[A recent Letter To The Editor in SI. I couldn’t agree more.]
After years of seeing athletes being convicted of spousal abuse, the lopsided outrage over dogfighting shows the insanity of our society. Dogfighting is bad but nowhere near as horrible as a man beating his wife or girlfriend.
- Jamey P., NY
The first few minutes of this just gives me chills considering how close we still are to the Benoit double-murder and suicide. For a business that supposedly has been reeling since the massacre, I find it absolutely ridiculous that they use “storylines” like this. As i’m sitting here listening to Kurt Angle (and, yes, I know these are fake, soap opera storylines with scripted dialogue) talk about how much of a “loving, caring and compassionate” person he is, I can’t help but remember how the wrestling community swarmed around Chris Benoit to say how great of a guy he was, how much of a “family man” he was and how professional he was with his work. All of this despite how he had murdered his wife and son.
It would be a great understatement to say that this is simply in poor taste but TNA wrestling doesn’t stop there. If you don’t watch the entire thing it’s basically an eye-roll enducing characterization of an abusive husband, the woman who is being emotionally (and suggestively physically) abused and the knight in shining armor protector who comes in to kick the abuser’s ass and save the abused woman as she tells the abuser that she’s leaving him. One could say that this is in some way a positive portayal…that the abuser (Angle) got his ass kicked and that his wife left him, all of which resulted from his asshole personality and the way he treated his wife. But of course at the other side of the coin we have the Somoa Joe character, the fan favorite, who comes to Karen’s aid after Angle begins to berate Karen. But is it a positive portrayal? I don’t think it is necessarily. I don’t buy that since our standards for wrestling are so low, we have to say “yea, awesome!” to what we would otherwise just scoff at–the focal point being the male hero coming to save the day. If I saw this on any other TV show, which is hard to imagine since nothing else is so hyperbolic in its forced drama than wrestling, it’d be pretty troubling to see. Yea you could say that the woman telling Angle tell basically fuck off is pretty great…but she leaves the ring, the camera isn’t on her anymore as the attention is all on Joe as he is who the audience now identifies with and cheers for.
(To be continued…)
The longer this Michael Vick thing goes and the more I hear about animal rights activists so loudly saying how evil he is and how he should burn in hell, the more I wonder what these people are thinking when Bosox Julio Lugo takes his wife’s head and slams it on the hood of his car. I wonder where these people are when MLB rising star Elijah Dukes sends his wife a voicemail message of “you dead, dawg.” I wonder where the boycotts and picket lines are when the Denver Broncos give a hefty contract extension to a player who has had repeated run-ins with the law for repeatedly beating his wife.
Dogs don’t deserve the barbaric treatment that they get in these dog-fighting circles, I get that. I get that they can’t speak out for themselves so that’s why people need to do the speaking. I get that everyone is going after Vick because he’s the big, famous target of the most popular sport in America and maybe then people will stop and think before they raise a dog to fight. What I don’t get is how people can prioritize injustices in such a way that basically says that cruelty against dogs is more important of an issue…is an issue that people are more passionate about and organize quickly for…than men’s violence against women.
[Real question that we ask at the New Job, real answer from a single mother]
Q: What do you hope your son or daughter will learn over time from this experience?
A: To learn to respect women.
I’ve always had a thing for cooking/food shows but without cable, my viewing options are pretty limited in this regard. So for the past few seasons or so, i’ve watched Hell’s Kitchen in an “if it’s on i’ll watch it” sort of way. If you’ve been watching this season, you know the contestant of Rock and that he is, as he’s shown today, an asshole with what I really think is an abusive personality. I know, I know it’s a reality show and i’m sure everyone’s real personality there is warped and such but there’s no denying what he did and said on the last episode. Though Rock didn’t lay a finger on anyone on the show, his intimidation of namely the other female contestants through verbal abuse and direct but not so direct that he’d get kicked off the show threats just really stink of one who gets what he wants by putting fear into others (women) and thus controlling them. For those who don’t watch the show, basically he “blew up” and “lost control” after he’d been sucking ass in the competition, been sniping back and forth with a female chef and said chef asked him to put a bowl of something near the sink to which he didn’t and said something along the lines of “I don’t jump when you say jump.” He then proceeded to call this woman (and another woman who came to her defense) bitch this and broad that all while splicing in the after-hours commentary of “I like working with women in the kitchen…but not these bitches.” Throughout his raging verbal attack of the two female chefs, he did some of this including “you don’t want to mess with me” as he’d walk past one of the two women, slam some kitchen utensils and trays around, stop to say what he was going to say and then proceed. It’s hard to remember all of the shit he said, it was just so much but if i’m missing anything, he roared on about “don’t fucking talk to me” “get the fuck outta me way” or some nonsense. But the idea is pretty clear. My dad destroyed furniture and punched walls in his moments of “rage” when he argued with my mom. He would always tell me that no matter what, he’d never hit my mom but it didn’t clear away the fact that he used physical intimidation to get what he wanted.
At the old job, there were many, many men who acted like this. When someone stands up or doesn’t take their shit, they throw an adult man-tantrum and try to intimidate their way through life. They know enough to not say “i’m going to kill you” but then again when you’ve got an abusive personality, you learn to blur the lines enough so that dumbasses like the show’s producers and Chef Ramsey don’t call him out and instead simply say “stop arguing.”
Come to think of it, I think in the last season of Hell’s Kitchen, there was another douchebag of a male chef who, after having lost a gender vs. gender competition, barked back at the women with something like “shut your mouths…women belong in the kitchen, get your ass back in there, woman.” But anyways.
While I was thinking about this abusive piece of shit, I wondered if I was being biased in seeing what he was doing as abusive when Chef Ramsey (some could argue) appears to do the same thing. Rock is Black and Chef Ramsey is White. Some could argue that through subtle layers of subconscious racism, I hold Black guys to a higher standard and that Chef Ramsey gets away with the same thing day after day. But I don’t think that’s the case. Sure, Chef Ramsey is verbally abusive (and sexist) in his comments to the different contestants and sure what he says is just awful all of the time, but the aspects of that abusive personality stop there. From what i’ve seen, he doesn’t say “don’t mess with me” which is a nice way of saying “don’t mess with me or i’m going to inflict harm on you” and he sure as hell doesn’t walk around the kitchen slamming shit around for the sole purpose of putting fear into the other people, namely the female contestants.
That Rock wasn’t eliminated in the last show makes me physically sick because Chef Ramsey didn’t for a second take into account Rock’s abusive (and i’m saying this word again because that’s what it is and there’s no better word for it nor is there a reason to use any other word) behavior and that to me reflects on an inability or unwillingness for Ramsey and the rest of the show’s team to say to the world “you may be a great chef, but if you’re going to treat people like that, if you’re going to treat women like that, fuck off because we don’t want you to represent our show.”
Q: You sound awful.
A: It’s the flu. I’m getting my ass kicked. I had to take a day off work the other day.
Q: You aren’t supposed to do that, aren’t you? You’re still training?
A: Yea, but if you’re sick you’re sick.
Q: When did it start?
A: Wednesday night, after I watched Transformers.
Q: Transformers made you sick, figures.
A: I thought it was good, actually. I mean, there were some eye-rolling moments with the “it’s gotta be Japanese” lines and “I always fall for the bad boys” moments and such but overall, it was fun. I don’t understand the folks who say “it’s too serious” or “it’s not serious enough.” It’s robots turning into cars and ships, after all.
Q: Didn’t mind all the GMC/Chevy ads then?
A: It’s to the point where I think viewers are used to it. I wish they could’ve been a little more subtle but it’s certainly not as bad as…say the Dr. Pepper shot in Spiderman. I think the ad-campaign by the automakers makes it worse than it is in the movie.
Q: So what’s been new otherwise?
A: Work. An under-wraps project that I won’t talk about at length (and jinx) until it’s out. Ummm, friend’s birthday coming up, so I managed to finally use that Amazon gift cert I had originally saved up for a camera I wanted to buy.
Q: What’d you get for the present?
A: Season one of….a certain TV show. DHARMAINITIATIVE*cough
Q: I hope he’s not reading this.
A: I don’t think he is.
Q: Do any of your in-person friends know about this?
A: No, I doubt it. They’d have to dig around a bit to find it. Or get at it through the Flickr.
Q: Why don’t you want them to read it?
A: Eh, it’s the lesson I learned from the first blog.
Q: You learned a lot of lessons from that “trial” I imagine.
A: Oh yea.
Q: You want to buy a camera? What for? You’ve already got one.
A: The most advertised feature of mine is that it also doubles as an MP3 player. And it was a gift. From my uncle who I don’t like. It’s time for an upgrade.
Q: What are you hungry for?
A: Nachos. Not really. I wish I wanted nachos so I could go get them. I have zero appetite right now. I could’ve gone the entire day yesterday on tea but I forced myself to eat a salad and then a mini-pizza.
Q: You’re about to say something?
A: A certain flickr group popped into my head just now. I posted about it a long time ago, but basically it’s a group called “feminism” and a majority of the photos people add there I have no idea how they’re related to feminism. So someone posed the question in the group…and the first response was something like “women are beautiful, mothers and nature” and stuff like then and then later on a guy chimes in with the old “this is a good discussion to have” and then proceeds to talk about how his photos (almost voyueristic photos of mainly young, white, attractive women) are somehow a comment on feminism. I don’t get it.
Q: People want views and subscribers. Hence they add their photos to every single group they belong to.
A: Yea.
Q: Are you going to talk about Chris Benoit?
A: God. I’ll just say that while i’m not a medical professional and I don’t know with intimate knowledge the effects of steroid use…just the way in which people are making this out to be purely roid rage is just ridiculous. It’s like a bad SVU episode. Society will always find ways to minimize, evade, cover up domestic violence, men’s violence against women, etc. If we suddenly found out that Dubya physically assaulted his wife, people would start saying that he’s just crazy, stupid and power-hungry. While the latter certainly is true for DV abusers, people just wouldn’t say “hey, it’s a man hitting a woman.”
Q: In Dubya’s case it seems like they’d concentrate on him though and not “the victim” which is unusual for how society reacts.
A: Right, it’s a different case because obviously the man is who he is. But in either way, it situates the abuse in a certain way to avoid looking at it directly. It’s like taking a side-glance at Dubya and focusing solely on him to avoid even considering that it’s indicative of a larger societal problem.
Is that this is yet another murder-suicide. WWE won’t say it on their official press release having just put on a three-hour tribute to the man but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that we see yet again another tragedy of a man killing his wife/ex-girlfriend/estranged partner and his children and then killing himself.
Update: I can’t believe people are putting up Benoit tributes everywhere. Well, I can believe it but it’s still some bullshit. I don’t care if the guy was Mr. Spectacular 2007, it’s not as if he died from some accident or got hit by a truck…he murdered his wife and kid and then killed himself. He now deserves a tribute for his life accomplishments? Really?
One of the routine things I do/places I visit as part of going online is checking out Yahoo!’s “Most Popular” page. They highlight the stuff that shouldn’t be popular (Paris Hilton back in jail!), the stuff that’s popular only for the day’s digg-like headline (Dog and Cat in love!) and then the stuff that otherwise sort of gets tucked under the rug.
Most times, that other stuff is of the global context and today is a prime example. Stuff like this really makes me question what i’m doing job-wise, where i’m putting my energy, and most of all, what the hell is wrong with people.