Allegedly, 2022.

In this piece I understand the Patriarchy as the ideological system that perpetuates the straight white male’s institutional supremacy. I also understand Capitalism from a Marxist materialist perspective and believe that Capitalism/Neoliberalism and Patriarchy work in concert to oppress women and girls.

This work is specifically about the way that ‘artistic genius’ protects certain straight white men from paying for their crimes, but is also, more broadly about the endemic problem of heterosexual white men hurting women and girls and not facing appropriate consequences. It speaks to the experience of women, of living and breathing this misogyny (where extreme violence against women is often served up as entertainment) and learning that their lives are not as important as those of the men that hurt them.  

In 2016, when Brock Turner was found guilty of ‘penetrating’ Chanel Miller while she was unconscious, much of the coverage was focussed on how the verdict would ruin his life, rather than that his own actions had consequences, with life altering repercussions for Chanel. His father (Dan Turner) demonstrated this sense of entitlement in a letter he wrote to the judge pleading for leniency, in which he said:

‘These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life. The fact that he now has to register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life forever alters where he can live, visit, work, and how he will be able to interact with people and organizations. (Xu, 2016)’

The work is pertinent at this historical moment, when the inadequacies of capitalism have been exposed by the financial crash, and feminist successes such as #metoo have provoked a vicious Men’s Rights Activist backlash. These ideological disruptions provide an opportunity for us to reflect on the capitalist/patriarchal capture of our subconscious (as conceptualised by Mark Fisher) that causes us to act in the interests of the ideology rather than our own, or those of our communities. 

The words in the artwork express the ‘stockholm syndrome’ of women internalizing the values of patriarchy and punishing themselves when their emotional responses are not inline with the ideology’s dogma.