a sense of joy and then a panic

This post began with a slightly meandering article by Roxane Gay at The Rumpus about the words we use to write about rape.  While I think she needs to interrogate herself as a writer a bit more - "I write about sexual violence a great deal in my fiction. The why of this writerly obsession doesn’t matter," she says, but yeah-huh, it does matter - but the beginning is a fine criticism of a New York Times article about a gang rape in Cleveland, Texas (bold mine).

The Times article was entitled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question was the town itself. James McKinley Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. There was discussion of how the eleven-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a twenty-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can “ask for it” and that it’s somehow understandable that eighteen men would rape a child. There were even questions about the whereabouts of the mother, given, as we all know, that a mother must be with her child at all times or whatever ill may befall the child is clearly the mother’s fault. Strangely, there were no questions about the whereabouts of the father while this rape was taking place.

The overall tone of the article was what a shame it all was, how so many lives were affected by this one terrible event. Little addressed the girl, the child. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not a town. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose life was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her.

You do notice this a lot in news articles about rape, especially in small towns or suburban communities, and especially - maybe exclusively - when the suspects are teenaged boys.  It's as if the boys are as much a victim as the girl.  I think it can be worth investigating how a town reacts to a gang rape (Glen Ridge, NJ, for example), but sometimes I wonder: how many times do we need to hear the same opinions from these seemingly identical, wagon-circling communities?  The article claimed to be probing "how could their young men have been drawn into the act," whatever that means, but that's not actually where they went with the article.  Because then the article would actually talk about, you know, motive to rape, tendencies toward violence, domestic violence in the town, etc.  Instead the article probed "how could their young men have fucked this little girl?" (oh, she looked older than she was - got it - that means they're not pedophiles, so that's good). 

I get that the Times was soliciting neighbors' opinions and these were the neighbors' opinions, but why is this actually worth a story?  No duh, the neighbors blamed the girl and pitied the boys and bemoaned the state (reputation?) of their town.  I could have figured that in my sleep.  Why is this worth repeating and promoting in the form of an article that does not offer any analysis of their opinion?  Do they deserve some kind of public outlet because they bred a bunch of predators?  Because that might have been an interesting line of inquiry: so how and why did you instill these values in your young men, Cleveland, TX?  Otherwise, I don't care about their ruined community.  Their ruined community is not a human interest story.  Just like I do not care about how The Ryan White Story offended the residents of Kokomo, Indiana.  Sometimes towns deserve to be pilloried.  Sorry, but there it is.  I mean, this NYT article actually says:

“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

Classic.  Pathetic.  These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives?  What about the girl they raped?  Is it because the boys seem like a greater loss to the town, I wonder - the loss of these promising young men to the justice system, when good men are hard to find (whereas an 11-year-old girl that they all but say dressed like a whore, well, who cares, they're a dime a dozen)?  Is it overwhelming sympathy and empathy for the families of the suspects, even though as one commenter at the Rumpus suggests, they apparently raised rapists (whereas this girl's mother, well, she's the one that let this happen)?  Is it the instinct that seems to pop up whenever something bad happens in one's community, to generalize it until it's so broad that you too can claim to be personally affected and devastated, because goddamn if you're going to let this selfish child hog all the attention?  Or is it just easier to write articles about reactionary people being reactionary, predictable people being predictable?  Maybe it's just an example of communal value, and communal priorities (as Hot Fuzz says, the greater good!), overriding individual value.

In any case, Roxane Gay is one of many people to have complained about this article, and the NYTimes has issued two responses.  There are some very biting comments replying to the second response, and it's worth reading.  My favorite:

“She’s 11 years old. It shouldn’t have happened. That’s a child. Somebody should have said, ‘What we are doing is wrong.’” Implying what, it would have been fine if she was an adult? How reassuring that there's a "voice of reason" in the community.

Yes, such are the questions that we should be asking indeed.  But coverage of rape always sounds the same.

I mentioned a while back that I got a free copy of The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, through a give-away at SF Signal.  I've finished it.  It is one of the worst books I have ever read - but maybe I'm the wrong reader for it, because I don't read the action thrillers that this thing is modeled on. 

I suspect that a lot of readers are just happy that these vampires are not Twilight vampires.  Indeed, they are unmistakably fiendish, murderous, grotesque.  They even defecate as they drain you of blood!  While I sympathize with the "finally, GORE!" crowd, these vampires aren't really vampires either.  They're more like zombies.  Can you imagine Lucy shambling down the road in a bathrobe, flailing mindlessly for anything that's got a vein available?  No.  Vampires are supposed to have some degree of charisma, some amount of style - I'm the person who thinks Herzog's Nosferatu is one of the most gorgeous and romantic movies ever.  They are not supposed to be a sexless horde.  Yes, The Strain's monsters suck blood.  But they fit the zombie category better.  Same with the vampires in the I Am Legend movie.*

Onto the thing that really bothered me.  More than the bad writing and unconvincing battle scenes (several Amazon reviewers mention the improbability of an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor with broken hands being the kick-ass action hero that he is), more than the repetition of vampires attacking their neighbors and turtle-slow pacing: I accurately predicted what would happen to the main characters. 

The main character (MC) is a "handsome," "genius" CDC dude who's in the middle of a divorce.  He really, really, really wants to be around his son Zach, who is just like him, brilliant and intense, etc.  Unfortunately, his beautiful ex-wife (who was the one calling MC a "handsome" "genius"), who never understood him and was always second to his work, wants custody of Zach.  And she has a new boyfriend who MC thinks is trying to replace him in Zach's life.  New boyfriend is pathetic (works at Sears) and sniveling.  Also, MC has a new love interest, who also works at the CDC (has the potential to understand his brilliance!) and gets along with Zach.  

So I'm like, hmm.  Clearly new boyfriend is going to die a horrible death.  Clearly Zach is going to end up with his rightful father.  If not for the new love interest, ex-wife would also end up with the MC, but given the new love interest, she will also die to make way for the MC's new and improved family.  I knew this because it is the plot offered up by disaster movies such as 2012 and War of the Worlds**.

I was exactly right.  Not only did new boyfriend turn into a vampire, providing the MC with the opportunity to stab him repeatedly (I think this was actually narrated in the book as stabstabstab), but the ex-wife was turned into a vampire who now wants to steal away Zach, the bitch!  One of the final lines of the book?  "The custody battle for Zach was not over."  She escapes to presumably reappear in the second book, as the MC laments that she will "haunt Zach forever."  And the girlfriend?  She stays behind in the final battle to take care of Zach. 

This kind of thing really bothers me, and I'm trying to figure out why.  For one I'm not sure about a custody battle subsuming the end of human life in New York City.  And on a basic level, it seems unrealistic as hell.  Disasters - or genocides - are not typically wish fulfillment scenarios (imagine if instead of vampires, people were being annihilated by an army instead; imagine the outrage that would ensue from trotting out genocide as an excuse for the main character to get whatever he wants [assuming he's seen as righteous and not a war profiteer, of course]).  Then there's the nasty little "why are you so special that the disaster works out aces for you, when everyone else is dying?  why should I be happy for you?" feeling, like it just doesn't seem fair, or justified.  But of course who am I to criticize what someone else wants to do with their story?  Why do I even want stories to be fair/justified?  I wouldn't care if the MC wasn't also this heroic figure that we're supposed to cheer for - I love to hate Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22, for example - but this book is written in such a way that there's no negotiating what side you're on, no unreliable narrator, no perspective except for the MC's.  Maybe I'd prefer it if the MC was scheming to use the vampire apocalypse to get Zach, get rid of his ex-wife, impress his girlfriend.  Etc.  Sure, he'd be a dickface.  But he'd be more interesting.  It would seem more accurate.  The outcome would not be inexplicable. 

And then there's the whole Hooray for Patriarchy aspect of it all.  Mothers are pretty much all doomed in The Strain, and by doomed I mean "turned evil."  There are two female characters of any importance - the ex-wife and the girlfriend, both defined entirely by their relationship to the MC - and the ex-wife goes bad, of course, while the girlfriend is billed as this sort of tough, smart counterpart to the MC but is really just the MC's toadie and on-call baby sitter.  She mostly stands back and screams in horror.  Two other female characters at least appear repeatedly: a blood-sucking lawyer turned vampire who eats her neighbor's kids (and then hunts her own kids) and just wants to get rich off lawsuits, and an unstable OCD-afflicted housewife who kills herself when her husband becomes a vampire (because she needs him to survive).  Contrast with the only vampire who shows any degree of complexity and morality - OCD housewife's husband, who nobly chains himself up in the shed so that he won't hurt his family.  D'awww.  Maybe this would make a good Father's Day present or something.  Certainly not a good Mother's Day present.  A father's love is protective, self-sacrificing, virtuous.  A mother's love is possessive, harmful/deadly, frightening.  What the fuck, you know?

* I suspect that somebody who's well-versed in the I Am Legend story could argue that it influenced The Strain, but that somebody is not me.
** To give W of the Worlds credit, though, it doesn't kill off mom's new boyfriend (or mom, but mom only dies if there's someone to take her place anyway).  I also appreciate W of the Worlds for clearly showing Tom Cruise's character's flaws - i.e., showing why his wife got a divorce, why he doesn't have custody.  In the case of 2012, though, mom's new boyfriend actually steps aside and then dies so that the "real family" can be together.