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For now, the Los Angeles judge has injected a dose of reality into the debate. But "Wanted and Desired" seems to have inserted into the public consciousness the idea that Polanski, an irrepressible European, had been naughty during a colorful time, and that he has been toyed with by a monstrous legal system. Creepy and disturbing, the film does show us a few of the director's moral warts. But it leaves the strong impression that Polanski was a wronged man, jerked around by a cartoony, publicity-hungry judge to the point where fleeing was his only viable option.
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These are all things that aren't relevant to any discussion of why or why not Polanski should be extradited to the US to face the charges he skipped out on thirty years ago—but the real stickler of the bunch seems to be that "she doesn't want the case pursued" one, with the argument going something like: If even the girl he raped wants to let it go, why shouldn't we?
The simple answer for that is because justice doesn't operate on the principle of what's best for the victim; it operates on the principle of what's best for the community. (That's why prosecutors represent "the people.")
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But just how good are their American accents? American-born Tim Dowling rates them
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Ahh: “the real tragedy.” Some people may be under the impression that a 13-year-old being drugged and raped by a 44-year-old man constitutes a “real tragedy.” Others may contend that both Polanski and his rape victim have suffered “real tragedies” in their lifetimes. But no, there can only be one the real tragedy, and it is that people have “snubbed” Roman Polanski because he raped someone and skipped town. If only the recognition of the Academy Awards, the BAFTAs, the Berlin International Film Festival, Cannes, the Directors Guild of America, the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Stokholm Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, and dozens of other awards organizations could begin to heal that wound.
Archive for September, 2009
links for 2009-09-30
September 30, 2009
links for 2009-09-29
September 29, 2009-
petition text and selected signatories
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What a proud legacy Colorado has given the nation with respect to our understanding of crime, consent, and rape. Now, we can’t even describe drunk and drugged 13-year old girls as rape victims–they’re just “accusers.” I’ve talked with my women’s history students about this for the past few years, when thinking about patriarchal equilibrium and the fact that I’m old enough now to see a good span of my life historically and to note the changes, and I think the language we use to describe rape has been shaped to the advantage of rapists everywhere. Unless and until all crime victims are going to be referred to as “accusers” in media accounts, I’ll stand by my analysis here.
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View the Commission Report in accessible HTML format.
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The Catholic Church has a problem with priests who rape children below the age of consent. That is a fact which is not changed by what name it's called. And, at this point, the last thing any thinking person with a conscience wants to hear from the Vatican is a bunch of bullshit technicalities being substituted for any serious acceptance of accountability.
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More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families – a category that often included unmarried mothers – were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last facilities shut in the 1990s.
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The Ryan report's meticulous gathering of evidence over several volumes paints a picture of a system of church and state in Ireland which was horrifically dysfunctional with its combination of sadism and deference. Page after page punches the point home with relentless clarity. Squarely in the frame are the religious orders who systematically protected and tolerated their members' actions even when they knew they were breaking the law. But also culpable is the state charged to inspect the childrens' homes and schools. It was too deferential to the Catholic church to ever do the job properly.
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On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. The following speech, revealed in 1999, was prepared by Nixon's then speechwriter, William Safire, to be used in the event of a disaster that would maroon the astronauts on the moon:
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I only briefly touched on the Lambda Literary Foundation fiasco in a locked entry previously today, but the more I read about it, the more irritated I got. For the record, I have no problem with the LLF deciding to restrict the award to GLBT authors of GLBT fiction. I'm still reading through arguments, but I agree with the principle.
That, however, is not what's really at issue for me. What's at issue is how entitled and offensive a lot of straight* slashers are being.
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So it has turned out to be in the discussions about changes in the Lambda Literary Awards. Straight* female authors are throwing shit fits (albeit in locked blog posts) about suddenly being excluded from an award they feel they should be eligible for as of right. Straight* readers are offering ‘advice’ to Lambda about this being a bad idea. The right of Lambda to do as it bloody well pleases is grudgingly and only partially accepted. The views of actual gay people (and minorities with relevant experience of the issues) are completely ignored.
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In the Washington Post, the commentator Anne Applebaum – who calls Polanski's arrest "outrageous" and passionately argues for his release – says: "If he weren't famous, I bet no one would bother with him at all." Which rather seems to be missing the point. If he weren't famous, he would not have been free to flee in the first place. And he would certainly not number among his public defenders a columnist writing for the Washington Post.
links for 2009-09-28
September 28, 2009-
Second, Polanski was "demonized by the press" because he raped a child, and was convicted because he pled guilty. He "feared heavy sentencing" because drugging and raping a child is generally frowned upon by the legal system. Shore really wants us to pity him because of these things? (And, I am not making this up, boycott the entire country of Switzerland for arresting him.)
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See, you or I might think that not going back to the U.S. or U.K. is an action Polanski took in order to make sure that, having raped a minor and fled the country, he would not be rearrested. But you or I would be wrong. In fact these are punishments that Polanski has suffered. But tiens, it was a long time ago. Puritanical Americans simply do not have the enlightened attitude toward wine at the dinner table, quaaludes, and child rape that the Europeans do. In Ireland, for instance, there are quite a number of seventy-odd year old men (and even older) who spent their youth ministering to children and raping them — some of their victims have been able to forgive them, and many want never to speak of those events again, so why all the legal fuss?
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My specific grouse about organics is that it has crowded out more useful practices. It seems quite hard to get free range meat these days, for instance. I like the idea that the meat I eat had the opportunity to run around a bit before it died, and whether it did so or not is a testable proposition. Calling it organic just obscures this.
On the other hand you can see why Prince Charles likes the idea so much. Here you have a range of products biologically identical to all the others yet somehow transcendently superior, higher class, produced in bespoke circumstances, naturally leading in its field – a matter of slick labeling and invented tradition. In short, the royalty of agriculture.
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And this brings us to the other big swindle of the organic industry, the way it has appropriated concerns that reasonable people might well have – the humane treatment of farm animals, the avoidance of unnecessary foodmiles, seasonal eating – and grouped them all under its own umbrella, so that it is now impossible to be a person who cares about cruelty to a pig, and yet isn't opposed to antibiotics. And it is impossible to be a person who is happy to eat seasonally, who actually isn't spoilt and doesn't want asparagus at Christmas, and yet isn't against the use of pesticides.
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Without knowing the background, one might think that Mr. Polanski was some sort of political prisoner who had escaped, or else someone who had served his time and was still being harassed by the authorities. He is neither. He is a rapist who pleaded guilty to having sex with a underage girl in 1977, and who has been on the run ever since. Nor was this some teenage fumble between a fifteen and a sixteen year old. He was forty four when it happened, while the rape victim was only thirteen years old (and it was rape since children cannot consent), which Mr. Polanski well knew, given that he had to ask her mother’s permission to let her accompany him.
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This nasty, racist national 'newspaper' has long flirted with the far-right and taken the line that England is under siege from foreigners. It has a completely anti-minority agenda. There have been front pages which have taken an 'us and them' line more blatantly than any other paper.
And its sister paper the Express is sticking BNP slogans on its cover the same day as the first EDL article appeared in the Star.
Is Richard Desmond now just running recruiting rags for the far-right?
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It’s funny. If your average guy were to rape a 13-year-old girl and then flee into exile rather than paying for his crime, pretty much everyone and their twin sister would agree that he was a scumbag who deserved nothing less than the hammer of justice brought down upon him. Turn that average guy into a rich artist with good connections, and suddenly the crime wasn’t that bad, the girl was probably asking for it (or her mother was, whatever), and it’s really close to fascism to put the guy through the indignity of being extradited to face justice.
links for 2009-09-27
September 27, 2009-
"Are you scared of anything?"
"Unbridled imperialism. And sharks." -
Handing a rightwing media don and author of pop ev psych books commission to wrote 500 words on the subject of “Lust” for a start of term humour article has to pretty much go in the “what could possibly go wrong?” column. But I think even the THES editors must have been a little bit surprised at what they got. A classic example of the sort of thing where having shown a draft to a single close female friend might have saved the day, and in the process offered a useful insight into the distinction between the concept “refreshingly un-PC” and the concept “creepy”, and perhaps the Pleistocene conditions on the veldt which might have given rise to it.
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Specifically, the obsessive locus of the evil character's evil in the fact that he was an engager in anal sex. I know lots of people point to the fact that there's a "sympathetic" gay character too (who reads, incidentally, to me, very like someone invented because an editor said, "we really need a counterbalance to the evil gay") but that character is explicitly defined as a goody because he doesn't have sex on the ship. That's nothing to do with historical research or attitudes (and parenthetically, the idea that in a crew that size only two men would be fucking is ludicrous) but to do with the text's pathological Terror of anal penetration which is (spoiler!–hello The Sparrow) the usual way culture gets to have a deep-seated pathologising of gay sexuality alongide putatively liberal attitudes to desexualised gay men.
links for 2009-09-25
September 25, 2009-
Recently on the morning drive to school my 8-year-old son asked me a question I’ve been dreading since he was a baby, “Mom, what happened on 9/11?”
Mass murder is impossible to explain to yourself, let alone a child. But how do I, as a parent, explain the slaughter of innocent people in the name of a religion that I am trying to pass on to my boy?
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When single mothers take 0.1 percent of this sum from the state, the same newspapers that laud Elizabeth as "the best of British" savage them as "scroungers." If they refused to pay tax — as Elizabeth did — they would have been put in prison.
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Frankly, it's hurtful to me when Christians address what happened to me by saying, "Those aren't real Christians," expecting me to salve their discomfort about the baggage of privilege by not disagreeing. People who would never in a million years think to try to console a victim of a hate crime with "All [white/straight/cis/abled] people aren't like that!" nonetheless responded that way to me when I was targeted and threatened by droves of self-identified Christians.
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Though most adolescents who come out do so in high school, sex researchers and counselors say that middle-school students are increasingly coming out to friends or family or to an adult in school. Just how they’re faring in a world that wasn’t expecting them — and that isn’t so sure a 12-year-old can know if he’s gay — is a complicated question that defies simple geographical explanations. Though gay kids in the South and in rural areas tend to have a harder time than those on the coasts, I met gay youth who were doing well in socially conservative areas like Tulsa and others in progressive cities who were afraid to come out.
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Aasif Mandvi demands an apology for not being called to cover Shah Rukh Khan's detention at Newark Airport.
links for 2009-09-24
September 24, 2009-
It's not simply that meat is a contributor to global warming; it's that it is a huge contributor. Larger, by a significant margin, than the global transportation sector.
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Both rape and rape accusations are products of the roles assigned by rape culture. In the traditional seduction scenario, a woman is expected to not desire to have sex, and to only submit after the man has successfully coerced her into submission. When the preferred model for consensual sex looks a hell of a lot like rape, an array of fucked-up scenarios are inevitable: the woman never wanted to fuck the guy, refuses to submit, and is raped; the woman submits to the man’s coercion in order to avoid other negative consequences (like being raped); the woman had desired the sex all along, but must defend her femininity by saying that she had been coerced into sex. Thankfully, a good deal of modern men and women reject these antiquated ideas, but they’re far from being banished from the sexual landscape. Especially when that landscape involves four men, one woman, and freshman year of college.
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Men lie about rape all the time. They say they didn’t do it. Their friend didn’t do it. But the burden is still placed upon women to not only eradicate rape, but to make sure rape culture has no male collateral damage.
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Crisis Pregnancy Centers Creating "Artificial Orphans" – Crisis pregnancy centers adoption – JezebelInstead, the ones who turn to CPCs for support are abandoned the moment the umbilical cord is cut and the baby can be spirited away to some stranger's quiver. Never mind if they want the baby. Never mind if they wanted an abortion months earlier. As soon as they stumbled into a CPC, what they wanted ceased to be a factor, because CPCs are not in the business of helping pregnant women but, as Joyce says critics put it: "separat[ing] willing biological parents from their offspring, artificially producing 'orphans' for Christian parents to adopt." If you think that sounds a lot like the "Baby Scoop" era of the mid-twentieth century, when at least 1.5 million pregnant girls and women were hidden away, often in maternity homes, until they gave birth to babies they didn't dare raise in a society that wouldn't tolerate single mothers, well, you're onto something.
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Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), the nonprofit pregnancy-testing facilities set up by antiabortion groups to dissuade women from having abortions, have become fixtures of the antiabortion landscape, buttressed by an estimated $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds. The National Abortion Federation estimates that as many as 4,000 CPCs operate in the United States, often using deceptive tactics like posing as abortion providers and showing women graphic antiabortion films. While there is growing awareness of how CPCs hinder abortion access, the centers have a broader agenda that is less well known: they seek not only to induce women to "choose life" but to choose adoption, either by offering adoption services themselves, as in Bethany's case, or by referring women to Christian adoption agencies. Far more than other adoption agencies, conservative Christian agencies demonstrate a pattern and history of coercing women to relinquish their children.
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Today is Bi Visibility Day, which serves to remind me that I’ve been terribly invisible around here lately.
I’ve been thinking about something Robyn Ochs said during her keynote at the Putting The “B” in LGBT Summit. She articulated something that’s been bothering me for a while — that the ways for bisexuality to be visible at all mirror the most common stereotypes about bisexuals.
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Yes, you heard the man, jokes about rape are violating taboos, which is why they only appear in every single film, book, TV series and stand-up routine aimed at men between 16 and 39 that’s been released in the last decade. Yes, Jim, there are taboos surrounding rape, but mockery of the act itself certainly isn’t one of them; if you want to really violate a taboo, point out the sheer amount of rape that goes on, point out how the alleyway-dwelling psychopath is largely a myth and most rape is committed by people who know the victim, point out that when women are raped it has nothing to do with them and everything to do with the rapist, and suggest that things be done. You’ll lose friends quickly. Trust me.
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Satire is a genre that ridicules human wrongdoing, with the ultimate goal being to expose institutional oppression and effect social change.
Putting ignorance on display, then panicking, backpedalling and calling it “satire” isn’t hip or edgy or anywhere near as successful a coverup as people seem to think it is.
links for 2009-09-23
September 23, 2009-
Y'ALL, THE 300,000 DEATHS THING WAS DEBUNKED IN 2005. By the CDC, not delusional fatties with axes to grind. Same folks who came up with the original stat, in fact. They just fucked up the first time:
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Q. I’m still confused — you want me to believe hating fat people is a bad thing?
A. Only if you’re a decent human being. If you’re not, no worries. -
This is a list of ways that boys can ally themselves against misogyny. Examples, anecdotes, and stories. This list is for men that want to help but don’t know what to do. It is also for anybody who wants to share a story of something good that they saw.
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"Both parties understand that the current system is broken," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday. "But what we can't seem to agree upon is how to best keep it broken, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever. It’s a very complicated issue."
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Following the jailing this week of Helen Goddard, the teacher who had a sexual relationship with a pupil, Jon Henley looks at how texting, emailing and social networking sites are radically changing the teacher-pupil relationship
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Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct
September 10, 2009 in English, agreement, ambiguity, grammar, history, languagelog, linguistics, plurals, pronouns, quantification, words, writing | Tags: anyone, c. s. lewis, chaucer, david gelernter, everyone, geoff pullum, he or she, indefinite pronoun, singular theySuppose you were reading and came to the following line:
“She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.”
Would you …
(a) continue reading, because that’s a perfectly acceptable sentence, or
(b) throw a tantrum and insist that the author is an imbecile speeding the wholesale destruction of the English language?If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re probably answering (a). If you’re answering (b), I regret to inform you that you hate the writing of C. S. Lewis.
links for 2009-09-21
September 21, 2009-
"If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they'll miss lots of special offers."
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Indeed, she had the nerve to look confused and offended as she asked, "Why not?"
Really, lady? You want me to explain to you why I don't want you to touch my hair? Let's see…
Because you're a STRANGER.
Because I'm not an animal in the zoo.
Because this is my body and I don't have to let anybody touch any part of it, EVER, if I don't want to.
Because my black ancestors may have been your ancestors' property, and had to smile while they got touched in ways they didn't want to, but I am not YOUR property and never will be so you'd best move your hand away from me.
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It may feel like a million years ago, but it was only 1985 when Conservative conference speakers were allowed to openly say “if you want a queer for a neighbour vote Labour” and 1987 when Margaret Thatcher explicitly attacked “the right to be gay”. And that was the political party young David Cameron felt compelled to join.
Labour came into power in 1997 while the Sun was still shouting that Britain was being run by a “gay mafia”. And yet, in a rare concession that they’d got it wrong, the red top announced it was changing tack.
links for 2009-09-19
September 19, 2009-
There is still a little bit of ambiguity between cause and effect here though. Does tabloid coverage cause people to vote for the BNP, or are the tabloids merely reflecting a rightward shift in public opinion? I know what I think, but you know what? I'm not going to bother arguing it right now. And that's because it's much much easier to show how the tabloids contribute to support for the campaign of new ball-'eds on the block, the English Defence League, to kick off violent confrontations with brown people Muslims.
links for 2009-09-18
September 18, 2009-
The real mystery about the Lib Dems is not why they aren’t performing better, but why they aren’t doing much worse.
Consider the Himalayan obstacles they face. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, most of the time, almost nobody listens to a word they say. As one of Mr Clegg’s predecessors put it, where the prime minister wakes up thinking about what he has to do, and the Tory leader ponders what to say, the Lib Dem chieftain wonders how to make anybody pay him the slightest attention. The proliferation of news outlets might, in theory, have helped the Lib Dems increase their exposure. It hasn’t: round-the-clock news channels and blogs have been as captured and captivated by the car-crash spectacle of Gordon Brown’s demise and by David Cameron’s rise as have the traditional media.
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I’ve never understood the argument that we should ignore Rush Limbaugh because he’s simply an entertainer who says outrageous things that millions of people are merely entertained by. I didn’t read the complete works of Silas Weir Mitchell because they were good—they are almost uniformly awful—I read them because they were popular. I was interested not in the content of his thought—it is almost uniformly mediocre—but in why his contemporaries found it so wildly appealing. If you want to learn which ideas and ideologies literate Americans in 1900 found comforting, you do not consult Henry James: you turn to the inartistic novels that parroted their prejudices back to them in a language they already understood. So when people say that we should dismiss Limbaugh on the grounds that he only says outrageous things to sell his product, I’m never quite sure why they’re more concerned with Limbaugh’s motivations than the fact that millions of Americans are buying what he’s selling.
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A selection of images taken from the Guinness World Records 2010 book
