Hope everyone is having a good weekend, and that those of you who are observing are having a good Yom Kippur. Or at least I hope that you aren’t totally starving.
Lots of stuff for your perusal this fine Monday:
I don’t link to Tiger Beatdown enough. If you’re not already reading it, go. Sady is amazing and has an addictive, hilarious writing style — plus she’s smart and feminist, so there’s no downside. While you’re over there, read this post of hers from July on Roman Polanski and funding rapists, found via Ann.
The always-fabulous Kate Harding also offers a timley reminder that Roman Polanski raped a child. Like a lot of people, I like some of Polanski’s films. I think he’s talented. I recognize he’s had a tough life and I have sympathy for much of what he’s gone through. But he also committed a crime — a crime for which he has shown little remorse — and talent, age, celebrity and a sad backstory don’t give someone a free pass. Ann at Feministing offers a round-up of other Polanski posts. If you somehow missed it, make sure you also read Little Light’s take.
And while I’m fan-girling some of my favorite feminist bloggers, you should also be reading Amanda Hess. I have a whole list of Amanda’s posts saved, and I keep meaning to write about all of them, but then I run out of time. So go read this one, on the anatomy of a Tucker Max joke. I find Tucker Max so repulsive and juvenile I can’t even work up the energy to write about him, because as far as I’m concerned anyone who likes Tucker Max is such a numbskull with no taste and an uncreative, pathetic sense of humor. I care to engage with them about as much as I care to engage with a dining room table (h/t Barney Frank). But apparently he’s some sort of cultural phenomenon and I suppose feminist blogs should be calling out him and his supporters. Amanda is doing that, over and over. So check her out. And show some support in the comments, where Max supporters seem to come out in full force.
Katha Pollitt responds to New York Time columnist Nicholas Kristof’s challenge that we in “the West” fight gender inequality in the not-West. She writes, “If women’s equality is the great cause of our time–and I hope it is–we’ll get further by acknowledging it as a challenge no country has yet fully met rather than by framing it as a Western crusade.” The whole column is pretty great, so go read.
Deborah Solomon interviews Seth Macfarlane. And I love her.
Above the Law covers “girl-on-girl” sexual harassment. And it is a big, trainwrecky blog-fail.
Indonesia’s Feminist Islamic Schools. It’s a short article, but an interesting story. Just avoid the comments.
Taking on sex tourism in the Ukraine. Natalia interviews awesome activist Anna Gutsol.
This article on sex trafficking has been on my “To Write About” list for a week now, and it deserves more than the blurb I’m going to give it now, but since I’m not sure I’m going to get to it I figure I’ll point you all in the right direction. It’s one of the better articles on anti-trafficking efforts that I’ve read in a while. It points out that trafficking isn’t as cut-and-dry as a lot of news outlets make it out to be. The narrative of the 13-year-old girl kidnapped from her village and sold into slavery in Thailand isn’t totally reflective of the reality of the situation. Certainly kidnappings and forced prostitution happen, and they happen with disturbing frequency. But there’s a lot of grey area — as one anti-trafficking activist puts it, “There were degrees of volition involved,” Crawford continues. “Under international law the minors can’t consent to prostitution, but it was important to understand what they were thinking. As for the women, they were making a rational decision under horrible conditions–to be raped for free in Burma or paid to do commercial sex work is one situation. For me, they are making a rational decision, but that’s a decision no one should have to make. We should be talking about the labor laws, migration laws and the situation in Burma–just as much as working with the courts and police.”
What else have I missed? Any of you read good articles or posts lately?
“somehow” I missed Little Light’s post because it isn’t on the front page like all of today’s other posts. WTF?
Thanks so much for posting the link to the Polanski round-up! I had written about his arrest on facebook and the comments I got were all along the lines of “give the guy a break – he’s old.” So glad I had something to throw back at them.
I’ve been watching the Polanski story all day and wrote this about Huffington Post’s star-struck apologists. It’s the same tired line the press swallowed thirty years ago–poor hapless guy tempted by a ‘nymphet’.
http://kmareka.com/2009/09/28/fangirl-and-fanboy/
And he’d never do it again. Except maybe with the 15 year old Natassja Kinski. Salon has a powerful essay on the real crime, rape. Then they put up a ‘rebuttal’ that says it’s better not to report those kind of crimes. I put in the links.
I think Eugene Robinson sums it up pretty well…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/28/AR2009092802403.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
Huh? It’s two posts below this one, right there on the front page.
I had the very unfortunate experience of interning with International Justice Mission while on a study abroad program several years ago. Most of their senior staff/country executive directors are American Christian evangelicals. One of their local staff members told me that she once had to translate, to a late-teenaged girl that IJM had helped exit prostitution, “Do you accept Jesus Christ into your heart now?”
For that and many other reasons, this organization is seriously fucked up.
Does anyone know, would Roman Polanski be extradited to California? With no one to appeal to except Governor Arnold (Gropinator) Schwarzenegger?
that would be one to watch–Terminator vs Predator
http://kmareka.com/2009/09/29/terminator-vs-predator/
[...] article that I found on Feministe, highlights one woman who took over her town’s madrasa after her husband’s death. [...]
http://feministlookingglass.com/2009/09/29/indonesias-feminist-islamic-schools/
[...]highlights one woman who took over her town’s madrasa after her husband’s death[...]
Above the Law is a blog-fail in general. It’s such a cesspool I never bother.
“I recognize he’s had a tough life and I have sympathy for much of what he’s gone through.”
Jill, I know this is your blog, and I don’t generally walk into other people’s homes and get up in their face in their foyers. But if you think that multi-millionaire fugitive ass-rapists and druggers of 13 year old girls live tough lives, I seriously question your perspective.
I am male and the age that Polanski was when he drugged a near-pre-teen, raped her mouth, her vagina and her rectum, got caught, pled guilty by choice with legal counsel, and when a judge didn’t want to sentence him lightly, he fled the country with his millions. He owns multiple houses in France and Switzerland. That’s not a tough life. Polanski can take my life as a father of two autistic kids and I will go party in Gstaad with Hans and Franz. Of course I don’t complain; I don’t have millions but neither do I have a “tough life.” I also rape no one, drug no one, and generally obey the law (aside from a few speed limits.) If I rape a girl in the ass tomorrow night after drugging her and flee justice into luxury, can I count on Feministe.us to have my back, to get me some sympathy for my “tough life?”
Who has a tough life? Millions of non-rapist non-drugger non-fugitive working people catching the early bus to the early factory and hotel and restaurant shifts away from their children while Roman the Rapist mocks justice in his relative luxury in France. Homeless people have tough lives. Rape survivors sometimes have tough lives. So do veterans surviving PTSD. The orphan, the widow, the poor, the disabled sometimes have tough lives.
Anyway, we differ on this point. Peace be with you.
Bruce, you bring up a good point, and it makes me realize that I was horribly unclear. I wasn’t talking about his life in France as a fugitive — I meant his life as a Holocaust survivor, and having his pregnant wife murdered. I have sympathy for what he went through before his crime. I certainly did NOT mean that it’s been tough for him to live in France as a multi-millionaire film director. And I definitely did not mean that we should feel bad for his “exile,” if you can even call it that. I only intended to say that people, including Roman Polanski, are multi-faceted and complex — we can sympathize with them in some aspects (he survived the Holocaust, his wife was horribly killed), we can admire their work, and we can still think that they have done terrible things (or even are terrible people) and deserve to be criminally prosecuted. We can sympathize with them in some regards and not in others; we can recognize that they’ve experienced trauma without using that as a justification when they do evil things.
Hope that clarifies. Sorry for any confusion.