Objectify This

Hat tip to Sabotabby of Punkassblog for the scoop on this one: the Russian Government has released a statement officially limiting children’s toys that are “psychologically incongruous” (thus, threatening irony in the next generation of Russian childhoods) and stating that, as Sabotabby has it,

“Apparently, the Russian government feels it necessary to fight the growing emo menace:

“The drafters of the concept took a particular negative stance in regard to the Goth and emo youth subcultures, which are characterized by black clothing, piercings and a depressed outlook on reality. They authors compared the danger those subcultures hold for society to the dangers of skinheads, soccer hooligans, National Bolsheviks and even anti-fascists. Emo youths, according to the concept, “are subject to suicidal tendencies” and Goth children cultivate bisexuality. “The cost of the sexual services of an underage boy prostitute with Goth attributes is lower than for students in military schools but higher than for usual gay prostitutes,” the authors say, demonstrating their knowledge of life.

Sabotabby writes, “I like to think that the last sentence is just a poor translation, but really, judging by the rest of the proposed legislation, it probably isn’t.

“If you’re a Russian emo kid now, though, don’t worry too much. You’re apparently already beyond hope:

“The authors of the concept say that many of its clauses will have the power of law by the summer of 2009. “Nothing can be done with the current younger generation. It is lost,” said film director and Duma member Stanislav Govorukhin. “We have to save those who are two years old now and those who have yet to be born.” For the full report, read on here.

Ironically, Emo culture, which is stereotyped as being based on an embittered, everyone-hates-me type of attitude, might only be encouraged by direct discrimination by the government, as it will gain a heretofore unrealized potential for political statements.

What if, instead of just deciding that emo kids suck (which seems to be a cultural consensus - the Punkassblog post uses graphics drawn from an official “National Emo Kid Beatdown Day”) we examined why emo kids go emo in the first place?

Interestingly, emo culture seems to make mainstream people uncomfortable because it challenges gender norms. The word emo was first used to describe a punk genre that arose in Washington, D.C. in the 80’s, which included such bands as Rites of Spring, who wanted to move away from the violence of the hardcore punk movement. Emo culture soon grew more politicized, and began to question social conventions. Some emo bands challenged the capitalism endemic in American society, birthing the D.I.Y. movement, and the substance abuse endemic in youth culture, bringing about the straight-edge movement.

Yet first-wave emo bands did not define themselves as emo, much as contemporary hipsters do not define themselves as hipsters. As Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and Rites of Spring stated in an interview in 2003,

“I don’t recognize that attribution. I’ve never recognized “emo” as a genre of music. I always thought it was the most retarded term ever. I know there is this generic commonplace that every band that gets labeled with that term hates it. They feel scandalized by it. But honestly, I just thought that all the bands I played in were punk rock bands. The reason I think it’s so stupid is that - what, like the Bad Brains weren’t emotional? What - they were robots or something? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Emo is not just about any kind of emotion, though, it’s about expressions of sadness, which Western medicine has pathologized as depression. And that’s where the characterization of emo kids as “female” which is made so often, becomes really interesting. As the Mayo Clinic reports, males and females have the same propensity to become depressed before puberty; after puberty, however, female Americans become much more likely to become sad, because of hormonal changes and because, as the Clinic states,

“It’s not just biology that may account for the higher rate of depression in women. Social and cultural stressors may play a role, too. Although these stressors also occur in men, it’s usually at a lower rate. Women are more likely than men to shoulder the burden of both work and family responsibilities, for instance. They’re also more likely to have lower incomes, be single parents and have a history of sexual or physical abuse, all of which can contribute to depression, especially in women who’ve had depression in the past.

“In general, American women earn less money than men do. Single women with children have one of the highest poverty rates in the United States. Low socioeconomic status brings with it many concerns and stressors, including uncertainty about the future and less access to community and health care resources. Minority women might also face added stress from racial discrimination. These issues can make you feel as if you don’t have control over your life. That, in turn, can contribute to feelings of passivity, negativism and lack of self-esteem, which all increase your risk of depression.”

As the Norwegian National Institute of Occupational Health reported in 2005, male ambulance personnel experience more anxiety and depression than men in the general working population, while female ambulance personnel experience less anxiety and depression than women in the general working population (see above graph). These data suggest that women, on average, experience more anxiety than the average male ambulance worker, and that even women in one of the most high-stress occupations — an occupation which appears, in  the case of men, to rank as more depressing than the average job — experience less depression than the average woman.

In the U.S., the data are even more grim. The chart to the left illustrates that women are generally more depressed than men are, across the spectrum of depression (source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). Thus, the conflation of depression and femininity is a sad result of the normalization of misogyny in our culture: when correlation is confused with causation, we associate sadness with the feminine and kids who are attempting to carve out a niche for themselves as “sad” also tack on the “feminine” for extra emphasis. (Of course, it’s also true that women are allowed to discuss their feelings more openly than men in our culture, so discussion of feelings is automatically feminine, and women may be more likely to report depression if men feel stigmatized when they do so. Here’s my other post on Gender Oppression and Depression)

If Russian officials examined the misogyny that their own culture is famous for, they might find that their centuries-old proverb about marriage “If he beats you, he loves you,” (Source: USA Today) has something to do with the culture of the “psychologically incongruous.”

So what can we American Women do if we want to rewrite our emo fate? Become a feminist. Feminists have better sex and live happier lives because we know that this patriarchal system is not our fault; our inabilities to protect ourselves from oppression are not the results of personal weakness but of a flawed system which we can fight in our classrooms, in popular culture, in court, and in our lives.