Buchanan, Palin, The Wire, and St. Maria Goretti
Buchanan: Palin Is A Feminist
Bleahhh! Today being a Sunday, there were political shows everywhere, and I believe it was on CNN that Buchanan held forth on Sarah Palin, asserting that she's a a feminist, a follower of "the true feminism."
Pat, Pat, Pat. You don't know what feminism is much more than Sarah does, and neither of you is qualified to hold forth on "true feminism."
Rape, The Wire, and Maria Goretti
Tonight is the premiere of Treme, David Simon's look at post-Katrina New Orleans. Fumbling around for the time on that, I found this about Simon's gritty Baltimore series, The Wire:
The analysis caught my eye because I'd just been reading about / working on St. Maria Goretti, an eleven-year-old Italian girl murdered in 1902, canonized because she died "defending her virginity." (Offhand, I can't recall a case in which the Church canonized a non-virgin woman for fighting a rapist, but there may be one somewhere in the calendar.) Hey, what about the possibility that the little girl died defending her determination not to get raped, virginity aside?
The "Explainer" article at Slate smarmily described the child's death struggle against an armed 20-year-old farmhand as "playing hard to get." The writer was putatively characterizing a 1985 debunker's take on the attack, but from what I could find online, the Slate writer was inserting his own point of view, not accurately reflecting what the debunker had written.
But more relevant to the reflection on The Wire is the Wikipedia article's "controversy" section (expanded after I laid hands on it). Before I got there, though, some prior editor had made note that canonizing a little girl for believing death is better than dishonor tends to offend feminists, who argue that it eroticizes and normalizes rape. Yep; and reinforces the Church's contempt for female life.
Bleahhh! Today being a Sunday, there were political shows everywhere, and I believe it was on CNN that Buchanan held forth on Sarah Palin, asserting that she's a a feminist, a follower of "the true feminism."
Pat, Pat, Pat. You don't know what feminism is much more than Sarah does, and neither of you is qualified to hold forth on "true feminism."
Rape, The Wire, and Maria Goretti
Tonight is the premiere of Treme, David Simon's look at post-Katrina New Orleans. Fumbling around for the time on that, I found this about Simon's gritty Baltimore series, The Wire:
- [Middlebury Professor] Jason Mittell aims to give his students a sense of the particular circumstances that shape The Wire. Among other things, it's a show written by white men about mostly black characters and a show about the urban poor that aired on a premium cable channel. Mittell argues that for all its vaunted realism The Wire still has a particular audience in mind, and that audience shapes the sort of stories the show tells and the way it tells them.
Take rape. Mittell assigns his students Philippe Bourgois' book In Search of Respect, an anthropological study of East Harlem crack gangs in the late 1980s and early '90s. One of the strands that runs through the book is what Bourgois describes as "the prevalence and normalcy of rape." Rape is not only common among the gang members Bourgois befriended and studied, it is celebrated.
This is a fact that someone who learned everything about drug gangs from The Wire would be aware of only dimly, if at all. Mittell argues that, conscious or not, this was a decision on the part of the show's creators. Faced with a choice between verisimilitude and drama's demand that the audience identify with the characters, the show's creators, Mittell believes, went with the latter. "It could be that with the specific types of dealers and users that Simon and Burns spent time with, rape was not really part of their culture. The other explanation, which I think is more probable, is that if you portrayed these people as rapists you would lose the ability to make them at all sympathetic and human," says Mittell.
Viewers are willing to sympathize with murderers, whether it's Stringer Bell, Avon Barksdale, or Omar, because there's a sense that they still have a certain code. Portraying them as rapists would make that much harder, Mittell argues. "Rape is a more taboo and emotionally volatile crime to portray on-screen than murder," he says. "Imagine the show Dexter, except instead of being a serial killer, he was a serial rapist."
The analysis caught my eye because I'd just been reading about / working on St. Maria Goretti, an eleven-year-old Italian girl murdered in 1902, canonized because she died "defending her virginity." (Offhand, I can't recall a case in which the Church canonized a non-virgin woman for fighting a rapist, but there may be one somewhere in the calendar.) Hey, what about the possibility that the little girl died defending her determination not to get raped, virginity aside?
The "Explainer" article at Slate smarmily described the child's death struggle against an armed 20-year-old farmhand as "playing hard to get." The writer was putatively characterizing a 1985 debunker's take on the attack, but from what I could find online, the Slate writer was inserting his own point of view, not accurately reflecting what the debunker had written.
But more relevant to the reflection on The Wire is the Wikipedia article's "controversy" section (expanded after I laid hands on it). Before I got there, though, some prior editor had made note that canonizing a little girl for believing death is better than dishonor tends to offend feminists, who argue that it eroticizes and normalizes rape. Yep; and reinforces the Church's contempt for female life.