Here’s to mutual respect, mea culpas everywhere, and at least one lap around the local jr high track, for me anyway…

Mike

The last line was “Why now? It seems more of a political tactic than one about justice.”

If it’s just because she was 13… that’s sexual misconduct with a minor, but not rape.

It also seems this isn’t about the rape, but about him fleeing. He filled one sentence in jail and the judge was then going to close the case as having served his sentence. But the judge reniged, going back on his word.

Polanski then fled the country. I would think that’d be a seperate crime. You can’t have Double Jeopardy (tried twice for the same crime) and if he did serve a sentence already…then that’s what this would be.

Unless, they tried him on his fleeing the country, but all media states this is about the rape/misconduct. So I don’t get what this is really all about.

Again, sorry if I gave offense, but glad you came to the party. If you have more to say, please do.

As I said, I do understand your point that these are grievous misdeeds that we should put the same amount of effort and fervor into confronting them as we do Polanski’s case. I do think that your criticism of how we pursue justice (that idea of what crime’s easiest to jump on, what takes more effort, what kind of mentality we have as a nation) is very much timely, necessary and important. I am glad you wrote about it, it is something worth looking at critically.

But my original point is not really questioning whether we as a nation care about women or not. It’s about how you made your argument, and what that choice meant.

While you say you are not dismissing Polanski’s crime to highlight the other, the title of your post is “Forget Polanski, Arrest Greenspan.” And in your article, you do make a case of how unimportant/ less crucial the Polanski case is, compared to the other, and cite multiple reasons. Now, I know that the point of this method of comparison was to strengthen your main argument, not to diminish the actual crime.

But while I do not disagree with your main argument, and I understand your intentions, I still disagree with your method and how you got there. To me, the choice itself again revealed the subconscious attitude we all in society are accustomed to, one that you yourself consciously recognize as “a sickness”. While you did not actually believe or intend to diminish the effect of misogyny and its link to the Polanski case, the title of your post and the specific way you chose to argue your position— however inadvertently— does.

I know this was not the intent. I know that you may feel this stuff has nothing to do with what you wanted to get across. But that is exactly it. I feel that you should know how your writing choices have affected me, as a reader. And why your main argument didn’t reach me. Because of the specific way you approached your post, I saw that latent subconscious attitude hiding in your post that I often see across the nation. And suddenly your main argument didn’t feel quite right.

I admire that you are sticking to your argument. I just wanted to call attention to the undesirable effect this particular angle may have, and has had. And specifically, what your choice to approach your story in this manner reveals about how many of us think when it comes to these issues.

I know that you can’t cater your writing to everyone, but you do have readers that value your words. And in the case of this post, I was worried the message inadvertently being sent, so I commented. I guess I really just want to get across why the particular semantics and methods of this post are so important to me. That’s about it.

Thanks again for replying in such a respectful manner and letting my voice be heard.

here’s kind of my bottom line on this:

If you want to write about the Greenspan debacle, do it. It’s obviously a one of THE important stories of recent history. But don’t get chippy and precious when people get riled when they see your headline contain the phrase “forget polanski” and you, intentionally or not, dilute polanski’s rape of a 13 year old, and you include the fact that he made some great movies as mitigating circumstances for cutting him some slack.

*Cavalier? Yes it was a bit…
#You’re right. It was.

*Your arguments presume that we don’t need to make a choice here about where to put our efforts, about where to direct our attention
#No they don’t. I wasn’t out to even make any arguments other than the one: don’t water down the Polanski rape. If you didn’t water it down, great. We all agree and 100% of your respondents so far owe you an apology. Maybe you did, unintentionally. Just something to consider…

*Why is it that we don’t seem to care at all about what’s happening to women as a result of Wall Street decisions but suddenly turn into righteous avengers when it comes to Polanski? Because it’s so much easier. It demands so much less of us.
#L and Doxy? He’s talking to you, and your not-caring-about-global-women’s-issues callous hearts. Spare me.

*Maybe you’re sort of insulated from the financial wreckage. That would explain your point of view a bit.
#Am I allowed to say “fuck you” on this board? If I am, fuck you. You got the wrong guy. I’ve never been insulated from a single financial issue a day in my life.

*You seem to assume that the Polanski affair is the real outrage here, the only rape here that counts
#No I don’t. Neither does L. Neither does Doxy. And I’m sure neither do you.

*Your arguments somehow insist that the Polanski affair must mean much more to women, that it says more about a woman-hating society, has more meaning ultimately for women, than what has happened on Wall Street.
N#o it doesn’t. My argument insists that you should make your point about Greenspan and women’s global issues, absent a misplayed comparison to Polanski drugging, sodomizing and raping a 13 year old.

*But I’m here to tell you they are, in fact, human beings, that they are at the very center of the frame in this economic disaster, and many of them will never recover.
#Preaching to the choir.

*It strikes me as the most profound trivialization of their plight that men and women who probably consider themselves unimpeachably on the side of the angels have taken to this Polanski case as if it were the alpha and omega of womens issues when so many millions of women are fighting for their lives in the greatest economic disaster in eighty years.
#You lead with “Free Polanski”. You offer Polanski’s age and film making as reason to mitigate outrage against his raping a 13 year old, then YOU invoke “profound trivialization”. That’s good stuff. // Beyond that (and beyond the fact that your characterization of people’s outrage is speculative at best), you set up a false choice, a false comparison, the implication being, “if you have moral outrage in the polanski case, you have no more outrage to spend anywhere else.” Just incorrect.

*How outraged have any of you been about that? I don’t hear much outrage in your posts, frankly. What I hear is rather a dismissal of those women. // If I were the accusatory type, I’d say shame on all of you, but instead I just feel sad. Caught in our separate dramas, paralyzed by our separate priorities, unable to see that the largest and greatest crimes are committed against all of us–men and women both–we seem no longer able to focus on the things that ought to unite us. Instead, we decamp to our small armies and yell at each other across artificial battle lines. // Was that too cavalier?
#Not too cavalier. Just too self-righteous, too presumptuous, too little too late. You had a legit point to make (the impact on women of the Greenspan era), but you muddied it up with the shock-n-awe headline of “Forget Polanski!”. Instead of entertaining the possibility that 100% of your respondents might be right by suggesting that your comparison might have been ill-conceived, you dug in, and wagged your finger at and gave an “indignation sermon” to a readership that (I’m just guessing) is no less morally engaged than you are.

= = = = =

Quote Of The Day: Tom Morello, that insulated from the financial wreckage guitarist for Rage Against The Machine had this to say about Polanski: “He’s probably one of the greatest child molesting directors of all time.”

How DARE you?!?!??!

How dare you suggest that we don’t care about the plight of women because we find your attitude on this issue offensive?!

I have spent the last 25 years of my life working to improve the lives of women–daily, in practical ways. I have educated, organized, marched, written, lobbied, you name it. I have marched women through lines of screaming anti-choicers so they could obtain legal abortions they desperately needed or wanted. I have helped to build housing for poor women and their families. I work on a daily basis to protect women from HIV.

Just what have YOU done to improve the lives of women, John Marks? Let me see YOUR credentials on this issue–your on-the-ground resume, not just words on a Web screen–before you call mine into question. (Have you ever heard the term “concern troll”? That’s what this post would get you labeled on a lot of feminist blogs.)

Why is it that we don’t seem to care at all about what’s happening to women as a result of Wall Street decisions but suddenly turn into righteous avengers when it comes to Polanski? Because it’s so much easier. It demands so much less of us.

This must be a nice little intellectual exercise for you–comparing the actual rape of a child to the figurative rape of the human race by the powerful. But I’m here to tell you…when women are not safe in their bodies—when they can be forcibly penetrated by any man who takes a notion to do so, secure in the knowledge that he can avoid punishment because people like you will minimize his crime by comparing it to “bigger” crimes–we will NEVER be safe from the predations of the rich and powerful.

We are only as safe as the least powerful among us.

None of this, however, is meant to undermine or in any way diminish the reality and monstrosity of the crime of rape.

Maybe you are “sort of insulated” from rape, John–and I mean REAL rape, not the figurative term you’ve used here. I doubt you’ve ever had someone hold you down and batter his way into your most intimate bodily cavities. Maybe you have no clue about the lifelong effects that sexual violence has on those who have suffered it.

Maybe you haven’t learned that, when suffering is prioritized by men, women and children will always lose. It has been ever thus, but I keep getting blindsided when people I thought were rational and thoughtful do it.

Here’s a suggestion–start by protecting the bodily integrity of every human being on this planet. Once that’s accomplished, you might actually see some change in the “largest and greatest crimes.” It is the attitude that crimes against the individual are not worth prioritizing that gives carte blanche to the Greenspans of the world.

Your arguments presume that we don’t need to make a choice here about where to put our efforts, about where to direct our attention, but I think we do.

You’ve turned the pyramid upside down, John. At the end of the day, we are all individuals. If we begin to believe that the mass of humanity is somehow “more important” than the safety of an individual 13-year-old girl, we fall right into the trap–because if you (collective “you”) can’t put yourself in that girl’s place and move to protect her, you won’t be able to put yourself in the place of those who have lost their jobs and their homes in the current crisis either. It’s all an abstraction at that point–and we become disempowered by the immenseness of it all.

I repeat—We are only as safe as the least powerful among us. The cabal behind Greenspan, Cheney, etc. understands that. Why don’t you?

Here’s how I will put it then. Millions women are going to be ruined and have been ruined by Greenspan’decisions—raped, in fact, in their jobs, their marriages, their homes, their dignity. That “one woman” in the Polanski case may be all women in a political sense, but all those other women whom you don’t seem to care about, they’re much closer to the mark. They truly are representative of all women.

Your arguments presume that we don’t need to make a choice here about where to put our efforts, about where to direct our attention, but I think we do. I’m sorry if it’s disconcerting. I think part of our problem in thinking about ourselves is that we’re like a dog constantly smelling new scents in the woods, running off down one trail or another when we need to be single-minded. Why is it that we don’t seem to care at all about what’s happening to women as a result of Wall Street decisions but suddenly turn into righteous avengers when it comes to Polanski? Because it’s so much easier. It demands so much less of us.

Maybe you’re sort of insulated from the financial wreckage. That would explain your point of view a bit. A lot of people are. Your use of the word “fat cats” in the Pearl comparison is a sort of interesting giveaway, as if I were making the same old argument about the same old intractable crowd, as if I were talking about an abstraction. I can assure you that for tens of millions of American women, this is no abstraction. Fat cats got nothing to do with it.

You seem to assume that the Polanski affair is the real outrage here, the only rape here that counts, but that is simply false, and there is a moral dimension to the error. Your arguments somehow insist that the Polanski affair must mean much more to women, that it says more about a woman-hating society, has more meaning ultimately for women, than what has happened on Wall Street. That is blatantly, deeply, tragically wrong, and the wrongness of it exposes intellectual mistakes that a generation of us have made in the way that we look at women as separate from every other part of the society. Perhaps one reason that we still so deeply undervalue women has to do with the way that we’ve ghettoized them intellectually as a group and subject, removing them from the rest of the frame as if they weren’t quite human.

But I’m here to tell you they are, in fact, human beings, that they are at the very center of the frame in this economic disaster, and many of them will never recover. It strikes me as the most profound trivialization of their plight that men and women who probably consider themselves unimpeachably on the side of the angels have taken to this Polanski case as if it were the alpha and omega of womens issues when so many millions of women are fighting for their lives in the greatest economic disaster in eighty years. How outraged have any of you been about that? I don’t hear much outrage in your posts, frankly. What I hear is rather a dismissal of those women.

If I were the accusatory type, I’d say shame on all of you, but instead I just feel sad.

Caught in our separate dramas, paralyzed by our separate priorities, unable to see that the largest and greatest crimes are committed against all of us–men and women both–we seem no longer able to focus on the things that ought to unite us. Instead, we decamp to our small armies and yell at each other across artificial battle lines.

Was that too cavalier?