Katha Pollit, columnist for the Nation, is unhappy with the reaction in Gaul to the Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrest for an alleged sexual assault in a New York hotel:
Dear France,
I used to love you, but this is it.
We're through.
Oh, it was lovely while it lasted, my crush on your big welfare state, with its excellent national health service and its government-funded childcare.
I liked your firm separation of church and state, your refusal to buy into the Iraq War, your mass demonstrations in support of workers and against the neoliberal agenda. And let's not forget the long vacations, outdoor markets, flourishing bookstores and high-speed trains!
I even liked the fact that all your schools have the same centralized curriculum — not like here, where local cranks and preachers get to meddle with history and science and cancel the school play. French kids study philosophy in high school! How cool is that?
It made me so happy to think that there was a country where being intelligent and well-read was seen as a good thing, I gladly forgave you for all those boring movies where genial groups of affluent friends sat for hours over lunch in the garden of a country house.
But, France, I don't like you anymore. Because what is the point of having all those smart, cultivated, social-democratically inclined secular people if it turns out they are such self-satisfied creeps?
You should listen to yourself sometime: smug, paunchy, powerful middle-aged men parading across the media going on about how Dominique Strauss-Kahn was just engaging in some typically Gallic flirtation in that Sofitel suite in Manhattan.
"It was just a quickie with the maid," said the famous journalist Jean-Francois Kahn, using an antiquated idiom (troussage de domestique) that suggests trussing up a chicken.
Read the rest here.
I'm with her.
We tend to think of Europeans in general as terribly civilized and advanced and then we come across such an incident such as this, or like Roman Polanski, and we see an odd, really disturbing undercurrent of something ugly & misogynistic.
Le yuck.
Update: Lysiane Gagnon, columnist for La Presse & The Globe & Mail, gives us a peek into the ramifications for the alleged victim in the case.
Caution: This may make you sick.
The chambermaid who accused former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault is going through such an ordeal that one wonders how many women, after this, would dare denounce their aggressor – that is, if he’s rich and powerful.
The French press didn’t respect the North American rule that forbids the media to reveal the identity of alleged victims of sexual assault. The woman’s full name, her address, even her teenaged daughter’s first name, plus a host of details about her personal life, have been exposed, which means of course that this information is widely available on the Web.
The woman, who is in hiding under police protection, must also suffer the pain of being shunned by part of her own community. She is a black Muslim immigrant from Guinea who came to the United States a few years ago with her daughter, after the death of her husband. Even though she is known in the tight-knit Guinean-American community as a serious woman and a devout Muslim, being a victim of a rape, alleged or real, is not well seen in this community.
“If you disagree,” said a man interviewed by Le Monde in front of a New York mosque, “you yell, you defend yourself. Our guess here is that she was willing.”
As one Senegalese specialist on Africa told Le Monde, “Islamic Americans have a culture of machismo. If a woman is a victim of a rape, they tend to believe that she looked for it.” Some Guinean-Americans even suspect her of having invented the story to extort money from Mr. Strauss-Kahn.
“By the way,” another Guinean man asked the French newspaper, “why did she wait so long to call the police?”
According to some French news reports, the answer is quite simple: After the alleged assault, she was found by other hotel workers cowering in a closet, trying to throw up, spitting on the floor and incapable of speaking – traumatized, in other words.
Read the rest here.
If ever there was a reason rename them Freedom Fries...
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