I’ve seen a number of people link to this today:
Here’s a couple of extracts:
Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron ”honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.
[…]
“Women’s inferiority — in fact, their malevolence – is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.”
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‘s journal:
I’m trying to work out if this is the same honor killing that led to the vengeance killing of the three Sunnis on the bus… I posted about that a little while back.
I’d have to read Joss’s post again to comment in more depth but I think that wider publicity for it is awesome and I hope that Joss’s relative celebrity might have an effect.
I’m concerned he’s “preaching to the choir” in that perhaps his audience is already aware of these issues, but I’m not so sure that he’s right that they would all have intervened. Kitty Genovese was, after all, not so very long ago. And from what we saw with the boys at that Australian high school making a DVD of their bullying of a girl in their class, I’m not so sure this indifference to violence is so contained.
I met an American-Moroccan 14-year-old the other day, the son of an acquaintance. He’s superbly educated, extremely bright. Well-versed in US politics, environmental issues, has read *and* seen Fast Food Nation. Is reading big fat books on Congress and impeachment. Yet he’s obsessed with animé and manga violence and throughout the Heroes series final last night kept expressing his boredom and saying “do these guys ever get into real fights? Like, this is dull’ and he Does. Not. See. The. Disconnect.
I’m definitely with Joss on the obscenity of the US movie industry and its attitudes to women, especially in horror. And I feel the same reflexive cringe Kate talk about regarding feminism when I try to discuss media influence and desensitization. I get this “Movies do not cause violence! Games do not cause violence’ (to women, to people) and I constantly have to drag out early British studies about children inured to racism through which TV shows they watched and the reasons for the American army releasing the computer game “America’s Army”. Not because they *cause* these things, but because they reinforce and enhance what’s already culturally there.
I see this call to action that Joss finishes with so often now. I’d love to know the statistics for follow-through.
And while I’m at it:
, meet
.
, meet
. I think you two will get along splendidly.