“How I miss the time when I could keep my wife under control!”, said an old American man when I distributed the “Bitch” flyer around the neighborhood. Nothing was the same since the sexual revolution came together with feminism… or so we tell ourselves.
Domestic violence is a leading cause of injury to women. 5.3 million women are abused each year and 1,232 women are killed by an intimate partner, according American Instituted of Domestic Violence.
The situation is worse for women immigrants that can not speak English fluently or have no document for to work legally. In the Woman Centers of the rural Homestead and Imokalee (Florida), the mayor part of the case of rape and domestic violence is against immigrants. They do not use to denounce their partners to the U.S authorities, because they do not want to be deported.
Woman, immigrants, latinos… many groups at many times carry the weight of the system on their shoulders. The are promised rewards (for them, or perhaps their children) as long as they conform. What is the promise? Assimilation, acceptance and wealth.
The Scientific Justification
BF Skinner had great apparent success with the behavioral conditioning of animals, and a tidy theory to explain it. That kind of thing is rare in science. The natural impulse was to apply the theory to humans. There has been a lot of (in our opinion, not enough) resistance to it. Just as the current fashion holds that everything is “information”, or the older philosophic fashion of “utility”, Skinner’s regime only works if you throw away much of what makes us human.
The regime requires brutal control over the subject’s environment. Skinner was only able to use food as a training reward because he fed the animals 3/4 of what they needed to live. A happy animal was utterly uninterested in jumping through his hoops. Skinner didn’t study the Rat, he studied the Desperately Starving Rat Locked In A Box. Yet his ideas have been with us for so long, and have proved so useful to others, that we identify with that rat without horror or shame.
Video # 1:
BÏTCH, Pavlovian Solution for the modern home (2007)
Carlos Bueno & Ytaelena López
Recorded by Kara Andrade
San Francisco, California
Video # 2:
ANI-MALES (2002)
Koral García & Ytaelena López (GrupoGrama)
Recorded by Macjob Parabavis & Andrés Piña
About Ytaelena López:
Yta is a Venezuelan writer who has been doing poetic performances since 1998. Her first projects were with GrupoGrama, a multimedia art collective in Caracas that promotes new artistic talent and cultural events in alternative public spaces. She is the author of two books: Voces Nuevas of Celarg-Monteavila (1998) and Pliegues (2007)
More about Ytaelena López:
http://almainsolada.blogspot.com/