The Steubenville Lesson: Power, Responsibility, Humanity

 

It's a plausible if, and only if, you have internalised the assumption that women are not real human beings, just bodies to be manipulated with or without consent, pieces of wet and willing meat there for you to use for your pleasure. There's a word for what happens when one group of people sees another as less than human and insists on its right to hurt and humiliate them for fun. It’s an everyday word that is often misused to refer to something outside of ourselves. The word is ‘evil’.

 

Does this picture disturb you?  Does it disturb you more than, say, this picture of slaughtered children, collateral damage of war?  What of pictures of nameless corpses, stacked like cord wood in piles beside crematoriums?

 

Or - how about the trophy fish hung upside down, or deer antlers on a wall?

 

Dehumanizing is to justify ignoring Commandmants and Golden Rules.  By taking away agency from life forms other than us, we entitle ourselves to do as we please - through whatever narrow definition of we gets used.

 

The defence of this gets described as the battle for freedom to say or do whatever one wants.

 

Well, with great power comes great responsibility - and, increasingly, matching consequence.

 

Be mindful of what you do and who you do it too - we're all in glass houses, now.