(no subject)

[d_aulnoy]

I remain irritated by Kincaid, but it's a useful kind of an irritation:while I may have scattered the margins with commentary like "ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!?!" (in response to a paragraph in which he addresses the murder of Polly Klaas, only to end with the thought that, "even worse," it resulted in the heightening of attention for 3-strikes legislation), I think his fundamental question of why we as a society apply a frighteningly prurient interest to crimes against children, focusing primarily upon the crimes with a sexual component, is an interesting one.  I think he's dismissive, but I'm reading from the perspective of someone who's known a lot of survivors: I get the feeling that, like Kate Roiphe, Kincaid views the situation from an abstract perspective; it gives him the distance to ask interesting questions, but that same distance skews his answers.

Well, next up is Annoying the Victorians: certainly, I'll be approaching it from a position of empathy.

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I may be misunderstanding, but I don't think our focus on crimes against children is a prurient one. This isn't like dwelling on the sex lives of celebrities, in which there's entertainment as well as an opportunity for easy moral judgments. We focus on crimes against children not because we find them titillating or entertaining, but because the damage to them is especially long-lasting and therefore especially significant and heinous. Have I misunderstood?

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Nope, you haven't misunderstood in the least. Basically, what Kincaid is arguing is that we self-select the crimes that get the most attention, and that within the category of crimes against children, which, I agree, are especially heinous, it's the ones involving salacious details that get the most attention (compare, say, the case of JonBenet Ramsay to that of the woman who drove her two kids into the lake). He's basically saying that we do it because it gives us an excuse to obsess about the details as a society. I find myself somewhat skeeved by the observation, but I can't decry its accuracy.

P.S. - He does, also, have an interesting discussion of celebrity sex scandals, looking at the fact that the ones that get the most media play are, similarly, the ones involving children - Michael Jackson as compared to the sportscaster who bit a partner (what was his name?), or, alternately, the ones involving the same incongruity of expectation (i.e., teachers, priests, rabbis).

[handworn.livejournal.com]

In that case, he conflates the people with the media. It was the media who overdwelled on JonBenet Ramsay; I was sick to God of it all a solid year before they let it drop.

I'd say this to him: "To suggest the media are only offering what the public is clamoring for assumes first that the media's perception of the market is right, and assumes second that the desires of enough of a segment of the public to cause a spike in a marketing study graph can be imputed to the population as a whole, which can then be indicted on that basis." Sloppy.

It's one reason why I sympathize with Richard Russo's explanation that he lives in Maine because it's easier there to drop out of the mainstream of popular culture.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

I see where you're coming from (I'm not a big fan of media feeding frenzies myself), but the thing is, the media doesn't exist in a vacuum. You're right, to a certain extent it's a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the media ... but, that being the case, it's a part of a cycle or continuum that begin back in the 19th c., and we're well enough into it that people *do* clamor for this stuff. Asking the question of *why* makes the book worth having read to me, even if I think his answers are problematic (my own theory is that is's a widely-enough spread problem that people's interest isn't necessarily prurient, but in many cases sympathetic - the victim reminds them of themselves, their cousin, their sister, or, *hypothetically* of themselves as they could be were it not for the grace of God and the NRA).