Desire, Sex & Power in Music Video. Presentation.

Desire, Sex & Power in Music Video
SUT JHALL

Puerto Rican day pride parade in New York City, the public space of central park turned into a literal war zone for scores of women who were doused, sexually assaulted, and stripped of their clothes by groups of men who felt they had anentitlement to act their desires on any female body. This footage, used by thepolice to identify and prosecute the assailants shocked and outraged the country when it was broadcast. When virtually identical images have been played out
over and over again on our television screens with virtually no comment, why should we be shocked? In fact, what was most striking about these images was how familiar they were.

While there are chilling similarities between the popular culture
images and the real life attacks in Central Park, there is a major difference. The women in the real world were not enjoying it. They weren’t smiling. This wasn’t their dream world. It was someone else’s, which had turned into their nightmare.
While disembodied and fragmented images of women cannot directly cause
sexual and violent assault they do rob women of their humanity and create an environment where a tax against them is not treated seriously. They cultivate attitudes and values that legitimate and justify the assaults as self deserving and provoked by the victims. If your understanding of female sexuality is mediated by the stories of music video then these are precisely the types of attitudes that one would expect that dream world to cultivate in it’s male watchers. Further, all behavior is based upon certain assumptions, attitudes and values. These stories of the pornographic imagination, then, do not directly cause sexual assault but they create understandings in a cultural environment that might encourage certain violent behaviors, influenced by many other things, of course, by some men towards women. Fantasies are fun but sometimes the line between fantasy and reality is blurred and the images of the dream world in that respect are not innocent, they are not just images. The stories they tell are firmly implicated in the gender and power relations in our society.




Central Park: Water Fight, Flight and Tears
Central Park , N.Y.C., Sunday June,11th, 2000 (11:30 a.m. -6:30 p.m.)

From the five boroughs of N.Y.C., sixty soulless monsters came, not knowing each other, they all found each other all in agreement: water all the women with ICE and bring them to tears. Disarmed, each woman, fifty and counting, and countless others - is disrobed, robbed, sexually pawed and clawed. Concentric circles form around a sole woman; a first circle of raging participants; a second circle of cheering and jeering spectators; and a third circle of indifferent police; 4500 police on duty; 900 in the park; eight calls to 911.
www.newnation.org/Archives/NNN-centralpark.htm

NIGHTMARISH LIBERALISM THE PUERTO RICAN DAY PARADE

The news reports we have gotten the past week have not been this graphic. The media has downplayed the rapes. Even the police, afraid to react during the attacks because of fear of being branded racists, have downplayed the crimes committed. However, we have a Socialist press to believe or Joe, a guy in New York who heard the first reports.

Five New York police officers face discipline as harsh as dismissal for not stopping or reporting the sexual abuse of women in Central Park last month after a parade, the police chief said Tuesday.