SCOTUS and Normalized Violence Against Women

"Because Eminem said it at a concert where people are going to be entertained..."

This reasoning just makes my skin crawl.

The Supreme Court decided to not to convict a man who posted threatening lyrics from singer Eminem on his facebook because they felt the standard to convict was too low, which gives us yet another example of how our society normalizes violence against women.  People have been critical of Eminem and his views about women for many years now and for good reason; the fact that he would write such violent songs about women and the fact that millions of fans would buy the albums already speaks volumes about how normalized violence against women is in our society.

But now, in this case, because some people find lyrics describing violence against women entertaining, the Supreme Court feels that they cannot considered threats and should be protected under Free Speech regulations.  While the man in question may not have said, explicitly, that the lyrics were in reference to his partner, the fact that he would post them publicly in the context of just having split up is troubling.

At least, it should be...

It's troubling because SCOTUS's invokes 'context' as a way to defend the decision not to convict when it's the context of where and when the man is using the lyric that they should be looking at.  The most dangerous time for women experiencing domestic violence is attempting to leave or immediately after having left the relationship, so for this man to be posting lyrics like this publicly has to, or should, be concerning.

Let me put it another way.

If a friend was posting lyrics that were about suicide, would we ignore them because songs are entertainment and there's no subtext to why someone would post lyrics like that publicly?

Music can be a powerful tool for emotional catharsis and there are a lot of feelings that people can have that can be addressed through listening to certain songs.  We all have songs in our music collection that are for very specific times in our lives when there's more negative thoughts going on than normal and we need a bit of extra help.  Internally identifying, validating, and naming those feelings through music can be a healthy way of addressing them.  But, if we start publicizing certain things it changes the context of the situation.  Again, if we consider the situation where someone is posting media that talks about suicide we'd start to get concerned about whomever was posting the material.

Whenever we make something public, part of our motivation is seeking validation for whatever it is that we're sharing; we're testing the waters to see how people feel or react to something that we think is important.  It can be normal things, like vacation photos, or it can be harmful things, like lyrics containing violence against women.  Now, not everyone who posts something alarming on facebook is guaranteed to act on them in every instance, but it should raise some red flags if we know that there's more to the story in terms of who is posting and it should tell us that there's something that needs to be addressed.

Sadly, though, this is a kind of chicken-and-egg example of normalized violence against women; if violence against women is so normalized that it can be considered entertainment, then it shouldn't surprise anyone that SCOTUS wouldn't identify it as threatening.

Linkage:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/01/politics/supreme-court-elonis-facebook-ruling/index.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/supreme-court-facebook-threat_n_7470634.html