Panic Sex: Should We Be Afraid of the Witch Hunt?
Julia Taratuta
When the whole world dressed in a Dior t-shirt with the inscription "We Should All Be Feminists," they told me a story that happened at an Ivy League American university. A group of students was preparing for a difficult session, and the young men, obeying educational superstitions, agreed not to shave their beards until the last exam was left behind. They threw out razors and dispersed around the campus, but then they were summoned to the carpet: classmates complained to the dean about gender discrimination. The men, they explained, carried out a group action in which the girls could not take part, which means they were taken out of the brackets.
This story, told at dinner, caused a split even in our circle, usually quite agreeable on ethical issues. Someone rested on the fact that the girls were really seated at a separate, practically children's “table”, and the situation, if we consider it theoretically and bring it to a logical end, is not very different from any other segregation - with a risky finale, like the “white only” sign. ", the yellow star or the shop of Herman Sterligov. Naturally, university young men did not mean to prohibit women as a class (they, if speaking Russian, just went to the bathhouse with friends), but it’s hard to deny that any experiments with distinctions often begin innocently.
Defenders of shaving opposed - this is not an abstract task from an ethics textbook, but a living history from which there is no need to remove an important aspect: the students wrote a slander to the dean's office, that is, they used a repressive tool, realizing that there was power behind them. At the slightest suspicion that the rights of women are violated, the liberal university today is safe and takes the side of a hypothetical victim. The victim and the aggressor are rapidly changing places - and how does it feel to live in a world where the victorious oppressed begin to dictate their rules from a position of strength? Moral coup is not far off - the harmless Soviet comedy “Three plus two” is turning into a bloodthirsty horror before our very eyes.
All year long, Western women’s march — from thousands of demonstrations against Trump to exposing Hollywood celebrities — was observed in Russia through those same black glasses. The parting with the idols who were serially accused of pedophilia, harassment and obscene sexual behavior, and the truth was surgical: the old favorites were completely cut out from the prime minister, and the old tapes were washed out from the movie sites - as if they were passing a bleed line from the audience. When anonymous artists pasted portraits of Meryl Streep (to the right of the offensive Harvey Weinstein) all over Los Angeles - with blindfold and the words "She knew", only the lazy did not start talking about the witch hunt and did not joke about the new era of contractual sex.
People did not imprison their neighbors, they were imprisoned by the state. And the spread of rumors about anonymous letters, which the writer was also accustomed to, was only one of the propaganda tools.
The American liberals were timidly worried about whether McCarthyism and sex panic had smelled in the country. But in how the situation was perceived in Russia, there is an amazing dissynchrony and asymmetry. This is not about those whose family constitution stands on the proverb "hits - it means love", and not about the representatives of the Russian authorities and the church, for whom the canon of female obedience - and the seal, and the patriotic crutch. Those who simply do not like America, also revived predictably: Kremlin ex-political strategist Vladislav Surkov even wrote an ornate pamphlet about double standards and curwling that Hollywood allegedly inherited from the hypocritical White House.
The reaction of the Russian bohemian was unexpected: from public intellectuals to people of art, ordinary users of social networks with liberal views and Russian publicists working in the West. They rushed to save their favorite stars from "slander", referring to the lightheadedness of show business, then to the laws of the old time, then to the presumption of innocence, which supposedly went out of fashion. But the main thing is the inadmissibility of the denunciations on which, in their opinion, the American exposing flash mob is built.
In post-Soviet Russia, the fear of denunciations has always always been more than fear. In a sense, this is how a person tried to separate himself from the state and his police car. Since childhood, the child has been taught not to chase, so he suffers humiliation, but does not give in to his people. Collective condemnation is considered to be harassment, even if it is objective, and behind the back of the “victim” both the shadow of power and the price of the deal are read. Sergey Dovlatov recalled in his time about four million denunciations that someone after all wrote on his neighbors in the USSR. Decades later, it turned out that mass informing is a myth, it is not supported by the archives of big terror. People did not imprison their neighbors, they were imprisoned by the state. And the spread of rumors about anonymous letters, which the writer fell for, was just one of the tools of propaganda and manipulation: a simple person should have thought that he was no better than power, he was also dirty, tied to it with one vicious chain.
The state system of punishment for months of sex scandals has never been reached, but Russian public opinion is already sickened by the very talk about the importance of the proceedings - it stands up for the mystical freethinking that the world allegedly turns out to be aggression. Dustin Hoffman - he is a humanist actor, he has roles in Kramer vs. Kramer and Tutsi. All these years, Louis C. Kay could simply participate in a public session of psychoanalysis. And Kevin Spacey is a gay drinker who finally came out. The Russians found their sexual freedoms just yesterday - and today they are already forced to part with them?
In a defocused legal system, evidence loses its value. There are no more crimes in the public consciousness - they, in fact, were canceled
The division between rejection and the promotion of the very possibility of violence is largely generational. Today's teenagers not only read English better, but also talk about sex without breathing and giggling, while parents with horror compare their "dull" asexual everyday life (kids in a cage, they will soon have to ask written permission to kiss) with their "dissolute" rock'n'roll holidays. Oh, an insatiable Russian people, it turns out, sex, he loves no less than football. Do these ambitions correspond to reality, or is sexual looseness still confused with ignorance and drunken cheek?
The same teenagers, by the way, this year suddenly went to rallies. There is a suspicion that they want to negotiate with them, and not put before the fact, like their parents, with the help of prohibitions and ultimatums: not letting anyone to the election, arbitrarily equipping the city streets, setting the rules, what others should wear, how to carry out time with whom to be friends and what to believe. Children are less afraid that the principle of consent will interfere with good sex (and, most likely, they are much less doomed to memories of shameful or simply bad sex in the future). But at the same time they feel better what power is and how not to use it.
Are harassment and rape related? In my opinion, about the same as the flu and its complications. Can an innocent person be blamed for violence? Of course, they can - just like in theft, murder, or "incitement of hatred." In the absence of fair trials, accusations are easier to manipulate: designate someone as a criminal or, on the contrary, innocent - without grounds and evidence, simply by following the political conjuncture. Encouraged impunity in this sense is equal to selective punishment and therefore no less dangerous. On the one hand, grab anyone: a popular director, a family member of a civic activist, a federal minister, a man from the street. On the other - the real criminal, and even though the killer, you can not touch: in a defocused legal system, the evidence loses its value. There are no more crimes in the public consciousness - they, in fact, have been canceled.
By the way, the posters against Meryl Streep were painted not by angry Californian liberals, but by Trump's extreme right-wing supporters: presumptuous Hollywood should be destroyed, they said, but let's start with recognized and undisturbed authorities. The witch hunt turned out to be a fake, but the panic around the upcoming moral apocalypse is quite real.
Photo: Etsy