Depicting Violence Against Women Terrible, Writing Just Great

A fun example of double standards here. We know the usual feminist argument against violent p0rno. This normalises such and makes men go out and do more. This is actually incorrect, we’ve proven this, The massive expansion of broadband and the associated trivially simple access to all sorts of p0rno has led to a fall in rape and other crimes of sexual violence against women.

Sure, certain incidences can, might, probably will have been, caused by the monkey see, monkey do experience. But what we want to know is what is the overall effect. Is the seeing a substitute for, or a complement to, the act? And on average it’s a substitute. Urges are dealt with in a solitary manner through access to the images, not acted out upon real people – on average.

So, we know the argument’s wrong but it is still made.

Then we’ve got this:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The Staunch prize, awarded to a thriller in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered, was launched last year to “offer an alternative narrative to stories based around violence to women”. When it was announced, it was widely criticised by major writers including Val McDermid and Sophie Hannah. McDermid said that “as long as men commit appalling acts of misogyny and violence against women, I will write about it so that it does not go unnoticed”, and Hannah told her publishers not to submit her books for the prize.[/perfectpullquote]

Writing about such violence is a good thing. Depicting the same events on film is terribly bad. No doubt it’s a dreadful demand for mansplaining to ask why?