Her Name was Reeva Steenkamp : It's Time We Take Personal Responsibility for our Media Culture

I am so very angry at the reporting of the murder of Reeva Steenkamp. The hypocrisy and women-hating of our media never fails to shock me.

I have written numerous times on the issue of personal responsibility in maintaining the women-blaming rhetoric in our celebrity- obsessed mass media culture; the hypocrisy of the British press publishing nude photos of some celebrities without consent whilst whining about other news media publishing those of others. I've written about the mass media's sensationalising and eroticising male violence for entertainment purposes and of the harmful nature of "women's" magazines. I've written about the links between reality television, bullying culture and the lack of personal responsibility in the Huffington Post.  

The media response to the murder of Reeva Steenkamp by her partner has been just as offensive as every other story of the murder of a woman by a man. The failure to name Reeva Steenkamp and the rendering her as an object has even surpassed even my cynicism of the media's desire to reinforce rape culture and VAW. I'm not going to link to the picture in the Sun or the article in the Daily Mail since both have been shredded on twitter this morning. And, really, no one expects much from either since they both stopped publishing the news years ago. 

However, they aren't the only mainstream media who've gone with worshipping a murderer at the expense of the victim. I found the Guardian's retrospective on the life of the murderer of Reeva Steenkamp particularly galling. The Washington Post went with a quote on how some man never saw Reeva Steenkamp's murderer as "violent". He's just murdered someone. I think the boats sailed on the question as to whether or not the man was violent. The BBC can't seem to remember Reeva Steenkamp's name. The mainstream media is effectively removing Reeva Steenkamp for the reporting of her own murder.

So far, I've only read two articles on the murder of Reeva Steenkamp which weren't offensive: Mother Jones wrote about it relation to the issue of gun violence in South Africa whilst the F-Word UK wrote about the sensationalising and obfuscation of responsibility of VAW committed by athletes. It is utterly pathetic that the mainstream media has not managed to report this case with anything approaching empathy.

You can complain to the Sun about their front page by phone:  0207 782 4104 

Or, email: dominic.mohan@the-sun.co.uk  and ombudsman@the-sun.co.uk

Do feel free to tweet your anger to @rupertmurdoch

There is a petition here demanding that the Sun apologise for their front page.

Sian and Crooked Rib has written a form letter here.

There are other suggestions for activism here.

Please make a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission. As EVAW has been tweeting, you can use article 12 of the Code of Practise to make your complaint.

More importantly though, we have got to start taking personal responsibility and stop financially supporting the media outlets which perpetuate VAW as entertainment. There is no point in complaining about the Sun running such an offensive front page if people are clicking on it which increases their advertising revenue. The same goes for the Daily Mail. Complaining about the hateful nature of celebrity culture  whilst financially supporting it is hypocritical.  If we genuinely want to stop this shit from being published, we need to stop buying the Sun, Daily Mail, Heat and OK Magazine. We need to stop financially supporting a culture of bullying vulnerable people for entertainment. 

The Sun may have chosen to run an offensive picture but they did knowing full well that people will buy it. 

We need to start boycotting all forms of media which sensationalise violence in society. We need to start making formal complaints to the Press Complaints Commission. We need to start getting our media coverage from sources interested in justice rather than profit.

We need to force our media to cover actual news without glorifying male violence.

UPDATE:

Here are some very good criticisms of the treatment of Reeva Steenkamp within mainstream media:

Helen Lewis in the New Statesman
Marina Hyde in the Guardian
Jane Fae in politics.co.uk

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A teacher was fired because she was a porn actress.

So, not only has a junior high science teacher in California  been fired for appearing in a pornographic movie, a three-judge commission upheld her firing. She was fired because the internet means the porn films she starred in will *always* be available to students.

This is the point were I have to make my bias clear: I am anti-porn.  I do not think it's possible to create pornography which is unharmful in a culture which constructs women as a sex class. In a post-patriarchy world things might be completely different. But, we aren't there yet and I do believe that porn, in its current incarnation, is inherently harmful due to its reductive construction of a racist heteronormative sexuality which privileges the male orgasm at the expense of women's physical and emotional well-being.

Being anti-porn is political stance. It is a critique of the capitalist-patriarchal structures which harm us all (within and out with porn).

However, this article isn't about questioning the role of porn in our culture. It's about slut-shaming. It's holding one woman responsible for the ignorance of her former colleagues and the fact that porn culture is so pervasive that students in the middle school where she taught found and watched some of the porn films she was in. 

According to the district superintendent Jeff Chancer  her decision to "engage in pornography was incompatible with her responsibilities as a role model for students,". Stacie Halas did not participate in the porn industry whilst a teacher. She made several films during a 9 month period in 2005 - 2006 because of poverty. She was not showing porn films in her classroom. She was not sharing the porn films with her students. She was not flogging them to her students. She appeared in several movies 8 years ago. And, this is enough to have her fired. 

I clearly missed the module in my education degree which said that only perfect people were allowed to be teachers. 

There is little discussion here of how the students, in middle school, accessed the films. Or, why children were watching porn. Surely, the access children have to porn is far more problematic than one teacher appearing in a porn film. Yes, I get that once the children found out, it would have been harder for Halas to do her job. But, let's be honest here, teenagers are just like adults. They can be equally cruel and a bunch of teenagers writing profanity on the teachers window is part of the job description. It happens even to perfect members of staff who never found themselves broke and taking a job in a porn film. 

Really though, the reason Halas worked within the porn industry is irrelevant for this. It only impacted her job because her co-workers complained to the school administration about it. It only impacted her job because she was fired. Halas was forced out of her job by slut-shaming reactionaries.

I am anti-porn but I can not see how preventing a woman from working as a teacher will end the pornification of our society and the hyper-sexualisation of childhood. This has taught her students that porn actresses are all sluts who do not deserve respect or basic human dignity. It has taught her students that slut-shaming is a perfectly acceptable activity. It has taught her students that it is acceptable to mock those who make different decisions than ourselves. It has taught them that it is okay to humiliate those who have fewer choices than they do. 

This is a horrible story. My sympathy is with Halas and not the slut-shaming, hypocritical arseholes who are preventing her from doing a job she was trained for. More importantly, I wouldn't want my children to be taught by people lacking in both empathy and the critical skills necessary to engage constructively in our Capitalist-Patriarchy. 

And, by the way Huff Post, those "student-teacher sex scandals" at the bottom are cases of child rape, possession of child pornography and other forms of sexual violence. Not "sex scandals". They are also all women; women who are convicted sex offenders. They are not comparable to a woman who used to work in the porn industry. Working in porn is not a criminal offence; raping a 14 year old boy is a crime. Could you at least pretend to keep that straight?

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In Defence of Megan Fox.

Until today, the only thing I knew about Megan Fox was that she starred in the first two Transformer movies and that she may or may not have been fired from the third for calling the director Micheal Bay a misogynist. It's hard to say if she walked or was fired as Fox is keeping a dignified silence whilst Bay, and her former co-star Shia LeBoeuf, are bad-mouthing her at every opportunity. Whatever actually happened, Fox is clearly a better person than either Bay or LeBoeuf; although that isn't the best compliment since I've eaten carrots that had more empathy than Bay. Suffice it to say, I'm on Team Fox.

Today, I learned that Fox is now married and has a very new baby. 

I learned about Fox's new baby from an op-ed piece in the Independent which effectively accuses Fox, but not her husband, of child neglect for hiring a night nurse. I have no idea who the writer Susan Elkin actually is, above her very basic biography attached to the article, but it's been a while since I've read a piece written by a woman who so clearly hates other women. 

Because, there is no excuse for what Elkin has written. 

There is no excuse for the Independent to have published the op-ed piece. 

But, you know what, I would like to thank Megan Fox for publicly acknowledging that she has hired a night nurse. 

Because what really pisses me off is the culture of "motherhood" that requires "celebrity" women to pretend that they do everything all by themselves after having a baby. That is what is harmful to all women: the idea that a woman who has just given birth must immediately lose all their baby weight, baking 250 cupcakes for the school fete, going back to work full-time at 6 weeks whilst simultaneously looking immaculate in their immaculate house. Celebrity women who try to exist outside this narrow and punitive construction of mother are punished by the likes of Perez Hilton calling them fat and Hello mag making snide remarks about their lack of make-up.

So, power to Megan Fox for being honest about something that was going to result in her being bullied. How freaking brave is she?

And, that shit about whether or not Fox breastfeeds, well that's none of our business. The culture which pushes formula feeding unnecessarily onto new mothers and which sexualises women's breasts to the point that women can not breastfeed publicly without feeling uncomfortable is the problem. The culture which believes that women's bodies belong to their husbands and that a man's rights to access his possession's breasts are more important than a new infant is the problem. The culture which defines any woman who has given birth  as unfuckable until they lose all their "baby weight" is the problem. That is what we need to address.

We won't create a breast-feeding friendly culture when women write shit like this:

Babies are born to women – whether some feminists like it or not and wish it otherwise – and nature provides the baby’s food in the form of breast milk. That milk, and suckling it from the mother’s breast, is the child’s entitlement. Direct access to its mother’s breast milk is, in my book, every child’s human right. 

That doesn’t mean extracting it with a pump and handing it over to someone else to pour into the child either. It means proper tactile feeding from the breast and all the bonding which goes with that. Everyone knows that there is nothing better than breast milk for a baby’s health and, there are benefits for the mother too – not least, it is much easier to lose the baby weight if you breast feed than if you don’t. It is also considerable less hassle – at a time when you’re tired and maybe stressed – than fiddling about with bottles which have to be sterilised. And you have it with you, on tap as it were, wherever you and the child happen to be. 

If you hire a night nurse the child may be losing out on part of this and I regard that as a form of neglect.

Now, I get that Elkin is clearly trying to flog some book that no one actually wants to read but, unless you are actually stupid, no one would think the above was going to increase the number of women breastfeeding exclusively for 6 months. It just isn't. All it does is make women feel like failures if they don't. As for the hyperbole of child neglect, well, I'd suggest that Elkin wasn't the most effective teacher on the planet if that's her definition of child neglect.

Plus, Elkin doesn't actually understand the mechanics of breast-feeding. It's not the breast-feeding which changes the shape of women's breasts. That's the result of the weight gain during pregnancy and the subsequent loss of weight thereafter. Not breastfeeding will do nothing to prevent a woman's breasts from changing. Pregnancy changes women's breasts.

And women shouldn't be policing other women's bodies. We should be standing up for other women being forced by Patriarchal structures into making "choices" they do no want for fear of reprisal. 

In many ways, this article is just spiteful. It's just the kind of spiteful that the Patriarchy loves: pitting women against women. Normally, I'd veer on the side of ignoring, however insulting a woman who has just given birth and making her personally responsible for the decisions of a thousand other women isn't kind. 

Megan Fox may be a very privileged woman but she is still a woman. She doesn't deserve this kind of treatment. 

Megan Fox is just a woman trying to survive in the Patriarchy; just like the rest of us. 

Cross-Posted in the New Statesman

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Circus Freak Shows: Bullying Culture, Mass Media and Personal Responsibility

This past Halloween, I watched the film Monster House with my children. It is one of the unnecessary DVDs that we own but one that I had not actively watched before. It is a children’s film about a haunted house. I expected puerile jokes and unnecessary references to films that no one cares about anymore. I was wrong.

The basic plot of Monster House is that a house is possessed by the spirit of a dead woman, Constance, who steals children's toys, which land on the grass around it. Before being “rescued” by the man she marries, Constance had spent her life as an unwilling freak show act in a circus where children paid money to laugh, belittle and humiliate her. Constance dies falling into the foundations of the house she was building with her rescuer-husband, after, once again, being belittled by a group of small children, and the house thus becomes both Constance’s grave and her avenger.

Possessed by the spirit of the abused Constance, the house is portrayed as insane, evil and violent. There is no discussion of whether or not she was justified in her paranoia following years of intense bullying. The house is angry and frightened because Constance was angry and frightened. But, no one listened when Constance was alive and no one listened when she died. Instead, the climax of the film is the complete destruction of Constance.

It is easy to dismiss Monster House as just another poorly executed children’s movie but this film is simply a reflection of our culture. We may no longer have circus freak shows designed to bully and humiliate those who do not fit our gendered dichotomy of human bodies, but our bullying culture still exists in the form of reality television, shock-jock radio programs, the ubiquity of  “lifestyle” and celebrity magazines, and mass media coverage of “news”. Much of our “entertainment”now rests on the same constructions as the circus freak show, we are simply unwilling to acknowledge our own personal responsibility in consuming these forms of “entertainment” and the harm that they cause.

Just as we now blame Mel Greig and Michael Christian for the death of Jacintha Saldanha, we blame Constance for her actions without looking at the context. I do not want to minimize what Greig and Christian did, since anyone who is no longer 15 should know the potential consequences of ‘pranks’, but they are not the only ones who are guilty in the death of Saldanha. Focusing our blame on Greig and Christian is a convenient way to minimize our collective guilt as a society that actively encourages the same bullying experienced by Constance.

Greig and Christian would not have made the prank call if there was not an audience for it. We cannot simply blame the two, although their culpability is without doubt, we also need to examine our own behaviour. We need to take personal responsibility for perpetuating and perpetrating bullying culture. Without an audience of consumers buying magazines like Heat and Grazia or newspapers like the Sun and the Daily Mail or watching/listening to shock jocks like Howard Stern and Matthew Wright, there would be no financial incentive for these people to behave in a crass and offensive manner. Before we start blaming others, we need to check our own behaviour, examine our own privilege, and stop financially supporting an industry based on the abject humiliation of others. The harm caused to vulnerable people who participate in reality television is obvious, yet millions of people watch shows like Big Brother and X-Factor and laugh at the judges’ vile comments. Millions of people take to Twitter to insult the physical appearance of contestants.

We shouldn’t need the Leveson Inquiry to regulate the media. We should be holding the media accountable through our financial power. We can change print media simply by refusing to consume misogynistic, racist, disablist and homophobic stories. We can change talk radio by switching off Greig, Christian and Stern. We can change the culture of bullying traumatised families by refusing to purchase newspapers or watch television newscasts that show images of traumatised parents mourning the loss of their children. We can stop buying newspapers that doorstop grieving parents. We can stop consuming media that suggest that women and children are somehow responsible for their own deaths at the hands of violent men for just exisiting.

Monster House is a film, which uses the emotional and physical abuse experienced by a vulnerable woman and then blames the woman for her behavior, whilst excusing the children, and their parents, who bullied her during her life. In fact, the film never makes the direct correlation between the long-term abuse experienced by Constance and her quite justified paranoia. The blame is entirely Constance’s despite the fact that society had conspired against her for cheap entertainment.

Contemporary mass media from reality television to celebrity culture, from talk shows to shock jocks, together form a 21st century freak show, only now the phenomenon is 24/7 and shows no respect for private boundaries or personal space. We are invited to laugh and jeer at vulnerable people, like Constance, and we pay to financially support their exploitation. We continue to exploit the most vulnerable members of our communities for our entertainment: in reality television, in “traditional” and online media, in the music industry and in pornography.

Life isn't a circus freak show. Lets just stop acting like it is.

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