May 20, 2008

• The Minds of Men in Gangs

  Three months ago, I posted How Odd, and said it would be an “introduction” to a future post about the mindsets and motivations of rapists, specifically gang rapists.  The subject had been brought up by magdalenamama.  She had read my old post about being turned out by Gypsy Jokers and saw in me a fellow rape survivor.  She asked me many questions along the lines of, “How could they?” and “Why?”  My plan at the time was to answer those questions in a post and link it to the story of her biker gang rape, so other survivors might see it and possibly benefit from it.

  As I explained in “How Odd,” her story went missing from her site for a while, but I went ahead and posted the intro.  Meanwhile, in an exchange of hundreds of Xanga messages, magdalenamama and I continued to discuss her issues.  It became apparent to me that she was asking all those questions about the minds and motivations of the men who raped us more in a rhetorical manner than actually seeking information.  She didn’t like what I was telling her, and couldn’t accept it.  In her reality, “real men” just don’t do such things, thus all the “why?” and “how could they?.”

  She said that real men behave chivalrously toward women, and that God made them bigger and stronger than us so that they could protect and care for us.  I responded that chivalry is a regrettable remnant of a past time in which only males of noble birth had any political power, and that its assumptions are detrimental to gender equality and women’s rights.  I pointed out how natural selection in the process of primitive human males fighting over females, and/or chasing down and raping females, could tend to produce a species with relatively smaller, weaker females and big, strong, quick males, since neither the weak little males nor the quickest, strongest females would pass along much of their DNA.

  I wasn’t buying her judgmental, resentful and vindictive attitude, and the men I knew who belonged to the Hells Angels, Gypsy Jokers, Black Ravens and Free Souls motorcycle clubs were as real as any other men I’ve ever known.  For a long time, magdalenamama flatly rejected my advice to let it go, quit torturing herself with it, be forgiving, and get over it.   I don’t know if she kept up our correspondence in the hope of converting me to her way of thinking, or what.  Several times she said she’d had enough of me, but she kept coming back for more.

  Meanwhile, Google keeps bringing new people to my old post about the rape and to the more recent one about outlaw motorcycle gangs.  Today, I found several footprints showing referrals from Google to each of those posts.  I decided it’s time to follow through on that teaser, “Watch this space for the next installment.”  Here is the information about gang rapists that magdalenamama asked for but did not really want.
  

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  First, why do men join gangs?  Why do animals hunt in packs?  The tendency to band together for strength and security is older than civilization, and was probably one of the major influences in the creation of civilization:  civil life, living in cities, banding together.  Now, within a sociopolitical structure where big “gangs”, such as the military and police establishments, have most of the power and weaponry, it makes sense for numbers of men whose philosophies and purposes set them at odds with the establishment to band together for safety and strength. 

  Besides, in some primitive core of our beings, there is something that makes it fun, that produces a jolt of dopamine to go along with the adrenaline of moving in heavy traffic, out in the open, buffeted by the wind created by the speed of the roaring machines between our legs, when we are doing it in a big, noisy, black-clad, threatening pack, watching the apprehensive stares on the faces of motorists as we pass.  Anyone weary or sick of being just a speck in a faceless multitude might derive some satisfaction from that sense of power.  In my youth, when I was part of that pack, I felt it.  From the talk I heard, although nobody verbalized it in quite that way, I know that we all felt it.

  From what I have read of street gangs of girls or women, they are similar to men’s gangs, with some important differences.  They can be more brutal and vicious to each other, in general, than men usually are.  They don’t tend to put as much of their energy into ganging up on outsiders, but may go on thieving raids, cover each other on shoplifting forays, crash parties together, etc.  This makes sense from an anthropological perspective, too, because men have a longstanding warrior tradition, of not just working together but fighting enemies together, that women lack.  Among our primitive ancestors men hunted large animals in packs, while women trapped small animals and gathered plant foods singly or in small family groups.

  But I digress.  My topic is supposed to be outlaw bikers and gang rape.  Googling for “female motorcycle gang” returned a mere 749 results, virtually all of them fictional and one expressing a wish or desire to create such a gang.  Most (not all, and I don’t intend to make light of the exceptions) stories of women as rapists fall into the “men’s wishful fantasy” category.

  One trait shared by most of the men I met among outlaw bikers was, for want of a better term, emotional woundedness.  Many of the bikers I knew had issues with their mothers:  abuse, abandonment, etc.  Some of those men were the children of prostitutes, and grew up in the life.  Some had mothers whose strict Christian principles led them to beat their sons and/or eject them from the family home.  The one I rode behind most of the time had been surprised by his mother during his first sexual exploration, with a female cousin.  His mother’s rage, and the shame she laid on him as a child, resulted in his sexual impotence into his thirties.

  If these men held their own mothers in contempt or harbored resentments against them for betrayal, or for injuries done them, it is fairly easy to understand that they wouldn’t tend to like or trust women in general.  They could find plenty of support for their feelings in everything from the Bible to popular culture.  Male superiority has been the way of the western political world since the cult of the Mother Goddess in the Mediterranean was overthrown by the Hellenes.

  The guys didn’t normally talk about their feelings, and I don’t think many of them were introspective or had any great degree of psychological insight.  Most of them overtly despised women for their weakness at the same time that they preyed on and exploited them.  If they gave any thought to why they did what they did, they had the traditions of patriarchal society and the behavior of their bros to relieve them of any necessity for introspection.  It was done because it was the thing to do.  The pervasive, near universal abuse of alcohol and other drugs served both to dull their inhibitions and to provide excuses with which to salve any pangs of conscience.

  History can offer a few insights into the stereotypical biker gangs’ attitudes toward women.  Most of the men who founded Hells Angels and similar clubs, during the years immediately following World War II, were disaffected former military men, some of whom returned from the war to find women holding the jobs they’d left behind to go fight Hitler. Many had received dear john letters and divorces in their absence.  I have heard more than one grizzled old biker deliver his version of that rant.

  In the 1960s, the period when I was riding with them, when Hells Angels were, according to Wikipedia, “viewed as the epitome of the biker counterculture,” those same old guys who hated Rosie the Riveter, and many younger ones, detested the Women’s Liberation Movement.  Their extreme misogynistic stance can be viewed as a reaction against women’s emergence from patriarchal oppression and second class status.  Threatened reactionaries, they fought the trends that would deprive them of their privileged status.  It would not serve them to question whether they deserved that privilege, so they did not question.

  As with just about any instance of anyone’s crimes, sins or misdeeds, the perpetrators have their own good reasons (“good” from their perspectives) for what they do.  From the bikers’ perspective, they are only keeping the uppity bitches in their place, but it’s not quite the same place that an average American woman held before the advent of Rosie the Riveter and Women’s Lib.  The 2006 Oregon crime report I cited in my “How Odd” post lists prostitution as one of the outlaw motorcycle gangs’ current criminal activities.  At least one current member of an outlaw motorcycle club claims that “all that”:  the gang rapes and violent oppression of their women, was left behind after the 1970s.  Maybe it was, in his club.  I don’t know.

  I do know that even since the turn of the millennium women are being gang raped and turned out by biker gangs.  The tactics and techniques they use are designed to break the woman’s spirit, dissuade her from reporting the crime, and persuade her to accept her fate as the club’s property.  Sometimes when they fail and she fights, she disappears into an unmarked grave.  Often, when they succeed, she disappears into some far away large city, sold or traded to a different biker gang, where she works the streets and turns her earnings over to her owner.  The brutalizing mind control techniques they use can be read in the ten parts of my story and in magdalenamama’s, if you are that curious and have a strong stomach.

  I do not deny that these things are injurious to the women involved.  I believe that raping, abducting and/or enslaving anyone is a gross injustice, and an infringement of that person’s liberty and free will.  I also believe, based on my own experience and those of others I know, that when we hang onto resentment over injustices done to us, we add further self-injury to the harm already done to us.  This is why, when I counsel people, I advise reporting the crime to the proper authorities if it is feasible in the individual case.  Beyond that, to the victims I recommend forgiveness, for one’s own sake, as part of the healing process.  It is the most direct and efficacious means to achieve closure.

  I neither condemn nor condone.  I love unconditionally, without judging.  I forgive those who have injured me, but that’s not to imply that injuring me was the right thing to do.  It is my personal preference and in my best interest to forgive, and it applies to everything and everyone, not just to the topic here and now.  I don’t use words such as, “evil” to describe the people who injure or enslave others, and I prefer more descriptive words such as “injurious” or “unjust”, for the acts they perpetrate to achieve their aims.   “Evil” is a throwaway word, often used to throw away people, to demonize and separate, and I prefer to include and accept people, if not all their behavior.

  Do not misconstrue this as approval.  It is simple acceptance, the understanding that this is reality.  It is what is, and calling it evil or abomination will do nothing to change it.  Since laws and mores are currently having virtually no success at ending societal patterns of such behavior, I have decided to try and change some of the attitudes that might, if they persist, create still more generations of people filled with hate and anger, loosing them to perpetrate still more injuries on others.  I am convinced that love is the way, forgiveness the means, and understanding can be the foundation for a healthier culture.  If you disagree, I love you anyway.  
  

  • 8:46 pm
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