Misogyny Re-loaded by Abigail Bray;

Author:Abigail, Bray;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spinifex Press
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

3.2 The Laughter of Fascists

Watching the whole 12-minute video of the leaked Steubenville rape, where young men joke and laugh about a drugged and unconscious rape victim being dead, is an eerie experience. The video focuses on one male in particular.62 There is an unnerving way in which the laughing podgy middle-class white boy, who sits with his legs spread apart on a chair, occasionally scratching his crotch, one hand clutching a smart phone that he frequently slaps against his legs, seems innocuous. He is smiling, squirming in his seat with uncontrollable laughter, and having a good time. He looks wholesome, if a little over-fed. His expression seems completely bereft of malice, he looks open, happy, an all-American fun-loving dude. The whole room is full of laughing males. In the face of all this raucous laughter, my failure to laugh, my awareness that my expression was horrified, made me pause, momentarily. I felt the presence of something instructing me to smile and laugh, a subtle ‘boys will be boys’ message which nudged me to lighten up and indulge their humour. But then I listened to what he and the rest of the males were saying and any possibility of laughter vanished.

This uncanny moment made me realise that the disconnect between someone laughing and smiling and what they are actually saying as they laugh is powerful. And I realised that I had experienced this disconnect countless times in the past when men had delivered insults with smiles, had thrown their heads back and laughed at my shocked expression. Hadn’t I also learnt how to smile and laugh with them in order to avoid being subjected to overtly violent verbal abuse? There were many times when I had not laughed, when I had called out the abuse for what it was, but most of the times I had done this had led to exhausting arguments. I had often smiled weakly and decided to make an exit, despairing inwardly at how many men pass abuse off as a joke. And also thinking, at times, that a smiling laughing misogynist was better than a screaming and openly violent one. The abusive humour was not, in my experience, the speciality of bad-taste working-class men: I’d heard it from barristers, upper-middle-class journalists, politicians, professors, psychologists, musicians, environmental scientists, and so on. Contemptuous smiles, satirical comments, patronising responses that frame women as laughable idiots, or hysterical psychos, a thousand carefully aimed nasty put-downs said with an ironic smirk and a malicious laugh disguised as healthy good humour.

While the laughter of the all-American dude on the video seems spontaneous at first, it very quickly becomes forced. As soon as I notice this, I also notice that a rifle is casually lying on the floor behind his chair. He searches, almost desperately for another joke, another way of describing her death—she is as “dead as O.J. Simpsons’ wife,” hahaha, she is as “dead as Robert Kennedy,” hahaha, “maybe her dying wish was to be raped,” hahaha, and so on, and so forth.

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