The Mother of All Questions Page 10
Richard Martinez, an imposing dark-haired man with a whitening beard, last spoke with Christopher a few hours before his death; the UCSB student was excited about his upcoming year studying abroad in London. Richard wonders if they had stayed on the phone a moment longer, or ended the conversation a moment sooner, whether Christopher would still be alive.
Each time I’ve met his father, I’ve seen more of who the son was, in stories, photographs, cell-phone videos: a handsome, vital, vibrant young man, noted for his kindness as well as his athleticism and intelligence. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, he had a wide, engaging smile, joyous, full of appetite for life. At sixteen he had wanted to go skydiving and his parents forbade it; four years later, a few months before he died, he went. After his death, someone gave Richard the video, which he showed me earlier this month. It shows Chris in a yellow jumpsuit, preparing to get into the plane, in the plane, freefalling in a blue sky with the instructor, and then falling more gently after the parachute opens, to the green California earth. The great grin never leaves his face. He was so alive. Then dead.
Martinez had one child; now he has none. He wears rubber bracelets, the kind given out for charitable causes and campaigns, stacked atop each other on his right wrist. Each of them commemorates a child killed somewhere in the United States by guns, at Sandy Hook and other mass shootings, and he can sort through them and speak of where and when each victim was killed. It’s an arm like a cemetery. The parents of these casualties share the bracelets as part of their campaigns; they are a community of the devastated. I have the sense, every time I’ve spoken with Martinez, starting with a few days after the murder, that he had to do something to make meaning out of the unbearable pain. He couldn’t escape it, but he could do something with it, and so he quit his longtime position as a public defender and went on the road.
You can look at the causes of the murder rampage in various ways. Feminists (myself included) focused last year on the misogyny, the killer’s furious sense that women owed him something, that he had a right to whatever pleasure and adulation they could deliver. Discussion of this crime spree joined the wider conversation about violence against women. Because men kept popping up to say “Not all men,” sometimes in the form of the hashtag #notallmen, as in “not all men are rapists and murderers and we shouldn’t talk about the patterns of male violence,” a young woman who tweets under the name Gilded Spine coined the hashtag #yesallwomen.
It was meant to say that yes, we know not all men commit these crimes, but the point is that all women are impacted by them. The hashtag went viral in the months after Isla Vista, though Gilded Spine received so many menacing tweets she went silent for a long time. Even speaking up about violence was dangerous, and the men who posted jeering remarks, pornographic images, and threats didn’t seem to realize they were all demonstrating why feminism is necessary. #Yesallwomen was perhaps the most widespread of the feminist hashtags that’ve been, in recent years, the umbrellas for collective conversation and bearing witness about violence and survival.
There’s entitlement or authoritarianism in all violence. We say a murderer took another’s life. To take is to take possession of. It’s to steal, to assume the privilege of an owner, to dispose of someone else’s life itself as though it were yours to do so. It never is. And then there’s the gargantuan American arsenal and the havoc wreaked with it. Ninety-one Americans are killed by guns every day in this country; there are twelve thousand gun homicides a year in the United States, more than twenty times the level of other industrialized nations, according to Martinez’s organization, Everytown for Gun Safety. It looks as though the gun homicide rate hasn’t risen, but that’s not because fewer people are shot than a decade ago. More are shot, but emergency rooms and trauma centers are better at saving lives now. The number of nonfatal gunshot wounds doubled between 2002 and 2011.
We are a war zone in two ways. The first is the literal war that produces those twelve thousand corpses a year, including suicides, domestic violence homicides (3,110 women killed by male partners or former partners between 2008 and 2012), other murders, accidental deaths. The second is a war of meaning. On one side are the people who constantly tell us that guns will make us safer, and that we need more guns in more hands in more places, stores, on the streets, in the schools and on the campuses. They constantly hawk scenarios in which “a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun.”
It is surpassingly rare that a person with a gun enters a chaotic situation and, like the gunman-hero in a Western, shoots accurately and effectively, taking out bad people and not harming good ones. The other scenarios involving guns—homicides, suicides, and horrible accidents—happen incessantly. When small children find guns and shoot friends, siblings, parents, we are told it was a terrible accident rather than that’s something likely to happen with easily available weapons. The argument in favor of more guns is not about facts but about guns as icons of identity, of fantasy about being dominant, masterful, in control, the same old impossible macho dream of being, as the killer in Isla Vista put it, an alpha male. For hardcore gun advocates, the weapons are totemic objects of identity, rather than the tools that actually take those twelve thousand lives a year.
One response to the Isla Vista rampage is a California law, AB 1014, that allows family members and law enforcement to petition a court to remove guns from the possession of someone who may be a risk to others. The Gun Violence Restraining Order, as it’s called, could have prevented at least part of the homicidal rampage carried out in Isla Vista and maybe undermined the whole scenario. The murderer’s mother had called the Santa Barbara sheriff’s office to report her concern about him earlier that month. It may prevent other murders when it goes into effect on January 1, 2016. Good legislation has been passed in Oregon and Washington state as well, Martinez told me, and Texas and Florida measures to expand gun rights were defeated this year. But knives as well as guns, even a car, were used to harm others that terrible evening a year ago.
There is no easy solution to the violence in this country, and no single cause. As Misrach noted when he contemplated those Playboy magazines used for target practice, “Every aspect of our society . . . was riddled with violence.” Many aspects are also full of the alternatives to violence: the willingness to negotiate, the love of life, generosity, empathy; these are also powerful forces in the culture. As the murder spree unfolded, people rushed to comfort, shelter, and provide emergency aid—tourniquets, pressure to gunshot wounds, CPR—to the injured and dying, and twenty thousand came to the memorial at the UCSB stadium that week. But the people who embody the best of us, like all of us, live in a climate in which violence can erupt anywhere at any time.
There is a scholarship in Christopher Michaels-Martinez’s name, for English majors committed to social justice. There are memorial events, exhibits, and a garden being prepared for the one-year anniversary at University of California–Santa Barbara. There are laws passed and pending, a vibrant feminist conversation about violence and misogyny. But the dead are still dead, the bereaved are still grieving, and the setup is still ripe for more murders.
The Short Happy Recent History of the Rape Joke
(2015)
Are rape jokes funny? The feminist position a few years ago seemed to be a firm no, and then everything changed. In fact, the rapid evolution of the rape joke over the past three years is a small-scale echo of the huge changes that have taken place in the public conversation about sexual violence, gender, feminism, whose voice matters, and who gets to tell the story.
The gauntlet was thrown down in 2012, when comedian Daniel Tosh was going on about how rape jokes are always funny, and an audience member shouted, “Rape jokes are never funny.” Tosh reportedly responded by saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys right now?” The woman who had that shouted at her then blogged about it, and her blog and the incident got a lot of attention back then. It was an epoch ago, by what’s happened since with feminism and comed
y.
That rape jokes aren’t funny was an axiom assuming that rape jokes are at the expense of the victim. That they are too funny was insisted upon by some of the tellers and fans of such jokes. Something horrible happened to you, hahhahha! I’m going to violate and degrade a woman and deny her humanity, hohohoho! It’s funny to me and you don’t matter!
Sam Morril, who was definitely standing up and who I guess I have to call a comedian, told that kind of joke: “My ex-girlfriend never made me wear a condom. That’s huge. She was on the pill.” Pause. “Ambien.” Because sex with unconscious victims is just so inherently hilarious that America’s most celebrated stand-up comic had allegedly been doing it for decades, but we weren’t talking about Bill Cosby yet in 2012.
When the conversation started, people drew a distinction between punching down (mocking the less powerful) and punching up (aiming at the privileged, the status quo, maybe even striking blows against the empire). The rape joke as it then existed was all about punching down. Louis C. K., who had lousy rapey jokes in his repertoire back then, remarked that the Tosh incident was part of a larger “fight between comedians and feminists, which are natural enemies. Because stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke.” (Or maybe they didn’t think feminists were funny because feminists were laughing at them.)
He recovered from his 2012 fumble to do some homework and say, in 2013, that it takes courage for men to ask women out and women to go out with them. Because, “How do women still go out with guys, when you consider that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat to women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women.” Which isn’t funny, exactly, except for the way that telling startling and transgressive truths is funny. Or at least we laugh when we hear them, out of surprise or discomfort or recognition. Humor and transgression are inseparable, but there are so many kinds of transgression—the kind of joke your eight-year-old loves transgresses against conventional expectations about language or logic and why the chicken crossed the road.
Of course Margaret Atwood had made the same point as Louis C. K. much earlier and more pithily when she remarked, “Men are afraid women are going to laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Men with no sense of humor might be the subgroups who fuel the men’s rights movement, Gamergate, and the rest of the misogynistic backlash. I don’t believe in revenge, but we are in a moment when one could plausibly mourn that men aren’t funny.
Funny women—Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Cameron Esposito, Margaret Cho, Sarah Silverman—have been achieving more and more prominence in recent years, but it was a man who got to deliver the coup de grace to comedy patriarchy. Hannibal Buress called out Bill Cosby. Finally the time was right to depose “America’s dad”—whom a tabloid in 2015 labeled, on its cover, “America’s rapist.”
Once Buress opened the gate, it was open season on Cosby. At the Golden Globes in January, Fey and Poehler ripped Cosby apart. Alluding to the dark, fairy-tale-based movie Into the Woods, Poehler remarked, “and Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Fey then did a parody of Cosby’s sputtering vocal affectations as she raised the drugging charges another way. “I put the pills in the people. The people did not want the pills.” Poehler joined in the mockery, and the cameras panned an audience in which some of the celebrities seemed to think that antirapist jokes were funny and some of them looked like deer in headlights.
And Cosby went down, because serious journalists and survivors’ testimony followed in the wake of Buress’s opening. Later in January, comedy’s august great-uncle, Jay Leno, remarked, “I don’t know why it’s so hard to believe women. You go to Saudi Arabia, you need two women to testify against a man. Here you need twenty-
five.” There is a special irony in a major stand-up comic becoming the butt of jokes. It marks the rise of feminist comedy in the mainstream and the weakening of rape culture. There is no clearer changing of the guard than this.
Bill Cosby survived his alleged crime spree as long as he did thanks to a culture in which women had no credibility and little voice, in which their reporting being raped by him just led to further attacks, to his impunity, to the inequality of power. He lost that impunity and much of that power, and the July 26 issue of New York magazine, in which thirty-five of the forty-six victims who’ve come forward to date spoke out and showed us their faces, is basically his tombstone. Their stories bury him. And exhume themselves from the silence of the grave.
Amy Schumer’s show on Comedy Central has featured a Cosby skit or two—one in which she’s his defense attorney trying to convince the jurors they love “America’s dad” and pudding and the rest of it more than they love truth and justice. It calls out people’s refusal to abandon something they’re fond of or to look at something that makes them uncomfortable. It ends with a twist: an offstage Cosby sends Schumer a drink in thanks and she looks at it in consternation, then tosses it over her shoulder. She knows.
But the great landmark, the epic, the Iliad of all rape jokes at the rapists’ expense, has to be Inside Amy Schumer’s “Football Town Nights,” a parody of Friday Night Lights (the TV show about high school football in Texas) and an even more scathing parody of the logic of rape culture. The late April skit features a new coach trying to teach his boys not to rape, to their incomprehension and the resentment of the community. Schumer plays the good wife to the coach, showing up mutely with larger and larger glasses of white wine as things go from bad to worse at his new job.
At the outset the football team in the locker room tries to find loopholes in the coach’s “no rape” rule. “Can we rape at away games?” No. “What if it’s Halloween and she’s dressed like a sexy cat?” No. “What if she thinks it’s rape and I don’t?” Still no. “What if my mom is the DA and won’t prosecute, can I rape?” “If the girl said yes to me the other day, but it was about something else?” “What if the girl says yes and then changes her mind out of nowhere, like a crazy person?”
The high schoolers’ arguments are exactly the kind of logic and illogic you get on college campuses and in comments sections, too, the refusal to recognize the limits to men’s rights or the existence of women’s. This section is followed by an excellent, appalling scene in which middle-aged ladies spit at the coach for not letting “our boys” have their rightful rapes (recalling the real rage directed at any young woman who accuses any sports star of rape and the mainstream focus on the impact on the perpetrator†† rather than the victim). The whole skit is a funny rape joke about what irrational, any-excuse jerks would-be rapists are, and how much communities support some of those jerks—about, in short, not rape (no rapes take place in the skit) but rape culture. The tables have turned. Feminism hasn’t won, and the war for everyone to have their basic human rights respected isn’t over, but we’re on a winning streak right now. And it’s kind of funny, at times, as well as deadly serious.
Postscript: Since I wrote this Schumer has badly missed the point on race in skits and statements. Her vision (and her scripts) are flawed, and at times her defense has been of the emotional needs of straight white young women rather than what a revolution might do for what it means to be a woman, to be many kinds of women. But she has made a masterpiece or two.
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†† The satirical Onion ran this headline in 2011: “College Basketball Star Heroically Overcomes Tragic Rape He Committed.”
2.
Breaking the Story
Escape from the Five-Million-Year-Old Suburb
(2015)
Sooner or later in conversations about who we are, who we have been, and who we can be, someone will tell a story about Man the Hunter. It’s a story not just about Man but about Woman and Child, too. There are countless variants, but all of them go something like this: in primordial times men went out and hunted and brought home meat to feed women and children, who sat around being dependent on them. In most versions, the story is set
in nuclear units, such that men provide only for their own family, and women have no community to help with the kids. In every version, women are baggage that breeds.
Though it makes claims about human societies as they existed 200,000 or 5 million years ago, the story itself isn’t so old. Whatever its origins, it seems to have reached a peak of popularity only in the middle of last century. Here’s a chunk of one of the most popular versions from the 1960s, Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape:
Because of the extremely long periods of dependency of the young and the heavy demands made by them, the females found themselves almost perpetually confined to the home base. . . . The hunting parties, unlike those of the “pure” carnivores, had to become all-male groups. . . . For a virile primate male to go off on a feeding trip and leave his females unprotected from the advances of any other males that might happen to come by was unheard of. . . . The answer was the development of a pair-bond.
This narrative, in other words, attempts to trace the dominant socioeconomic arrangements of the late fifties and early sixties middle class back to the origins of our species. I think of it as the story of the five-million-year-old suburb. Proto-human males go off—all of them, since apparently none are old or sick or sitting around talking about the fantastic eland they got last week. They go out all day, every day, carrying their spears and atlatls to work and punching the primordial time clock. Females hang around the hearth with the kids, waiting for the men to bring home the bacon. Man feeds woman. Woman propagates man’s genes. So many of these stories, as women anthropologists later pointed out, are worried about female fidelity and male power. They assuage these worries by explaining why females are faithful and males are powerful: fidelity is exchanged for gobbets of meat.