Translated material
I'm not ashamed
On April 20, the conference "post -syuality: love, violence and democracy" was held in St. Petersburg. At an event with a note of 18+, organized by the programs “Socio-Political Philosophy” and “Gender Research” of the European University in St. Petersburg, the participants discussed the problem of sexuality in connection with an avalanche of scandals and revelations, given not only by the Global Campania #Metoo, but also in the post-Soviet space #I will be sung, as well as other social processes in the center of which were women and sex.
What is the phenomenon before us? How did democratization, uprising of subordinate groups, affective mobilization of new media, feminization of labor, conservative turn, etc.?
How to determine where flirting ends and harassment begins? Where does harassment end and violence begins? How to understand the fact of sexual consent? Is it possible to “retroactively” to recall your consent - and if so, what obligations this impose on each of those who at least once in their lives found themselves in a ambiguous situation of decision to enter or not get into a connection with another person? Will the moral and legal ban on such an ambiguity in the relationship between the floors of their romantic and erotic component will deprive? What will become with love if sexuality is the subject of a strict agreement? And what remains of the sexuality itself if violence, harassment, ambiguity, power relations and unsafe games are removed from it? How are the phenomena data in the context of a conservative turn and gender traditionalism in Russia transformed?
These and other issues were discussed by Elena Zdravomyslova, Ivan Kurill, Artemy Magun, Joel Regev, Anna Temkina, Jonathan Brooks Platt, Elena Kostyleva, Maria Bikbulatova and Valery Levchuk. The organizers and participants plan to continue the conversation - the new round of Debatov about sex and violence is scheduled for the autumn of this year in the Higher School.
Colta.ru publishes one of the reports that sounded at the conference: the philosopher Oksana Timofeeva analyzes the painful and important topic of rape for Russian society.
A 13-year-old schoolgirl from Zelenograd turned to the police and stated that five adult men raped her on the way to school. The girl claimed that the rape occurred on March 21 in a car parked at the children's clinic. However, after looking at the recordings from video surveillance cameras, law enforcement officers found out that she calmly, without getting into any cars, reached school, and then also returned home without incident. He did not reveal traces of violence and medical examination [1] . “Why did she announce rape-it is unclear,” the “naive deer” comments on this news “male” telegram channel. “Some say that recent stars with TV, which became popular due to rape stories, influenced it.”
Popularity due to the rape stories that the deer writes about is a very recent phenomenon. Twenty and even ten years ago in Russia it was still impossible to imagine that a woman could publicly declare a rape and, moreover, openly discuss what happened on TV in front of the whole country. After all, the first thing that the victim of sexual violence in Russia is always encounters is the return of guilt to the victim, Victimbleming. Following, as a rule, the sending of a sending begins: no matter what a woman does, she falls into a situation of condemned sexuality. This complex of double stigmatization can greatly spoil life; It is very difficult to resist his pressure. However, something that is based on it breaks now before our eyes. The first bright media precedent was the case of Diana Shurygina, who challenged the powerful traditional mechanisms of public censure, making her rape by the subject of public discussion in increased colors. The rapist was planted, and Diana began to periodically appear in a talk show, causing millions of heaters comments, accusations of all mortal sins and cruel ridicule-not only from individuals, but also from some media and communities on social networks. The name of the girl became a household name for the Slavicmers and Victimblamers of both sexes.
Shurygin was raped in the spring of 2016. In the summer of the same year, an information event unprecedented for the post-Soviet society took place-the Flashmob Anastasia Melnichenko, who began on Facebook by Ukrainian journalist, who participants and participants under the hashtags #in Ukrainian) and #in Russian, publicly admitted that they had once been subjected to sexual violence or in Russian) Sexual harassment. Thousands of people took part in the action - mainly women who shared the memories of the traumatic situations of various severity experienced in the past - from a sebaceous look on the street or in transport to real rape (or attempts to commit it) from strangers, spouses, parents, friends or relatives.
In Russia, the reaction to the wave of these cruel confessions turned out to be heterogeneous. Progressive observers noted that such a frank conversation has long been ripe, that the injuries of this kind experienced every second woman need to work out, and their implementation in public space is of a positive, emancipator in nature and contributes to liberalization from below - contrary to the imposed ideological apparatus of the state with conservative and patriarchal values, in accordance with which violence against which violence against A woman is the norm [2] . Others urged to see in this action not a session of group therapy, but, on the contrary, sucking in an increasing number of people a “funnel of injury”, and warned about the dangers of even more violence, which, having opened this box of Pandora, would supposedly entail it [3] . And someone was ironic, discussed the muzhenoviteism of the participants in the action, expressed extravagant conspiracy ideas that there are interests of certain subjects, commercial (advertising and traffic on the Internet) or political (discrediting the media image of Russia on the eve of the Day of Love, Family and Fidelity) [4] , or even called detailed stories about habitat and derivatives rape free home porn.
The action turned out to be really mass: as if people finally untied their mouths and allowed to tell what most of them were silent all their lives about. The woman who thought that the trouble happened to her alone, and for many years hiding her heavy secret from others, suddenly found out that she was not just not alone, but not even in the minority. It turned out that they raped-either tried to rape, or harassed, or humiliated us all or almost everyone, that the emergency that she once got into is no exception, but the rule that the fault and shame she experiences is the result of the unjust stigmatization of victims of sexual violence in Russian society that they must be overcome, and the most effective way to overcome such an overcoming. (conjugated, however, with a very high risk) is a camming out.
The effect of confessions turned out to be an avalanche -like: even those with whom nothing of the kind happened to have found unpleasant or dubious episodes in their biography to add them to a common piggy bank. The variety of negative sexual scenarios resulted in many well -written stories, in the details of which some readers plunged with indignation, while others with excitement. The fact is that the arsenal of expressive means intended to talk about violence is borrowed by a victim from an ordinary language, already infected with this violence and more adapted for porn, or for the testimony that it should give before the court, as if justifying itself.
Reflecting on these confessions, I began to wonder: where even those who did not survive in reality of any violence, this will to recognize, is this kind of false memory (or the memory of what was not with me)? Some kind of generic female memory of an event that returns again and again? I turned to “Hysteria research, written by Freud together with Joseph Breer in 1892. This book contains several bright stories of the disease, and it begins with the description of the case of the patient Breer, known as Anna O. In fact, it was about Berte Pappenheim, who later became a prominent public figure and defender of women's rights. It was she who proposed for the method, at that time completely new and experimental, a wonderful definition of Talking Cure .
Before the birth of a psychoanalysis, the phenomenon of hysteria, from the time of antiquity, is still often explained (in strict accordance with the etymology of this word [5] ) “wandering of the uterus” and other physiological causes, many doctors, including Freud himself, then still a beginner neurologist, tried to treat electrotherapy and hypnosis. Psychoanalysis is born from the creative union of the patient and analyst, from her active desire to speak out, pour out the soul - and listen to his readiness to listen. The search for the source of hysteria is conducted in the field of human mental life: in the body of the tantrum, the uterus wanders - the memory of the event wanders so unacceptable that it cannot be allowed to consciousness - the memory is crowded out or suppressed.
In the light of this hypothesis, Freud literally covered, one might say, a wave of Metoo even before such a phenomenon became possible in public space. Having analyzed eighteen cases of hysteria, Freud concluded that the painful memories of the body are associated with mental injuries of a sexual nature, with fear or excitement caused by irritation of the genitals in early childhood. One after another, patients admitted that they were subjected to violence and harassment in childhood or adolescence. So there was a theory of seduction, according to which the origins of hysteria should be sought in sexual violence against children, and behind the image of a rapist - a suspicious “uncle” - in the memoirs of the first patients Freud looped the figure of his father.
In 1897, Freud abandoned the theory of seduction as contradicting common sense. But the question remained - what then to do with the confessions of patients? Freud’s next assumption was that childhood memories - scenes arising in our memory - could actually be fabricated. However, the fact that these infantile experiences are the fruit of the imagination does not reduce their significance. On the contrary, fantasy reality is even more important than the so -called real reality. Freud says that these fantasies have a psychic reality as opposed to material, and draws attention to the fact that they arise as if with necessity.
“It seems that such events in childhood are somehow required, with iron necessity are part of neurosis. They are in reality - good; If reality refuses them, then they are compiled from hints and complemented by fantasy. The result is the same, and to date, we have not been able to prove the differences in the consequences, depending on whether fantasy or reality is taking a greater participation in these children's events ” [6] .
Children's memories - including indirect ones, are more similar to hints - can be designed. But even if this was not, it was still. Just not in our life. Even if we were not raped, we were raped anyway.
With some iron necessity, mental reality is adjusted to an obsessive fantasm scenario, where a woman is subjected to sexual abuse. Returning to the occasion with which I started: the rape of a schoolgirl from Zelenograd does not occur in the reality that the surveillance cameras record, but in the fantasy reality that the observer is not even aware of. Even if the girl safely reached school and back, the result is the same - she was still raped by those five fictional men. This fantasy becomes part of its subjective experience and can not only be built into it, but also to structure it on full rights. We live in a society where, even if we were not actually raped, we ourselves are completing this obsessive psychoscope.
Freud says that such fantasies can be associated with an unconscious desire - that is, one in which we ourselves do not admit. If we recognized how Freud, what desire is, we could move on and think about where it comes from (Freud does so, associating these desires with our phylogenetic inheritance - with myth, primitive horde, etc.). However, in the current situation, which can be given the general name Metoo , it is impossible to talk about such a desire if Freud and I, of course, do not want to get into the category of Snown -Minh and Victimblemers (but we do not want!). That is, if we say that the girl’s fantasy is associated with some unconscious desire, we thereby blame the victim: it is guilty, I wanted to.
This is where the paradox who occupies me is found: the assumption about the presence of a woman, even unconscious, sounds like an accusation. The installation that a woman in sex can only be a victim, deprives her of the right to subjectivity and therefore is essentially deeply patriarchal. So it turns out that, no matter how criticize violence, the material of unconscious fantasies - both female and masculine - is thus a socially constructed scenario of abuse of a woman, and the real victim of rape in the end is most often to justify himself.
We are in a trap of an evil tongue. One of its main elements is the imposition of desire, pleasure and guilt on each other. Evidence of our innocence is expected from us. She is recognized if we can convince the judges, lawyers, the public that we did not want or enjoyed us before. The victim of violence cannot desire and enjoy, but only passively undergoes suffering. She did not want, did not enjoy - it means she is innocent. The rapists, on the contrary, justify themselves with her desire and pleasure: she herself wanted, she liked it, this is her fault. But both of them proceed from the assumption that desire and pleasure make us guilty.
This is a very cunning trap, which eludes, remains invisible in the optics of Metoo . In the wave of confessions that are now around the world, there is courage, a challenge, a will to change, but this acquittal is still heard. The recognition of rape begins to sound as an excuse: yes, I had sex, but I didn’t want, I am not like that! We collect evidence of rape not so much in order to punish the perpetrators as (unconsciously) in order to present our own innocence to the world. At the same time, the described fantasever script does not go anywhere. The mechanism of public censure is fed by the innocence of victims. It’s just not to break it. You must first understand how he works - but such an understanding is incomparable with conventional ethics. It requires a reassessment of sexual values, a complete revision of the usual models of female sexuality, the rupture of all possible templates and the exit from the victim’s position. Instead of “I'm not to blame,” we must learn to say “I'm not ashamed.”
[2] See, for example, Anna Temkina's comment .
[5] Hyst é ra - the uterus (Greek).
[6] Z. Freud. Introduction to psychoanalysis. - St. Petersburg: Aletheya, 2000. S. 158.
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