Voyeurism & Rape

In Chicago last week, prosecutors decided to try three teenage boys as adults for raping a 12-year-old girl and posting a video of the attack on Facebook:  Salon. As horrific as this seems, it is not the first case involving videoing rape. Last year, Jared Len Cruise was convicted of sexual assault in a brutal gang rape of an 11-year-old in Texas, which was recorded on a cell phone and circulated around the girl's school. This past April, a 17-year-old rape victim committed suicide 18 months after allegedly being raped — and having a photo of the event distributed among her classmates. And in Steubenville, Ohio, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond were convicted in March of raping a classmate and then sharing images from the night and “hundreds of text messages from more than a dozen cell phones.”

These horrific crimes might lead many to decry the breakdown of morality among youth today or the looming effects of eroticized violence on television in movies and on videogames. I believe there is truth in all of these claims and that more research needs to take place to really measure the effects of constant exposure to violence, which is made more and more real every day. On the other hand, it also seems to speak to the dark side of social networking itself. One could argue, as I have on several occasions, that social networking emerged as a response to the increased loneliness people felt spending so much time online. Videogames became interactive and multiuser, instant messaging emerged and now social networking all feed our desire for social interaction as we spend more and more time on line or with other technology. Yet does online communication mirror real life interaction?

I would argue it differs in profoundly important ways. For one, the interaction occurs through an intermediary, which is not a subject but object. Technology becomes the means to communicate with others and this creates a relationship between people and things that feels like a relationship between people – the definition of commodity fetishism. The problem is that the intermediary makes the subject-subject relationship into a subject-object-object-subject relationship. And this seems to manifest interesting, and troubling, trends. One is the increased cruelty and bullying we see online. When not having to face the actual person you are objectifying for your pleasure (and that of others), it makes it easier. And when coupled with the “culture of cruelty” that increasingly exists in videogames, television, movies and advertising, it reinforces the idea that people largely exist as objects to illicit psychological and emotional responses in us. The fetishized relationship is one where empathy appears secondary or nonexistent, thus making it easier to do harm to the objectified other.

On top of this is the relationship between violence and subjectivity. Marshall McLuhan argued that violence among young men was really the struggle for identity. Since kids live more and more of their lives online, it is not surprising that they would seek mechanisms to develop and legitimate themselves as subjects. And with young men, this process of “becoming” is often intimately tied to violence. This helps explain the popularity of violent video games, movies and television but also the more violent behavior we continue to witness exterior to the virtual world. Violence in the spectacle can arguably be cathartic and thus alleviate the desire to engage in real violence, but it can also be a mechanism that separates violence from its ramifications and actually incites young men to go out and make that virtual violence real. We have seen that relationship manifest with accelerating frequency over the past 20 or so years, from Columbine to the Boston Marathon bombing.

Virtual rape, or rape that is rebroadcast in the spectacle, brings together the two key aspects of our being – as both social and sexual animals. Given the predilection toward sexualizing violence and sensationalism within the spectacle, is it surprising that some boys and men then want to combine the imaginary with their own lives and become active participants in that sexualized violence? The other is objectified as a mere player in their own construction of self, a victim without empathy that serves a role as the depersonified object that can make the fantasy world come alive. And the voyeuristic culture we have created then feeds off of these tragedies as if they are merely scripted scenes from a movie or television show we call real life. It is a disturbing trend on the edges of our new wired culture, but not really a surprising one from my perspective.