Have you ever noticed that whenever you watch a news story about a five year old girl getting abducted, raped and then disposed of, someone in the room says something like “That’s an awful pretty girl for her to be raped and killed like that.” What the fuck?!
What does her appearance even matter? She was fucking raped and mutilated! How, in a sane world would the subject of her physical appearance even come up? Would the brutal rape-murder of an ugly child be less of a travesty?
I have a confession. I uttered “that phrase” myself not so long ago. Hearing that all-too-common reaction from my own lips made me really think about its implications. For one, it seems to be uniquely confined to female victims. You’ll never hear a guy say “Oh, Adam Walsh was such a pretty little boy for him to be killed like that!” The avoidance of the word “pretty” when discussing male victims of the same sort of crimes is revealing about what people mean in applying it to female victims.
When people talk about how pretty some murdered girl was, they don’t mean “pretty” in the sublime abstract way that nebulae or the Ode to Joy are beautiful, if they were referring to an aesthetic philosophical abstraction there’d be no reason for gender specificity.
Instead people seem to be voicing an otherwise unspoken understanding in our culture that women’s primary value is to serve as objects of lust for men. The reflexive action we all seem to have in the face of these horrors is a perverse sort of mourning. Our culture’s knee-jerk reaction is not sympathy for the suffering of a fellow human being or our society’s loss at them being taken forcefully taken from us.
Instead, the loss is of a “pretty girl,” which is to say, one that looks like she will grow up to be sexually desirable. I invite you to reflect on the implications this has for our culture and our selves. Guys, have you been seeing or treating women as objects? Ladies, have you been exploiting your objectification for social or material gain? Parents, how do you feel about knowing that if your child was stolen from you the first thing people would mourn is her potential desirablity?
February 20, 2009 at 2:07 pm |
You have many valid points. Society does feel more mournful when it is someone who possess desirablity, rather than one who is “let’s say, for lack of better words”, ugly or poor.