I know I might as well stamp “tragically unhip” on my forehead by admitting this, but right now I’m rereading The Iliad. You know, Homer. They made a movie of it with Brad Pitt a few years back? I just can’t get enough of dactylic hexameter! (I’m not kidding—it’s 600-page poem.)
Anyway, plowing through a 2,800-year-old text is pretty revealing from a cultural standpoint. For one thing, The Iliad is violent as hell. It seems that every other line contains some gross description of someone’s head being lopped off and the bones spurting marrow or something else liable to make you say “ewww.” The Iliad also has quite a lot of sex, but unlike the violence, it contains nothing approaching explicit physical descriptions. So and so lays with so and so and that’s about it. At one point, Zeus is being seduced by Hera—the god of thunder is so randy, his own wife has to concoct an elaborate plot to seduce him—and Zeus explains he’s never been so overwhelmed with desire, “not even, when I loved Acrisius’ daughter Danae—marvelous ankles.” If you’re looking for titillation in The Iliad, “marvelous ankles” is about as good as it gets.
Now bear in mind that this is a culture that believed women were spoils of war and even rape was not necessarily a cause for opprobrium—indeed, the war being described in The Iliad is happening because Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, was kidnapped by Paris and hauled off to Troy. But despite the less-than-enlightened attitudes on display, there’s an odd reverence to female sexuality that provides a stark contrast to the explicit violence. The animating observation behind The Iliad is that men would rather hack each other to pieces in battle than come to terms with the emotional power women have over us.
In other words, the more things change… well, I refer you to the bastards in ISIS raping Yezdi girls and selling them off like chattel. Even in the 21st century, civilization remains on a razor’s edge of male violence. We’re still dependent on cultivating honorable men to protect women from the not-so-honorable men. What’s interesting about the current feminist moment is that it’s shot through with a kind of Hegelian, progressive idealism that tacitly accepts the perfectibility of human nature. If we just educate enough men, or failing that, shame them—we can solve sexual inequality! This is silly because it denies biology, in addition to human nature.
Which, finally, brings me to the foofaraw over J-Law’s nude pics. If we think of Jennifer Lawrence as the Millennial Helen of Troy, it’s not surprising that the mere idea that nude pics on her cell phone might theoretically exist would drive men wild with lust to get them. Why would anyone speculate they exist? Because every young girl seems to take nude selfies these days—and for that maybe we can blame the Greeks, too. Holla, ladies of Alpha Omicron Pi!
And so Jennifer Lawrence became the face that launched 1,000 hackers. This is all very predictable. What’s astonishing is that when some people suggested that keeping naked photos of yourself on a transmission device isn’t the wisest idea for people who are famously lusted after, this amounted to “victim blaming.” But wanting to prevent someone from being victimized in the first place is not blaming the victim.
Let us stipulate that the hackers who violated J-Law and the various other female celebrities’ privacy are terrible people who deserve jail. Further, it is wrong for men to look at the purloined goods. And that these crimes by men are worse than any lapse in judgment that resulted in these nude selfies.
Having said that, why again is it wrong to tell women that men’s nature is what it is? If you think improperly channeled male desire for women will cease to be a force that profoundly shapes society in terrible ways from war to rape to porn, guess again. If we don’t want women to be victims, we need to encourage an honest and realistic assessment of the darker aspects of the male nature, in addition to holding men accountable for their transgressions. This is not to say all men are untrustworthy or awful, but simply that, as it ever was and will always be, there is a sizable contingent of dishonorable men who will exploit women given the chance. And on the internet, exploitation is alarmingly easy, even for men who usually mean well. I recently asked a male friend if he’d seen the Jennifer Lawrence photos. He responded, “Well, not all of them.”
As the saying goes, women civilize men. That’s very true. But our current notion that we’re at the End of History and men can cease to be violent, lust-driven creatures is as unrealistic as any of the fantastical aspects of The Iliad. It turns out that Homer’s insights into male conflict three millennia ago are as relevant to as they ever were, which is why he is still being read. In this respect, the real lesson of The Iliad might be this: “Be aware of Greeks bearing truths.”
