Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Hunting Bambi
Last week I wrote about hunting grizzlies, oryx and foxes. This week, it's hunting women. Debauched? Decadent? Depraved? Yes, I certainly think so. But a guy in the US has got up a web site, "http://HuntingForBambi.com", that promotes hunting naked women as a sport. The web site is apparently aimed at well-heeled males. It is also an extension — some would say a logical extension — of the paintball war- games craze (in which junior executives in search of something more interesting than sales get to dress up in military fatigues and shoot at one another with guns firing paintballs). http://HuntingForBambi.com offers the opportunity, for US$10,000, to stalk nude women through the woods and shoot them with a paintball gun. What a jolly idea. Paintballs are fired at an estimated 300 kilometres an hour. Presumably alarmed at the potential for injury, bad publicity and possible lawsuits arising from this nude venture, Brass Eagle Inc, the world's largest paintball products manufacturer, spoke against the hunts. Brass Eagle warned that women who agree to be hunted "run the danger of injury". Rather a coy statement that sounds like they ran it past their lawyers first. The creature behind this decadence, one Michael Burdick, proudly defends the women's lack of any protective clothing (they are allowed to wear only sneakers): "I don't go deer hunting and see a deer with a football helmet on so I don't want to see one on my girl either." Burdick's company is called Real Men Outdoor Productions, Inc. It also markets a video of combat-dressed hunters chasing various naked women through the woods (presumably the sort of thing "real men" like to dream about). Americans are used to all manner of sick and depraved "entertainments" being offered on video and cable. (For tame but nevertheless bizarre entertainment, have a look at Naked News on Foxtel some night, or one of those gun-nut videos of voluptuous babes in skimpy bikinis shooting off large and very powerful guns in the desert. Weird.) But the "sport" promoted by "HuntingForBambi.com" shocked even US observers. The ramifications in a country where violence against women is rife were obvious. At first it was believed the whole thing must be an elaborate publicity stunt to promote the video from Real Men Outdoor Productions. But after Burdick had been interviewed by several prime time news programs, some of which ran clips from alleged "actual hunts", it became clear that, after this kind of publicity, if no such hunts had actually been available before, they would be now. The US ruling class operates on the divide and rule principal: it assiduously works to set — and keep — white against black and Latino, men against women and young against old. Every night on US television, women will be stalked, trussed up, threatened, humiliated, tortured, incarcerated or murdered. Often, all of these in the one program. Women have poorer job prospects than men and are encouraged to have a low image of their own self-worth. With rampant unemployment and few opportunities for satisfying, meaningful work, it's not surprising that large numbers of women end up in the so-called "adult entertainment industry". Strip clubs, lap dancing bars, porno movies and prostitution may be demeaning and worse, but they do pay the rent. Burdick's outfit apparently pays between one and two thousand dollars for a woman to be the "prey" in one of their "games". The hunts take place at various undisclosed locations in southern Nevada. Activists for women's rights, outraged that something so degrading and violent can be openly marketed, point out that Nevada already has the fourth highest rate of violence against women of any US state. But for Burdick, the storm of controversy only provided publicity of the type "you can't buy". He says business is booming and there are apparently entrepreneurs in other countries anxious to do a deal with him to market the "game" in their territories. Once again, the lure of the dollar helps spread US "culture" to the world. "Follow your dream" US culture in its least cultured form was also on view on Australian television earlier this month: On Saturday, August, the ABC ran a program in its Famous Faces slot on the entertainer Madonna. Nothing wrong with that, of course. As a famous singer, Madonna is a worthy subject for a television program. The program in Famous Faces however, was not about her music; it was about her money. Titled Madonna's Millions, it revealed that she earns US$6000 for every minute of her music used on television programs, so not surprisingly she has a fair bit of the ready. She lives in an apartment that cost her US$8 million. Together with her business advisers, managers, collaborators and publicists, she keeps a tight reign on her image, her music and her money. She is in her own person a business operation — in fact a big business operation. But her fortune is wildly out of proportion to her actual worth as an artist. There are many singers, of many different types of music, who are as deserving as Madonna to be highly regarded for their artistry and talent. Only capitalism so distorts cultural values that an artist can leap to the front rank largely on the strength of wearing her underwear on the outside. Pop icons are important to capitalism: they divert the attention of the masses from pressing issues that could arouse their ire if examined too closely, and they serve to sustain the fiction that anyone can succeed under capitalism. All you need is to "follow your dream", work hard, have faith in god and with luck you'll make it. Look at Madonna: came to New York with $35 in her pocket and lived in an apartment that was more like a squat. See, capitalism works.