Jaycee Dugard and speaking the unspeakable
Yesterday, sitting in the bright lights of my hairdresser’s chair with my own daughters who had just had their blond hair cut, my hairdresser leaned in and asked
Did you hear about the kidnapping case? Some girl kidnapped when she was 11. Her stepfather saw it. Everyone suspected him. Turns out she’s still alive, 18 years later. Some guy was holding her prisoner in his backyard, fathered two children with her. Can you imagine that she’s still alive?”
She was speaking, or whispering, about Jaycee Dugard, a woman kidnapped as a child and kept captive well into adulthood. As today’s NY Times said in its headline, Ms. Dugard was not always “locked away,” but rather survived with her two children, now 14 and 11 themselves, in a series of backyard shacks and tents along with a cage and a soundproof shed.
Were the Times reporters, Jesse McKinley and Carol Pogash, suggesting she was not “really” a captive? If so, they should be forced to apologize because even without all the expert psychology into kidnapping victims, commonsense should tell them that someone taken as a child and raped and locked up in a cage and kept as a slave would be incapable of thinking rationally about her options for escape.
Kidnapping Victim Was Not Always Locked Away – NYTimes.com.
The bigger question for me is the last thing my hairdresser said about it:
The whole thing is making me physically ill. I want to be sick. I can’t talk about it anymore. Maybe it’s on the news now. Let’s put on CNN.”
This physical revulsion and wanting to not talk about it make sense. Much of human life is so revolting, so Abject according to psychoanalytic theory, that we literally cannot speak it aloud. The “let’s talk about it endlessly”- which is, quite honestly, what I want to do- requires a bit more thinking about our particular historical moment.
Michel Foucault says “sex is the secret” of modernity, a secret we are incessantly forced to confess, first through the literal confession of the Catholic Church, but within the last century, through the couch of psychoanalysis then as the demand to “come out” because of sexual identity politics and in the past decades for entertainment on the Jerry Springer Show or for “networking” on Facebook.
But Foucault forgot to mention the other secret of modernity: violence. Violence is that which we moderns supposedly do not engage in. Someone upsets us, we do not shoot them or beat them or kill them. If a man wants a woman, he does not just take her, throw her over his shoulder, and drag her back to his cave.
We control our emotions and our desires. That’s what makes us civilized. Of course, modern civilizations have committed more acts of violence than any on record, often in the name of “nation states” but also in the name of drugs or prisons or other forms of the “civilizing process.” As for controlling our desires, we’re not so good at that either (see Jerry Springer, above).
So it is when something truly barbaric leaks into our cultural consciousness, like the case of Jaycee Dugard, we are literally forced to watch it, talk about it, be disgusted by it, and insist it is unusual. But there is nothing truly unusual about this. Sexually violent acts are committed daily by “civilized” men– on children, women, and yes, other men. The number of date rapes on any American college campus, the number of phone calls to 911 because of domestic violence, the number of children in foster care because of sexual and physical abuse means that the unspeakable and disgusting acts committed by Phillip Garrido are not exactly unimaginable or even all that unique. Quite honestly, this case is so eerily like the Austrian case of Josef Fritzl, who held his own daughter a slave in a soundproof basement in plain sight and also repeatedly raped her and fathered children with her, that Garrido and he could be brothers.
And the very ordinariness of men’s violence and sexual acts is what haunts our civilization and forces us to say it aloud, like a protective spell: this is unheard of, unspeakable, has nothing to do with any of us. It would be far more civilized and even productive to ask instead: under what conditions of patriarchy can these things happen? How is it that no one questioned these men? Not even their wives or neighbors? And how can we change these structural forces that make monsters like Garrido and gossiping ghouls out of the rest of us?
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After reading the NYT article by Jesse McKinley and Carol Pogash there was really no mention of an opportunity for ms. Dugard to escape. The inference is that there were times when the perpetrators allowed outside contact with ms. Dugard and her children as well as some “supervised” trips. Patty Hearst was kidnapped and later involved in a bank robbery with her abductors. She served almost two years in prison before she was ultimately pardoned and exonerated. Elizabeth Smart walked the streets with her abductors before finally feeling safe enough to identify herself. These are the headline examples of mind control created by the trauma of physical and psychological abuse. The unreported cases are probably in the tens of thousands. The dad next door appears to be a “good guy” while wives and children are suffering from his abuse. This is a gender equal social problem. The statistics are family abuse readily found. Most of the victims suffer silently, brainwashed to keep the family secret. Tom Medlicott
Thank you, Laurie, for speaking the unspeakable.
I once lived in a town that was terrorized by a serial rapist and killer. That was horrifying, but after he was caught came another phenomenon that was alarming: the haste with which life returned to normal. The perpetrator was separated from us as a “monster” and an “animal” even though the worst monsters of the human imagination commit only one of his many crimes and the only animal to do such things is the human. I wanted us to hold onto our grief and fear long enough to try to change ourselves or at least to keep watch. To learn something from what those women had lost. Going back to normal, it seems to me, just sets the stage for the next perpetrator and the next victim.
You’ve mentioned psychoanalysis and schadenfreude, and we also turn these crimes into entertainment (“The Vanishing,” “Kiss the Girls,” etc), and I worry that gives the perpetrator a kind of cultural permission. He’s normal enough, anyway, to be a recurring character in our literature.
Can we make space, or gain permission, for a look at the complicity in these crimes of our whole culture or society or species?
Your sensitivity to this issue is laudable, Jeff. Thank you.
In response to another comment. See in context »exactly- by making him a “monster” or “other” we can continue to act as if we’re not implicated as a culture in all this.
In response to another comment. See in context »There may be another dimension of how not unusual this violence is, sort of maybe a “Violence PLUS” edge in the story. I’ve often remarked to colleagues that despite what the psychoanalytic literature says, people today seem to describe sexual acts and feelings with more ease than they have when talking about money and what they own. Its really very curious. And the thing about this story is how everyone was seeming OK that this man took ownership over this child, and her children, and no one, like those Times reporters, want to acknowledge how deep that ownership can go. So, I’m wondering if the abject in what he did includes sexual violence plus the way he took ownership over this child, and the children they produced. We have a such a hard time looking at how we too are owned and are owned by others. Like your hairdresser we don’t want to talk about how we’ve become what Erich Fromm would have called a necrophilic society.
I hope that those in charge of helping this young women and her children can learn something from the Fritzl case. It’s been more than a year now, hasn’t it, that the Fritzl woman and her children have been freed? I can’t imagine the deprivation … I’m so so very sorry for them all.
I have to admit I am a member of the “gossiping ghoul” club of Jessica Dugard. And to be well informed as a gossip in my obsessive search for the latest info., I ran across your most excellent commentary here on True/Slash. Thank-you. It is so refreshing to see intelligent analysis of this abusive-violence toward children and our response to it. I have noticed that in these long term kidnapping cases, most of the victims were renamed by their captors, one way to identify ownership. This was done by the Spaniards to the natives on their Baptism for instance. Film Studios claimed their ownership of stars by giving them a new name. Laying claim on land by renaming it, is a way to subjugate it for our use. Hence, Jaycee became Alissa.But one of the most disturbing pieces of this story for me is how Drug Addicts on parole are treated far more stringently and criminally than Rapists. It gives this message that one will be punished for hurting one’s self but to hurt or be powerful over other’s will be looked over, tacitly accepted. If we don’t look too closely (e.g. not looking further into the bowels of Gallido’s back yard) we will not have to deal with the possibility of having to do the hard work of rooting out what horrors the inequality of the sexes does to our selves, our children, our world.
If Jaycee Dugard regularly wore a burka and was hooked up to a battery or waterboarded in an isolated prison cell in Cuba, would we even be having this discussion?
Photographs of grinning thumbs-up American serviceWOMEN holding nude male prisoners by a dog leash didn’t cause this much stir.
Photographs of naked male prisoners stacked upon each other and forced into mock homosexual act poses are now out of sight and out of mind.
Quote:”"It would be far more civilized and even productive to ask instead: under what conditions of patriarchy can these things happen? How is it that no one questioned these men?”"
As a former service WOMAN myself, I’m glad conditions of patriarchy are blamed, far be it from me to question how each and everyone of us, man or woman, does not rise up in protest against our national condoning of torture – it too is monstrous animal behavior we no longer even question.
Quote: “” Sexually violent acts are committed daily by “civilized” men– on children, women, and yes, other men. The number of date rapes on any American college campus, the number of phone calls to 911 because of domestic violence, the number of children in foster care because of sexual and physical abuse means that the unspeakable and disgusting acts committed by Phillip Garrido are not exactly unimaginable or even all that unique”"
As a civilized woman in this society, I join you – and the patriarchy – in patently ignoring the sexually violent acts committed everyday by “helpless” women against men, children, and yes, other women, such as verifiable false rape accusations(almost without exception dismissed or dropped in sympathy to the fragile mental state of the false accuser. The number of 911 calls to domestic abuse hotlines to falsely ’set up’ an errant husband or boyfriend, especially in contentious divorce or custody cases – or the number of women who confidently know most men will not report physical abuse against them.
PostPartum depression or bad husbands are to be blamed for ‘Tot Mom’ murders. The Casey Andersons, Sharon Smiths, and Melissa Huckabys of this world are now rather commonplace.
I don’t think either gender is nearly as ‘civilized’ as we are ‘brainwashed’ into believing.