Seeing A Difference

Lots of people are talking about the cover of New York Magazine. If you haven't heard, it's a picture of 35 of the women who have accused Bill Cosby of rape.  There are also short write-ups of the experiences of each of the women.  They are as shocking as would be expected, but people still seem fixated on the effect of that cover photo.

That leaves me with a question: why does the picture have such an effect?  It doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know.  We already knew the sort of numbers we were dealing with in this case; we could easily imagine what 35 women would look like.  I know, the medium is the message and all that.  But still, the effect of a visual is striking.

This first came to my attention last year in the case of Ray Rice, the football player who was arrested for knocking his then-fiancée unconscious in a hotel elevator. When the report came out, he was given a slap-on-the-wrist two-game suspension.  But later, when video of the incident became public, there was a widespread outcry, and he was released by his team and given an indefinite suspension.

A lot was said about the incident, but what I found shocking was that the video didn't tell us anything we didn't already know.  You could understand the shift in attitude if the video had revealed something that wasn't in the reports of events.  But it showed that the report was pretty accurate.  To me that reveals our complacency about violence against women.  We're used to brushing off men assaulting their partners and accepting it as part of life.  The video forced us to confront what we were really talking about, and to judge the behaviour for what it really is.

I think we're seeing the same effect with the magazine cover.  We've heard for a while now about the sheer quantity of women accusing Cosby.  As much as the numbers have lead to more widespread belief of the women, it's also shifted it from a story of individuals to a story about numbers.  Forcing us to come face-to-face with these women has brought it back to a human level. Again, it shouldn't be that way; we should be able to give importance to a story on our own, without a visual cue. Hopefully stories like this one will allow more of us to remember victims' humanity.