I’m not sure that article really goes against any kind of dehumanization thesis, and I find the paragraph you quote very strange. The author seems to think that dehumanization is the process of replacing your belief that other people are humans with the belief that they are not humans, and then moving on to hold a consistent worldview with that in mind, where you act consistently in the belief that those others are not humans.
it’s a bit like if someone read a story about vampires and said, “I don’t get it, if they are un-dead then they are alive!”
You know other people are humans. The Nazis knew the people they killed were humans. American slavers knew the people they enslaved were humans. Dehumanization didn’t mean they forgot that. It meant the compartmentalized that from their willingness to treat the people as less than human. Because of that they had to perform radical acts to prove their lies to themselves.
So when I read this:
“The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature,” she writes, urging us to recognize “the banality of misogyny,” the disturbing possibility that “people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness.”
I am confused how the author could think that means they aren’t dehumanizing their victims. Brutally degrading someone in inhuman ways to bolster your thin veneer of false consciousness is dehumanization. Dehumanization is a lie you tell yourself, not a Black Mirror-esque brain-altering chip (not throwing shade on Black Mirror, which is a science fiction show and hence deals in metaphor).
I get a feeling that what is getting neglected is how Warren Ellis never hid that he was an asshole. He wan’t playing the role, he merely played that it was a role. I recall him always being like this in his blog, open about his awfulness. But man, that scumbag could write.
Charles Bukowski was an awful scumbag, and also a gifted poet. But he’s also dead. William Burroughs was also an absolute shit of a person, he himself would be the first to tell you. And yet, we still respect him. Same for Hunter S. Thompson.
I put Warren Ellis in the same category: a deeply flawed individual who people should never have considered respectable, but one who can speak to us all from that scarred and bestial soul.
The women are right to speak out. And they remind us not to laud the “bad boys”, because they aren’t just putting on an act, they are reminding us of how much we still are merely naked apes. These women are reminding us that we should not look up to them, but treat their writings as warnings.
Like that philosopher said… Try, Fail, Try again. Fail better.
But also, maybe if we start more actively calling out asshole men who abuse women like this, we’ll have a world that eventually treats us as equals. It would be nice.
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree! But we need to pay attention at the beginning as well! Creative types are assholes, I just feel we keep forgetting that when they themselves tell us that they are assholes, we need to believe them and not just gloss it over because we are seeing the art.
I don’t think this is accurate, because I think there are plenty of creative types who are not. Just as a counterexample, we have the late Terry Pratchett who in all accounts comes off as a wonderful human being.
Yes. But that’s not just on them to some degree. It’s on the people who also not only patronize those artists, but actively expect artists to be assholes. The cultural industry also seeks out and cultivates people like this because of the mythology.
This is especially problematic in rock music, where the asshole rock star is so deeply entrenched in our expected mythologies, that those who aren’t often have trouble navigating the industry… Kurt Cobain, for example, really seemed like an incredibly kind person, and look what happened to him. Or in films, someone like River Phoenix.
For me, his actions were clearly those of an asshole in the first read-through.
Spider Jerusalem, like his real-life inspiration Hunter S. Thompson, was a writer who had a knack for exposing the dark underbelly of modern society while also being a thoroughly toxic asshole to everyone around him. The kind of person who made the world more a more interesting place, but not the kind of person you’d necessarily want as a personal friend or coworker.
The disappointing thing here is learning Ellis was apparently cut from the same cloth.
I think the truth is more along the lines of “smart/creative/work-driven assholes often cite their intelligence/creativity/drive as a justification for failing to address their glaring personality flaws.”
Totally. He just wasn’t a large-scale asshole like the politicians in that series, Spider was a hateful amoral bastard to just a few people at a time, hiding his bad behaviour with his Gonzo Journalist writer schtick.
Ellis really seemed to reflect himself AND Hunter S Thompson didn’t he?
