Have I Been In This Job Too Long?
It is not surprising that someone would direct me to a webpage that unites feminism, antiquity, sex and blogging. I was surprised, however, to find myself quite so perplexed by it. If you have a moment, please do have a look here: I'd be really interested to know what people make of it. This is a long post but I am very interested in this.
I confess that while I could see the cause of the consternation, I didn't share it. I hope this is not because I am unsympathtic to the plight of kidnapped, enslaved and raped women. However, I simply cannot see that the renovation of a well-preserved ancient ruin and the promotion of visits to such a site is in any way identical with collusion in slave-rape. To begin with, these women (and boys) and the men who abused them (if this is what was, in fact, happening - I don't know that for certain, and I doubt the blogger does either) are long dead. Their experience was the product of a society, culture and politics which are also long dead: whatever parallels people may wish to draw between it and our own do not obviate the fact that, for instance, we have laws against this kind of thing. I think it's of limited practical value to get up in arms about the fate of these specific women.
Of course, I quite accept that there's such a thing as socialisation and fully appreciate that encouraging people to view slave-rape as entertainment has the potential to normalise it and contribute to a modern-day culture of (at best) indifferent or (at worst) titillated reponses to such stimuli. But it's not at all clear, at least from what this blogger writes, that the site is being marketed in deliberately callous or titillating terms. And quite apart from that, people do know this is the product of an another time and other circumstances. If that weren't the fundamental point of the site, why go? Sickos can, I'm told, look at clearer, faster, better and more anatomically convincing and wildly specialised porn from the comfort of their laptops and not bother traipsing round a dimly lit cavern in a manky town in Southern Italy.
Secondly, you can't restrict access to a cultural artefact of undoubted historical significance just because not everyone will have an "appropriate" reaction to it. It is a pity that not everyone who goes to Pompeii spares a thought for the possibility that some nasty stuff happened to real people in these places. It is unpleasant to think that anyone would actually enjoy the idea of said nasty stuff. But this is not something than can or should be policed; and the alternative is that no one has the opportunity to look at it. It is, of course, arguable that it is more important to protect the dignity of individuals who have been dead for two thousands years than it is to examine, document, collate, discuss and educate people about the exiguous and miraculously preserved remains of an ancient civilisation whose culture and history still fascinates and engages us, but you won't hear me saying so. Maybe I have been in this job too long.
Thirdly, it is not as though ancient historians don't notice or care that bad things happened in Greece and Rome; it's just that deciding in advance that a historical source is in its very essence wicked and corrupting defeats the entire point of scholarship. It is not enlightening to say "slavery and rape shouldn't happen." We know. It is enlightening, however, to explore what new things these sources can tell us about the society that produced them. I for one am much in favour of this apparently controversial process of discovery and enlightenment, unless anyone can point me to some active harm it may be causing, which they haven't so far.
The cleasrest attempt to demonstrate harm is this reference to the papyri which are so unjustly neglected. I need hardly add that I am very sorry to hear this. I have always yearned for more Livy and am devastated to hear that tranches of it are being kept from me. Seriously though, I don't presume to lay down criteria for which cultural artefact is more important. I am a convinced literary bug, but even I don't see that it is irrefutably the case that more Aristotle should necessarily and obviously be prioritised over extensive frescoes. Besides which, it's the limited funds which are the disgrace here. I don't complain that they pick the pix over the papyri, I complain that they have to pick at all. Surely the blogger isn't saying that the brothel (or "brothel", if you must - I'd have said the force of the punctuation is inherent in the term, myself) should rot altogether? Or is she?
From the point of view of the visitors, I would a) rather people visited ancient sites than didn't; b) rather they had something to look at there which engages them with the idea that the Romans were real people with real vices and virtues. You may think it a shame that sex sells, but it's no less a fact about Pompeii than all those boring ditches and far more interesting to most people. What exactly is the objection? That tourists are insufficiently discerning and highminded in their tastes and education, so as to prefer the (gasp) coarse-but-interesting bits to the dull-but-worthy ones? How dare they. That not everyone who visits knows the whole terrible history of Roman imperial domination and the details of its social effects? Shame on them. Whatever happens, we mustn't market these sites using points of universal human interest that might engage and involve people with no previous interest in antiquity and make them consider the humanity, with its joys and sorrows and everything in between, that we all share through the ages.
I note that nowhere in this thread is any allusion made to, say, the display of real human skeletons (NB: not drawings) preserved in their huddled poses of terror and futile self-protection as they were buried alive in burning ash. I note too that a similar objection is not made to tourism in the Colosseum, where countless people were tortured to death by public fiat amid the avid cries of hundreds of citizens. Or does human suffering only matter when it is caused by patriarchally sanctioned male-on-female violence? Perhaps it is not after all the Pompeii Tourist Board in whom a sense of perspective about sex, porn and prostitution is somewhat lacking.
I confess that while I could see the cause of the consternation, I didn't share it. I hope this is not because I am unsympathtic to the plight of kidnapped, enslaved and raped women. However, I simply cannot see that the renovation of a well-preserved ancient ruin and the promotion of visits to such a site is in any way identical with collusion in slave-rape. To begin with, these women (and boys) and the men who abused them (if this is what was, in fact, happening - I don't know that for certain, and I doubt the blogger does either) are long dead. Their experience was the product of a society, culture and politics which are also long dead: whatever parallels people may wish to draw between it and our own do not obviate the fact that, for instance, we have laws against this kind of thing. I think it's of limited practical value to get up in arms about the fate of these specific women.
Of course, I quite accept that there's such a thing as socialisation and fully appreciate that encouraging people to view slave-rape as entertainment has the potential to normalise it and contribute to a modern-day culture of (at best) indifferent or (at worst) titillated reponses to such stimuli. But it's not at all clear, at least from what this blogger writes, that the site is being marketed in deliberately callous or titillating terms. And quite apart from that, people do know this is the product of an another time and other circumstances. If that weren't the fundamental point of the site, why go? Sickos can, I'm told, look at clearer, faster, better and more anatomically convincing and wildly specialised porn from the comfort of their laptops and not bother traipsing round a dimly lit cavern in a manky town in Southern Italy.
Secondly, you can't restrict access to a cultural artefact of undoubted historical significance just because not everyone will have an "appropriate" reaction to it. It is a pity that not everyone who goes to Pompeii spares a thought for the possibility that some nasty stuff happened to real people in these places. It is unpleasant to think that anyone would actually enjoy the idea of said nasty stuff. But this is not something than can or should be policed; and the alternative is that no one has the opportunity to look at it. It is, of course, arguable that it is more important to protect the dignity of individuals who have been dead for two thousands years than it is to examine, document, collate, discuss and educate people about the exiguous and miraculously preserved remains of an ancient civilisation whose culture and history still fascinates and engages us, but you won't hear me saying so. Maybe I have been in this job too long.
Thirdly, it is not as though ancient historians don't notice or care that bad things happened in Greece and Rome; it's just that deciding in advance that a historical source is in its very essence wicked and corrupting defeats the entire point of scholarship. It is not enlightening to say "slavery and rape shouldn't happen." We know. It is enlightening, however, to explore what new things these sources can tell us about the society that produced them. I for one am much in favour of this apparently controversial process of discovery and enlightenment, unless anyone can point me to some active harm it may be causing, which they haven't so far.
The cleasrest attempt to demonstrate harm is this reference to the papyri which are so unjustly neglected. I need hardly add that I am very sorry to hear this. I have always yearned for more Livy and am devastated to hear that tranches of it are being kept from me. Seriously though, I don't presume to lay down criteria for which cultural artefact is more important. I am a convinced literary bug, but even I don't see that it is irrefutably the case that more Aristotle should necessarily and obviously be prioritised over extensive frescoes. Besides which, it's the limited funds which are the disgrace here. I don't complain that they pick the pix over the papyri, I complain that they have to pick at all. Surely the blogger isn't saying that the brothel (or "brothel", if you must - I'd have said the force of the punctuation is inherent in the term, myself) should rot altogether? Or is she?
From the point of view of the visitors, I would a) rather people visited ancient sites than didn't; b) rather they had something to look at there which engages them with the idea that the Romans were real people with real vices and virtues. You may think it a shame that sex sells, but it's no less a fact about Pompeii than all those boring ditches and far more interesting to most people. What exactly is the objection? That tourists are insufficiently discerning and highminded in their tastes and education, so as to prefer the (gasp) coarse-but-interesting bits to the dull-but-worthy ones? How dare they. That not everyone who visits knows the whole terrible history of Roman imperial domination and the details of its social effects? Shame on them. Whatever happens, we mustn't market these sites using points of universal human interest that might engage and involve people with no previous interest in antiquity and make them consider the humanity, with its joys and sorrows and everything in between, that we all share through the ages.
I note that nowhere in this thread is any allusion made to, say, the display of real human skeletons (NB: not drawings) preserved in their huddled poses of terror and futile self-protection as they were buried alive in burning ash. I note too that a similar objection is not made to tourism in the Colosseum, where countless people were tortured to death by public fiat amid the avid cries of hundreds of citizens. Or does human suffering only matter when it is caused by patriarchally sanctioned male-on-female violence? Perhaps it is not after all the Pompeii Tourist Board in whom a sense of perspective about sex, porn and prostitution is somewhat lacking.
posted by Scarlet at 5:20 am
5 Comments:
you took this apart so much more eloquently than i could (restraining my response to pinging it over to you going "huh?"). i admire twisty and her patriarchy-blaming blog greatly - her take on tacos, reductive girliness and breast cancer politics (think before you pink) is second to none - but i too thought she'd picked a troubling one here. also, i agree, the "iffy x is funded while worthy y languishes" is bogus as a critique of x, when it should be directed at z, where z is the funding body in question...
It's an interesting one this - I would guess that a majority of historical sites have some unpleasant history (be that directly or indirectly) so clearly that in itself shouldn't preclude people from visiting or bodies from funding them. But what I think *is* interesting (perhaps?) is how this history is presented to the public. For instance, at Auschwitz this isn't a problem -anyone visiting knows the history, plus all the information/education at the site is focused on that. On the other hand, at Pompeii it sounds like it may be more focused on ''ooh err naughty old sex'' and probably doesn't educate people on the context. Which, you could argue, is a missed opportunity.
Oh, absolutely agreed. The trouble is, you can't force people to take the ugly history seriously. If you are of a turn of mind that doesn't consider that the plight of kidnapped prostituted women matters as much as the fwoar factor, then very little I can write on a plaque is going to affect that. Though should still be there, natch, and shame on them if it's not; but it takes a lot of information to understand this society in context, and it's not reallistic to say it all.
I also think it's not for me to say what anyone else should find significant or interesting about these historical data. "Oh my god, the Romans had oral sex too!" is not my response, but I wouldn't like to get into saying that it's an illegitimate response, or even a "worse" one than "Oh my god, the Romans whored slaves!". And for many people (including scholars at one point, presumably) the Man-Bites-Dog issue with the former discovery perhaps justifies its primacy to some extent.
There's also the question that the whole approach is ahistorical. You're completely right about how most historical sites have some horrible past, but on whose terms are we going to define it? For instance, every house in Pompeii contained a family in which all females and slaves were the personal property of the paterfamilias to dispose of as he wished. That's just how it was then. We don't like that to happen now, but are we going to designate every single house in every single Roman site a chamber of horrors? These were also people's homes where they fed their babies and played with the cat. Can't people see that social institutions actually don't map on to one another over centuries? Pederasty in ancient Athens is simply and straightforwardly a different cultural phenomenon from pederasty now. Applying modern standards of outrage to it does nothing but obfuscate the historical.
i would say you're right. the other side is known as 'philistinism', i'd have thought.
also, the incoherent notion that artworks depicting undesirable things should be censored set aside, the confusion of types of imperative for a moment overlooked, and the (philistinic) substitution of righteous passion for real contemplation briefly forgiven, how would you ever study history properly if this other blogger had her way? how? how?
angrily. b
Post a Comment
<< Home