CURRENT MOON

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

I. Am. Not. Fucking. Sorry.


The brilliant snake Goddess Echidne has the full story on the young woman who was gang raped at college and rescued by a few young women soccer players.

Noting that "One of the guys who was in the room said 'This is her fault. She got drunk and she did this to herself.'", Echidne reports that:

"When I looked in, I saw about ten pairs of legs surrounding a girl, lying on the mattress on the floor and a guy on top of her with his pants down and his hips thrusting on top of her," recall Chief Elk. "And when I saw that I knew immediately something wasn't right. It just didn't look right."
"I saw that this young girl did not want to be in there, and that's when we just went 'We're getting this girl out of there,'" says Grolle.
April and Lauren -- along with a third soccer player named Lauren Breayans -- broke down the door and were shocked with what they found.
"This poor girl was not moving. She had vomit dribbling down her face. We had to scoop vomit out of her mouth [and] lift her up. Her pants were completely off her body," says Chief Elk. "She had her one shoe one, her jeans were wrapped around one of her ankles and her underwear was left around her ankles. To the left of the bed there was some condom thrown on the ground."
"When they lifted her head up, her eyes moved and she said 'I'm sorry,'" says Grolle.


Interestingly, Josh Wheadon, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, recently posted about his concern over an American movie entitled, creatively enough, "Captivity."

I watched the trailer for “Captivity”.

A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”


Now, I find that rather interesting. Whether we're discussing a movie in which, for men's entertainment, a woman is kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly, and horrifically tortured, or whether we're discussing real life, in which, for men's entertainment, a woman is gang-raped and her mouth filled with someone else's vomit -- the first words that the woman utters to her torturers are, "I'm sorry."

And I think that tells us everything that we will ever need to know about (1) the patriarchy and (2) precisely how far we have not yet come.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sure many wingnuts will get off on movies like that.

filkertom said...

Horrific. I can understand the instinct at least superficially -- "Why would someone be doing something like this to me? I must've done something wrong" -- but, yeah, the misogyny and expectation of the woman's apology for what's being done to her just burns.

Fidelbogen said...

Good thing not many people are quite that twisted...