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Case 1: Slender Man attacks in Wisconsin are the result of bad internet culture not paying the proper respect to fictional monsters. Also known as: Little Girls Like Dollies, not Knifies.
Purveyor of The Stupid: John Kass of the Chicago Tribune
Many of you have probably heard of the recent attack in Wisconsin in which two middle-school girls attempted to murder their 12-year-old classmate by luring her into the woods and stabbing her multiple times in the legs, arms and trunk. The victim survived and is expected to make a full recovery, although surgery was required to treat her many wounds. This being America, the two young girls are going to be tried as adults. This being America, their baffling crime has been attributed by one conservative nimrod (well hey, if I’m a pinhead, I think I have the right to launch a two-syllable quasi-slur at the people I don’t like, too) to our culture, particularly internet culture, and extra particularly to the blurring lines between fantasy and reality and the gentrification of movie monsters, who would now just as soon marry you and cook you chicken soup when you’re sick as devour your immortal soul. The girls were apparently involved in a fiction-writing site (and we all know how dangerous and unsavory those are) specializing in horror and the development of that urban legend we all know and love and which has kicked our asses more times than we can count: the carb-conscious Slender Man. It seems the two little would-be murderers wanted to impress ole’ Slendy by offering up their buddy as a sacrifice.
And here’s the part where I stop summarizing and make my point. To put it simply: there is nothing weird or new about a bunch of satanically-minded little girls going into the woods and trying to take out one of their own. This is just what happens when you’re a female teetering on the brink of puberty and living in a society which you’re just beginning to suspect doesn’t actually value you for your immortal soul. I am going to go ahead and make the argument that this treatment of the girls’ ghastly deeds is inherently and profoundly sexist because it treats a crime which can readily be understood in psychological terms (or indeed by anyone who has ever raised a tweenager or been one themselves) as aberrant, unnatural, so inconceivable on an individual level that it absolutely must be blamed on a larger societal ill. I don’t disagree that we live in a sick, sad world, but quite frankly no one would be making this sort of claim if two little boys had been involved. Men can commit violence on a far larger scale and there is a shocking amount of room allotted to ‘boys being boys’, yet when it’s revealed that females also have an intense capacity for cruelty and sadism, then there must be something unholy about the whole situation.
This author made a somewhat disjointed attempt to explain his argument and to make it seem like more than the simplistic appeal to reason that it was by decrying our culture’s taming of fictional monsters, the de-fanging of the vampire in such pop-culture staples as Twilight to the point where the monster will not only not hurt you, he’ll even marry you. Making friends with monsters is thus the reason that these two girls wanted to impress Slender Man, because they thought maybe they’d be invited to the Slender family picnic if they cut up a virgin and left her for dead in his backyard, right? Wrong. Having been a little girl myself once, and a pretty twisted one at that, let me set this poor man straight: these girls love Slender because he is evil, because he will devour their immortal souls, because he is fond of killing. They never once mistook him for their benevolent Uncle Jimbo who takes them out for ice-cream even when Dad says no. They are responding positively, with unthinkable perversity, as members of the female sex who not only endorse violence, but who like to get their own hands blood-red from time to time.
There’s a psycho-babble term for all this: folie à deux. It represents what is really likely going on here and what allows this crime to be comprehensible without recourse to either sexism or extreme generalization. A psychosis can be shared by two people in close association. Only one of the two need be truly fucked up, as the other can be merely impressionable and just go along with the crime. This phenomenon has been well-documented. I can think of two examples right away. For the male version, consider Boy A with Speidy…I mean Andy…I mean Andrew Garfield in a gut-wrenching turn before he was famous. For the female case, there’s the equally fantastic Heavenly Creatures with Kate Winslet just before she did Titanic. This movie was based directly on a real-life story, so clearly there is precedent and clearly this has existed for much longer than the internet.
Purveyor of The Stupid: John Kass of the Chicago Tribune
Many of you have probably heard of the recent attack in Wisconsin in which two middle-school girls attempted to murder their 12-year-old classmate by luring her into the woods and stabbing her multiple times in the legs, arms and trunk. The victim survived and is expected to make a full recovery, although surgery was required to treat her many wounds. This being America, the two young girls are going to be tried as adults. This being America, their baffling crime has been attributed by one conservative nimrod (well hey, if I’m a pinhead, I think I have the right to launch a two-syllable quasi-slur at the people I don’t like, too) to our culture, particularly internet culture, and extra particularly to the blurring lines between fantasy and reality and the gentrification of movie monsters, who would now just as soon marry you and cook you chicken soup when you’re sick as devour your immortal soul. The girls were apparently involved in a fiction-writing site (and we all know how dangerous and unsavory those are) specializing in horror and the development of that urban legend we all know and love and which has kicked our asses more times than we can count: the carb-conscious Slender Man. It seems the two little would-be murderers wanted to impress ole’ Slendy by offering up their buddy as a sacrifice.
And here’s the part where I stop summarizing and make my point. To put it simply: there is nothing weird or new about a bunch of satanically-minded little girls going into the woods and trying to take out one of their own. This is just what happens when you’re a female teetering on the brink of puberty and living in a society which you’re just beginning to suspect doesn’t actually value you for your immortal soul. I am going to go ahead and make the argument that this treatment of the girls’ ghastly deeds is inherently and profoundly sexist because it treats a crime which can readily be understood in psychological terms (or indeed by anyone who has ever raised a tweenager or been one themselves) as aberrant, unnatural, so inconceivable on an individual level that it absolutely must be blamed on a larger societal ill. I don’t disagree that we live in a sick, sad world, but quite frankly no one would be making this sort of claim if two little boys had been involved. Men can commit violence on a far larger scale and there is a shocking amount of room allotted to ‘boys being boys’, yet when it’s revealed that females also have an intense capacity for cruelty and sadism, then there must be something unholy about the whole situation.
This author made a somewhat disjointed attempt to explain his argument and to make it seem like more than the simplistic appeal to reason that it was by decrying our culture’s taming of fictional monsters, the de-fanging of the vampire in such pop-culture staples as Twilight to the point where the monster will not only not hurt you, he’ll even marry you. Making friends with monsters is thus the reason that these two girls wanted to impress Slender Man, because they thought maybe they’d be invited to the Slender family picnic if they cut up a virgin and left her for dead in his backyard, right? Wrong. Having been a little girl myself once, and a pretty twisted one at that, let me set this poor man straight: these girls love Slender because he is evil, because he will devour their immortal souls, because he is fond of killing. They never once mistook him for their benevolent Uncle Jimbo who takes them out for ice-cream even when Dad says no. They are responding positively, with unthinkable perversity, as members of the female sex who not only endorse violence, but who like to get their own hands blood-red from time to time.
There’s a psycho-babble term for all this: folie à deux. It represents what is really likely going on here and what allows this crime to be comprehensible without recourse to either sexism or extreme generalization. A psychosis can be shared by two people in close association. Only one of the two need be truly fucked up, as the other can be merely impressionable and just go along with the crime. This phenomenon has been well-documented. I can think of two examples right away. For the male version, consider Boy A with Speidy…I mean Andy…I mean Andrew Garfield in a gut-wrenching turn before he was famous. For the female case, there’s the equally fantastic Heavenly Creatures with Kate Winslet just before she did Titanic. This movie was based directly on a real-life story, so clearly there is precedent and clearly this has existed for much longer than the internet.
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