Like Stanley Milgram and Phineas Gage, Kitty Genovese is a key name in the field of psychology. The story of her widely-witnessed, unreported rape and murder came to define what’s called the bystander effect — the phenomenon of group apathy or paralysis in the face of a disaster.

Early Sunday morning, I, along with dozens of other drunken idiots outside Zee Bar, fell victim to the bystander effect. And if my story is less gruesome than Genovese’s, it’s as troubling and disheartening.

It started when I got kicked out of the club and into the street, where a crowd had already gathered. Two girls were alternately shoving and straddling each other, to the soundtrack of much hooting and hollering. These girls were young and well-dressed — they could have been Penn students were they less attractive. Two guys, clearly Zee Bar veterans, were catching all the action on a high-end video camera.

Things got ugly quick. The two girls began to fight in earnest, and for a moment it was impossible to say what was happening in that mess of legs and stringy wet hair and glistening cleavage. Was there a trace of a smile on my face as I watched these young women engage in an act that beer commercials had instructed me to treasure? I’m not sure. I hope not.

But then one of the girls — a blonde — punched the other — a brunette — in the face. Hard. Then she did it again. And again. And again. At some point, the brunette passed out. She fell and her head hit pavement. But the blonde girl kept at it, delivering another flurry of punches to her unconscious opponent.

And no one did anything. Slackjawed bouncers just stood there. The camera guys rolled their cameras. Eventually some of us stepped in and separated the girls, but it was too late. The damage had been done: the brunette was out cold and her blood was everywhere. Fights in fringe sports like World Extreme Cagefighting get stopped before this one did.

The rest of the story is uneventful. The ambulance and the police showed up. The brunette came to and was carried off by paramedics. No arrests were made. The makeshift crowd dissipated. I caught a cab, sat down in the backseat and stared at the blood on my hands all the way home.

It came off easily in the sink. Too easily. And I realized then that, like a reverse Lady Macbeth, I wanted that girl’s blood on my hands, like the gory palette of an artist. I wanted to smear it on everyone who had cheered on the fight; on the guys with the camera who were going to make a YouTube video out of it; on all the people who watch YouTube videos like that and are entertained. That’s the industry of violence: from real life to the internet to millions of computer screens.

And I guess that’s what I thought was so fucked up about that night. The Kitty Genovese witnesses might have been apathetic towards violence, but our whole generation trafficks in it. A dangerous, unstaged fight reduces us to either film crew or live audience — even in real life we are YouTubers. We all deserve blood on our hands.

Tags: bystander effect, Kitty Genovese, YouTube

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Penn, Philadelphia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.