(Content warning for discussions of rape, abuse, and violence.)

Recently I came across my music library from a few years ago. It was filled with top hits of the year I downloaded them in and in general, songs I heard on the radio or from other people. If I liked an artist, I would just download as many popular songs they had as possible to make sure I was up to date on my music knowledge and knew the cool lyrics to songs everyone listened to. Cool lyrics being the key phrase here, when I reopened that library, and tried listening to a few songs, I couldn't do it. 

This is of course, not because I am trying to be a snobby indie kid who hates on pop music and disses auto tune in the music industry with every breath she takes, but because I want to use this revelation I had as a gateway into a broader topic I have wanted to write about for a while. 

As I always try to reiterate on this blog, I value personal growth and independence highly and think that everyone should always be striving to be better and and kinder and more open-minded. We should always be moving towards bigger self-awareness and confidence, we should always be learning more about things we don't know, we should always try to better ourselves and our world. Trying to achieve these types of dreams obviously isn't as easy as it is to type them, but I believe that in the past few years I have grown as a person. 

And now, I realize it's going to sound like I grew out of pop music and the Top 40, but that's not it. The reason I couldn't listen to the majority of these songs was because of the content and the ways the lyrics made me feel. They were mostly very degrading towards women, violent and dehumanizing to a point where the mood stayed the same from song to song and I felt really uncomfortable. The kind of songs that hypersexualize women, that encourage rape and non-consensual sex, that reduce women to objects to be used and devoured, that focus entirely on a woman's physical attributes, that normalize stalking fantasies and infidelity etc. etc.

But, where am I going with this? 

I want to tie this in to the human psychology and how our thoughts and beliefs and desires take form and what role the outside environment plays on them. A disclaimer before I get into it: I am not certified to speak on the medical and scientific aspects of psychology. These are only my theories and observations based on personal experience. 

I have already said that I have grown as a person, and I know this will make it seem like I am a part of this generation that old white men in power fear, the part that has progressive thoughts, unlimited hope, and radical ideas about how we should run our governments and what we should do about injustices – you know, the crazy kids who declare themselves feminists and activists, and place themselves on the liberal side of political scales, those kids. I am okay with that. Because while people will use my labels to try and invalidate my experiences and thoughts, the reality of the situation will remain as it is. I will have lived these events, and I will have had these thoughts. So yes, this is coming from a self-loving, always learning, joke making but also joke ripping feminist, who thinks and fights for social rights and is proud to be a part of those movements that try to make this world a better, more livable place. 

(Side note on this whole post: I haven't written an opinion piece in such a long time, I think my brain is overcompensating, but bear with me.)

In any case, I was okay with listening to those kind of songs at the time because I didn't really feel affected by them. They were endorsing ideas that were engraved into my mind and I had a huge supply of internalized misogyny to make me agree with some of them while taking others lightly or deliberately misinterpreting them. Not that I thought too much about the lyrics I was listening to – I just listened to them on repeat, sang along, and didn't feel conflicted. (It was horrible). I was solidifying the expectations and unwritten rules society had placed about women and I was siding with people who created and furthered these expectations and rules. Obviously, my self-respect and awareness was very very very misplaced.

Which is why, after beginning to improve myself, and opening my eyes to the problems we have as women, I couldn't really listen to these songs. But songs are only one part of the media we consume. And even from them, we can see how effective they are and how big of an impact they have on our worldviews. 

The point is – these things, they are not consumed in a vacuum. And people who treat them like they are are either super naive or super ignorant. The music we listen to affects us. It makes a place for itself in our subconscious. We repeat words and phrases that we don't wholly agree with or that we would never produce ourselves. We don't listen to music in a vacuum, where it stays only as a catchy tempo and never influences the way we see things. We don't play games or chat with strangers or write stories and poetry in a vacuum. We make conscious decisions to do these things and they affect us. 

I got involved in several arguments on Twitter over the fairly recent Gamergate controversy because a lot of men were insistent that what happens in video games stays in video games. Which is not true. When a gamer makes the decision to kill a sex worker in a game, to violate another body, no matter its virtuality, he is making that decision. He is thinking, I will now rape this character on my screen and then brutally run her over with my car. This is coming from the same organ he decides what socks to wear and what greetings to say to a cashier. We can't put dividers in our brain that can separate our actions and thoughts so absolutely. It's a thought he had? Then it is a thought he had. He can't just say it was only a game and he would never do that in real life. Sure, for the big majority of gamers this is true. 

If we think about it, the big majority of music listeners won't go out and commit rape either. The big majority of readers of fiction that has themes like pedophilia aren't going to be pedophiles either. Yes, that is true. But we need to stop acting like these things we consume aren't affecting us. Violence in our movie and television sector has become so brutally common that I am no longer affected by intense torture scenes. This is not a normal reaction to have. When I see a man's throat being cut or someone's eyes scooped out, I should cringe despite knowing that it's film effects because there are people, real people, who are victims of violence and acts like those. I should be aware that these are not normal, they are not something anyone should be used to. Because once something is normalized, we become indifferent to it and indifference is the worst disease.   

A lot of my Gamergate arguments were with people who believed that having these kind of fantasies (rape, violence, murder etc.) was okay and that the gaming industry only provided a safe space for people to act these fantasies out. This was shocking to me as I had not realized mentally and emotionally healthy human beings were regularly overtaken by fantasies of brutal homicides and gang rapes. Because while we are, as people, capable of these sort of acts, in peaceful and safe environments, we should see no need for them whatsoever. So, no, the gaming industry isn't providing a safe space for people to act these out, it's furthering the normalization of these sort of thoughts and desires in people. 

Of course, this is not a simple issue. We can't just say, let's stop talking about these. Let's just censor books and games and music and only talk about all things sugar, spice, and everything nice. This is more complex. And it's because we have a culture set up that pushes people towards these kind of wants. We need to ask ourselves, why do men fantasize about rape? Why do women fantasize about being raped? Why is killing people in a video-game considered an anti-depressant? 

How do we reach a middle ground where we can talk about these problems while cutting them down at the same time and not romanticizing them? Because sure, Lolita is a psychology novel with great literary merit, and a novel that raises a lot of questions, but it is not a one dimensional book created to only make us question how we interact with people of different age groups and ask ourselves if we can sympathize with a pedophile. Books and media in general, they come in layers. There is what the author intended, there is what the story says, and there is what the reader interprets. How do we reconcile all these in having a healthy discussion and supporting research to find answers and in providing one more way for people to further their thoughts and wishes of these things?

We can't police people's thoughts. We aren't in 1984. We don't want to police people's thoughts. I think what we want, or at least, what I want, is to make sure that we don't have these thoughts, because they are not healthy thoughts and they shouldn't make up a big portion of our lives. We shouldn't be enjoying music that glamorizes rape. So the question is, why are we?

Lots of figs,

Belle