WUNRN
USA - HIGH SCHOOL "PREDATOR
& PREY DAY" - BOYS HUNT GIRLS - CRITICAL REVIEWS
By Piper Hoffman - September 17, 2012
A high school in
The Grand Forks Herald reported that the idea originated
with the student council. School superintendent Chris Bates said that the “kids
saw it as a fun thing and didn’t see that it could be taken in another way,”
adding that “hunting in this area is pretty popular.” I’m not sure what he meant
by “another way” — there is really only one way to take the planned costumes:
boys chase with malicious intent, and girls run, just like hunters and deer.
You know rape culture has really seeped in when both students and
officials at a high school see no problem casting boys as armed hunters and
girls as helpless animals. According to UpsettingRapeCulture.com,
“In a rape culture, people are surrounded with images, language, laws, and
other everyday phenomena that validate and perpetuate rape. Rape culture
includes jokes, TV, music, advertising, legal jargon, laws, words and imagery,
that make violence against women and sexual coercion seem” normal.
The high school debacle
echoes another recent example of rape culture, an ad for Dos Equis beer that advised (male)
viewers, “Approach women like you do wild animals, with caution and a
soothing voice.” Fortunately Dos Equis removed the ad, but the belief system that inspired the
idea and allowed advertising and beer executives to approve it hasn’t changed:
Americans still view women as prey for hunters to do with as they will.
The domination of animals
is as integral to “Prey and Predator Day,” and to its successor, “Camo Day,” as
rape culture is. A theory called ecofeminism regards the oppression of women and the
domination of animals as interconnected. Consider the men who mount
antlers on their trucks, and the ones who display mudflaps featuring pin-up
silhouettes. And the men who hang stags’ heads on their walls, or hang nudie
calendars instead. These are all considered “macho” statements that real men
enjoy killing helpless animals and ogling defenseless women.
But we can’t ignore that
the students came up with this idea, and presumably that included some female
students. Maybe when Bates said they didn’t think their event could be
“taken in another way,” he meant that of course girls are supposed to like
being hunted by powerful and violent men, and it wasn’t supposed to be taken as
anything non-consensual. After all, that mudflap lady looks pretty content. It’s a twist on rape
culture: not only is rape normal–girls dress and preen for it and find it
flattering.
But back in reality, as
local resident Ileanna Noyes put it, “Really, in this day and age, you think
it’s OK to have the mentality of the men as predators and the women as pretty
prey? And that’s adults doing this?…How absurd. How appalling.”
Exactly.
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Via 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign - Discussion List
By Jeanne Sarson MEd, BScN, RN - http://nonstatetorture.org/what-is-nsat-and-rat/ - Persons Against Non-State Torture including Ritual-Abuse Torture
As shocking but yet not
surprising as this article, On ‘Predator
and Prey Day’ Boys Hunt Girls, by Piper Hoffman is,
it is a very important piece of reporting. There is another layer of importance
that is not addressed probably because it consists of a reality that has yet to
be disclosed. I will disclose it now.
My colleague, Linda MacDonald, and I have been, since 1993, grass
root supporters and human right defenders of women mainly who have survived
torture by private persons or non-state actors. In the course of these almost
20 years we have been trusted to hear their life-threatening ordeals. These
ordeals have included being told of “hunting games”. For example, one woman
spoke of being taken to cabins in the woods and told to start running that she
was going to be hunted down. She ran and guns were fired. Of course there is
never an escape. A childhood ‘story’ involving human trafficking, which has
always been present in the non-state torture ordeals that we have experienced
listening to, mean the woman when she was a young child was taken to a strange
city. Taken out onto the street she was told to start running so that the
torturers could have the pleasure of chasing her down. ‘Hunting games’ are
about the torturers considering ‘creative’ ways to satisfy the pleasures
derived from the infliction of terror.
So, for Linda and I this article is most important. It enables us
to tell and write of the ‘hunting game’ stories that have been entrusted to us.
It enables us to refer to the article in a manner that lends support to the
reality of ‘hunting games’. It helps to remove the denial we usually are
confronted with when we speak of the ‘creative’ brutalities are non-state
torturers inflict.
The other point I make is that Linda and I have also been told
that necrophilic bestiality occurs during hunting seasons—the hunter rapes his
kill. So the ‘hunting game’ described in Piper Hoffman’s article must be taken
seriously for many many reasons. The attitudes and pleasures such ‘games’
trigger can be inter-generationally dangerous but could also be deadly.
Classic non-state torture is an emerging human rights violation,
it has been a struggle to have it visibilized, but it must be if humanity is to
progress.
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