Everyday sadism
So another item from the Washington Post snagged my attention while I was reading the first one – sidebars work, kids! It snagged my attention so I read it, in horror.
A Playboy Playmate found this normal woman’s naked body gross. So she posted it online.
Because it’s important for the world at large to see and judge random people’s naked bodies.
Dani Mathers, Playboy’s 2015 Playmate of the Year, was at L.A. Fitness on Wednesday when the body of a fellow gym-goer offended her. The 29-year-old took to Snapchat to post the woman’s body — naked, on her story.
The caption: “If I can’t see unsee this then you can’t either.” It pictured Mathers, sporting weight-lifting gloves and a Nike tank top, covering her mouth in false-shock. What resulted was likely thousands looking at this woman’s nude body, fat-shamed by a blond Playmate, on Mathers’s public Snapchat.
Now it’s her turn to be shamed all over social media, so in a sense I shouldn’t join in by blogging about it…But I am anyway, because this kind of casual sadism interests me. It interests me partly, but only partly, because I’ve been subjected to a huge amount of it myself. Because of that I’ve learned that there are a surprisingly large number of people who are ostensibly adult, intelligent, in some sense thoughtful, who are perfectly comfortable doing this kind of thing. That is surprising to me, because it seems like being perfectly comfortable touching a red-hot stove burner.
What possessed her? What caused her to feel (rather than think) that her distaste for a stranger’s body justified her in taking a picture of it and publishing the picture online? What causes people to feel that way?
I suppose it’s partly to do with the relentless perfectionism of US media culture and porn culture, with the relentless exclusion from tv and movies of women who are too old too fat too plain too average too ordinary too flawed too not like a Playboy model. I suppose it’s partly to do with a culture that pretends women who are lawyers look like Julianna Margulies and women who are cops look like Mariska Hargitay. That perhaps partly explains the demented perfectionism, but it doesn’t explain the sadism.
One thing that occurred to me when I saw this story is that there’s a nonzero chance that Mathers will look very similar to her victim in 20 years. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happened to me, and it happens to a lot of people. Fortunately I wasn’t raised in a barn, so it never occurred to me when I was younger to ridicule the bodies of people who were older, fatter, uglier and less healthy than I was. I stopped listening to a few atheist/progressive podcasts because the young men hosting them didn’t seem to have a problem mocking people whose bodies didn’t meet their exacting standards; I remember writing to one of them something like ‘I sincerely hope that someday when you’re old, fat and sick you won’t be the subject of ridicule by people younger, thinner and healthier than you.’
Huh. I’m a bad person – I hope they will be subject to ridicule.
What’s new (and heartening) is people being outraged about it. Mathers’ casual contempt is as common as grass.
Touching a red-hot stove burner hurts the touchee.
Mathers’ “apology” is also noteworthy:
(From the LA Times.)
It was absolutely what she meant to do (though maybe she did not mean to make the photo public.) She didn’t take a photo, caption it, and post it, accidentally.
You meant to do it, Dani. That is the type of person you are.
I know, but that’s my point. Imagining myself doing what Mathers did is painful in that way. It’s not just a rule that I wouldn’t violate because it’s a rule, the thought of it makes me squirm with anguish.
Lordy – her video apology – she says she took the photo for a private conversation. HEY!! You’re not allowed to take naked photos of people in locker rooms without their permission EVEN FOR A PRIVATE CONVERSATION.
I also often wonder about women such as the one from the opening post. Does she have a long history of cruel behavior towards others? Will she ever stop being abusive? Will public shaming get her to change her behavior? It definitely got the fitness centers to change, and it increased the awareness of the problem across the internet.
To me, the big question is, what is the best approach or approaches to get that type of abusive behavior stopped.
For example, in my own community we have a woman who has been very abusive to a wide variety of people, often targeting other women more successful than herself. Suspecting that she might have been abused as a child, the community initially was very sympathetic to her and incredibly patient. The community tried very hard for many years but still hasn’t been able to stop her inappropriate behavior. They tried to compliment her on good work and cooperative behavior. Even some kind, well-intentioned people made sure to give her various projects/positions with leadership components so she would have opportunities to shine. This sounded like a good idea at first. Sadly, this approach backfired and served only to reward her abusive behavior. Community members watched in horror as the frequency of her abuse increased and so did the number of her victims.
So what is the best approach or approaches to get this type of abusive behavior stopped when someone goes off the rails?
Would it help if we increased efforts to raise awareness of mental health issues (resources, destigmatization)? Should we be lobbying for better and more effective healthcare at the government level? How can we best help the many victims who have already been hurt by the abuse of the woman? What can family and close friends do to help the woman (encourage her to get professional help, be good role models, discourage her from contacting her past victims – they need their safe spaces)? What can others do (shine a bright internet light on the problem, warn individuals on the whisper network)? One thing is clear, her problem isn’t going away any time soon. It’s going to take a whole village to solve this one.
Just my two cents.
kayla@6:
I don’t know what your community is that you speak of, but this question reminds me of a familiar aphorism: “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior”. People do not, generally, change. At least, that is, not through the efforts of others, at least in my experience. All you can really do is decide whether you want that person in your community/life, or not. Hoping to get them to change with carrots on sticks is a probably going to be hopeless.
This type of abusive behavior will stop when people no longer see ugly women as subhuman punchlines.
I’ll say it again: Dani’s attitude is common (I said, “common as grass.” I should have said, “common as dirt.”) I lived as the target of this sort of cruelty for decades.
Kayla, your abusive community member may have a personality disorder. If so, giving them more power is a recipe for disaster. They aren’t going to change. They don’t feel bad about what they do.
But dealing with individuals one by one won’t help much. The way to deal with cruelty like Mathers’ is to work toward values opposed to hers. In Opposite Daniland, women are commonly perceived as full human beings, not decorative objects, and cruelty toward those weaker or less privileged than ourselves is ugly.
I wish we could be rid of the ruinous idea that how a person’s body looks, especially for women, determines how valuable they are as a person.
To Kayla:
You know, there is a solution to abusive behaviour within a community.
REMOVE THE OFFENDER.
I’m sick of communities coddling abusers instead of supporting their targets. You’re losing good people because you’re making excuses for this abusive individual. You’re losing people who actually make a difference, because you’re not seeing how much of a problem the offender is.
I’m so tired of everyone bending over backwards to give the problem a second (third, fourth, fifth…) chance to stop being an abusive nightmare, wringing their hands over “but we can’t *possibly* exclude people, that’s terrible!” – when you’re excluding the people the abuser is targeting, because they can’t deal with the abuse, and shouldn’t have to. It results in gaslighting – “She didn’t mean it like that/she didn’t mean to hurt you/you’re making too much out of this/you’re being too sensitive” – so you’re basically joining in the abuse, and making it impossible for the targets to heal. The more marginalised you are, the more likely you are to be targeted, because it’s so much harder to fight back. You have fewer resources to deal with this behaviour, and enough stuff on your plate already, without adding abuse from within your own community. Refusing to address abuse in that context is simply cruel. Those with more power need to get off their asses and remove the problem. That’s what those people are there for. Got more power? Use it. Don’t leave the burden on those who are least able to carry it.
“Oh, but she’d have such a hard time if we kicked her out!” Really? Too bad. She should have thought of that before she decided to be an abusive nightmare to everyone around her. Stop being cheerleaders for abuse. That’s what you’re doing.
Is kicking someone out an easy solution? No, it rarely is that simple. But the people she’s repeatedly abusing deserve better. Otherwise you’re going to be left with a community entirely composed of horrible people, because everyone else is going to leave. If the “community” refuse to even try to fix the problem, then it deserves to fall apart, because there is a massive problem – abuse should be dealt with. Remove the offender from their targets. Anything else is punishing the target for being chosen by an abuser, and you’re doing the abuser’s work for them.
I have left communities because of this problem, as have many friends and acquaintances – even where we really needed those communities for our survival. We had to leave, and start all over again, while dealing with the fact that we had been targeted by abusers. For some of us, it set off recurrences of things like PTSD because it was that bad. One friend was raped and then attempted suicide because the community refused to deal with their abuser problem. Nobody believed her – because women “don’t matter”.
You have to support the targets (or victims, if that’s how those folks feel). You HAVE to prioritise them over the abusers. You have to.
Am I missing something or does that woman have a physique that is completely within the “normal” range? As in the Body Mass Index we’re told our bodies should conform to?
This woman came up with a nice response to Mathers I think:
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/news/a61546/christine-blackmon-facebook-response-to-dani-mathers-body-shaming/
I don’t know because I haven’t seen her, and didn’t look closely at the ones with smaller bars because she never gave permission for Mathers to take that picture so it felt wrong to look closely. But the first headline I saw said something like “Playmate posts naked photo of normal woman” so yes, I gather she does. But, you know…the point is, she’s not a Playmate, and women who are good enough to be Playmates are much much better than the rest of us, and need to make sure everyone knows it.
Kayla:
Unfortunately, you helped to make the problem by giving the problem person leadership roles in which she could “shine”, and now she’s shining, with an audience for her bullying. Leadership and authority are not things that can be given, as if they were consolation prizes for previous suffering. Once someone with a severe personality disorder becomes embedded within a social group it can be almost impossible to dislodge them from a position of power. This is especially true of social groups that are large enough to provide a steady stream of newcomers or members on the outskirts – people unfamiliar with the pattern of bullying help to sustain her in her position.
In my experience, the only thing that can be done in such a circumstance is to walk away, or at least drift to the outskirts of the group where the bullying won’t have as great an impact.
How old is Mathers? What sort of life has she lived?
Officially ‘hawt’ women live in a bubble even stranger than college athletes. For all her smug superiority, how much of that has been built up in response to relentless objectification that she’s managed to internalize completely?
On the other hand, ‘hawt’ women may be coddled along in terrible behavior by competing women or lusting men.
I haven’t seen the images, but the sidebar thumbnails suggest that Mathers is a surgical artifact as much as anything else.