and notes that the poses are oddly cheesecakey,
I thought exactly the same thing, but it seemed creepy to mention it.
John McCain in a tiger cage? Weird.
John McCain in a tiger cage in a tiger-print suit? Hott.
The one lying on the beach was particularly...egregious? obvious? evocative? I dunno, but I thought it was weird.
And I confess I wanted to know the story of the blonde in the snow-caked truck, and found it interesting that hers was a story "only" of combat-based PTSD.
Come to think of it, the writing struck the same note -- a peculiar amount of attention to the beauty of the women involved. One gets described as like a Victorian doll.
TomK got it right in the comments at Majikthise: "there's nothing that moves papers like a hot victim."
TomK got it right in the comments at Majikthise: "there's nothing that moves papers like a hot victim."
Yep. I don't buy Beyerstein's justification at all. News4 doesn't do sweep shows about teenage prostitution in order to confront its viewership with a serious problem; it does such shows to increase its viewership.
Since you're a slacker anyway, LB, why not try to contact Grannan to see what she was up to? It could be interesting.
Eh, there's room for mixed motives. I'd buy Beyerstein's explanation for what was consciously going on in the editors' heads, and a combination of "Sex sells!" and "What could be inappropriate about posing women as cheesecake? That's what women are for!" keeping them from realizing that that this was neither a respectful nor a helpful way of treating the story.
I agree about the writing, although the pictures probably reinforce the message. When I saw how many screens the article would have, I switched to "print" right away, and therefore didn't see the pictures.
So my take-away from the article was the pattern, and particularly the Menlo Park program. But I probably have a filter up all the time anyway.
I agree with 9. The only picture I saw was the woman with whom the article begins and ends, sitting on the rocky beach looking angry and un-made-up. I certainly didn't see it as cheesecake. It made me think "this woman is probably and hell-raising type who doesn't want to be seen as a victim", which turned out to be partially true.
"would anyone have asked John McCain to pose in a tiger cage as a dramatization of what happened to him in Vietnam?"
Hell yes.
The McCain thing is just going to take us off topic. I don't know how he posed after he was released, but they show pictures of him in captivity, all beaten up, pretty regularly, and I've also seen plenty of pictures of him hobbling around after he arrived. People love that suffering shit.
Newspaper exist to sell papers and advertising. Journalistic standards? Ha! Not a chance.
If it bleeds, it leads.
My reaction to the pictures was that they were going for the "wow, someone harassed those ugly women?!?!?!?" reaction.
Maybe -- I see a difference between symbolic reenactment and reportage, but I might be off base there. I'm not wedded to the contrast.
I don't know that you're off-base, it just seems complicated, almost like...an analogy...dun dun dun...
I think it is similar to showing the pictures of the hot female teacher who had sex with a student.
Do you remember seeing pictures of an attractive male teacher had sex with a student? I don't.
The beach pose was really bad, cheesecakey or not. Would anyone ever lie on a rock pile that way?
What I felt was that all of the picture were posed in a fake-naturalistic way. It had a sort of Andy Warhol 15-seconds-of-fame, when NYC high society goes looking for Real People to slightly relieve their boredom.
Clearly, they were trying to get these women to look more vulnerable and exposed, though the text insisted that most of them are incredibly tough ladies who have tried to be totally one-of-the-boys all along and attempting to cover up feelings in a traditionally military-stoic manner. Is it supposed to be some kind of visual irony? Or to show the exposed little girl inside? Or what? Even when I try to think generous things about their intent, the pictures actually kept me from understanding the article better. All the stuff about Swift (beach girl) sitting with her mom at a table, swigging beers and repressing her emotions didn't make sense with that picture, which makes it look like she is a vaguely masochistic, introspective tease. Is the NYT afraid that we might see her as "unattractive" and that will derail discussion about it?
Lord knows that was all around the Lynndie England stuff. "Sex with a superior? It musta been love, 'cause she's a dog."
19: I was afraid you were going to link to that awful picture of Zizek and bride.
The pictures were weird. I agree that's it's probably symbolic of nothing more than a desire to sell papers, but it annoyed me that none of the women were in uniform. It's an article on a military problem; why are all the women looking like all-American girls who drink and party at Joe's parents' farm?
but it annoyed me that none of the women were in uniform.
Aren't fatigues considered uniform?
19 - will said "attractive" not "scary as fuck".
I thought the beach picture was very odd. Not so sure about the others.
I get trying to show them as not as tough as they think they are, or something, which seems to be their point about PTSD, but that's a problem with PTSD diagnosis all over the military, not just among women. If the article is arguing that "command rape" happens all the time and is using up more of female soldiers' stress defenses and keeping them from being able to do the job, then showing them doing their job or in the context of their job would be far better.
22: Some of them were -- there's a picture of a woman in a white shirt/dark skirt Navy uniform, and the woman in fatigues (barefoot, of course, but in fatigues.)
I was afraid you were going to link to that awful picture of Zizek and bride.
You're good for another year or so, AWB.
25: Yeah, very much so -- a message something like "You thought you were a soldier, but turns out you're just a woman."
Damn those feminists! You can't have it all, ladies.
Dr. Laura! I knew you had opinions but the grandchildren are a surprise.
"Damn those feminists! You can't have it all, ladies."
Exactly. Why would you expect not to be subjected to a felonious assault simply because you are in the military?!?!? The military is very, very busy with important issues like restoring law and order to Iraq. If the price of establishing the Rule of Law is rapes, sexual assaults, and murders, then so be it. Making sure that others follow the law is very important to us.
I guess I found the article itself really touching. I identify with those women totally. You think you're one of the guys, someone who's never trusted women but has a lot of fun being tough and locker-roomy with boys, but then you find out that, although most of them are okay with you, there are always some there who feel the need to punish you for trying to be an equal. This is pretty much where I was at, especially around 22. I just would have preferred a pic of Swift sitting at the bar with her mom, tats ablaze--being herself. Maybe there was a fear no one identifies with women like that.
Yeah, I feel like the message of the pictures is supposed to be "look at the way that PTSD robbed these women of their agency and their military careers," but the problem is that it just dumps them into a pre-existing passive-girl category. I do think, in fact, that you might see the Times doing pictures like this about guys with PTSD, but the effect would be very different.
20: But the other side of that is that any woman who complains about rape or harassment gets called ugly (almost--I suppose a really irrefutably beautiful woman wouldn't). I mean, consider blogging--even women bloggers who are indubitably cute get called ugly as soon as they start talking feminist.
What depressed me about myself was this: I was indeed surprised that these women were talking about being raped, even though I knew the photos were those sort of "realism=rough surfaces and no prettiness" ones, and even though I know that rape is rarely about someone being just so pretty that...that...I mean, I know better than that.
Could someone please write a follow-up editorial explaining that heterosexual males should not be allowed in the military, because, you see, their uncontrollable sexual desires get in the way of them doing their job? Then we can have an all-gay-and-female Armed Forces. That would kick ass.
I knew you had opinions but the grandchildren are a surprise.
Grandchildren are like assholes. You're constantly having to clean them off and sometimes they get warts.
I must have missed those two. The rest seemed to be mostly street clothes. And the beach shot is just bizarre.
AWB:
The Gayness is immoral. Rape and sexual assault is natural. Can you really blame the guys? They arent around their womens and they have natural urges. It isnt their fault.
35: I have been advocating for an all-girl all-gay military ever since my draft notice came in 1968.
At least this sort of stuff needs to be explicitly tied to the arguments against gays in the military, which always use the distractability of homos and the dissolution of unit cohesion as their main platforms. Is the danger in doing this that someone might say, "Yeah, see, and now we have to ban women too, because sweet pussy is to blame"? I guess that's a no-brainer, huh?
James B. Shearer beat you to it a couple of threads ago.
Aaah, sweet pussy, that evil seductress. The root of all evil.
Yeah, it really is too much to ask that people in the military simply not commit any felonies while on active duty. We wouldnt want the bar set too high.
Yeah, it's shocking that, as college instructors, we all sit around for hours trying to figure out whether we're being appropriate with our students or not--whether it's okay to have lunch together or talk about private lives in meetings, or how to discuss a text that narrates traumatic things our students may have experienced without re-traumatizing them. We feel a responsibility for the emotional health of our students. Shouldn't CO's feel some of that? Like a little tiny bit?
To be fair, I'm sure most of them do -- as always, you don't need all that many bad actors to create a pervasive problem. To the extent the problem is systemic, I would guess that it's not that most men in the military participate directly in abusing female soldiers, it's that the ones who don't aren't attentive to or effective in stopping the ones who do.
Exactly, LB, but whereas, in my profession, were someone to go around emotionally abusing students and sexually harassing them, other profs would be ashamed of them and try to do something about it (unless said person was tenured, ahem). At least it would be openly frowned upon. Where are the other CO's? Who is keeping silent for these assholes?
re: 45
My impression has always been that there's a culture in the military that you're just supposed to suck it up and/or fight back. It's not that COs don't care -- but that they don't see certain kinds of pastoral duties as their duty (iyswim).
So, if someone's bullying you, you kick their ass, or otherwise deal with it. You can't go crying to 'daddy' -- that may well be a fucked up attitude to have about lots of stuff, whether it's sexual harassment, or bullying or other abuse, but it does seem to be an attitude that's out there.
12: I'm thinking my proposal wouldn't get past McCain's current handlers, which is fair, since my intentions (personal amusement) might not be in McCain's best interest. I probably could Photoshop some.
However, I think that some savvy art director could do it, and goodness knows, the man has not been shy about his Hilton stay before. Black and white, the lines on his face, the grain of the bamboo, voice over: "McCain. Character." You know.
To loop this back in to the main discussion, how much voice did the soldiers in the photographs have in the process? That seems to me the crux of the matter.
Isn't that where the isolation comes in? For non-sexual, male on male harassment, the ethos isn't literally that you're a weakling unless you handle ill-treatment entirely alone; you're allowed to have friends and allies who have your back. And that attitude of mutual support is something that gets actively encouraged. But while men protecting each other is all tight-knit, band-of-brothersy and can be reciprocal without demeaning anyone, men protecting women has a tendency to leave the women looking like property, unless they simply aren't treated as part of the mutually protective community at all.
re: 48
Yeah, I imagine so. Unless there are enough women in the unit for women to back each other up -- but that's not going to be a practical reality a lot of the time.
Just for fun I will wander into the minefield and ask why did these women join the military? Did they want to be around a lot of guys? Frowner alluded to it earlier, and it made me wonder. It's not as if our culture has embraced the Amazon model. Motivations are different for every individual, and I am in no way inplying that they "asked for it", but there is something that is making my spidey sense tingle.
Patriotism? Needed the money? Thought the opportunities for training sounded better than in their other options?
I'm not sure what's making your spidey sense tingle -- perhaps you could be more explicit.
52: My guess is they're, like me, the kinds of women who have always felt more comfortable in aggressive jobs. They played sports on boys' teams, never got along with women much, and felt safe around "their boys." Being the token woman can be really comforting until you figure out its benefits only go so far.
Like, if you're asking if they joined the military because they wanted to fuck a lot of high-ranking dudes, I'm guessing your spidey sense needs recalibrating. If you want to fuck lots of dudes, you don't do dudely things. You do girly things.
54. I don't think they joined for the sex. My spidey sense is that these were vulnerable women, who were then preyed upon by sharks who knew where to hide. The women have not only no natural support system in place, but an artificial one that does not understand them. A good CO would have seen this on base, but in the field he is otherwise occupied.
How much voice did the soldiers in the photographs have in the process? That seems to me the crux of the matter.
I think to a certain extent it doesn't matter. These are women who are used to being silenced, and used to having their voices disregarded when they do dare to speak up. In that context, I think it's creepy that they selected the photographer they did to do this story. Someone who has PTSD from a combination of combat and sexual assault is not really in an emotional/psychological place where she's going to question why the photographer is asking her to lie down on a beach or why she isn't wearing her uniform for the shoot.
it annoyed me that none of the women were in uniform
I think it's telling that that's the impression at least one of us took away from the photographs.
That spidey sense is working only off the fact that they joined the military, which is unusual for women? That seems a little overgeneralized.
57. No, obviously not all women who join the military are vulnerable or emotionally needy. Something in the article gave me that impression about these particular women, and it was probably the pictures that made you have this thread in the first place.
That spidey sense is working only off the fact that they joined the military, which is unusual for women? That seems a little overgeneralized.
I'm pretty sure that the article actually said that the military has found that a higher percentage of women (and perhaps soldiers, generally--I can't remember) who join the military have abuse in their background than is found in the population at large. (It's the bit about "reservoirs.")
Wait, what did I allude to earlier? I don't think I said that, or if I did it was Other Frowner talking.
That sounds right to me -- the pictures do give them all that alienated, beaten down look. I don't think there's any good reason to attribute that to pre-existing problems rather than a combination of editorial decisions creating that appearance regardless of anything real about the subjects, and the effects of what the subjects went through.
In my experience in the pre-permanent war era, women joined the army because it helped them get money to go to college. This was also true of men.
(a) Everyone on earth is emotionally needy. Saying there's lots of emotionally needy women in the military is like saying there are lots of basenjis that piss on fire hydrants.
(b) All the women I've known who've joined the military have done so because they needed some kind of challenge and they weren't great at school.
It's men and women, though the women have had the rougher time of it:
'' She notes that though both men and women who join the military have been shown to have higher rates of sexual and physical abuse in their backgrounds than the general population, women entering the military tend to have more traumas accumulated than men. One way to conceptualize this is to imagine that each one of us has a psychic reservoir for holding life's traumas, but by some indeterminate combination of genetics and socioeconomic factors, some of us appear to have bigger reservoirs than others, making us more resilient. Women entering the military with abuse in their backgrounds, Resick says, ''may be more likely to have that reservoir half full.''
60. Not you, Frowner, AWB. My bad.
I dunno that I'd hang anything off that in terms of an explanation for what happened to the women in the story.
Other thoughts -- the story comments that women are diagnosed with PTSD at a higher rate than men. I'm just thinking, but as I understand it symptoms of PTSD are extreme irritability/sudden rages, as well as emotional withdrawal. This seems to me like the sort of behavior that would be just much more conspicuous, as further from socially expected norms, in a woman -- I wonder if men are systematically underdiagnosed because the assumption is 'he's just like that'.
I dunno that I'd hang anything off that in terms of an explanation for what happened to the women in the story.
I don't think it suggests anything about the specific women discussed, or that women with PTSD have put themselves in situations that resulted in harassment, but, if I understand that section correctly, the speaker is suggesting that--assuming a standard sized "reservoir"--the women are more likely to get PTSD because the women who have suffered through past trauma have suffered through more past trauma than the analogous men.
I took away that the whole subject is uncharted territory, and so I'd be careful making assumptions about men's vs. women's relative reservoirs and past traumas. I do think the suggestion was that women were much more likely to been in abusive relationships since joining the Army, and that seems plausible.
AWB's suggestion about the psychology of female recruits, of what they're looking for and what kind of person they see themselves as being, including their gender attitudes, is intriguing. I wonder if anybody is trying to do studies about this?
I took away that the whole subject is uncharted territory, and so I'd be careful making assumptions about men's vs. women's relative reservoirs and past traumas. I do think the suggestion was that women were much more likely to been in abusive relationships since joining the Army, and that seems plausible.
AWB's suggestion about the psychology of female recruits, of what they're looking for and what kind of person they see themselves as being, including their gender attitudes, is intriguing. I wonder if anybody is trying to do studies about this?
Sorry, I lost my connection there and it was in the pipeline, I guess.
I do think the suggestion was that women were much more likely to been in abusive relationships since joining the Army, and that seems plausible.
I'm afraid I can't see that reading of the following sentence: "'' She notes that though both men and women who join the military have been shown to have higher rates of sexual and physical abuse in their backgrounds than the general population, women entering the military tend to have more traumas accumulated than men."
I saw that, but wondered how they measured it, and wanted to concentrate on what seems to have happened to many of them recently.
Grannan has an astringent style that alienates us from our emotions. Her studio work is appropriate for the rave or techno crowd; the emphasis is on "coolness" as opposed to "warm" or "hot."
I am thinking of Bertold Brecht's use of the term "alienation" as a theatrical technique. It is a form of catharsis, the dramatic purging of pity and terror. Alienation removes us from our emotional responses. As an anxiety disorder, PTSD is about feelings of depersonalization and derealization, in other words, a form of "alienation" in clinical terms. Viewed from this perspective, Grannan's work succeeds. But is this the kind of photojournalism to which we have become accustomed?
We expect photojournalism to engage our emotions, not purge them. Whereas Grannan's work succeeds artistically, it fails as photojurnalism because we do to connect emotionally. That is why, I think, viewers find Grannan's work to be incongruous and jarring.
http://katygrannan.com/ (Some shots not safe for work)
73: Agreed, but I'd extend that coolness to her other work too. The word I'd perhaps use is "scientific".