Like almost everyone else in the world, I read Stieg Larsson's trilogy about a bisexual computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, who suffers sexual abuse and is out for revenge.
Salander, a brilliant woman with a photographic memory, is wrongly locked up in an asylum for violently attacking her father, a Russian spy, to protect her mother. Her legal guardian violently rapes her, but Salander gets him back by, among other things, tattooing "I am a sadistic pig and a rapist" across his chest -- giving readers a vicarious thrill. Despite a poor translation and some pedestrian prose, I enjoyed all two thousand pages of the tale, in three volumes.
Then I caught myself. Okay, my wife caught me. "This book minimizes the brutal rape, torture and murder of dozens of women," she said after reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," the first book in the series. "It seems entirely inconsistent that Larsson would allow his 'principled' character (journalist Mikael Blomkvist) to conceal all of the murders from the police and the families of the victims." The next time I saw a little old lady clutching the yellow paperback (among a dozen others on my subway train), I thought twice about the amazing popularity of Larsson's books.
Americans are obviously enthralled by the topic. But rather than simply being voyeurs, we should use the book's popularity as a way to initiate a real discussion about sexual assault -- a pervasive problem we, as a culture, don't talk about enough.
The U.S. Justice Department recently estimated that only 26 percent of all rapes or attempted rapes are reported to law enforcement officials. 17.6 percent of women in the U.S. have survived a completed or attempted rape. (Of these, 21.6 percent were younger than age 12 when they were first raped, and 32.4 percent were between the ages of 12 and 17.)
With the "Millennium Trilogy" rivaling "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" in popularity, the recurring theme of sexual abuse, and its relationship to real life here in America, has gone largely unacknowledged in the public discourse. Domestic abuse rarely makes headlines -- unless a celebrity is caught beating up his girlfriend -- and yet we can't seem to get enough of Salander. As my wife points out, it's hypocritical to remain silent on sexual abuse while slurping up graphic fiction that exploits our curiosity about the issue.
"I found the polemical concern for women to ring quite hollow," David Greene, the executive director of "The First Amendment Project", told me. "If Larsson really wanted to write about sexual abuse, perhaps he could have chosen a male hero (Blomkvist) that was not seemingly irresistible to women of all ages. To me, the book read as a condemnation of the most atrocious acts -- Nazism, serial rape, exploitation by a guardian -- but not of the more subtle forms of exploitation and abuse." Blomkvist, the savior and detective, sleeps with every likable female character, undercutting the feminist sentiment that Larsson sets out to express.
"I do think that Larsson's goal was to raise awareness about the issue," Amanda Wolfe told me. She is an education and prevention specialist at Casa Myrna Vazquez, and speaks across the state about domestic abuse. "The attack of Salander by her guardian was graphic, but I don't think it was done to be titillating. It was definitely trying to show the severity of the violence within that rape."
Salander is portrayed as childlike in appearance, but possesses powerful sex appeal to men and women, young and old. It leaves open the question whether readers are getting off on reading about a woman whose promiscuity can be seen as resulting from her abuse. Wolfe doesn't agree. "As a bisexual, I wasn't offended by [the portrayal of Salander's sexuality]. I just thought [it portrayed] her as a strong female who's not afraid to take ownership of her sexuality."
Jenny Efimova, manager of SafeLink, a statewide domestic violence hotline, adds, "I agree with your wife: There's a lot of misconceptions about sexual violence perpetrated by men against women. [It] isn't really talked about in our society the way it should be talked about, and particularly the dynamics of power and control."
Larsson himself once witnessed a gang rape of a young girl that he was unable to stop -- an event that shaped him as a feminist and as a novelist. Efimova points out, "Salander doesn't just get raped -- she gets raped by her guardian. So I think [Larsson] was also trying to shed light on the power imbalances that are inherent, not just in the sexual assault, but on the power imbalance that their relationship had to begin with, and that she had no power in that society and he had all the power in the society."
"People think the victims [of domestic violence] are staying because they want to, and the victims are choosing their partners, so thereby it's their fault," Efimova says. "We need to connect the dots for people, to talk about what this is all about, and the power imbalances that are inherent in our society. We consider that to be an individual thing, and we think rape is about sex, and domestic violence is about somebody who has used too many drugs or alcohol -- we attribute it to individual factors."
Larsson gives his readers a window on sadistic rape, and yet we really don't want to make the association with reality. "It would be a very scary world for people to live in if they felt [rape] could happen to anybody," says Efimova. "And so, as a defense mechanism we say, This can't really happen to me because I don't do this, this, and this."
But ignoring the problem won't make it go away -- by choosing to remain voyeurs, we are, in effect, making the world safer for violent predators. Sexual abuse is rampant and the real victims don't have Lisbeth Salander's ability to fight back. They are depending on the rest of us to do the right thing, by stamping out a culture of abuse and holding perpetrators accountable. "Social change will happen," Wolfe points out, "when more people stop choosing the route of saying nothing and acting like it's not happening."
Follow Tom Matlack on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tmatlack
Billy Frolick: Lisbeth Salander in 2012!
I welcome Mr. Matlock's discussion on Stieg Larsson's trilogy and would like to make the following points: (1) I think the theme of all the books, violence against women generated in part by societal mores and government power structures is much more complex than the statement that the books deal with Salander's sexual abuse and desire for revenge. (2) Some critics' view that Blomqvist's active sexual life undercuts the theme doesn't seem true. Blomqvist as a character appears to like women a lot, and the women he sleeps with are strong, liberated, and make the choices themselves. (3) Finally, the point that people who like the books are hypocritical because they are "silent" about the real problem doesn't seem to be true. Isn't this topic a major one? Don't we have many organizations that deal with the safety of women and help and guidance for them? I don't get this point and think it needs a bit more support to make it stick.
I don't pretend to understand popular culture fully, but the question of exactly WHY this series of books has become such an American obsession is worth pondering given the connection to violence against women. Maybe it is a sign of progress after decades of women (and men) beating the drum on this issue. Or maybe it has a darker meaning. I am frankly not sure. But I think it very important to contemplate and discuss, which was my point and you all have done so well.
One point of interest is that Larsson's trilogy illuminates a reality of the status of women in a society long considered to be totally fair and just to both sexes. For example, Larsson's common law wife couldn't inherit his property because of Sweden's laws requiring formal marriage. That component is not as relevant in other countries, such as the U.S., where we have more variety in views of women's equality.
And that's why there are experts on, and programs against, violence against women for you to consult now. Thanks to those many decades of our society talking about this problem at the urging of feminist activists.
Hooray for Larsson for finally bringing all of this to your attention.
Perhaps your wife would like him to make his points more emphatically; to, in effect, pound people over the head with the violence and the wrongness of domestic violence and sexual abuse. However, stridency is more likely to turn readers off and drive them away from reading him, leaving him with no platform to say anything. Softly, softly catchee monkey, so to speak. Nobody wants to be preached at, but if you suck them in by entertaining them for a bit, you can often stroke their minds with the points you wish to make.
I also did not find Blomkvist'x sexuality a problem, neither as a woman or a feminist. I don't find him unrealistic as a character in that sense. He is human and flawed as the rest of us, but not ashamed to admit that he has sexual desires. If we want to create a world in which people are freed to choose not to be sexually exploited, why does that necessarily mean others aren't equally free to explore their sexuality with willing partners as Blomkvist does?
http://www.vday.org/home
I tried posting this helpful info yesterday but the comment did not go through.
It's runaway success in America is horribly unsettling. In Sweden, I can't say. Perhaps it punctures some cultural smugness I'm not aware of. The style and the writing (translator's or Larsson's) is atrocious--132 cups of coffee consumed in the book and not one ounce of honest stimulation.
That explains why you agree with him. You haven't finished the story he was trying to tell. You've only read the beginning, not the middle or the end.
If you'd read the other two books, you'd feel differently. The second and third books deal with how society responds to the sexual and domestic violence in the first book.
The problem is not the author, it's the readers.
If the readers only want to read the one book where she is graphically raped, and don't want to read the other two books where the the legal and moral consequences of this rape reveal themselves and eventually end up being known and discussed by the public, it's not really Larsson's fault.
But more important is the question of means and ends raised by what were clearly the muckraking intentions of Larsson. I understand that one reader/viewer’s titillation can be another’s revelation. Granting that, I have to ask the champions of this work who are also long time and ardent workers to end violence against women, and QV appears to fully qualify as a part of this important work, where should we draw a line? Television crime series are filled with stories that play up violence against women. Are they part of the problem or part of the solution?
Long ago women asked the question if the oppressor could be fought with the tools of the oppressor? Adding nuance to discussions of popular books and films which raise this issue makes sense to me. Women’s scholarship does this as a matter of course. Swallowing Larsson whole and hoping all who come in contact with this work will have their consciousness raised in regard to the long and continuing silent plague of violence against women is, I’m afraid, not going to happen. The Matlacks provide an important contribution to the conversation on this book.