The fact is, from the moment her trial started, Casey Anthony’s sexuality has been a public good. And this has revealed some very ugly truths about women, about sex, and about the role that sex still plays in the cultural imagination. When we, the people hate a woman, we want more than anything to see her get fucked.
So, about that Casey Anthony porn offer! I wrote a bit about it, for the Global Comment. Please click through and read, won’t you?
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Amazing post đ
Well, I would just add that I tend to think this has gone beyond slut-shaming, something that could be applied to any woman, and has a lot to do with shoring up the virgin-mother-whore paradigm, the diagram that never Venns. To my mind, there’s a very specific dichotomy being affirmed here between mother and whore. She can’t possibly be a good mother because she’s overtly sexual, and those things can’t ever overlap. I don’t disagree that wanting to see her fucked becomes part of the punishment, but I also think it’s been pretty evident that wanting to see her fucked is part of the indictment. Hence the “Tot Mom” monniker. As if to be a hot mom (clearly that’s the word play there)is an evil in its own right. It’s all well and good to be a MILF, but a MWLF? Not hardly. Hot moms can be objects, but if they attempt to be subjects, it’s a societal aberrancy worthy of goddamned unrelenting fascination. And, you know, I tend to think the converse is at play here, too- that’s she an object of sexual fascination because she’s clearly not a very good person in a lot of ways. And therefore the conclusion becomes that she must be some sort of sexual hellcat in bed. In comes the virgin v. whore part of the diagram. She’s unfeeling so she must be hot as as hell. What I get out of that is the message that, you know, because I’m a caring(-ish) lady who looks after people in my life in something of a maternal fashion, that I must be pretty crap in bed. The policing here is happening in all kinds of directions.
Brilliant article, Sady.
My two cents:
Okay, so. A child murder. Pretty disgusting crime. The kind that would be heinous when committed by a dude, but not unremarkable, since that kind of psychotic, violent aggression squares pretty well with a certain strand of masculinity. Weâd hate the guy, sure, but weâd at least be able to process his actions in light of some of the other (male) monsters whoâve gone before him.
A female child murderer, however, is a different species entirely. There is nothing *remotely* feminine about violence directed at a child, let alone murder. The anger directed at a female child killerâwho transgresses all our cherished ideas about femininity *and* unconditional maternal child loveâis thus way more pronounced. So the threat posed by this figure needs to be mitigated by the fact that she can still be sexually humiliated. She may be a horrendous monster, but sheâs still female. Relax, everyone: Nothing to be scared of, weâll remind this c*nt what she is if sheâs forgotten (itâs like âwoman-as-child-killerâ is something people canât even process, so they need to get back to an image they *can* process, i.e. âwoman-as-passive-sex-object.â)
…So, in addition to what Sadyâs argued about using sexual humiliation as punishment for Anthonyâs âsluttinessâ, Iâm also arguing that itâs used to downplay the threat posed by women who engage in violent and radically unfeminine behaviour (the latter category which âsluttinessâ also falls under). This seems like just the most recent manifestation of the de-fanging of female aggression by way of sexualisation. (Or perhaps the old âcrazy chicks are the best laysâ meme, based on the apparent demand for Anthony by a fringe faction of porn fans. I havenât decided.)
I wholeheartedly agree with Emily đ