"Fascinating and Depressing": Discussion Highlights from Week One
Your thoughts on Part One of "Flowers of Fire": “#MeToo, #WithYou”
Thanks to all readers who contributed their thoughts to the first week of our Flowers of Fire book club. Here are some comments that stood out when we read Part 1, “#MeToo, #WithYou.”
This is really fascinating and depressing. The overall effect for me was a sort of kaleidoscoping of multiple eras of experiences of women in the American workforce that somehow were condensed into a much shorter time span. So, most of the elements described felt familiar to stories I've read/heard about women in the US workforce. Think Mad Men, for instance. And yet, to see all of these elements overlap and coexist was strange, different.
But also, I'm yet again reminded of the difficulty in most cultures in world history (past or present) of recognizing why rape is wrong. Without a Judeo-Christian ethic of the dignity of human beings and their bodies, arriving at anything resembling genuine human dignity and the valuing of persons seems quite difficult.
The “speedrun” quality of the change stood out to me, too. It’s a tricky balance, where you want justice to come as quickly as possible, but a speedy social revolution can leave people without any idea what the new rules are.
Nobel-prize-winner Claudia Goldin has an interesting recent paper on how fast social change suppresses fertility, since social norms break and take time to reform.
As to the "too many criminals to jail" question, we could grapple with the question of whether jail is a useful concept in this situation. Jail is too late, too slow, too expensive, too unrelated to the crime, and too easy to get out of, as well as being very likely to reinforce the rape mindset as revenge.
We need something that is prompt and painful if we want to actually avoid this behavior, but short and cheap so it will actually be carried ou
As far as changing culture. I go more towards changing the picture in people's heads, which means dealing with porn or making strings of rom-coms in Korean where men behave wonderfully and get the love of the heroine as a result. Preferably there is a plot line where they beat up a smart-mouthed bully of women along the way. (Rom-coms are big in South Korea.)
It left me wanting more stories about fathers and sons, where a father tries to prepare his son to live better than he did. And speaking of male voices and stories…
wanted to hear more perspectives in the reporting:I would have liked to get a deeper and more nuanced sense of South Korean culture, and how people (ideally all sorts... women, men, older people, younger people, etc etc) feel about the cultural changes. The book's presentation was so dominated by the adversarial paradigm (women pushing back against a patriarchal culture!) that it was hard to get much sense of the contours of the cultural conversation and how it's developing.
I’d say the book has a strongly “third person limited” point of view in its reporting and the author has a perceptible admiration for her subjects.
I think we’ll come back to this point next week, where I would have liked to hear more from men who were furious about being treated as they had treated women about what their thought process was.
We’ll start to see the backlash forming, but we don’t have the same intimate view of it.
Over at Other Feminisms, I asked readers about where they’d seen people go through a deep, rapid revaluation of values on sexual relations, and
had a film recommendation:I have no idea how to address things on a societal level, but you (and readers) might be interested in the 1976 film "Not a Pretty Picture." It's an experimental film where the director recreated the scene of her own rape, with her younger self played by a young woman who had also been raped as a teenager, and the film includes a lot of discussion by all of the actors about what they have been taught about rape. It's the 1970s so nobody has any idea what boundaries are, which means that the young actors of both sexes are really candid in describing the basically pro-rape things they still to some extent believe. They work through some of those beliefs on camera. Obviously an extremely grueling watch, but also an example of people seeking to unlearn the beliefs that make rape hard to prevent or combat.
Join us next week for a discussion of Part Two: “Where Did All the Girls Go?”