by Iain Overton
I explained what I was doing. As she listened she took small sips from a coffee that had been served in a wine glass and considered her reply. ‘One of the things about adult entertainment,’ she said, ‘is that it has to be inherently superficial. I mean, what do you think of when you have an orgasm?’
I spluttered. I’d never been asked that in an interview. She answered for me. ‘Oblivion. Nothingness. Don’t you? At that moment you are probably not contemplating anything. So in a film if you are trying to get across deep philosophical concepts you are pretty much shooting yourself in the foot.’ She was telling me not to look too deeply into what role she had played; it was a porn film, stupid.
‘When you do an adult feature you are making a film for about fifteen minutes in terms of the plot, and the rest is sex,’ she explained. ‘And so you have to work in archetypes in those short sections. So you have cheerleaders, nurses, moms baking apple pie. And one of those things that Robby D [her director] is good at is making chicks with guns look awesome. So playing a sniper had nothing to do with me. That was down to Robby D.’
There were certainly sexual archetypes that I had heard of before that focused on female snipers: black propaganda all. Russian forces in Chechnya in the 1980s spoke of blonde Amazonian biathletes fighting against them as sniper mercenaries; they called them ‘white tights’.2 The Russians sighted them again in South Ossetia and Georgia in 2008, and in Ukraine in 2014.3 Then there was the female Viet Cong sniper known as Apache, who they said used to torture US Marines, letting them bleed to death.4 One of her ‘trademarks’ was to castrate her captives. Later I learned that Dr Ruth, the famous American-Jewish psychosocial sex therapist, had also once trained as an Israeli sniper.5
This was the subverted image of the markswoman: sex, death and fear all wrapped up together. The erotic power of the unseen female killer – a shadow figure called God – bringing death and sex to men. It reminded me of Mexico’s dark goddess of death that the gangs pray to – Santa Muerte – or the Israeli sniper I had met. Certainly I had been struck by how attractive the latter was, as if, somehow, her beauty, in an unseemly way, was incongruous with her ability to take life so easily. Perhaps this allure was what Robby D was seeking by casting Stoya in this role.
The reality, though, was quite different.
‘I mean, I don’t even like guns,’ Stoya said, lighting up another cigarette. ‘They frighten me.’
There’s certainly a link between sex and guns.
On a superficial level you can point to things like videos of women in bikinis shooting rifles. This genre was most famously captured by Andy Sidari in his vacuous series ‘Bullets, Bombs, and Babes’ in the late 1980s. It featured a montage of unreconstructed sexual clichés – Playboy Playmates and Penthouse Pets wielding semi-automatics in G-strings. Men’s violent fantasies made flesh.
More recently, as with Stoya, the gun has entered the peripheries of hard porn. The ‘teenage starlet’ Indigo Augustine seems to have built up a loyal following partly because her breasts are tattooed with inked images of pistols. And there are plenty of videos on porn sites with titles such as Chick Has a Gun to Sell, I Got a Gun to Suck or French Girls Shoot Guns Then Have Orgy. This fetish clearly says more about the masturbators than about the women involved. But seeing things through the prism of sex and gender helps in other ways. It makes it slightly easier to peer through the looking glass to see what guns really mean to men.
Of all the people I’d met on my travels so far, only a few had been women, and even fewer had been holding a gun in their hands. There was the doctor in South Africa, the funeral-home saleswoman in Honduras and the suicide-charity worker in Switzerland. But all of these women, in one way or another, were responding to the changes the gun had wrought; they were not the ones wielding them.
The ones holding the guns were almost always men. This did not surprise me; the odds of a man in the US owning a gun are at least three times higher than for a woman.6 In Portugal it’s even more extreme: 99 per cent of firearm licence applications are from men.7
Why is this? Historical influences and the male bias of many of the jobs that require guns offer some explanations. But it might also be a response to something else. After all, as female emancipation and sexual equality has edged its way forward, it seems that guns still remain as unreconstructed an instrument of male violence as they were 100 years ago.
This is possibly because in many countries modern market economics have caused the manly virtues of muscle and brawn to be challenged by the more ‘feminine’ charms of intellect, creativity and guile. Putting it simply, in developed knowledge economies, IT computer programmers and public-relations executives earn far more than construction workers and security guards.8 This shift in desired skills has happened alongside a major manufacturing output decline, particularly in the US. There, nearly 30 per cent of all jobs in 1960 were blue-collar. Today it is about 10 per cent. Despite a near doubling of the American population, there are now about four million fewer manufacturing jobs there than fifty years ago.9
The outcome of this decline has been well documented: a pervasive insecurity about a man’s role in the world (even if this insecurity is often based more on the perception of lost power than is actually the case – men still earn on average more than women).10 And, for those men who feel their status has been eroded and confused by an ever-changing world, the gun is one thing they can cling on to. It redresses their sense of manliness and imparts the illusion of strength, status and power.
It’s not me coming to this conclusion: the gun manufacturers themselves blatantly acknowledge this zeitgeist. Their adverts are full of vitalised masculinity. Glock says its guns give you the ‘confidence to live your life’.11 ‘Balance the Power in your hands today!’ is how the Tavor Semi-Automatic Rifle ad tells it.12 The Walther PPX pistol is just ‘Tough. Very Tough’.13
The manufacturers of the Bushmaster automatic rifle pushed all of this it to its logical extreme. They ran a highly successful ‘Man Card’ campaign, where owning one ‘confirms that you are a Man’s Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded’. Your friends can even revoke your man card if you are a ‘crybaby’ or ‘coward’.14
The Small Arms Survey have even added their august views to this issue. They noted that men often turn to guns to assert their place in society: ‘They are powerful tools with which young men can assert their masculinity, whether by acquiring the objects and status they are conditioned to seek, or by overturning the societies from which they are excluded.’15
All of this, to me, made sense, not least because I had witnessed the reality close up years before, a few days after seeing that murdered woman in the early hours of a Brazilian morning.
We had agreed to meet in one of the squat, square homes that fill the dead spaces and shantytowns of São Paolo’s outer reaches. It was a district where the houses look like children’s drawings – places thrown together and hemmed in with corrugated iron and breezeblock. He had told us not to be late, so we waited for him inside, behind a high metal door that felt like a prison’s gate. When he walked in, a thin and tight-wired man of nerves and reptilian movements, he greeted us wordlessly with an elaborate handshake and then looked around the place with a suspicious eye. He had a beany hat pulled low, despite the heat.
Pulling up a plastic chair, he motioned for us to sit at an unstable table. Perhaps this piece of furniture served as an object of respectability. It made this seem more like an interview than a snatched conversation that broke the law. He was nervous, and tension crackled in the air. Then he reached under his shirt and pulled out the thing we had come to see – his pistol. He showed it to us slyly at first, and we leaned in to get a better look. It was a US-made gun – a .38 Harrington & Richardson, made by an American company that now operated under the Freedom Group umbrella of gun companies. It must have been over thirty years old.
I had wanted this for the film I was making: to meet a gang member with
an illegal gun. Oddly, in El Salvador and Honduras gangland guns had been kept hidden from me, but I had got what I sought here.
‘I carry this,’ he said, his arms strong and sinewy and marked with a history of violence, ‘because of the power it gives me. It makes me feel like I am taller. Like I am bigger.’
The reporter – Ramita Navai – asked if he had killed anyone with it, and the translator said it was better if we did not ask that question. Instead he carried on talking: ‘Here – this can make you someone. The police, other gangs, other men – they listen to you. This one talks.’ And he held it out again – a heavy five-shooter with a worn edge and a dull patina. He spoke in that slow singsong way. With all its cadences and rhythm, Brazilian Portuguese can sound like a balmy evening on a beach with a cold beer. But right now it sounded like a death threat, like a serpent’s hiss.
The way the gun had the capability to make this slight, rat-faced gang member feel like a tough guy is something that exists across time and culture. It has even led a columnist in the US to suggest that the best form of gun control would be a campaign to challenge masculinity at its roots, to insinuate that men who bought semi-automatic rifles had small penises.16 This might sound ludicrous, but here in Brazil a peace charity, Viva Rio, did pretty much that. As a lobbyist for them, Professor Antonio Bandeira, said in an interview: ‘One of our most successful media campaigns ironically associated sexual insecurity with the glorification of guns. Pretty and popular actresses said, “Good lovers don’t need a gun.”’ The campaign helped the charity lobby for tighter Brazilian gun control, and, as the professor said: ‘Research showed gun homicides declined 8 per cent in the five years after the law was implemented in 2004, saving 5,000 lives.’17
I think Viva Rio understood something that many gun control lobbyists elsewhere fail to. That simply imposing gun laws without a cultural shift in attitudes to guns is not going to work; that you have to look at hard psychological truths. If you view attitudes to guns through the lens of sex and desire you might see, to take inspiration from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, that man’s desire to own a phallic symbol like the gun is a response to something deeper. A shrink might argue that gun ownership is a response to the fear of emasculation – a reaction to metrosexual modernism where men face losing their jobs, their status and, ultimately, their meaning.18
Any threat – such as the possibility of men losing their gun – causes, in turn, a deeper fear. This might explain why even the most basic gun legislation is met with fierce opposition in the US.
You see it in the details. Like when a Florida gun instructor put a video on the Facebook page of the pro-gun control group Moms Demand Action. In it, he shot a target bearing the group’s logo. ‘Happy Mother’s Day,’ he said, showing the bullet holes to the camera. Or when forty members of the group Open Carry Texas – who call Moms Demand Action ‘thugs with jugs’ – showed up outside a restaurant in Arlington, Texas, armed with assault rifles. Four women from Moms Demand Action were inside eating, and the men stood outside posturing in a bewildering way. Members from that same armed group were later to hold a ‘mad minute’ at a firing range, pulverising a female mannequin with a hail of bullets.
These small events are so ugly as to make you scratch your head. But psychology perhaps helps us understand why such intense, disturbing emotions might come about. It shows how the debate is not just about guns but about other, deeper fears.
Looking at gun ownership in psychological terms also did something else for me. It helped me challenge the notion that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’, as Richard had claimed back in that hunting lodge in South Africa.
In 2006, psychologists at Knox College in Galesburg carried out an experiment on thirty male college students. They each provided a saliva sample and then were given a gun or a child’s toy to play with for fifteen minutes. Afterwards another sample of their saliva was taken. The men were then asked to add as much hot sauce as they wanted to a cup of water they thought another subject was going to drink. Those who had been given the gun showed significantly greater increases in testosterone and added much more hot sauce to the water than those who had played with the toy.19 In this experiment the gun seemed transformative. Other studies have shown similar results. Carrying a concealed gun has even been said to change the way people are seen to walk.20
Of course, such experiments need to be replicated a dozen times to prove anything. But I can say this: I have seen policemen and soldiers, self-defence trainers and criminal gangbangers visibly change when they picked up a gun. I have watched the way their guns became part of them, the barrel an extension of their bodies and wills, emboldening them and diminishing the rest of us who did not have guns. The gun transformed these men and the entire situation with it, just as it changed the eyes of the thief who sat opposite me in the heat of that São Paolo summer.
Afterwards, as we sat in the crew car and drove away from the dusty favela, our translator told us she had been terrified. The gang member had spoken words that oscillated between paranoia and anger, and she had struggled to comprehend some of the things he was saying. And she had feared the small pistol in the hands of this angry man.
But this is what happens. A gun gives that ultimate edge of authority to someone who lacks it through intelligence alone. On its own the gun wins any argument – it elevates ‘A Nobody’ to ‘The Man’. Small wonder so many men love them.
As with so many love affairs, things quickly go sour. So it is with man’s love for the gun – a love affair infused with death.
With the exception of New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Tonga and Latvia, more men are killed as a result of armed violence than women. Globally, the male homicide rate is almost four times that of females.21 And in places such as Brazil the vast majority of homicide victims, over 90 per cent, are men – usually poor and young ones.22 For every woman killed by armed violence, the World Health Organization has reported that thirteen men are killed in Colombia, fifteen in El Salvador, sixteen in the Philippines and almost seventeen in Venezuela.23
In war, men fare similarly badly. A major analysis of global mortality data found that the male deaths in war always outstrip female deaths. Also, the females with the highest death rates are baby girls; in males it’s those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine who are hardest hit. This is because women are often impacted by the indirect consequences of war – disease and malnutrition. Men are impacted directly by gunfire – herds of young men going to their death.24
As I had found out from the World Health Organization, men also commit suicide more often than women. The extra-governmental agency looked into gun suicides and found that in every country they reviewed men had killed themselves with greater frequency than women.25
Yet these terrible and sad figures about the impact of guns on men are often not debated with any conviction. It’s almost as if we feel this is all inevitable, as if men somehow deserve their painful and lonely deaths at the hand of a gun.
Google the exact phrase ‘Armed violence against women’ and you get 26,900 responses. Google ‘Armed violence against men’ and you’ll get two hits.26 Of course, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of gun violence, but this turning away from the true impact of gun violence on men has consequences that are deep and troubling.
For years, a spectre hung over Ciudad Juárez. In the 1990s, this northern Mexican border town became known for its gruesome femicides – the deaths of hundreds of women. These murders, often sexual in nature, grew in the public’s imagination – referenced in Tori Amos’s song ‘Juárez’, Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 and FX’s drama The Bridge. The city became synonymous with the rape and murder of young girls; pink crosses sprouting around its barren edges, each commemorating the bodies of women found in that grey Mexican dirt.
But as these female tragedies were unfolding in Juárez, far greater numbers of men were also being killed and mutilated. Between 2007 and 2012, over 11,400 people were murdered
here. Despite having only 1 per cent of the Mexican population, this border town had about 9 per cent of Mexico’s homicides. By 2010, ten people a day were being gunned down. That year over 3,500 people died, and Juárez earned the title of the most violent city in the world outside a war zone.27
And the vast majority of these dead were men. But few crosses were raised for them.28 In fact, when you really look at the figures you’ll be surprised. The proportion of women as victims of all homicides in Juárez was less than it is in many US cities. Female murder victims in Juárez between 1987 and 2007 worked out at less than 10 per cent of all killings there. In US cities such as Houston up to 20 per cent of those murdered in a given year are women.29 And where women were murdered in Juárez, about three-quarters were the victims of terrible domestic violence – so the cases were essentially solved. Indeed, in those years, only about 100 of the murders of women there were of the type immortalised in film and print.30
Molly Molloy, a researcher into the drug violence that has plagued Mexico, pointed out in an interview with the Texas Observer: ‘I’ve read things by some feminist scholars talking about the “harvest” of young, nubile women. I mean, the terminology becomes kind of sensual, or sexual. Some of the writing about these cases I find to be pushing over into the extreme and eroticizing the victims in a way that makes them appear a lot more helpless and powerless than women in Juárez are.’31
Her concern was that the murdered females of Juárez, in a place where about ten times as many men are killed as women, have somehow been overly focused on – to the point of being fetishised. Saying these hard truths does not diminish the fact that each and every death suffered by women there was terrible. But these truths should be said, because every single victim of gun violence matters, regardless of gender.
