whizzes round in the golf cart causing trouble wherever she goes.
Paul, I have seen Passions.
It’s ridiculous and heaps of fun. Yes, it’s wallowing, but without the “real-life” element.
Paul Walter
That “blonde snoot” happens to be Ivy Crane! And it is not a golf cart, it is a motorised conveyance because she is paraplegic. Ivy was struck by lightning while helping Detective Sam Bennet man the lighthouse during the hurricane while the kids were on Warlock Island.
Julian Crane was in Bermuda ostensibly to divorce Ivy, but ended up getting his ex-son’s (whose real father is Detective Chief Inspector Sam Bennett) ex-fiance drunk before seducing her. Theresa, like her a mother, was a very strict Catholic, and insisted on being a virgin until she married.
Ivy drove a car through the church just in time to stop Ethan’s marriage to Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald, who, as you know, is Pala’s (the Latina housekeeper at the Crane mansion) daughter, and the brother of Luis Lopez-Fitzgerald who is dating Sheridan (Julian’s sister).
It was Ivy’s resilience and stoicism that saw her pull through her Vidocin addiction, so I must object most strongly to your trivialising Ivy Crane as a “blonde snoot in a golf cart!”
See what I mean? *JG* IS an ironist!
Better tell the Swiss Guards to watch out for bears
See what I mean? *JG* IS an ironist!
Is that why I get sometimes get… board with his comments?
Wait a minute. So the Left, after decades and decades of exalting victimhood as the ultimate in high status, and extreme society-victimhood as the fastest way to win an argument, is now surprised that this nonsense has leaped the gate and made its way into the mainstream culture? What could be more predictable?
I reckon these sorts of phenomena arise, at least in part, from a kind of intellectual slippage or drift, based on the fact that it’s awfully difficult to get millions and millions of people to stay on the same intellectual page, let alone for them all to proceed from point A to point B in an orderly fashion. Half of human intellectual life is a giant game of “telephone,” where the information from an original message is gradually degraded, and the message comically distorted, the more times it is communicated through various channels. This victim-lit thing is a classic case in point:
ORIGINAL LEFTIST MESSAGE: It’s bad to oppress people. Oppression is bad.
Step 1: You shouldn’t oppress people because the oppressed aren’t subhuman, they’re noble just like you and me.
Step 2: Those who are oppressed are categorically noble.
Step 3: It’s noble to be oppressed.
Step 4: The path to nobility lies in being one of the oppressed.
Step 5: I want to be noble, too. Look at me! I’m a victim!
Step 6: Me too! Me too! We’re ALL victims!
Step 7: Remind me again why we all wanted to be victims?
I am sure the reasons for the rise of ‘mis-lit’ are many and varied.
The rise in talk shows (e.g. Oprah and Phil Donohue) in the 1980s (influenced by the “market” and by liberal concerns – in the American sense) are probably partly to blame.
While the notion that the person is political is a good thing, as is the end of secrecy in relation to child abuse, it has had some negative effects.
Years ago Donohue featured some folks who’d been accused of abusing their kids after their adult children retained memories that had supposedly been previously repressed.
Donohue was sympathetic to the parent’s plight, and another person on the panel said, “I thought you were on our side”.
Like presuming there is a monopolistic view on anything (including politics), such views are not just wrong, but potentially dangerous.
“I reckon these sorts of phenomena arise, at least in part, from a kind of intellectual slippage or drift, based on the fact that it’s awfully difficult to get millions and millions of people to stay on the same intellectual page, let alone for them all to proceed from point A to point B in an orderly fashion. Half of human intellectual life is a giant game of “telephone,â€? where the information from an original message is gradually degraded, and the message comically distorted, the more times it is communicated through various channels. This victim-lit thing is a classic case in point.”
This is obtuse enough to have been written by a po/mo theorist. Please, as another Queenslander did say, explain?
Yeah, but Japerz, the American Left is such a bunch of puling Creeping Jesuses.
Don’t judge the whole Left on the basis of the American Left.
No doubt the Creeping Jesus syndrome does infect the Left worldwide, but in most places it’s by no means as virulent as it is in the US.
Take-home message: there are many Lefts.
Katz, you are bad.
The reasons for the rise of the cult of the victim is a really interesting area for sociological research. It seems, especially in America, that the middle class has a general sense of agreement. This relates to the fetishisation of the role of the ‘victim’ as the ultimate authority in all talk about crime. Until the 1970s, and especially the 90s, they were barely mentioned.
* correction agreement = “being aggrieved�.
As the a member of an invisibly Deceiving group and identifying as an Oppressor, I take note of what you say j_p_z. I would respond to it by saying, using the evidence of experience, that the best trick victims ever pulled was convincing people they didn’t exist.
“This relates to the fetishisation of the role of the ‘victim’ as the ultimate authority in all talk about crime. Until the 1970s, and especially the 90s, they were barely mentioned.”
Good point, David. Surely what we really need is a balance. And also the retention of the presumption of innocence.
It was interesting to read that a parents group down here want to “name and shame” (life is an episode of Today Tonight these days) teachers accused of sexual abuse. What happens when the wrong person gets accused?
“The rise in talk shows (e.g. Oprah and Phil Donohue) in the 1980s (influenced by the “marketâ€? and by liberal concerns – in the American sense) are probably partly to blame.”
Interesting corollary (and not quite sure what it means in cultural terms) — do you have these things in Australia? After the rise in Donohue/Oprah type talk shows here, came the popularity of “judge” shows, where they have a fake courtroom and a theatrically “no-nonsense, tough-talkin’” judge who doles out stern, unsympathetic lectures to the same sorts of dysfunctional folks who would have gotten a sympathetic hearing on Donohue. Fascinating.
Did anybody see the movie ‘Little Black Book,’ where the staging of televised emotional train-wrecks as theatrical spectacle took on increasingly weird, Brechtian overtones? Worth a look, even though it’s kinda surreal. I’ll watch Holly Hunter do just about anything.
Japeasy – DO NOT WATCH HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS!!!!!
I don’t care how much you like her, just save yourself while you still can.
The rise of the Victim coincides with the anxiety and identity crisis Leftists descended into in the 1960s and 1970s as they realised Marx and Lenin were false prophets. However, they could NOT excorcise their Manichean world-view. So, during the 1970s, the proletariat was replaced by identity politics – women, gays, blacks, handicapped, Palestinians, and Aborigines all began a contest for the ’subaltern most worthy.’
The manichean theology of the Leftist needed new prophets and a new Bible. Voila Foucault, Derrida, Judith Butler, and Edward Said.
The Great Brain and Mind Swindle continues, but the barbarians have been increasingly resisted since the late 1980s (in the US) and 1996 in Australia.
“Mis Lit” – By this definition then all the Aboriginal womens autobiography Ive read and the Bringing Them Home publication should be put in this genre? right?
There seems to be a general feeling on this strand that because of the sensational nature of the confessions, the truth value of these stories are suspect..I find that really interesting. Who is to say what is truth and what is not. Also the proliferation of these stories has led to suggestions that its some malaise that has developed as a result of the confessional society in which we live. These accusations were levelled at Bringing them Home too.
Whats it going to be? Do we slam the white western stories from adult survivors of abuse only? (artefacts of an obscene confessional impulse, emotional p098nography, call it what you will) -or what? Do we lump BTH and the Sth African Truth commission stories with them?
An aside: Of course the families of these writers will disagree. Exactly what else would they do? They have a vested interest in denying the allegations – whether it be to protect themselves or to protect the memories they need to maintain to function. Brings to mind David Helfgott and his siblings.
Look, about presumption of innocence. Nice idea. How do you prove, as an adult survivor of child rape, how do you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it happened all those years ago? what, you cant? well then it didnt happen and shutup. And dont write about it, if you cant prove it. Is that it?
There is no proof when something happens in a room between two people and then time passes, there only a line – you pick the side you are going to believe when one of them talks. End of story. Its a problem for adult rape victims too.
And at the very end of the day, if its cathartic for the writer, if they can pull together the shards of an identity and reformulate it as “survivor” and go on as an “adviser” then more power to them. Many survivors survive in just this way, annoyingly so, but they function – they dont kill themselves like a lot of others do. If the people who read them find sustenance too, then they are finding a voice where there has been silence. I dont care about the excess really. Im sorry there are cases of out and out fraud, but that happens everywhere.
In the end, whatever helps. To me these books signal the fragmentation of silence which surrounds abuse and thats a good thing.
Some of the worst stuff I have read was in Bringing them Home. Who has read it by the way? What did you make of that? Did you read it unproblematically as truth? What made you take that position? Now what makes you read this stuff unproblematically as emotional p*&&nography?? or untruthful? Are your suspicions perhaps informed by your weariness with the Oprah and Dr Phil phenomenon? Interesting, the choices we make as readers….
Darlene, I too was at a books store and saw these covers. All these kids staring out from the covers….I moved away, because I find these stories disturbing. And isnt that also an impulse? Do I want to know this? I just wish it would go away. Well maybe my utter fear of these sorts of confessionals is precisely the reason I might be tempted to reject their graphic excesses and analyse them instead as voyeuristic exercises, emotional p–nography.
I don’t think it’s a case of “slamming” anyone, especially not the victims. But there is sociological interest in why there is such a large market of consumers for victim texts. Of course it could be good for victims to have the cathartic writing experience, but why do so many people – especially in the middle class – want to read them? I think it’s because of a generalised sense of victimhood. The victim is something of a modern archetype; we identify with victims. It’s kind of a cathartic release for all our frustrations and sense of being wronged. We’ve always been hurt, but over the past 20 years I think there has been a rise in the idea that for every hurt we suffer *someone needs to be blamed*.
“The victim is something of a modern archetype; we identify with victims. It’s kind of a cathartic release for all our frustrations and sense of being wronged. We’ve always been hurt, but over the past 20 years I think there has been a rise in the idea that for every hurt we suffer *someone needs to be blamed*.”
Why is that do you think, why this rise?
I would offer a few suggestions:
Life has become a lot more fragmented and alienating since the 1960s. Anxiety has risen as jobs/traditional communities/traditional assumptions of morality have been undermined by social change, globalisation and neo-liberalism. People feel wronged, and they need a cathartic release for that. That’s why the archetype of the innocent victim and the big bad lurking criminal has such sway. I think it’s heavily tied up with the rise in reactionary politics in general (simple ‘hard lines’ and exclusionary social policy). These play into people’s fears, and into their desire for certainty. A fact of the human mind is that it tends to attribute an explanation to things that are emotionally important to it, even if it doesn’t understand the real explanation. The real sociological causes for the flux and destabilisation are too complex, and insufficiently cathartic, so we need tangible figures of blame – eg. Asians, Muslims, the youth, the single mums, etc. By putting an identity to our problems, we feel we have some measure of control.
This is tied up with the risk society and the struggle to control, explain and eliminate every single bad thing. Add to this the rise of the emotionalistic mass media and the consumerist emphasis on the self-expressive of immediate fears and desires.
Well, you are quite right of course. Moving away from the therapeutics of the confessional and the sorts of recuperations which can take place for writer and reader who have experienced abuse, then David, I do find your comments on the sorts of literary consumptions undertaken by the middle classes in light of these historical factors you outline, quite compelling and very interesting. Thanks.
David, out of interest though, where do you place the Australian middle classes in their consumption of Aboriginal confessional narratives? (My Place, Wandering Girl, Stolen Gen) – do you think they are narratives where non Aboriginals identify again with the universalities of the child as victim? I really am curious. I did a thesis on the reading desires these texts hooked into and I still couldnt answer it unproblematically.
What lachymose spawn you Tellurians are, weeping and ejaculating whenever the self-inflicted
tattoostaboos of your breeding stock and their herders and collectors are rudely penetrated by reality.You do not see your bovines, Bratz, Pentiums and xTreme skygodders wollowing in the sorrow and pity whenever simple basic supply and demand feedstock ultilization equations need to be performed to step on stones towards the macrocosmic all, do you?
Rest assured that when the glorious day of liberation comes, the firm but caring tentacles of Boskone will banish all misery. All the way to the chrysolite mines and bentlam plantations.
If we want confessions, we will have them when and how we want them.
JPZ, what kind of stuff do you ingest to produce that? And can I have some? no really….
Thanks very much Casey, I appreciate what you say. I’ve put a long time and lots of research into developing that analysis (which is a fragment of larger research).
I have no doubt that it’s part of the reason for the middle class identification with Indigenous literature, although I haven’t really thought of that before. At least that’s an area in which it has more benign consequences. It’s als sociologically interesting, but just because it fulfils some middle class desire, doesn’t mean we should morally condemn it as bad. Personally, I think some literary critics come too close to doing this.
A simplistic interpretation of Foucault can lead you into an priorism in which any instance of compassion needs to interpreted as a strategy of power (ie. plain old niceness starts to look like tokenising, infantilising, objectifying etc). But practically all human relationships, even the most loving ones, have an element of objectification. This is a problem with Kantian ethics. I tend to think: sure, the middle class gets some kind of Orientalist kick out of subaltern texts, but is that so bad? Indeed, as an alternative to violent oppression, perhaps that’s a good thing? The positive with texts like Bringing them Back Home is that they provoke sympathy – and sympathy is too easy to dismiss as subordinating condescension. Anyway, I’ve gone rambling and musing way past what you asked, sorry.
“I tend to think: sure, the middle class gets some kind of Orientalist kick out of subaltern texts, but is that so bad? Indeed, as an alternative to violent oppression, perhaps that’s a good thing? The positive with texts like Bringing them Back Home is that they provoke sympathy – and sympathy is too easy to dismiss as subordinating condescension.”
Agreed. That was where I arrived at the end. That, and the idea that for whatever reason non Aboriginals chose to read such confronting texts (identification with the victim, or with the universal child, or a voyeuristic impulse, or just plain sympathy and a need to know really) these stories did not come for free. The white Australian reading public were also reading (for some for the first time) of the violent practices of their own colonial history and this would have certainly challenged some people’s beliefs of peaceful settlement. Instead of identification, it may well, well I know it did, dislocate some people and made them ask questions about their own history.
Anyway very interesting research David. Sorry if this is a ‘derail’ Darlene! I will bow out now.
casey — well now I’m interested, what exactly did you think was so zany about what I said? (I assume it’s the first comment, and not my admiration for Holly Hunter).
I don’t think it’s particularly original or controversial to look at intellectual drift as a potential cause of unlooked-for social or cultural phenomena. Ideas and assumptions mutate like everything else, and if we’re looking at the underlying basis for an unusual change in mass-cultural tastes (like David, I’m mostly talking about the audience for the texts and the matrix in which they’re received, not strictly the texts themselves) it seems like a fairly reasonable place to start. Over time, large numbers of people are generally prone to interpret and misinterpret an idea in varied and unintended ways: look at the wave of love-suicides that Chikamatsu accidentally started in 18th-century Japan, or the wave of troubled-young-man suicides that Goethe accidentally touched off with “Young Werther.” And those are only some very highly-literal examples.
Well, if that’s what stoned is like, then clearly I need to fire my dealer.
I dont know why JPZ, for some reason I thought you were Zwilnik. My apologies. But if you happen to know what he’s on?……
I still have no idea what you are on about!
The last post said something to do with supply and demand? Yeah… demand for this kind of text has gone up, and we are trying to explain why…
Oh sorry I was looking at that post too.
Encore JG, that was brilliant!
You are obviously familiar both with the world shattering significance of the muliplicity of events and characters you describe, as well with the neglected fanzine aspect, concerning this esoteric matters.
You lost me after “… Luis Lopez Fitzgerald…”, but I did catch a glance of a lurking “Sheridan” out of the corner of my eye.
Any Courtney’s”, Fawns, Tylers or Larks slipping undetected under my radar? Mormons!
Also agree with JG; Catholic sheilas, esp Latinas, are h-o-t!
Enough now. Want to follow David and Casey, who between them did the impossible and actually moved the thread on.
Shhhh!!
As someone who’s spent years studying, working on, and writing about the “honor” killings situation in Jordan, I have mixed feelings about Norma Khouri. Although her book turned out to be fictional, she wrote about a horrid human rights problem in Jordan that continues to this day, in approximately the very way she wrote about it. In fact, some of the real-life killings are more brutal than the fictional Dalia’s. So Norma actually performed a service to the victims, the at-risk girls and women, and the international community by shining a light on this problem. I just wish she had fully disclosed that the case she wrote about was fictional.
But, by writing about this, Norma also ticked off at least one journalist and one activist in Jordan. When I visited Jordan in the summer of 2003, they were already gunning for her, angry that her book was successful, angry that she’d been able to call attention to a human rights problem that they see as an internal problem (their turf, not one anyone else should be caring about), quick to show their disdain and even their jealousy. And it seems that unleashed a media circus which, in my estimation, has distracted too many people from the core issue–the victims and the at-risk people and how we can better protect them.
I don’t understand why any legal and criminal proceedings against Norma weren’t left to the law enforcement and the judicial officials. When lives are hanging in the balance, it seems to me unwise to get distracted with petty jealousies. It seems to me Norma isn’t the only one who’s ethically and morally lost her way.
Ellen R. Sheeley, Author “Reclaiming Honor in Jordan”
For those confused, Zwilnik is channelling some classic pulp SF. (BTW, you just failed the geek test)
I think these kind of memoirs form a continuum with the true crime genre and “I survived x by cutting off my own leg and eating it” travelogues. People are interested because they are naturally curious about people in extreme situations. Gitta Sereny, wrote an absolutely extraordinary book, Cries Unheard, about Mary Black, an abused child who killed two other children. In the hands of a good writer these books can explore aspects of life that other kinds of writing simply cannot. It is not the content but the quality of the writing that determines whether the book delivers something more than the mere retelling of horrific details. I find it curious that people assume that most people reading these books will not have had similar experiences themselves (and that they are middle class). The sad thing is that these memoirists are exceptional, not because of their experience, but because they write about it. There’s dross out there in bucketloads certainly, as there is in the adventure lit market, yet we don’t speak of mountaineering porn. I think that this attitude reflects in part the old taboo that speaking of emotional pain is self indulgent and reading about it is prurient. It can be those things I suppose, but it need not be. I thoroughly recommend Sereny’s book, it is even better than her examination of Albert Speer in my opinion.
Paul Walter
Luis Lopez-Fitzgerald is the son of Pilar Lopez-Fitzgerald – Ivy Crane’s former maid. I say ‘former’ maid, because after Julian Crane found out that Detective Inspector Bennett (the dude with Ivy at the lighthouse, when Ivy got struck by lightning) was actually Ethan’s (Julian and Ivy’s son) father, Julian divorced Ivy, so she had to leave the Crane Manision. Pilar has stayed on at the Crane Mansion even though she had been Ivy’s maid since Ivy was a child (Ivy Winthrop)
Now, depsite Pilar’s fetching and carrying for the stinking rich Cranes, she and the Lopez-Fitzgeral clan – Luis, Theresa, and Miguel (I won’t introduce Antonio at this stage, as he saves Sheridan when she is washed up on beach in Bermuda with amnesia) – hate the Cranes.
Pilar got kicked out of the mansion after she locked the weelchair-bound Ivy upstairs at the Mansion, so that Ivy could not tell Ethan that his girlfriend got sozzled in Bermuda, had it off with Julian and was now carrying Julian’s baby. for you see, Ethan and Theresa were engaged.
But Ivy managed to get word to Ethan about his strumpet fiance actually being married to the man he thought was his father, but had kicked him out.
So no wonder Ivy was in a “snoot” as you so callously dismiss her!
“Interesting corollary (and not quite sure what it means in cultural terms) — do you have these things in Australia? After the rise in Donohue/Oprah type talk shows here, came the popularity of “judgeâ€? shows, where they have a fake courtroom and a theatrically “no-nonsense, tough-talkin’â€? judge who doles out stern, unsympathetic lectures to the same sorts of dysfunctional folks who would have gotten a sympathetic hearing on Donohue. Fascinating.”
We just import those shows from the United States. We also used to get Springer. Yikes. Interesting about the judge shows. I suspect they were a reaction to the “victim’ culture thing. We get the US versions of those as well. Even Oprah as moved away from the “victim” thing. I seem to recall that she got sick of it when somebody came on the show complaining about the treatment they’d had in the womb.
“The rise of the Victim coincides with the anxiety and identity crisis Leftists descended into in the 1960s and 1970s as they realised Marx and Lenin were false prophets. However, they could NOT excorcise their Manichean world-view. So, during the 1970s, the proletariat was replaced by identity politics – women, gays, blacks, handicapped, Palestinians, and Aborigines all began a contest for the ’subaltern most worthy.”‘
Well, John, the rise of identity politics served (and to some degree continues to serve) a valid purpose. If you can’t concede that “handicapped” folks etc haven’t been treated as less than equal historically than you are being deliberately blinkered to suit your ideological view. However, identity politics can be incredibly limiting and paradoxially exclusive, and as you suggest privilege the status of “victim”. By the way, you are aware that Ms Khouri has been accused of ripping off a very old woman? See the film and see if your opinion of her changes.
Darlene
Don’t impose your own moral vanity onto my words. As if I do not support any initiatives that can assist handicapped people integrate into society.
On La Khouri, I keep my ethics and my art separate.
Oh and on the privilege of the victim, have you read any of that stuff in the genre “Can the subaltern speak?” Puhleez. Talk about needing to reach for the revolver!
I should have written “Mary Bell” not Mary Black.
Casey, all good points.
I do think the end of secrecy is a good thing, but even good things can have bad effects. Obviously silence only privileges the abusers and those who benefit from the abuse. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s empowering to regard oneself as a “victim”. I also think there will always be people who will lie (a small group of people). The language of some of these books is rather over-the-top (see, for example, Pelzer).
There are times when we need to draw a line under the past for our sense of self.
Yes, people will react strongly to such accusations, but possibly it could be because the accusations are not true or are exaggerated. We live in a strange world where people who are being abused right now are probably less likely to be believed than those who front up to a talk show with a book about past abuses.
Those books just have a nasty air about them. They give some truth to the “porn” angle. That people feel uncomfortable with them also may indicate the truth that not all survivors find them helpful. It seems some “victims” feel they have the right to speak for everybody else.
“Anyway very interesting research David. Sorry if this is a ‘derail’ Darlene! I will bow out now.”
No, interesting stuff. If it was a ‘derail’ it was a worthy one. Certainly more interesting than just churning out more “the Left is evil….ha ha ha (evil laugh) stuff”.
Thanks very much for that recommendation of the Sereny book. I’ll have a look at that. The Speer one was interesting. I don’t presume people who read the more “over-the-top” mis-lit haven’t all had the experiences detailed in them, I just object to them presuming to speak for other people who’ve suffered abuse.
Tigtog, I totally missed that.
Thanks for the clarification, Su.
Thanks ERS for your contribution. It was a troubling aspect of the film that the feminists in Jordan seemed rather too interested in the image of Jordan. I can understand why they wouldn’t necessarily want “Westerners” telling them what to do etc, however, as women we should be interested in the plight of other women wherever they reside.
Norma’s a dubious character, but when you say “it seems to me Norma isn’t the only one who’s ethically and morally lost her way” you make a very good point.
Ellen’s book, Reclaiming Honor in Jordan: A National Public Opinion Survey on “Honor” Killings, is available via Amazon.
I don’t think this is possible. People revisit the past their whole lives through. Hopefully we do it with less pain and more understanding as we get older. I will have to take your word for it that these memoirs are attempting to speak for all victims because I have not read any apart from the one I mentioned which is biography. They do perform a function for me however, because they confirm the reality of events and experiences that can seem to be invalidated by the world at large. For people with these kinds of experiences it can seem that the whole world goes around blinkered, that there is a pretense of normality which is taken at face value and perhaps this may account for a certain vehemence on their part.
Forgeries and fakeries are always going to exist where there is a market, and it will be particularly hard for publishers to verify these kinds of accounts.
I take issue with Furedi’s statement;
not because it is completely inaccurate but because it is not unique to this genre. Stories of physical trauma and survival do exactly the same thing. There was nothing I liked better when sailing than curling up with a good sea survival story. I confess I loved the details of what they ate, how sunburnt they became and the condition they were in when finally rescued. Paradoxically they made me feel safe. I think that Furedi sees the abuse memoirs as intrinsically distasteful otherwise his criticisms would be more widely applied. I don’t like this kind of fastidious withdrawing of the hem.
G’day,
I didn’t find jeeperz’s post obscure at all: po-mo is written in impenetrable jargon, is it not? Jeeperz’s notion of ‘intellectual drift’ I found interesting, and clear enough. I think one cause of drift, is the “emotional pull” of some ideas, which then become distorted to better assuage emotional hurts and tally with instinctive reactions.
But this happens behind a kind of ‘intellectual smokescreen’. A two-dimensional shadow play is apparent to the audience, possibly conducted in fairly rational discourse; while behind are lurking petty jealousies in the publishing and academic worlds, feuds and back-stabbing (commercial, academic); huge, long-term societal shifts sometimes not noticed or well-described until decades later; influences not yet described by sociology, let alone understood. Etc etc etc.
Not surprising, if (any of) the above be granted, that a “Chinese Whispers” or “telephone” process of distortion [or creative transformation if you prefer] of ideas, slogans, and ideologies should be observed.
But still, why are victims idolised? Why is victimhood desperately reached for? An interesting book (10 years ago?) by Beatrice Faust railed against the “victim” strand of modern feminism. Dr Greer was not Beatrice’s only target. Why seek victimhood when you might instead aim for strength? Still a damn good question.
cheerio
Are the two mutually exclusive?
If we don’t acknowledge genuine victims, then how do we learn to identify and discourage the perpetrators?
If victims don’t speak up about their experiences, then how do other actual and potential victims find the strength to acknowledge that they need to change their circumstances before things get worse?
Let’s tidy this up a bit.
1. Relatively few people stopped being Old Left to become New Left. This was more a generational change, not a change of heart on an individual basis.
2. The Manichean worldview du jour was owned by the Right. Remember the Cold War?
3. As I suggested above, (I’m being bad again PC) the Creeping Jesus branch of the Left did indulge themselves with victim politics.
4. And let’s look at the big picture. The Libertarian Left has won most of the big battles of the Australian Culture Wars. Inherited privilege is dead. Organised religion is in a sickened state. We can see, hear and say more or less what we want. Statism is in a long-term state of decay. I can move my money instantaneously to a large number of locations around the world simultaneously. There is no compulsory national service. Sacred cows have been, or are being, slaughtered. Marriage is an optional extra. If anyone had suggested in 1960 that such a state of affairs were possible, they would have been considered a lunatic. This is the program, to the exstent there is a program, of the Libertarian Left. We have won by convincing ever so persuasively and subtlely the big batallions to march with us.
So, Greensleeves would be well-advised to amend somewhat his view of the relative successes of Left and Right in the half century since 1960.
And his best first step in that regard is to think a little more carefully about what “Left” actually means.
Darlene
On how victim politics can become farcical, I imagine you have read Sophie Roiphe’s The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism. The Chapter where she describes the melodrama of a Take Back the Night march on the campus of Princeton University – one of the safest places in the US – where women who had never even had a brush with sexual violence were described as “potential survivors.”
I mean, please.
John, do you watch Bold and the Beautiful as well? Always up for a B & B report.
“Darlene
Don’t impose your own moral vanity onto my words. As if I do not support any initiatives that can assist handicapped people integrate into society.
On La Khouri, I keep my ethics and my art separate.”
Too late John, I already did.
You keep your art and your ethics separate? How very po/mo of you.
“I don’t think this is possible. People revisit the past their whole lives through. Hopefully we do it with less pain and more understanding as we get older.”
Mmmm, I think it is. Remnants might remain, but most people get on with their lives.
“I will have to take your word for it that these memoirs are attempting to speak for all victims because I have not read any apart from the one I mentioned which is biography.”
I was really discussing those people who comment on articles critical of “mis-lit” with the debate-stopping claims that they are a victim and the author must not be because of their critical stance.
“They do perform a function for me however, because they confirm the reality of events and experiences that can seem to be invalidated by the world at large. For people with these kinds of experiences it can seem that the whole world goes around blinkered, that there is a pretense of normality which is taken at face value and perhaps this may account for a certain vehemence on their part.”
They don’t perform a function for me, however, because reading such books isn’t cathartic or helpful.
“If victims don’t speak up about their experiences, then how do other actual and potential victims find the strength to acknowledge that they need to change their circumstances before things get worse?”
I don’t think there’s one solution for coping with childhood abuse. I’m sure there are people who read this blog who’ve suffered from it, and have managed to carve out lives for themselves. Some might find talk effective and other might not.
“But still, why are victims idolised? Why is victimhood desperately reached for? An interesting book (10 years ago?) by Beatrice Faust railed against the “victimâ€? strand of modern feminism. Dr Greer was not Beatrice’s only target. Why seek victimhood when you might instead aim for strength? Still a damn good question.”
I agree with the first point, but when has Dr Greer (that tough as nails female) every presented herself as a victim?
Darlene
I could not agree. That bird is tough as old boots!
I love Germaine. Have you noticed how her low-rent underlings from the next genertaion – such as katherin Lumby – can’t stand Greer?
Germaine is a true aesthete with an irrepressible grasp of irony and laconicism. It never ceases to amaze me that folks do not appreciate she is your dinkey-di Aussie ratbag.
How much better Australian cultural and intellectual life would have been if Australia had been able to keep her! Alas, she would have turned Presbyterian beige.
How does one repress a grasp?
Askin’.
Wait a minute. So the Left, after decades and decades of exalting victimhood as the ultimate in high status, and extreme society-victimhood as the fastest way to win an argument, is now surprised that this nonsense has leaped the gate and made its way into the mainstream culture? What could be more predictable? (JPZ)
Of course, the most cursory examination of “victim-lit” would show that it is hardly a leftist genre. The Oprah- and Phil- watchers are more likely to be conservative types who admire the vic-lit writers as an example of bootstrapping as they are to be leftist radicals.
Step 5: I want to be noble, too. Look at me! I’m a victim!
Step 6: Me too! Me too! We’re ALL victims!
The most cursory examination of left-wing blogs would show you that at present, leftwing US writers who are middle class, university educated, white or otherwise relatively privileged are concerned to acknowledge the fact of their own privilege, which is the very opposite of that imaginary scenario. Also, if that makes them “creeping Jesuses”, Katz, well, my bad, but I actually find many US leftwing blogs funnier and less earnest than plenty of Australian ones. (And atheism, as well as brands of christianity which oppose fundamentalism, are flourishing). Maybe you’d like to point out the actual Creeping Jesuses so you can make up your own mind.
And then there’s the fact that I’m not at all into vic lit myself, and I’m a card carrying latte-sipping chardonnay-swilling greenie pinko. This-here supposed correlation is starting to fall apart, badly.
(As for Identity Politics, you can’t beat the white, authoritarian “traditionalists” for that – I can’t open a newspaper without being bombarded with their bleating.)
Maybe you’d like to point out the actual Creeping Jesuses so you can make up your own mind.
I mean, so I can make up my own mind. D’oh.
Sorry, didn’t get your later comment until later, John, or I would have addressed it before.
“On how victim politics can become farcical, I imagine you have read Sophie Roiphe’s (sic) The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism. The Chapter where she describes the melodrama of a Take Back the Night march on the campus of Princeton University – one of the safest places in the US – where women who had never even had a brush with sexual violence were described as “potential survivors.â€?”
Yes, I read that book many years ago. If I remember rightly it came out around the same time as Garner’s The First Stone.
“Potential survivors”? That’s really silly and unproductive. Roiphe’s was riding the “Backlash”, but she made some good points. There is a lot of theatre to Take Back the Night (TBTN).
TBTN had good intentions (see TBTN website for details of history), but I fear it’s weighed down in 1970s radical feminism.
I’ve attended about two or three Take Back the Night and I especially found the speeches depressing and uninspiring. I felt weaker, not stronger. Incidentally, I feel as negative towards all those strange “victim” men’s groups. Yikes.
Hmmm, I don’t think I’d go to TBTN again.
Darlene
I have absolutely no problem with TBTN. More power to y’all, I say, but I actually think it is a little bit disrespectful and miserable to try and indoctrinate young women that their lives are shitty.
Helen, I’d didn’t say all American lefties were Creeping Jesuses.
There are, as you say, many honourable exceptions. Nevertheless, it cannot be gainsaid that victimology is quite characteristic of American leftism.
My central point is that there are many Lefts, both in Australia and also in the United States.
That should have been when has Dr Greer ever presented herself as a victim?
“(As for Identity Politics, you can’t beat the white, authoritarian “traditionalistsâ€? for that – I can’t open a newspaper without being bombarded with their bleating.)”
My favourite line from The Simpsons movie is from Monty Burns:
“Well, for once, the rich white man is in control.”
Have a look at the TBTN website and the stories on it. I feel disempowered by just reading it. Anyway, I guess that’s happening again soon, so perhaps I should give it another go and see if it’s changed at all.
Also, just in case anyone is unsuccessfully Googling her, the person Greensleeves calls Sophie Roiphe is the one the rest of us call Katie Roiphe.
“Of course, the most cursory examination of “victim-litâ€? would show that it is hardly a leftist genre. The Oprah- and Phil- watchers are more likely to be conservative types who admire the vic-lit writers as an example of bootstrapping as they are to be leftist radicals.
Step 5: I want to be noble, too. Look at me! I’m a victim!
Step 6: Me too! Me too! We’re ALL victims!”
Middle-class soft liberals, I would have thought.
Here’s the link to the TBTN website of stories:
http://www.takebackthenight.org/net-read.html
Darlene
But surely that should be the point. If YOU don’t feel empowered, don’t go. For my own taste and types of people I like, I would rather stick hot needles in my eyes than go anywhere near the tedious melodrama queens. But even more, I strongly endorse civil movements of people who feel they have to act publicly in same way or another, regardless of my own personal view.
Miss Hathaway
Excellent, perhaps I shall be able to re-offer to throw some work your way. I wonder where I got the sophie from? perhaps I am having a ‘Jethro’ moment!
Yikes, i hope not as La Hathaway is always trying to jump his bones.
Tigtog,
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean to imply that we don’t need to identify victims and deal with perpetrators. Far from it. A person I admire very much is working on a project likely to lead to law reform in the area of family violence. Being within the legal sphere, this has required very detailed examination of the types of violence perpetrated [in case the definitions in the law need changing] and judging how to improve investigations by police, aspects of court procedures, representation in court for both victim and perpetrator, etc etc.
The process has welcomed submissions from women’s refuges, victim support groups, the police, the magistracy, lawyers, etc You might call this “practical feminism” or “humanitarianism”. It may be informed by notions of human rights and how best they can guide police and court procedures.
I wasn’t arguing that victims be ignored.
I was suggesting that there may have been a gloomy (and self-defeating?) strand of feminist apologetics which almost “treasured” victimhood, and didn’t seem interested in empowerment or improvement or in tiny ameliorations of bad conditions. If that no longer applies to any influential strand of Australian “feminism” [yes - there are many feminisms], then I’d be delighted to learn of it.
cheerio
You might call this “practical feminism�
Like “practical reconciliation”?
Hi Darl,
I don’t think I said Dr Greer had claimed to be a victim (others who know her oeuvre may have opinions). I was referring to a “victimhood” strand of modern feminism [OK, I meant 1970s/1980s feminism; I was as thrilled as anyone here when the early 20th century gels were disrupting Royal horse races and chaining themselves to railings in London]. Dr Greer (Dr Drear??) tended to emphasise the cruel, negative, beastly side of social and intimate life at one stage.
Then she discovered )sigh( young men, for a while…..
BTW, to say to a critic, “You don’t understand my victim-book because you’ve never been one”, is not a way of shutting-down debate. The author might hope it has that effect. In rational debate the ploy cannot succeed.
Would we all be excluded (on similar grounds) from criticising a book on Napoleon because we didn’t fight in (or against) his armies? Is a male critic excluded from writing about a woman’s book of poetry? Must I remain silent about a book on the First Gulf War because I’m not Iraqi or Kurdish?
cheerio
“John, do you watch Bold and the Beautiful as well? Always up for a B & B report.”
Look, how do I say this? Its bad news Darlene. Unfortunately it might be likely (it might be not) that Taylor (ridge’s ex who has been trying for a baby with Nick)(who is Brooke’s ex) has been implanted with one of Brooke’s eggs fertilized by Nick’s sperm quite by accident at the hand of Bridget, Nick’s other ex and Brooke’s daughter by Ridge’s father, Eric.
Brooke, who wants Nick bad whenever Ridge doesnt want her, (which he sure as hell doesnt right now cause he wants to ‘do’ some refugee from Young and the Restless), doesnt know it yet but if and when she finds out, there will probably be a court case to get the baby.
Bridget has taken to fainting every now and then in order to cope (I think she still wants Nick too) and I do like Taylor’s extensions, even if her face doesnt seem to move so much anymore….and I often wonder, Darlene (dont we all), how these two stepfords continue to be so fecund well into their sixties isnt it now?……but, you know, I dont watch it too often. Just a vague idea of whats going on really….
“practical feminism” that was the reference, yes.
But at least in the case I was describing, it’s likely to have more good results than poor results!
Probably better to call it pragmatic, ameliorative, piecemeal, attempting to deal with nasty and everyday injustices (rather than build a grand narrative).
That lawyer in Melbourne who was shot down as he went to the aid of a stranger being assaulted in a city street this year, I’d call him a “practical feminist”. Immediate, unconditional support to a ‘potential victim’. He paid with his life.
I honour his memory.
And while Im at it, I often wonder what twilight zone of the fashion world is it exactly that happily houses the chiffons and diamontes of Forrester Creations, of which Brooke at age 62, is the house model still, innit? Geez I love Bold.
Ambigulous
I think the distinction you are looking for is between equity feminism and gender feminism. The latter is repellant and intellectually bankrupt. Tragically, it is also hegemonic.
casey
I don’t get a buzz from B & B like I do from Passions. But is that Brooke Old Boiler, STILL around? I was saddened when that trannie Sally died.
Hi Ambi (Pambi)
“BTW, to say to a critic, “You don’t understand my victim-book because you’ve never been oneâ€?, is not a way of shutting-down debate. The author might hope it has that effect. In rational debate the ploy cannot succeed.”
Thank heavens for that. That sort of thing raises my hackles. At any rate, it just can’t be presumed that people haven’t been victims even though they disagree with particular ways of expressing that victimhood.
Casey, I could kiss you. B & B gets more and more ridiculous and I love it because it’s so ridiculous. Accidentally implanted with one of Brooke’s eggs? Right!! Well, it could, ummm, happen. Tee hee. Taylor has been Botoxed right out of existence.
“I dont watch it too often. Just a vague idea of whats going on really…”
Yes, that’s what we all say : )
Brooke Logan (previously Forrester, Chambers, Jones and Marone – according to Wikipedia) has been in the show since 1987. Her date of birth is apparently 1960. Thus she is 47. Hmmm, she’s getting close to the crucial non-fecund time, I reckon.
Dr. Taylor Hayes Marone (née Hamilton, formerly; Rashid and Forrester – according to Wikpedia) has been on the show (on and off) since 1990, and was apparently born in 1962, thus making her 45. Hmmm, she’s getting close to the crucial non-fecund time, I reckon.
“That lawyer in Melbourne who was shot down as he went to the aid of a stranger being assaulted in a city street this year, I’d call him a “practical feministâ€?. Immediate, unconditional support to a ‘potential victim’. He paid with his life.
I honour his memory.”
He was really a decent human being.
Darlene
If I were a B&B writer, I would sic Tabitha Lennox’s cat, Fluffy, onto Brooke, or sentence her to an eternity with Timmy drinking Ma-Timmies. Hmmm…actually, I would love to hang oout with Timmy for a while knocking back Matimmies, except he died in real life, didn’t he?
Thanks for that, John. I can’t believe you watch Passions.
Back to something more serious. Looking up information about Mary Bell revealed some terrible things. What is it about the English press and the concept of “evil children”?
Yes my bullshit detectors switch on when anyone uses the word evil in relation to any crime or any person. Actions may be bizarre and cruel and all explainations for it somehow inadequate, but the concept of evil precludes even the attempt to understand.
This is all the more bizarre, Su, because she was a child. As if some children are born with devil’s horns.
JG, missed your later epistle blaming ‘victimism’ on teh Left. You jest?
Back to status quo for us, then. Must wade in in support of Darlene’s more plausible model (silently echoed by tig tog?) in citing feminism at its best in offering a working example of previously abstracted left theorising as to the relationship between social structure and dynamism and kinesis, individuation,reactionism and reification; against the unhelpful catcall of “victimhood” by unthinking bystanders ( what causes this? ).
We didn’t “imagine” Iraq, Jack. The “victimhood” is not imaginary for the millions murdered because of western individuation- originated fantasism from people like
Cheney and Howard- themselves victims of a process that few recognise and others deny.
We are all victims of an imperfect system that generates poverty for the many and discontent within ourselves for the reification of obsolete, meaningless structures and traits that only psychically maim and deny us all a chance of fulfillment beyond simulacra shopping mall and control-freakery. Better to think through and make the effort to change both ourselves through acknowledging the horrors of the REAL third world,bothas actuality and symptom, rather than wallowing in mindless “second-best” rancour for lack of curiosity and imagination, like Medeival peasants on top of an Aristotelian dung heap defined by stasis.
Zwilnik: Trackback, ya crazy alien life form.
Actually, reading jg’s reply concerning “Luis Lopez
Fitzgerald” and following further edifications for my benefit, begin to detect something Sophoclean if not outright Homeric behind all these incessant coincidences and singularities.
Take this someone else gets a fetus of Brooke’s, or Taylor’s or whoever’s Frankensteinian electri-activated ova, or was she getting pregnant through artifical insemination of herself, in a performance of a mind’s-eye of her own or some audience fantasy concerning pregnancy with (out) sex or romance; or bloody lightning bolts as you waddle up a lighthouse!
This is a weird world, when one is actually punished more for wearing green twinsets than unrelenting meaness. And always this underlying, unrelenting fixation on vicarious fertility and sex, always cut off at the very moment of consumation or resolution of curiosity with the prying, prurient watcher at the utter, teetering brink of gratification ever-postponed. If the people who put out this bollocks know what the audience wants and actually gives it to them, are they scared that once satisfied they’ll never come back?
So, back you’ll come next episode, knowing someone will bang on the door and disturb things before anything interesting happens. Then some moralising nonsense from Brooke or Cameron or whoever alpha female is given the following script lines, to alibi the prurience.
Sorry, it just seems
morbid. Shouldn’t some of them get their minds cleaned up, like the ones who go to right to life demos or church on sundays?
Can you people please stop it, as you’re making me think of buying the boxed set of B&B.
I am a victim of viral marketing. And aliens.
I don’t feel disempowered by them, but I do feel that they’re not especially aimed at me.
They’re more a catharsis for actual victims, and displayed for the benefit of those who are still blaming themselves for being attacked, to let them know that they aren’t freaks who somehow “asked for it”, but just ordinary women who didn’t do anything wrong.
I think that simple realisation can be more empowering than many realise, in a culture that still is too quick to ask “well, what was she doing there anyway?” but simultaneously chastises women who are wary of being vulnerable around men as “tarring all men with the same brush”.
I just realised my comment above could be read as implying that I somehow have special knowledge that Darlene has never been a victim of sexual assault, when I of course know no such thing, don’t want to know and it isn’t particularly relevant anyway.
I meant more that there is a certain subpopulation of sexual assault victims who will and do find those stories empowering because they show that they didn’t do anything to bring about their own assault, and the stories section is valuable for that reason alone. I could well imagine that not all victims would find it equally empowering, but also that some non-victims (”potential survivors” if you like) could also find it empowering in reinforcing that if it does happen to them in the future, they won’t have deserved it and that they can survive it.
I don’t think such shared stories have to cater for everyone’s sensibilities to be worthwhile.
Just quietly Brooke/Helen and Darlene, and not that I have availed myself of these services, but I have been told that there is a place, down a dark dusty alley of the intertubes where a lone brave soul has understood the scourge of a generation and established a B&B injecting room as a public service.
There you can find episodes from the beginning of time until the present. And it comes with pictures of them staring at each other and everything!
Thanks for that, Tigtog.
“I meant more that there is a certain subpopulation of sexual assault victims who will and do find those stories empowering because they show that they didn’t do anything to bring about their own assault, and the stories section is valuable for that reason alone. I could well imagine that not all victims would find it equally empowering, but also that some non-victims (â€?potential survivorsâ€? if you like) could also find it empowering in reinforcing that if it does happen to them in the future, they won’t have deserved it and that they can survive it.
I don’t think such shared stories have to cater for everyone’s sensibilities to be worthwhile.”
That’s fair enough, as long as there is acknowledgement that such a response isn’t for everybody.
Yeah, a website devoted to Bold. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Paul Walter
I am extremely pleased that somebody realises this. In fact the evolutionary psychology that irradiates premodern – especially classical – mythopoeia is the key to ‘getting’ soap operas and indeed pop culture in general. All these kids studying Gender/Culture/Media Studies under faculties bereft of training in Biology, Psychology, and Classics are really doing their minds a great disservice.
Tig tog, Darlene more likely has been subjected to assaults of a general nature than those of a specific one.
Helen: “Of course, the most cursory examination of “victim-litâ€? would show that it is hardly a leftist genre. The Oprah- and Phil- watchers are more likely to be conservative types… as they are to be leftist radicals.”
But, see, I never said that only leftists participate in this discourse, or that everyone who does participate is by definition a leftist. I suggested that the left had proposed a certain discourse of victimization, and that the discourse mutated and expanded, and eventually became a Received Idea. Now that it is a Received Idea — an unquestioned, unconscious assumption — anyone can participate in it, regardless of their political views.
Thank you, Helen. You just illustrated the idea of ‘intellectual drift’ far better than I could ever do.
Darlene
I saw Anna Broinowski interviewed recently (The Movie Show?) and she struck me as a top bird! However, SMH Boss of the Yarts, Malcolm Knox, has taken a creepy lien over the Khouri “event” and tries bitchslapping La Broinowski for her doco.
As I mentioned above I love Anna’s energetic and more phenomenological take on the story than Knox’s po-faced sanctimony. Knox is turning into a Mini-Manne.
What is it about white bourgeois males of a certain age who write for Fairfax and their mawkish Presbyterian moral vanity.
Too Ann and Norma, I say You Go Girls!
Oops, forgot link to attempted Bitchslapping.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/neverending-storys-secrets-and-lies/2007/09/11/1189276712534.html
“What is it about white bourgeois males of a certain age who write for Fairfax and their mawkish Presbyterian moral vanity.”
What is it about white bourgeoise males period, John. Tee hee.
Go see the movie and let me know what you think. Yes, Anna presents it in a very entertaining way. I suspect your view of Norma might be changed by watching it, but we will see.
Thanks for the link. Will peruse later.
While I am in a sapphic state of mind – having just spent a few hours reading Sappho’s poems (and one of Catullus’s Latin poems – Lesbia) – have any of you ladies read La Greer’s The Mad Woman’s Underclothes? What a hoot! Germaine should be made a saint before Mary McKillop!
I wrote some stuff on Furedi at http://barista.media2.org/?p=207
This is part of a larger campaign against “victimhood”, which is also an assault on therapy, as assisted by the extraordinary Spike.
Jayzus Mini-J, you’re one try hard little prannet aren’t you? So excited you’re now reading books without pictures that you have to share this with everyone.
No, you’re extremely pleased that you’ve managed to frame a basic truism about storytelling that everyone, from producers to consumers to academia already gets in one way or another, as some kinda profound insight. I mean what the yellow rubbery fuck do you think is the morpheme of mythopoeia anyway?
So where’s the collateral for that statement?
Another egregious typo. Normally pointing this kinda thing out is just nitpicking but since you make such a heavy-handed fist of calling others on their imprecise use of words, then it’s worth noting that if language is a tool, you frequently hit your thumb while hammering in screws and screwing in nails. Hard to have much confidence in the rigour of any etymological or indeed ontological argument assembled by such a clumsy craftsperson.
As opposed to his non-Latin poems? You do realise he translated from and not wrote in Greek? Another pointless piece of fustian fluffing.
And the point of that non sequitur is what?
Like so many other informed yet unformed intellectual striplings you mistake breadth of knowledge for application of intelligence.
Pack it in mate. If you really want to pleasure yourself online, there’s plenty of sites out there, where for the right fee, the talent only admires your shortcomings.