On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 15:36 +1100, Jacinta Richardson wrote:
> So despite my deeply personal response, explaining why Mark's talk made me feel
> uncomfortable, you're telling me that Mark's talk is a non-issue or a borderline
> case that I shouldn't be making a fuss over. Way to go with the marginalising!
My apologies; I've been dealing with too many top-posters recently and
only saw the first 4 paragraphs of your previous email; I didn't scroll
down past the quote and read the rest.
> I have been sexually assaulted. I didn't find the specific images in Mark's
> talk triggering _but_ I still felt unease. Why? Because suddenly - in a
> technical talk where I should feel just as much one of the crowd as anyone else
> - at least some of the overwhelmingly male audience around me were thinking
> about sex.
So, let me rephrase that in my own words, just to make sure I'm
understanding you correctly...
As an expert on the male psyche, it is your belief that the images in
question will have made a significant number of us think about sex when
we would not otherwise have been doing so every seven seconds anyway.
And then, in your rôle as Thought Police, you are objecting to what you
*assume* we may have been *thinking*.
I think that's basically what you're saying, right? I don't think I've
wildly misinterpreted it?
I will thank you to judge me on my words and my actions, and *not* on
wild guesses about what's may or may not be going through my head.
I don't know your background and whether you claim to be an expert on
the male brain. I do not make that claim, but I *have* had such a brain
for over 36 years, and in that time I've also had plenty of 'boys-only'
conversations with others who possess such brains — in an environment
where they can speak freely about what they think and feel, in a manner
which would quite rightly get them strung up and whipped if they did it
in public at a conference. So I feel I have a fair amount of insight.
I speak categorically for myself and presumptively on behalf of others,
when I say that those images did not make many of us think about sex at
all.
I think that was mostly because Mark introduced the masochism imagery
with the photo of a *man* in his underpants being dominated. Strangely
enough, that did not encourage sexual thoughts in me — and I took it as
a cue to think about *masochism*, in line with what Mark was actually
saying, rather than anything else that the image may have brought to
mind in a more febrile imagination.
And then when the later image was shown which introduced balance by
showing a *woman* being dominated, we were already 'trained' to think of
it in the way it was intended. That was assisted by the fact that there
was much less female flesh on show in the latter image than there had
been male flesh in the former, which further ensured that it was taken
the 'right' way.
(I already commented elsewhere on other factors which seem to show that
some care was taken in the choice of that second image to avoid
'trigger' issues or any realistic claim that it depicted sexual abuse.
The fact that the other participant was another woman distinguished it
clearly from rape scenes, the fact that the item was under her *chin*
and not even constricting her throat, and the fact that she displayed no
fear or pain. I linked to a study describing how facial emotion gives a
*strong* link to emotional triggering in imagery.)
That image was something you could well see in any popular music video
these days. Should we ban MTV too?
--
dwmw2
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Received on Wed Feb 02 2011 - 09:08:41 GMT