Sheena good, Walker bad
T Bomhower
Media Studies: 101
Here we go again. People on the other side of the infotainment media
lens or desk from most - editors, producers, columnists, staff - who
would usually disdain the Donahue formula of women good, men bad,
are picking it up and running with it, that formula, because, well,
special circumstances. You know: incest changes everything.
Not that it was, really. Incest. Because if it was then North
American journalists, who otherwise pride themselves on having no
taboos, anymore, would want to tell us all about it. But they don't.
Instead, they are carefully dancing on eggshells, negotiating among
themselves to construct just the right myth to allow Sheena and
mother and grandchildren to "get on with their lives". The myth
being necessary to club the unseemly curious into silence on the
subject.
There is a lot of unseemly curiosity, these days, aided and abetted
by the media. A lot of garbage picking and other prying, in service,
generally, of their advertisers' agenda: converting us, all, from
citizens entirely into consumers, instead. It's an anti-democratic
agenda. But incest is a serious criminal charge in most democracies.
How is it, then, that there appears to be so much interest among so
many at the managerial level in Canadian media in constructing a
"get on with their lives" Walker myth, to employ now and to haul out
as necessary the future in justification of not pursuing the issue
themselves or trying to browbeat others into silence?
[Except, of course, for carefully bowdlerized movies of the week,
which are ok because advertisers demand the right to speak of the
matter as they please. A right which supercedes any consumer right
and eclipses any ancient history sort of citizen right.]
We've seen this phenomenon before and will again. The on again/off
again citizenship status of women, where somehow the rights of
citizenship are inseparable from the responsibilities, for men,
but when it suits some women and much of the infotainment media
then they can choose to opt out, temporarily, from that democratic
arrangement and revert at will from being citizens to being
juvenile females who cannot, of course, be expected to be
responsible.
If a man sneaks up and blows his wife away with a shotgun, that is
of course the worst sort of murder. Premeditated, first degree. If
it is a boyfriend/girlfriend thing, public outrage demands that he
be tried as an adult, rather than in the juvenile system. But if a
woman does it, documentary campaigns are launched to get her a get
out of jail free card. Because, at thirty, forty, fifty years old,
she can still choose to have all the rights but none of the
responsibilities of citizenship. Choose to be temporarily juvenile
and thus not responsible in the way any other citizen would be for
premeditated killing.
This silliness becomes specially acute during magazine style tv
shows, where one minute they are titillating us with a favourable
review about some other media product depicting a menage a trois
- which is, of course, something we should all be entertained by,
even if we don't choose to do it ourselves or have religious
objections - and the next minute they are hectoring us about how
it's only right that some woman not go to jail for killing her
husband or boyfriend because, horror of horrors, he got her
involved in group sex, which she now regrets.
Hence, the Sheena good, Walker bad game currently being played out
in much of the Canadian infotainment media.
As I understand it, and not to put to fine a point on the matter, 14
may fuck 19. Or 89, as 14 pleases, in Canada, for lust or love. Just
not for money, on a direct sex-for-money exchange basis. 14 has to
become 18, for that. Except that no one is supposed to fuck
incestuously, at any age, in any circumstances.
Sheena was 15 when it started and spent years after she turned 18
living in an apparently incestuous relationship with her father and
having two children. She wasn't shackled in the attic. When the
police arrived on the doorstep of their household, investigating a
murder, they caught her trying to stuff gold bars, I think it was,
into a diaper bag.
Here's the question, then: If Canadians can choose at 14 to fuck 19
or 89 for lust, and that is only criminal if it is incest, and if
Sheena chose at 15 and for many years there after to fuck her
father, then why shouldn't both she and her father, as citizens,
be brought up on charges of incest?
And if not, why not?
Why aren't those journalists, so called, who are busy making excuses
for Sheena and company, equally busy agitating to have the age of
sexual consent raised? If that's the problem with apportioning
quilt, in such a case. Or busy agitating to have the incest laws
revoked, if they are to be of no consequence in the opinion of
leading editors and producers in the media? To the point where we
should all make nice and just shush about it.
--
copyright 1998, T Bomhower