Framing Determines Content

"We are eating from the trashcan of ideology all the time" etc.

//Content Warning: Discussion of sexual consent; potentially a gloomy read//

The other day I watched an episode of a television programme in which a family are kidnapped – shanghaied really – and imprisoned upon a cruise ship. The father is focused to work as a cook for the ship alongside a disturbed, sexually desperate chef de cuisine; his young children left to find for themselves. His 13-year-old daughter begs a masseur for an intimate massage, sexually gratified by his reluctant aquiescence to massage her scalp. Worse still, his 11-year-old son is groomed by a puppeteer through the use of his busty, sexualised puppet, with which he financially extorts the boy while promising him sexual favours. Eventually, frantic to escape, the father promises sexual favours to the French chef; his son, meanwhile, is forever scarred by the loss of his innocence, the predatory puppeteer only coming clean during a bout of profuse vomiting, an experience so wretched it seems to tap into his remaining vestiges of humanity and guilt.

The name of this show – Bob’s Burgers. Ba dum tish!

The structure I’ve just employed is the same as that of the infamous ‘The Aristocrats’ joke in which a litany of offensive, transgressive and taboo (often sexual and/or scatalogical) behaviour by a family of performers is capped by the relevation that their act’s name is ‘The Aristocrats’. Surely, such a name implies a respectable, famile-friendly act, U or PG-13 rated at the worst… like much of Bob’s Burgers.

However, ‘pull back and reveal’ jokes like that used in the ‘Aristocrats’ routine work because they invert the way in which life usually works: usually, in life, we have the framing context in place before we encounter content. We just don’t notice it.

So, watching Bob’s Burgers, with its chirpy soundtrack and soft, colourful visuals, the viewer isn’t inclined to take its stories of degregation and sexual coercion very seriously. It’s like how when we watch Tom and Jerry we don’t tend to find the extreme violence meted out against Tom disturbing (a possibly exception being the Gene Deitch directed Czech episodes due to the comparative realism of the violence therein).

When considering the above, I’m not especially troubled. I’m not about to start a ‘Justice for Gene’ or ‘Justice for Tom’ campaign like a Zoomer would. The rules of cartoons work differently. Likewise, tallying the number of times Marv should be killed in Home Alone 2 misses the fact that the film is a live-action cartoon. The sheer amount of YouTube videos produced with titles like “SpongeBob is really horrifying” or “Undertake is actually about trauma” are as facile as undergrad English lit essays on fairytales being dark under the surface. How do they think allegorical, rhetorical, or even the written work itself functions?

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The older I get, the more convinced I am that humans judging events and behaviour in the real world (outside of cartoons) are hopelessly skewed and compromised by their preexisting value systems and assumptions to the degree that everyone is always already talking past one another, using the same words but with different meanings, a-priori framing determining content. I would write “determining how content is perceived”, but I’m increasingly unconvinced that we can reach objective truths, even if they do exist. In a recent article (that has inevitably invited some terrible comments, such is his readership) Freddie deBoer reflects that “What we’re dealing with here looks more like the complete absence of a rule, replaced by a set of aesthetic and tribal signals that masquerade as moral commitments”.

He writes that as though we’re in a new post-truth world (a standpoint that a lot of online commentators seem to agree upon) but I fear that it has ever been thus. Maybe it is vibes all the way down. What Freddie writes about how people respond to accusations of abuse has certainly always been so for drug offences.

In a very popular article from last week, Hannah Glenn warns “moral superiority will make you a bad person”, explaining that folks are liable to judge themselves with far more leniancy than others. These folks do not have OCD. However, the point stands that we bring an understand of our own intentions to bear upon our actions in a way we don’t (and cannot) do for the actions of others. This is a great point well worth making again and again; but I think it’s a tiny microcosm symptomatic of the way in which we often apply labels (or, perhaps more accurately, thinking back to my cartoon examples, genre forms) to what we read, hear about, even experience, before we even reach the content. For instance, I’ve known many people to say that they don’t enjoy horror, before sitting down to enjoy the likes of The Sixth Sense, Alien, or even The Silence of the Lambs, simply because they hadn’t categorised what they were about to watch as horror horror.

However, I’m back talking about fictional examples because what I’m really thinking about is far more tricky and uncomfortable. I am absolutely not naming names or linking to the article (I think it would be unfair and the focus of the writer’s piece is on a traumatic experience that happened to her, which I do not wish to detract from or distract attention away from on her own blog) but the other day I came across an article that, frankly, triggered me – and exemplified what I’m trying to get at here.

The young woman who wrote the article describes in harrowing detail how she lost her virginity when drunk, giving verbal content while very obviously in pain with the man still keeping on going. It makes sense to me to categorise that as rape and a lot of states and counties would legally agree. She rightly has lots of readers congratulating her for the writing and damning the guy to a permanent shitty future of sleepless nights – fair enough.

However, not one of the many, many commentators were seemingly troubled whatsoever by her opening paragraph in which she describes how her first boyfriend was able to complete intercourse with her because he was “petrified”, “nervous” and kept losing his erection. She shared this in rather a jokey, cavalier way, as though it was just her slightly embarassing story to tell.

Okay, bear with me here. I think a lot of righteous anti-feminist guys would seize upon this moment (with barely concealed glee) to point out that were the genders flipped, were it a guy talking about a virgin who was “petrified” and “nervous” and not sexually aroused, we’d have no hesitancy in labelling him a predator and his actions as sexual assault. I think a fourth-wave feminist perspective probably should honour that perspective, but I have more sympathy for second-wave feminism that would hold that – on aggregate at least – there are some biological differences between the sexes. The young man in such a scenario at least doesn’t have to fear getting pregnant and likely has more physical strength than the young woman (if they are approximately the same age). I’m absolutely not looking for this woman to be prosecuted, but her sharing these events in such a jokey, cavalier way, with no recognition that she might have done something wrong herself, really upset me. I think she owes this guy an apology and I think it is unlikely it would occur to her (or most of her readers) that she might possibly owe him one.

This is not an effective anti-feminist gotcha, however, since far more men are much more staggering unself-aware and self-exculpatory about their own behaviours with women, especially when young.

I’ve mentioned this before, but a long-lasting bugbear of mine (perhaps due to having OCD and being at least somewhat autistic) is that all the 2010s feminist bloggers (of which I read a lot) who championed the concept of “enthusiastic consent” (an important concept that should be normalised even while it is hard to legally enforce) always, when discussing rates of predation, cited studies that used more restrictive definitions of rape reliant upon the use of force or unconsciousness, even while knowing that this is not what the majority of sexual assault looks like. This allowed them to assert that women are almost never culpable or capable of such acts and that these acts are committed by some 8% of men who are sociopaths, who are, in turn, supported and abetted by rape culture, patriarchy and male friends who look away and don’t speak out. To be clear, I do think that is part of the story, especially when looking at repeat offenders and offences which meet the most traditional, restrictive definitions of rape. But that is a small percentage (a devestating pecentage but a small one nonetheless) of what society need to face up to and address with moral clarity and good faith.

The study I never see cited paints a more disquieting picture because it doesn’t allow us to maintain a simplistic moral vision of a minority of male sociopaths pitted against an always already innocent totality of women: wife and husband team Cindy and David Struckman-Johnson’s paradigm-shifting (at least it was for me) 2003 paper ‘Tactics of sexual coercion: when men and women won’t take no for an answer’. It’s a very tough read, but that’s exactly why I think more people haven’t read it (though slowly but surely it’s citation numbers keep creeping up over the years).

The Struckman-Johnsons straightfrowardly and sensibly define sexual coercion as any behaviour that continues (by the perpetrator) after the victim has indicated in some way they are not interested in sexual activity. This could be a “not tonight, I’m tired” but it could be (as in the blog article above) an expression of being scared or terrified or uncomfortable, redirecting in some way or raising an objection intended as a polite refusal (“your mum’s downstairs”). The pair found that when not phrased as coercion (or indeed, attempted or completed sexual assault or rape) 40% of the young men interviewed and 26% of the young women admitted to having committed such coercion, with 78% of the women reporting having experienced it and 58% of men also reporting having been subjected. Since humans are more likely to focus upon their own victimisation that having victimised, I suspect that the precentages of perpetration might be raised a couple of digits. Either way, while women unsurprisingly rarely used physical force or blackout intoxication, some 23% of women and 39% of men admitted to “persistent kissing and touching” post-refusal and some 14% of women and 29% of men admitted to “repeatedly asking” having been refused.

While it is possible that Midwestern and Southern universities circa 2003 were simply hotbeds of sexual coercion, I think it’s more likely that the sexual license of the times combined with the selfishness of teenagers and the lack of decent sex education resulted in depressingly high rates of such behaviour across the US (and the UK too).

In a sense things are better now. Young people today are coercing people into sex at far lower rates, partly because they are having sex at far lower rates. When teaching at secondary schools and colleges, I have noticed that power differentials, such as those found in relationships with age disparities of above one year, are rigorously policed. An 18-year-old rizzing on a 17-year-old will reliably be called a “pedo” (so Americanized is our culture in the UK, despite the House of Commons and Lords failure to raise the country’s age of consent from 16 to reflect the legal age of adulthood). However, I have had to make safeguarding reports about the illegal sharing of sexualised images (which thankfully I’ve never seen, but certainly hear about). It is, unsurprisingly, almost always boys pressuring girls to produce these images (though they also seem to be produced in some cases without coercion). However, the sharing of these images and the bullying that results is an equal opportunities affair. You might want to think that girls would be morally above such things. You’d be wrong.

However, like with almost all bullying, I doubt many of the perpetrators would see themselves as engaged in anything more than banter or gossip despite the serious harm they cause, unless they are victimised themselves. When I first got a Facebook account back in university, I was confused (and a little shocked) by the number of my former bullies who sent me friend requests. “But”, I used to think, “you bullied me”. Surely they knew? Nowadays I think our clashing paradigms passed like ships in the night. They were engaged in banter. I was engaged in being bullied. One side is engaged in seduction (which they excuse away with images of film scenes of yore or simply by reflecting on more overtly coercive behaviour that at least they’re not engaged in); the other side is being assaulted.

Now, maybe the liberal project is to bring light to such situations. Help victims understand they’ve been victimised, when they so often don’t identify as such. Help perpetrators realise that they’ve perpetrated. I’ve come to believe that the central project of prison is not so much removing criminals from the body of law-abiding citizens (since only those young enough to be outside of the reach of the law are truly law-abiding and, ultimately, the majority of criminals will be released back into the community) but to impose the socially-mandated correct narrative onto offenders who choose to self-identify as they please. “I’m just a traditional husband who expects his wife to know her place.” “No, you’re a wife beater.” “I’m just a traditional husband who expects his wife to know her place.” “No, you’re a criminal, that’s why we have shaved your head and locked you up.” “I’m just a traditional husband who expects his wife to know her place.” “No, you’re a deviant because the majority of men do not beat their wives and you are wrong to do so.” etc. etc. until, hopefully, it works.

It does not work in many cases and the privations and shame of prison just seem to drive people to reoffend. Unfortunately, once sometimes has internalised “I am a criminal” they seem to be more – not less – likely to commit crimes. Erg.

I don’t know what the answer is. I honestly believe the likes of Asia Argento and Devin Faraci and Aziz Ansari and other high-profile hypocrites outed during MeToo weren’t simply operating in bad faith but from the a priori position that they were good, progressive people. And good progressives can’t do bad things.