XXXTentacion, Eurydice, and the politics of death

I’m going to tell a story about my last week, and it’s going to be long. It’s not going to be particularly important coming from me, but I need to write it out and share it to make sense of the thoughts it has generated in my mind. The theme of this week has been violence and gender, and I’m not sure how to approach this topic due to the extremely high modality with which most treat it. It’s a topic that is anger inducing to some and potentially triggering to others. So as a content warning, this blog will discuss murder, rape and violence, as well as social attitudes. And have I mentioned long and rambly? It’ll be long and rambly. Good luck.

On my way to work on Tuesday June 19, I heard Triple J’s Brooke Boney announce that a name I had heard of only days before, XXXTentacion, had been shot and was in a coma. She discussed the artist as Triple J don’t normally play him, but the news was exceptionally breaking, having happened just minutes before. The brief news bulletin included something about a very troubled past, she mentioned the 20 year old having murdered someone at 6 years old, and also mentioned that he had some alleged assaults in his past. I didn’t get details and I noted particularly the very deliberate use of Brooke to say ‘alleged’ so I assumed there was some sort of court case happening.

XXXTentacion

I found it strange and it stuck in my brain, originally as a bewildered musing on how many guns America has and how normal it is that someone can just walk up and shoot someone else. These thoughts were cut off by the school bell and I went to class.

In the preceding days, my students had been making a PowerPoint when I’d taken them for music at the start of the week. They were given genres of music and were encouraged to research artist, songs and styles of the genre. Hip Hop wasn’t on the worksheet, but as a lot of the kids were hip hop heads and I enjoy the odd rapper here and there, I told them they could do that genre too.

I found myself musing at the state of the rappers when I saw more and more tattooed faces, bizarre hairstyles of usually neon pink and green, and a propensity to pose without shirts. Even though Tupac, one of my heroes from when I was the kid’s age, used to love the ol’ shirtless gangsta pose, the faces appearing on my screen had been missing some of his… dignity.

L’il Xan, L’il Yachty, L’il Pump?  Why were they all so l’il? In my day it was only L’il Wayne and L’iL Bow Wow. Kids these days, I thought.

But the other name that kept popping up on the powerpoint slides was XXXTentacion, which I thought was just the worst name for a rapper ever, but as I’m on the north side of 30 and the kids keep telling me - what do I know? Good kids, nice kids that seemed well brought up, seemed to respect him.

Anyway, flash forward to the day I hear his name again 3 days later, and he’s been shot in a car. By the time I’ve finished teaching my second period, students are coming up and telling me he is dead. (They have their own twittersphere. Imagine sneaky pieces of paper passed between one another times 1000).

I go up, have my coffee, this guy’s story rattling around my brain. Particularly the part about being involved in gang violence at the age of 6. The kid who gets (spoiler alert for Breaking Bad, but really if you haven’t watched it, it’s your own fault at this point) killed in Breaking Bad by the gangsters who’ve had him dealing drugs kept flashing to the forefront of my psyche.

I sipped my coffee and I made a post on Facebook, and it looked a little like this.

I barely think about this status until a few hours later, when after school I fire up the iPad to see some people think I’m making a joke by posting a tribute to XXXTentacion. Turns out, the alleged violence alluded to by Brooke Boney on the radio had a lot more evidence attached, none of which was circumstantial. And upon closer inspection of his lyrics, they did have overtones of sexism, violence and misogyny in many instances.

But my greatest mistake was posting a tribute post, even a harmless one with not a lot of thought put into it, at a time when a lot of people in my country and community were in mourning for another victim of crime: Eurydice Dixon.

Eurydice Dixon

Speaking of names rattling around my head, I have been saying the name Eurydice in my head over and over in the last week. Australia as a nation was sharing a shock after exactly 1 week beforehand on the night of Tuesday the 12th of June, a young, ambitious up and comer comedian named Eurydice Dixon didn’t make it home from work. She became the victim of a murder, and from police accounts, sexual assault. A tragic and disgusting act is an understatement. I had looked up the name Eurydice as I thought it was enchanting, and it turns out it does come from Greek mythology; the name of an oak nymph, daughter of Apollo, wife of Ortheus. Orpheus tried to raise Eurydice from the dead by playing sweet music. Somehow that made the real Eurydice’s story sadder to me.

The tragedy was compounded not two days after Eurydice’s passing that my city of Newcastle was rocked by another heinous unspeakable act - the abduction and sexual assault of an 11-year old girl.

Needless to say, the public wanted blood. Women and men voiced anger and shared around the alleged perpetrator on Facebook and comments of ‘tell your cousins in prison to get their shivs ready’ were seen. The general feeling was that the NSW Justice System wouldn’t dispense the justice that we all felt like doling out to the subhuman scum.

There was not a day that went by last week that I wasn’t disgusted by an example of my gender. If it wasn’t XXXTentacion’s alleged crimes being spelled out for me by angry women, it was a man choosing to take the innocence of a little girl for their own sick sexual gratification. It was a 19-year-old man who believed a little too much Incel rhetoric and took what wasn’t his to fuck around with - the life of a beautiful young comedian with a whole life to live.

But I was disgusted by other men also. The year 10 boy who said ‘ah well, MILF’ when one of his peers said that Megan Fox wasn’t attractive because she’d had two babies. The aging baby boomer in the comments section in the political Facebook groups I frequent (sometimes for the sole purpose of making myself angry) desperately trying to make the feminists, the postmodernists, and the Left in general the problem for creating this new culture. It was the men described by Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, as she tells her story in the Netflix special Nanette, (which I absolutely recommend everyone watch as it is tantamount to genius). And this is the most important of all - it was me. I was disgusted with myself for my own faux pas of eulogising XXXTentacion rather than Eurydice. Why hadn’t I made a little post for her, as well? Why did the man get the attention, just because he was famous and successful in his art?

These were questions asked of me and other men in the 300+ comments of that original post. My friends from many walks of life, whom I’ve met in many stages of my life, argue amongst themselves about the issue of XXXTentacion and the separation of crimes from art, and how we treat the issue of gender after shocking, horrifying crimes of a gendered nature take place. But I stopped joining in on my own tribute. I did feel a little bit shit about my own silence. But still - after all of his crimes were mentioned to me - I still felt that maybe he was breaking out of that cycle and his death was a tragedy still. A 6 year old doesn’t murder.  At what point do we analyse the catalysts before these events before we are told by angry, sad people that we are making excuses for the perpetrators, and dishonouring the victims? The kinds of contexts that must exist to breed and socialise such a person as ‘X’ absolutely flabbergasted me. They are beyond my realms of imagination.

But that was, to me, the takeaway that I am going to try to share with male students or those men i see behaving like uncivilised neanderthals. Our realms of imagination only go so far. We can only see our experience. Men know what being a man like and women know what being a woman is like. Though science shows us we are NINETY PER CENT the same, the 5 per cent on the masculine and 5 per cent of the feminine behaviours are increasingly what drive us, what define us, what socialise us.

The Courtney Barnett lyric ‘Men are afraid women will laugh at them; Women are afraid that men will kill them’ is a quote from Margaret Atwood that has beared repeating in light of recent events like Eurydice and the young Newcastle girl. It is a poignant and jarring reminder that despite sharing many similarities, men and women are still destined to walk different paths in many respects. And I do mean metaphorically, but men are actually starting to keep their distance from women on walking paths as well as a show of safety and solidarity. And because they really just don’t want to scare them. I know I feel that’s fucked up if we’re at a place we have to do that now, but here we are.

Some more disgusting men might even take my blog here the wrong way. They have a toolkit to discredit and dismantle men who try to stand up for feminist outcomes or even stand up for women in general. They reduce everything intellectual into its basest sexual form. If I’m standing up for women, I must be trying to seduce them. If I say men can do better, it’s because I’m a pathetic ‘White Knight’ trying to access the ‘Pussy Pass’. They know better - they’re alpha males who know that the only way to get women to love and respect (and the most important: to fuck) you is to disrespect them, place them on a level below you and never treat them as an equal. If you try to stand up for being a decent human being, you’re a ‘virtue signaller’ who only wants people to see them for the brilliant compassionate person they are and get pats on the back for it. Well fuck you, nameless commenter. Save your comment. The only person I am trying to attract is my wife, and we pretty much see eye to eye on this issue already.

The words ‘not all men’ are a hashtag that became a cliche that became a dictionary definition of missing the point. They spawned article after article after article. I don’t believe this is solely the fault of men (gasp!) but it is a failure of the way the entire issue is discussed and the rhetoric that surrounds the basic emotional reactions of people, men and women, when presented with stories like Eurydice’s, XXXTentacion’s, and the little Newcastle girl’s. I believe that anger does come from a good place. A moral place. I believe the majority of people know their right from wrong and are involuntarily outraged and sickened when they hear of violence. Or rape. Or murder.

As I’ve shown, this is a spectacularly nuanced topic that very rarely gets discussed in a careful enough matter. I feel this is not going to stop. I agree with Hannah Gadsby (seriously, though, one more time for the people in the back, watch Nanette. 5 Star review incoming. Have the Kleenex ready) who says that men are at a difficult and confusing time, identity wise. But so are women. We are writing the rules of our new society every single day. We are creating the world in which we leave for our descendants. It responds to us and the decisions we make every single day.

I guess after the catharsis that was typing out the rattling in my head in 2300-word form, I’d like to end on something positive. So I will reiterate my apology for my selective eulogising; for my silence when I have a powerful voice that everyone knows I’m not scared of using. RIP Eurydice Dixon. I can only hope that the cultural wildfire your death has started is a fraction of the laughter you could have created and the positivity you could have brought to our world.

The other positive thing I want to say to everyone is, please try to calm down. As our anger abates, look around and notice the people around you. The great majority of us are good, I’m certain of it. I teach many students, some who could become criminals, some who could become Prime Minister. They are largely good. Humans are. It is easy to lose our faith in humanity, after weeks like this. But you musn’t. We are good, all of us, with times of badness. I truly believe that and you may feel I am naive. But I’m just 30, I’m not old and crotchety just yet. The day we lose the respect that entire subsections of our society, be it races, genders, sexualities, lifestyles, ANYTHING are majority good people, is the day all our social divisions get a whole lot worse, and everything goes to shit.

I finished that long and rambly blog by saying what I wanted to say in a long and rambly way, so I’ll defer to the master wordsmith Kurt Vonnegut to say it better.

See ya later.