Categotry Archives: Outrage

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Rapist, International Fugitive Arrested: Media Aghast

Categories: don't get your panties in a bunch, monday media watch, Outrage, privilege stories, rape is hy-larious, supremely sexist, your rda of misogyny

I will preface this by saying I like Roman Polanski’s movies, at least the ones I’ve seen–Rosemary’s Baby, Frantic, The Pianist, and especially Chinatown; I saw a restored print of it ten years ago that was almost a religious experience.

His sudden arrest in Switzerland over the weekend has stunned the world’s artistic community. A true cinematic artist, one who’s long-suffered and even been forgiven by his victim, opinion seems to be that…the man is a rapist and why the fuck are we having this conversation?

Yeah. Rapist. He didn’t “have sex” with a 13-year old girl. He raped her. Well, first he got her drunk and high on quaaludes. Then he raped her.

Don’t believe me? Check out the Smoking Gun’s transcript of her testimony. I looked at it for the first time on Sunday. It made me ill.

Predictably, the comments at the New York Times website were full of fail. A lot of people seem to feel that he’s “suffered enough.” They base this, I guess, because he hasn’t been allowed to re-enter the United States since he fled in 1977. Instead, he’s had to content himself with making lots of money directing movies in Europe and living in France.

Ya know, I just got back from France. That’s really not a hardship assignment.

The latest bit of doucheoisie posturing is this:

Nearly 100 entertainment industry professionals, including the movie directors Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar Wai and Wim Wenders urged in a petition that Mr. Polanski be release, saying: “Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision.”

Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar as screenwriter of “The Pianist,” which Mr. Polanski directed, said: “It’s really disgraceful. Both the Americans and the Swiss have miscalculated.”

Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, said that for Europeans the development showed that the American system of justice had run amok.

“Sometimes, the American justice system shows an excess of formalism,” Mr. Lang said, “like an infernal machine that advances inexorably and blindly.”

One wonders, however, if Wong Kar Wei, Wim Wenders, or Pedro Almodovar would feel comfortable leaving a prepubescent female relative unattended around Roman Polanski. Or if they’d be arguing about the “great artist” exemption for a shocking act of rape if it were their 13-year old daughter.

Liss McEwan, as usual, hits it right on the head:

Very few, if any, of the people who have publicly defended Polanski, or who have worked with him, make it their business to champion or associate themselves with admitted child rapists. They make an exception for Polanski for the same reason exceptions have been for other famous, artistic men – directors, writers, actors, comedians, singers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, photographers – who have been known to sexually assault women and/or children: Because geniuses get special dispensation.

Because there’s only one Roman Polanski.

So goes the breathless defense of the artiste, while the flipside of that particular coin, because thirteen-year-old girls are a dime a dozen, goes unspoken.

So yeah. Overaggressive prosecution! Of a child molester! Who admitted to it! That’s overzealousness, all right! Just remember, as long as you can paint a nice picture or make a good movie, you get to rape young girls!

But not boys. That would be sick.

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Baron Cohen: Glorious Privileges For Amusement Of Elites

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, hipster irony must die, media tool kit, Outrage

I can’t say that I’m a Sacha Baron Cohen fan. (Now, Simon Baron-Cohen, I can totes get behind.) My niece liked his song in Madagascar, I’ve probably seen Ali G a few times, and other than that I’ve been pretty much indifferent to him.

But that hasn’t been much of an option of late, thanks to this:

A lot of people–led by Liss over at Shakesville–have talked about the, oh, FAIL risk inherent about using homophobic humor to expose…homophobia. Hell, even the New York Times–not my usual stop for cutting-edge progressivism–says as much in a well-balanced review by A.O. Scott:

The film demonstrates, at a fairly high level of conceptual sophistication, that lampooning homophobia has become an acceptable, almost unavoidable form of homophobic humor, or at least a way of licensing gags that would otherwise be out of bounds. An early sequence that graphically shows Brüno and his lover exerting themselves in various positions and with the assistance of, among other things, a Champagne bottle, a fire extinguisher and a specially modified exercise machine, derives its humor less from the extremity of their practices than from the assumption that sex between men is inherently weird, gross and comical. The same sequence with a man and a woman — or for that matter, two women — would play, most likely on the Internet rather than in the multiplex, as inventive, moderately kinky pornography rather than as icky, gasp-inducing farce.

Exactly.

However, here at The Second Awakening, we don’t just do analysis: we do analysis of privilege! (It says so somewhere in the mission statement, which I think The Grey Mouser is using as a pillow right now.) So what can we say about the privilege used, abused, hidden, and sickeningly visible in Baron Cohen’s work? And is that the reason why no matter what, you always feel vaguely icky watching it?

To answer the last first: Yes. Yes it is.

The thing is, both Borat and Bruno1 are humor for privileged people. They let you, the privileged person, laugh at other people who aren’t as privileged as you. To make it funny, of course, we use multiple axes of privilege: so Borat spent a lot of time lampooning white people of different educational or cultural backgrounds. (Most egregiously, the Romanian villagers who provided the backdrop for the movie’s early scenes.)

The way that both these movies mitigate any privilege guilt you might have about laughing at other people (please, please tell me you have privilege guilt for laughing–not everybody does) is by selling you the ultimate privilege: you’re in on it. Unlike the hapless buffoons of the movie’s universe, you get the joke. You know all along that Borat isn’t really a Kazakh journalist, that Bruno isn’t really a gay fashionista–that Baron Cohen is using these guises to draw people out of their shell and show their true colors. Which are inevitably ugly or laughable. As A.O. Scott says,

They — Americans just like you but of course nothing like you — were exposed as bigots either for being outraged at the things Borat did or for politely agreeing with his misogynistic, anti-Semitic or otherwise objectionable statements. Any twinge of guilt you might have felt on behalf of the actual glorious nation of Kazakhstan was quickly soothed by the spectacle of American intolerance and idiocy that “Borat” purported to expose.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a time honored technique (Jonathan Swift, for example, used it to great effect.) But I have to feel that there’s a fundamental difference in, say, attacking the powerful by pointing out they were essentially eating the children of the Irish by oppressing them into starvation, and getting a laugh out of a few ordinary citizens who aren’t hip that they’re being lampooned.

I mean, it’s not like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia (my personal fave) or anti-religious bigotry needs much encouragement to come out; nor is it likely that using a horrid charicature of gayness to draw people into overt homophobia is going to do much to alleviate homophobia. Instead, it’s more oppression masquerading as liberation; a joke for those “good” enough to be in on it, a joke on everyone else.

‘Cause not having privilege is hysterical. For them who have it.

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1. I refuse to use the idiotic umlauts; that’s not how you spell the name in German. And you don’t spell “Borat” that way in Cyrillic, which is odd given that the DVD box actually spelled out the English title in Cyrillic characters. Yes, I am a hopeless pedant; you knew that already.

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Shut Up, Nasty Sports Lady! Alex Is My Bro!

Categories: media tool kit, Outrage, teh bazeball

Lately I’ve been watching the morning news shows more, something I haven’t done in over a decade–this is because I have to take care of dilation after breakfast, and I like to watch TV during that time, and an hour long episode of any show I’ve recorded on my DVR will only cover the dilation period, not breakfast, and aren’t you sorry you started reading this paragraph? (Yes.)

Anyway, this morning there was an interview with Selena Roberts, the author of a new book that accuses Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez of using steroids for much longer than he’s previously admitted. (He came clean this year that he used after joining the Yankees; the book alleges he’d been using since high school.)

The interview took basically this form:

Interviewer: Nasty sports lady, you’re mean to my friend Alex!

Roberts: Um. You see, if you read my book…

Interviewer-Tool: How do you know he could only lift 100 pounds as a sophmore? He might have been modest.

Roberts: Um–I have interviewed people on the record…

Tool: You don’t even like him. You hate my bro!

Roberts: Um. What the hell?

…which doesn’t even capture the nastiness and hostility of the interviewer. He was practically cross-examining her.

Now, I understand that a book about A-Rod is going to catch flack because of his popularity–the interviewer was a New Yorker, and the Yankees are practically a cult there–but I have to wonder: would he have been so hostile had the book been written by a guy? Would he have challenged her objectivity and reporting techniques had she possessed her own, um, bat? Fer eff’s sake, he got after her for reporting that Alex was vain, asking his trainers if his “pecs looked good.” (Rodriguez’s vanity is something consistently reported in all accounts by people who played with him.) He (the interviewer) actually said,

“Is that vanity, or is that professionalism perhaps?”

OMG. What a sentence to unpack. I mean, there’s thesubtext of homosexuality–only ladies like to look good! You’re saying he’s like a lady! That means he’s gay!–as well as casual misogyny, i.e. if a guy works on his appearance, it’s professionalism. If a woman works on her appearance–which costs more, is more time-intensive, and frankly is far more expected of her than it is of men–she’s still vain.

The interview finishes up with him asking Roberts about the picture on the back cover (Rodriguez lighting a cigar and looking pretty arrogant.) He asks Roberts if she chose the photo; she didn’t–authors have surprisingly little say in the covers of their books, but that doesn’t keep him from attacking her about it, and then attacking her professionalism again: did you interview A-Rod about these things?

No, Roberts calmly explains, we made that request and it was turned down. And then she talks about one of the interviews she did make with him, where A-Rod talked about how he’s calmer now than he was when he played in Seattle, much less worried about being perfect all the time. Which is really the heart of the matter; like Barry Bonds, A-Rod’s story is largely about a great player wanting to push the envelope past mere greatness, and willing to cheat to do that. It’s a very American story of overreach, and when you look at the Masters of Greed on Wall Street, you see the same kind of arrogance.

And then the interviewer accuses her again of not liking A-Rod. Cause, you know, she’s a lady, and can’t possibly understand how dudes give each other a free ride, cause they’re like, you know, dudes! Bros! And they’re all on the same team, really.

Good morning, misogyny: how are you going to fuck up people’s lives today?

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On Why the Cat Is Mad

Categories: Outrage, teh tranz, This Was My Life, vive le feminisme

For most of my life I’ve been folded safely in the arms of privilege.

I grew up in the suburbs of a Great American Metropolis. My parents were both college-educated professionals. I’m white, and at the time I was male. In America, it doesn’t really get too much better than that–we were the norm you were supposed to aspire to you. (Even people whose income put them in the upper classes describe themselves as “middle class.”)

In my case, though, there was one flaw in the picture: I was trans. As early as three or four I knew I wanted to be a girl, though it took a long time for me to put that plan into action. So much of my mental energy went into managing that problem, especially once I started to crossdress in secret during junior high. I got good at lying, dissembling, concealing; my social life was a disaster; I probably hated myself.

Nothing special there, though–any number of trans people could tell that story.

No, what I want to get to is that despite my transness and its conflicts and encumbrances, I still could retreat into the safety of my white, (apparently) cis, (apparently) straight, middle class privilege. Even after I moved to Metropolis and became a regular in the trans subculture, I still had the refuge of putting myself out to the world as a white man.

Now, even before I began to transition, I was becoming aware of my privilege. I encountered the work of helen boyd, who challenged me to become a feminist. In the summer of 2005, the last happy year of my marriage, I embarked on a reading binge that changed my personal feminist convictions from lukewarm to white-hot.

That didn’t change through the early days of my transition. As I became essentially fulltime, my convictions were nothing if not reinforced. How could they not be? Misogyny began to be something I had to deal with at street level.

All that said, there was still a–detachment, call it–from these things. After all, I still had plenty of privilege stockpiled–still white, still (apparently) cis, still (apparently) straight. The Great American Metropolis has liberal attitudes, and misogyny was something no longer overt. I could still blithely glide over things, if I chose.

Being able to ignore things is the essential definition of privilege.

What changed, was: I had surgery. And since then, my feminist convictions have changed from an intellectual pursuit to something I feel in my gut; they have become a viewpoint, the criterion I use to make sense of the world.

And you know what? It sucks that it took my surgery to do that. It sucks that even living and identifying as a woman I was still able to traipse lightly over inconvenient truths. I’m not proud of the fact that I needed the surgery to reach this point.

But I did. The major change I’ve noticed since the operation is that I no longer have reservations or doubts about being a woman. Not that I wasn’t before: my womanhood is not transactional, and can’t be limited or reduced.

Before, though, that was an intellectual conviction; today, it’s something I feel in my soul.

And now, when I see misogyny, when I see stupid shit directed at women simply because they are women, I get pissed: “Hey! They’re talking about me!” Again, it completely sucks that I took so long to reach this place. I am humbled by the women I know and admire who had to endure this from birth.

That didn’t, couldn’t happen to me. And maybe that’s why I’ve become so engaged: that having seen, firsthand, how privilege can invisibly change your life, it’s left me a bitter foe of it in all its manifestations. Not so much to lift my boat–this isn’t an attempt for me to reclaim my lost male privilege. You can stuff male privilege.

No, it’s more this: having had privilege, lost privilege, gained others (many would privilege me over other trans people because I am transsexual, have had the surgery, look female, etc.), I no longer want privilege to exist at all.

Maybe that’s a radical position. Call me a Marxist, a bomb-thrower, a lunatic. Tell me that I only feel this way because I hurt so much and regret losing my former advantages.

I won’t care. Because it doesn’t matter how I got here; what matters is that I’m here now, and ready to start to pitch in.

And thus I dedicate this blog: to be a record of my implacable, boundless outrage; my mouthpiece to the world; my voice crying in the wilderness, adding itself to the chorus of other women everywhere.

I wasn’t born to the fight; but I’ll fight now forever.