To Discipline and Punish
A Respondent to a Sex Crime Victim’s Story Counsels “Self Empowerment” through Submission
The patriarchal structure that children imitate — a structure of silences and silencing — Within this frame children learn to adapt or to suffer in silence. So the overarching accepted norms are: be obedient, be normal, do not stand out and do not provoke.
— Alan Finlay, Global Information Society Watch 2015: Sexual Rights and the Internet
My daughter encountered her first feminist learning moment at the end of what had begun as a lovely Spring day in the second grade. For me, it was the day I first started to understand the practical application of Michel Foucault’s ideas about ‘discipline,’ ‘punishment,’ ‘biopower,’ and the like.
This was the day my little girl came home and told me she had “gotten in trouble” at school for violating the dress code. She had been ordered to redon her sweater worn for that morning’s chill, and to keep it on for the rest of the day. Unaware of the code’s precise content, her mother, as conscientious and nurturing a mother as a child could dream of, had sent her off that morning in attire both age and weather appropriate. But the concern of the school, as embodied in the dress code, was neither age nor weather — but gender. “Spaghetti straps,” it turns out, posed a serious threat to the boys in her school.
Now, I want to be clear, hers was a terrific school, with wonderfully supportive teachers, staff and administrators. So, no, she was not treated harshly. But Foucault explained that we shouldn’t have expected that any way. But she was indeed disciplined in precisely the way Foucault employs the term in contrast with punishment. While only the latter is associated with the harsh, physical, bodily use of power against children, they both seek to attain the same end — control. In modern society, we have learned we need not rely on those harsh punishments, because far more subtle, but far more effective, modes of discipline will do the job.
By discipline, Foucault meant that institutions like schools produce “obedient citizens who comply with social norms, not simply under threat of corporal punishment, but as a result of their behaviour being constantly sculpted to ensure they fully internalise the dominant beliefs and values” (Pollard 2019).
When my daughter confessed that she did not understand what she had done wrong, why what she was wearing was deemed an offense against a rule she didn't even know existed, we had to talk about dress codes. I endeavored to explain that schools have a legitimate need to maintain an adequately orderly environment so that students can do what they are there to do — learn. And I noted that most schools have some kind of code that says what you can and cannot wear to school. She conceded that this made sense. “It would be bad,” she said, “if kids wore shirts to school with curse words on them.” Indeed.
But things got interesting when we decided we should learn what the code actually included, so that she would not have to endure the embarrassing, shaming experience of that day.
Now I honestly can’t recall if I was the first to note the obvious inequity in the code, or if she noticed it first. Whichever, when we found it at the school’s website it was crystal clear that this was not really a students’ dress code, but rather quite obviously a girls’ dress code. She was seven. And she was incensed!
Why were there a dozen or more items listed in the code, but all but perhaps one or two of them applied uniquely to girls, and the other one or two applied to both?
There was not a single exclusively male oriented element of the dress code.
As a teacher, I know students will retain a lesson far longer if they reason through a puzzle for themselves as best as they are able. It did not take her long to see that school’s dress code, constructed for what she agreed is the legitimate goal of maintaining an orderly, learning-conducive environment, was nevertheless profoundly gendered. Order, a legitimate aim we agreed, was to be obtained by an almost exclusive emphasis on disciplining girls, rather than boys. It was to be girls, not boys, who were to internalize social norms about what constitutes proper attire. It would be the obedient compliance with social norms of girls, not boys, that would be obtained by the sculpting of children's’ behavior.
My daughter decided that very moment to run for student council (she won!) for the purpose of changing the dress code (she failed).
I have not thought of that day in quite some time. It was both a distressing moment for a father, seeing my daughter learn about the unjust role that gender plays in the constitution of her society and her place in it. I remember thinking that at some point she’s going to realize that today was really about controlling her female sexuality, a global and historical effort that runs the gamut from “merely” shaming a 7 year old girl for sporting a top with straps deemed spaghetti like, to truly horrific practices of genital cutting, referring to those truly severe varieties (infibulation, for example). But it is also a moment I cherish, being there to help and comfort her, as she first stepped foot on what I know will remain, throughout her life, treacherous terrain.
But I was reminded of that day this morning after reading here Anonymous’ 2014 article “I Found Naked Pictures of Myself on the Internet.” Well, to be precise, after reading the “story” by Kevin Goetz, and the associated supplementary comments.
After reading Anonymous’ story, and Goetz’s initial comment and subsequent replies, I concluded we must have read different columns. I just did not recognize her column, her reactions, expressed feelings and responses in his characterization.
Anonymous tells the now too familiar story of finding nude photographs of herself on the internet. She had, indeed, made the adult decision to consent to such an expression of her sexuality and pose for the photographs. But the man with whom she had consented to have that sexual experience, stole the photographs from her computer and posted them on a revenge porn site. She makes it clear in the very subtitle of her story, that it was not so much seeing the photos, but rather, she says, it is [t]he comments under these photos [that] will stay with me for the rest of my life.” In the six years since it was published, her story as received 21 thousand claps.
She also received a lesson in Foucauldian discipline from Mr. Goetz.
“Whatever picture you take,” he asserts, “expect it to show up on the internet. If you cannot live with this reality, do not take the picture.”
Now just what is this reality of which he speaks?
The internet is not an agentic being. It is a but a medium to which only human agents can give meaning and content (well, in the age of AI bots, that’s less true, I suppose). But the “reality” to which he refers would have been more accurately described as: “whatever picture she takes, she must know that the person with whom she engaged in an adult, mutually consensual act of sexual expression, will invariably violate that consent and post the images on the internet.”
This is the perfect expression of the “boys will be boys” mentality that has been used to excuse all manner of abuse against women. When the commander of UN peacekeeping forces in Cambodia was told of the high rates of sexual abuse being perpetrated by the soldiers under his command, and of the rapidly escalating spread of HIV resulting from their sexual activities, he literally responded with, meh, “boys will be boys” (Whitworth 2004, 13).
Does this not sound like a reality we should all be actively seeking to change? Or should we simply accept Goetz’s vision that this is the natural order of things?
I agree with Goetz, as does the author so clearly, when he tells her “The only person to take responsibility for how you feel about this is yourself.” But then he disingenuously adopts the language of ally in saying “However, you can empower yourself and stop seen (sic) yourself as a victim and start taking responsibility for your own actions and reactions.”
As for taking responsibility for her actions and reactions? How much clearer could she have been that she did not grant the perpetrator victory in his effort, an effort that Goetz, with his comments, seems to reengage — that is, to elicit from her feelings of irrational shame and guilt for having engaged in an adult, consensual act of sexuality.
Being in front and behind that camera were equally sexual acts, but only one party subsequently decided to use the act to which they had mutually consented against the other for the age old purpose of limiting and controlling (disciplining) women’s sexuality.
Anonymous was as clear as she could be that she was not “seen herself” as but a helpless victim.
She stated clearly,
I refuse to accept that I was even remotely at fault for what happened.
It wasn’t even the criminal posting of her images that appears to have caused the most distress, rather “the comments written underneath my body made me sick to my stomach….words like “slut” and “defile” and “slap” and “hard” and “tight.””
Yes, she concedes to an initial reaction of panic and fear — I guess that’s ‘seen” herself as a victim — but those were quite rational reactions given the way we treat those who dare to push back against the boundaries for women’s proper sexual behavior imposed by those whose intentions are to control women’s sexuality.
And how could one miss that she then goes to great lengths to describe herself as a woman taking action. She:
1. Confronted the perpetrator of this sex crime, receiving an empty apology,
2. She then courageously consulted with friends and family, despite the very real possibility that they might have, as Goetz did, subtly sided with the perpetrator by continuing his assault on her sense of self worth by challenging her right as an adult to engage in a mutually consensual expression of sexuality without fear of later being criminally abused by her partner,
3. She consulted a lawyer, but discovered justice was to be denied to her, because like health care for so many in the US, she could not afford the lawyer’s fees,
4. She further reveals, far from being the passive victim Goetz charges her with being, she magnanimously concluded that even had she been able to afford it, suing the perp was not a course action that could meaningfully rectify the situation, it held no promise of repairing the harm done to her,
5. She even contacted the police but was met with such curious befuddlement that she concluded things would not go well down that path either.
I mean how much more of her story must one recount for Goetz and the 1.5 thousand people who clapped his response, to see that that she was not and is not ‘seen’ herself as but a victim?
Which leaves us to consider his other supportive bit advice, that she “take responsibility for [her] actions and reactions.”
I wonder just what he’s offering her here? What does ‘taking charge of her actions” imply? I mean I just listed five courageous courses of action she took.
But come on, we know what that means. Its mean she must not act as if she has the adult human right to behave as a sexual being, to engage in an act of mutually consensual sexual expression. Because if she dares to exercise her rights as an autonomous adult sexual being, we — not an inert, passive, non-agentic entity like the internet, but real life human beings nefariously exercising free will — are going to make her pay a price for her audacity.
It is the height of disingenuity to declare, as Goetz does, that she can empower herself, when his whole argument makes clear that what he means is that she can self-censor, self-deny — that she can succumb to that global and historical effort to control the terms of women’s sexuality. She can be disciplined.
Goetz counsels empowerment through submission.
He actually prescribes for her to be the kind of victim he chastises her for seeing herself as, despite in every passage of her essay she demonstrated a steadfast refusal to play that role.
Thus, one must conclude she has no ally in a man who tells her she can empower herself in such a fashion. Those who would counsel self-empowerment through blind adherence to arbitrary gender norms that she, and every person, has a right to reject, do not stand with this victim in opposing the problem of an increasingly common sex crime. To the contrary, he appears to be part of, rather than a agent seeking to change, the problem, because his counsel functions in a way that is wholly consistent with the aims of the perpetrator of the crime itself.
The poet, writer, and satirist Dorothy Parker was once asked by her editor why she hadn’t sent him any material while she was on her honeymoon. She famously replied,
I was too fucking busy, and vice versa!
Someday, perhaps not in my lifetime, but someday, people might occupy a world where Parker’s retort will be seen as merely clever, and, because they were uttered by a woman, not mind bogglingly shocking.