Psycho
The night my mother watched Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in the late '60s is now a family legend. It was dark and late, and she was at home alone with two small children. She switched on the television to relax, for a bit of company. And got the shower scene.
Twenty years later, Psycho comes round again. This time, he comes wrapped in plastic, and booksellers are under instructions to limit his contact to those over age 18. The chances of Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho being read by the unsuspecting are therefore slim.
After a stream of talk shows and magazine articles, we know he is there.
This time it's something worse than terror; something on a scale far beyond the lone car pulling into an eerie motel. Terror has come back to us in gruesome technicolor and partly decomposed, like the corpses in the nightmares on Elm Street.
Whether or not American Psycho works as the satire Ellis and his publishers claim it is, the publicity surrounding it forms part of the background noise to our daily experience.
We know that there is a book out there which describes, in feminist lawyer Jocelynne Scutt's words, "women, tongue and lips cut off, forced to 'accept' a penis shoved between their bleeding, toothless gums; women, vagina forcibly slathered with camembert and waiting in sheer, struggling, exhausted terror, for the chilling, tearing teeth of a rat".
It is sickening to know that there are men out there reading this stuff: as Scutt says, "turning the pages, hunting quickly through for the thumbed portions of the book wherein these horrible descriptions are full-blown".
But this mental category of the psychopath, the stranger, the creep turning the pages of a book in a darkened room, is immobilising, depressing and basically inaccurate. That's not to say psychopaths don't exist: there are people beyond the pale of whatever we construe as "normal" social relationships; beyond hope of rehabilitation, sympathy or even understanding.
But to get beyond the despair and towards hope of change, we have to shift our focus from the psychopathic to "normal" men and women, all of whom, in a sexist society, are touched by sexism. Studies have shown that women are most at risk of violence and abuse not from strangers and psychopaths but from men they know, trust and even love. As Sydney columnist Adele Horin pointed out after a recent incident in a nightclub, normal men watch another man rape a woman and do nothing. Normal men have misogynist, gynophobic thoughts; women doubt their abilities. Women preface their sentences by apologies for even speaking; men interrupt them. In normal homes, everyone in the room laughs at a "bimbo" joke and thinks nothing of it.
If the idea that women are "airheads" and "only good for one thing" has any currency, then it is an idea which breeds contempt, and that breeds a market for the woman-hating strand in our culture.
By focussing on the continuum between the lighter and darker shades of sexism, we can overcome the immobilising effects of the grossest examples of it. Men and women can change their ideas; the positive experiences of the effects of the women's movement attest to this. It isn't easy. But we know it's possible.
By Tracy Sorensen