pearwaldorf | (no subject)

You've probably never heard of Dua Khalil. I never would have known she existed except for an incidental news item on boingboing. She was a seventeen year old girl stoned to death for being seen with a Sunni boy suspected of being her lover. The even more fucked-up part is the participants were filming it on their cellphones for later distribution. I saw this post, and I skipped right past it in my feed reader, because some things just hurt too much to think about. It's one of the reasons I have a hard time reading Margaret Atwood, because she has this keen, intimate sense of how incredibly cruel the world can be to women. But every so often, somebody gives me a good hard poke in the ribs and tells me I have to pay attention to this sort of thing. Cue Joss Whedon:

A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film [Captivity], which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. 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.

So, yes. It's hard to remember that it's not helpful nor good to not think about things like this, and that we all have responsibilities to acknowledge these horrible things and to not pretend they don't exist. But we all need reminders sometimes. Thank you Joss, for this one.