As details emerge in the case of International Monetary Fund chief and alleged attacker Dominique Strauss-Kahn, my eye is on how his wrecked political clout is getting all the attention. The brutal assault of a hotel housekeeper that Manhattan District Attorney Artie McConnell described yesterday to a judge, who subsequently ordered that the IMF's managing director be held without bail at the Rikers Island jail complex? Not so much.
The IMF leader was (I think it's safe to use the past tense here because it's doubtful he'll re-emerge in politics, regardless of the outcome of this apparently damning case) a very likely French presidential candidate. In fact, he was widely seen as the Socialist Party's best hope for unseating French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Within hours of the story breaking, comments about a "Sarkozy setup" flooded the comments sections of online news reports, and soon emerged as their own articles.
As this story develops, it's all about Strauss-Kahn, instead of the woman (whose name is rightly protected) who accuses him of brutally attacking her. At her workplace. This woman, who was cleaning a $3,000-per-night hotel suite, is a human being. She deserves compassion as the global punditocracy conjectures about what's going happen to the IMF without that French "rockstar" at its helm.
My work focuses on the trafficking and exploitation of immigrant domestic workers, many of whom worked for Diplomats and employees of the World Bank and IMF. Of course, I'm reading the news coverage with interest. Over the past days, I have been watching how HER story is covered, in light of her occupation, ethnicity (reporters say that she's an African immigrant), and status as a crime victim. Usually, housekeepers are treated as silent, anonymous machines of the household, hotel, or office building, if they're noticed at all. But surely a vicious attack would shed light on the fact that this is a real person... right?
While I mostly work with household workers in private homes, the life of a hotel chambermaid is very similar. Being a housekeeper at a hotel (or anywhere else) doesn't exactly put you on equal footing with the wealthy and powerful when you are in "their" space. So when you're stuck in a bedroom (or private household) with them, what are your defenses?
Statistics about the frequency of sexual assault of hotel maids are difficult to find, but here's what I know about New York City's household workers, from a 2006 report by the Data Center and Domestic Workers United: "Thirty-three percent of workers experience verbal or physical abuse or have been made to feel uncomfortable by their employers. One-third of workers who face abuse identify race and immigration status as factors for their employers' actions." What we do know about the conditions of hotel housekeepers is that immigrants comprise the majority of that workforce, as do women of color, and that their workplace is dangerous on its own, let alone with the additional risk of sexual assault. Rushing to keep up with demand, hotel housekeepers have an injury rate 40 percent higher than workers in the overall service sector.
I have many other questions too. The two that come to mind immediately are:
1- Do Europeans and North Americans just assume that being subjected to sexual aggression is a given if you're a woman working as a maid in a wealthy man's home or hotel suite?
2- Why would anyone assume that a working-class woman would lie about a sexual assault to get money from a settlement?
I can't fathom why anyone would believe these things, but here we are in the comments section in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and ABC News where every fourth word is "setup" and where the maid's getting very little empathy. I don't think the people writing these comments or news stories are malicious. It's just a symptom of the way household workers are treated in the United States and around the world. They are servants, and therefore -- for hotel guests and the people who can afford to have them clean their homes -- barely human.
Strauss-Kahn's lawyer Benjamin Brafman said that he represents "good people who have gone astray... that doesn't mean their lives should be destroyed." The themes of many of the reports and commentaries I have read center around the feeling that it would be a tragedy for this politician's career, and his removal would put the global economy at risk.
Because this "just" involves a hotel housekeeper, there's not a lot of conjecture about the tragedy she'll face as she tries to put her own life back together. Even if the reason that reporters aren't covering her story with humanity is that they want to respect our legal system's promise of "innocent until proven guilty," they're missing the broader point: this storyline isn't uncommon. No one is talking about the countless other household and hotel workers who have endured sexual harassment and assault at the hands of wealthy (or even middle-class) men around the world.
Why? Perhaps because it's supposed to be a fact of life that poor women's bodies are collateral damage of war, prizes for global accomplishment, or simply a means to an end. Women who are household workers or "servants" are even more vulnerable to dehumanizing sexual assault than others because their relationships are inherently unequal to their employers. We don't have scientific studies of the relative risks, but we have hundreds of testimonies of household workers who have been trafficked, exploited, and assaulted, and our common sense that tells us there are many more out there.
Of course it isn't uncommon that famous/wealthy men who assault women usually dominate the news. What will Strauss-Kahn do next? Even when their conduct is deemed improper without being illegal, there's a lot of hand-wringing over how prominent men such as former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, and former Sen. John Edwards, will suffer for their indiscretions.
At a quarter to midnight, a group of people made their way to the balcony of the Stadhuys opposite the clock tower. They took turns to lead us in chanting those slogans. One of them read out the “10 Tuntutan Janji Demokrasi” which went like this:
Membersihkan senarai pengundi
Mereformaiskan undi pos
Menggunakan dakwat kekal
Minima 21 hari berkempen
Ases media yang bebas dan adil
Kukuhkan institusi awam
Hentikan rasuah
Hentikan politik kotor
Pihak SPR harus meletak jawatan
Menjemput pemantau dari luar negeri
When the clock struck midnight, shouts of “Merdeka” verberated throughout the whole area. After that, Shamsul Iskandar read out A. Samad Said’s poem “Janji Demokrasi”. A few more rounds of chanting, some greetings, then, we were asked to disperse peacefully.
Away we went, smiling happily and laughing. A good and productive outing, I thought.
While celebrating “Hari Merdeka”, I cannot help but think of our brothers and sisters in Sabah and Sarawak. About 15 years ago, I went to a neighbouring country for a holiday. I left thinking that they had a sinful government. How can I not but feel that way when I see boys as young as five or six years old jumping into the sea, performing a trick or two, just so we tourists would buy their wares for an equivalent of a ringgit or two. I remember relieving a boy of a bunch of bananas. They should be in school but here they were, risking their lives for just a ringgit or two. Everywhere I went, I saw their menfolk just hanging around their coffeeshops, smoking away with nothing better to do. (Cigarettes must be cheap there, I thought.) No school for the little ones and no jobs for what should be the breadwinners! And this was a country blessed with an abundance of natural resources. How come?
You know what was sadder? Some years later I went to Sarawak. I saw exactly the same situation there. It broke my heart to see how hard my brethren there had to slog in order to earn the same ringgit or two. Sarawak, the Land of the Hornbills, abundantly blessed, yet the majority live in poverty. How can this be? Only five per cent royalty from their oil? You got to be kidding me! Daylight robbery or what? They joined us on September 16, 1963 to be enslaved? Don’t think that was their intention at all! The best democracy in the world or aping colonial masters of old? Or worse? Come on, there’s more than enough for everyone. Why so greedy? I wonder how some people go to sleep at night? Really, this is more than sinful!
I believe our brethren in Sabah also suffer the same fate. Honestly, how could anyone in their right mind, enslave their own brethren? Even animals behave better!
“Merdeka” for whom? Definitely not for our brethren in Sabah and Sarawak. If we in the peninsula think we have it bad, they in east Malaysia have it a lot more worse! They toil their land day and night but do not get to taste the fruits of their labour. Is this justice? Is this equality? Do we ever see them as fellow Malaysians? Or do we think we are masters and they slaves? Come on, “Merdeka” for whom?
If the powers-that-be still refuse to grant Sabahans and Sarawakians their liberty and accord them the dignity they deserve, I don’t see why they should be with us and what’s there to celebrate, come the so-called “Malaysia Day”.
My friends in Sabah and Sarawak, please educate your people and tell them, each and every one of you deserve a lot, lot better. Arise and claim back your birthright. Enough of slavery. You didn’t ask for this. It was forced onto you. Be brave and arise. Life can be a lot, lot better. You choose.
My fellow Malaysians, till the day each and every one of us enjoy the same liberty and dignity, we are not one. Till the day we are accorded the same privileges, we will always view each other with suspicion. Let’s work towards that day. We can do this if we all think, truly as one. And this must include our brethren from Sabah and Sarawak. Best we stop this charade and call them Malaysians when they cannot even begin to live the Malaysian dream. For so long, it has been only a nightmare for them. Enough, please, enough.
Hopefully, with the change that will come soon enough, we can usher in a new dawn. One, where we are truly all Malaysians. Work on it. Work hard.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication a
Lim Lee Lan, or Elle to her friends, is 23 and newly employed as an account executive in an international advertising agency in the city.
She loves shopping (“H&M is opening soon!”) and is concerned that she is still single while her best friend is almost engaged to her boyfriend of one year.
And whether she knows it or not (“I hate politics... I don’t even read the newspapers”) Elle is being targeted by at least one political party.
Both Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat have been focusing on being youth-friendly in preparation for the 13th general election, but there is one subsection of this group that has been underserved: Young women between the ages of 21 and 31.
According to the 2010 national census, there were 2,667,343 women between the ages of 20 and 30 in Malaysia. While there are no new statistics available for 2012, it is safe to say this number will have gone up. Now, that is a lot of votes.
Purchasing power and safety were key issues for young women.
“All issues affect women, but political parties have to tune in to the specific elements that affect women more,” said Praba Ganesan, who is the social media strategist for PKR.
“My brief is to help the party interact and engage with women through social media.”
So what issues are young women like Elle concerned about? A straw poll done by The Malaysian Insider revealed that even the most apolitical young woman is concerned with the economy. Or to be more specific, the buying power of her ringgit.
“The ringgit is weaker than say... the Singapore dollar. Someone working as an account executive in Singapore can buy a designer bag like Marc Jacobs but I have to save for a Coach bag,” explained Elle’s best friend, Alina, 24, who also works in an advertising agency.
Then there is the issue of crime and personal safety. Many of these young women go out a lot. On weekends. After work. “I have begun to feel quite paranoid about safety... it feels like there is some kind of crime posted on Facebook or Twitter every other day,” said Elle.
And that is why Praba feels the messaging is important. “Issues like the economy, lowering the prices of cars and crime... these things affect women too. Political parties have to impress upon women that the wrong government leads to the wrong policies which affect their lives. But we have to appeal to them on their terms.”
He added that one key change PKR has adopted was to factor gender into all of their activities. “Even if it is an economic meeting, we ask ourselves if there are enough women both in the panel and audience.
“Having more women in our events will mean, firstly, we will consciously emphasise elements which will attract women, and secondly have more female favoured issues being raised at that specific event.
“If women don’t attend or participate, then it is our failure, not the failure of women to understand us.”
Abortion was still illegal in 1970. At the time, as both an underground abortion referral service and a stand-up satirist, I faced an undefined paradox. Irreverence was my only sacred cow, yet I wouldn't allow victims to become the target of my humor. There was one particular routine I did that called for a "rape-in" of legislators' wives in order to impregnate them so that they would then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortion.
But my feminist friends objected. I resisted at first, because it was such a well-intentioned joke. And then I reconsidered. Even in a joke, why should women be assaulted because men made the laws? Legislators' wives were the victims in that joke, but the legislators themselves were the oppressors, and their hypocrisy was really my target. But for me to stop doing that bit of comedy wasn't self-censorship. Rather, it was, I rationalized, a matter of conscious evolution. Now, in July 2012, more than four decades later, rape-joking triggered a widespread controversy when a woman who prefers to remain anonymous went to a comedy club, expecting to be entertained. She chose the Laugh Factory in Hollywood because Dane Cook was on the bill, but he was followed by Daniel Tosh, and she had never heard of him.
In an email to her Tumblr blogger friend, she accused Tosh of saying that "rape jokes are always funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape jokes are hilarious." She was so offended that she felt morally compelled to shout, "Actually, rape jokes are never funny!" Tosh paused and then seized the opportunity, responding, "Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?"
The audience laughed raucously. After all, isn't anyone who yells at a comedian practically asking to become an immediate target? But this woman was stunned and humiliated, and she left. In the lobby, she demanded to see the manager, who apologized profusely and gave her free tickets for another night -- admitting, however, that she understood if this woman never wanted to return.
In her email, she concluded that, "having to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophobic room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place."
She added, "Please reblog and spread the word." And indeed, it went viral.
Coincidentally, on the same night that Tosh, in his signature sarcastic approach to reality, provoked the woman, Sarah Silverman was performing at Foxwords Casino and shetouched upon the same taboo subject:
"We need more rape jokes. We really do. Needless to say, rape, the most heinous crime imaginable, seems it's a comic's dream, though. It's because it seems when you do rape jokes, that the material is so dangerous and edgy, and the truth is, it's like the safest area to talk about in comedy 'cause who's gonna complain about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don't even report rape. They're just traditionally not complainers."
Ironically, in The Aristocrats, a documentary entirely about a classic joke of the same name, Silverman complained that she was once raped by show-biz legend Joe Franklin. In the fall of 1981, I booked myself for a cross-country tour, from New York to Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
While I was in New York, a nun was raped. When I got to Chicago, the rapist was also there. He had given himself up to the police. On stage I explained the true reason why: "He heard that the Mafia, in a rush of Christian compassion, put a $25,000 contract out on his life." That part was true. "So now I'm asking the Mafia to use their clout to end the war in El Salvador since four nuns were raped and killed there." They must've heard my request. By the time I got to Los Angeles, the Herald-Examiner was reporting that the Mafia was "probably the largest source of arms for the rebels in El Salvador."
In the spring of 1982, there was a Radical Humor Festival at New York University. That weekend, the festival sponsored an evening of radical comedy. The next day, my performance was analyzed by an unofficial women's caucus. Robin Tyler ("I am not a lesbian comic -- I am a comic who is a lesbian") served as the spokesperson for their conclusions. What had caused a stir was my reference to the use of turkey basters by single mothers-to-be who were attempting to impregnate themselves by artificial insemination.
Tyler explained to me, "You have to understand, some women still have a hang-up about penetration."
Well, I must have been suffering from Delayed Punchline Syndrome, because it wasn't until I was on a plane, contemplating the notion that freedom of absurdity transcends gender difference, that I finally did respond, in absentia: "Yeah, but you have to understand, some men still feel threatened by turkey basters." Although Tosh is a consistently unapologetic performer for the sardonic material he exudes on his Comedy Central series -- which features a running theme of rape jokes, even including one about his sister -- for this occasion he decided to go the Twitter route: "All the out of context misquotes aside, I'd like to sincerely apologize." He also tweeted, "The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them."
According to Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory, Tosh asked the audience, "What you guys wanna talk about?" Someone called out "Rape," and a woman in the audience started screaming, "No, rape is painful, don't talk about it." Then, says Masada, "Daniel came in, and he said, 'Well, it sounds like she's been raped by five guys' -- something like that. I didn't hear properly. It was a comment -- it wasn't a joke at the expense of this girl." Masada claims that she sat through the rest of Tosh's performance, which received a standing ovation, before she complained to the manager.
Fellow comedians defended Tosh with their own tweets. Dane Cook: "If you journey through this life easily offended by other peoples words I think it's best for everyone if you just kill yourself." Doug Stanhope: "You're hilarious. If you ever apologize to a heckler again I will rape you." Louis C.K.: "your show makes me laugh every time I watch it. And you have pretty eyes" -- except that he wrote it after watching Tosh on TV, but before he learned about the Laugh Factory incident. Nevertheless, he was excoriated and accused of being a "rape apologist."
But C.K. himself is no stranger to sexual-assault jokes. Onstage, he has said that he's against rape -- "unless you have a reason, like you wanna fuck someone and they won't let you, in which case what other option do you have?"
Conversely, on the second episode of his series, Louie, on the FX channel, he reversed such roles. After leaving a bar with an especially aggressive woman, Laurie (played by Melissa Leo), he had inadvertently met earlier, she performs fellatio on him in her pickup truck, then insists that he in turn perform cunnilingus on her. And he refuses.
So, she attacks him physically with unabashed viciousness, mounts him, and he gives in to her demand. In other words, Laurie rapes Louie. No joke. To watch this scene was positively jaw-dropping. It served as a reminder of how often comedians -- and their jaded audiences -- find prison-rape jokes not only to be funny, but also, as in the case of Jerry Sandusky, an act of delayed justice resulting in laughter that morphs into applause.
Meanwhile, reacting to the Tosh tirade, Julie Burton, president of the Women's Media Center, stated:
If free speech permits a comedian to suggest a woman in his audience should be gang-raped, then it certainly permits us to object, and to ask what message this sends to survivors or to perpetuators. Tosh's comment was just one extreme example of pop culture's dismissive treatment of sexualized violence, which desensitizes audiences to enormous human suffering. Internet outcry is encouraging, but popular media needs to push back too.
And the original blogger posted another message:
"My friend and I wanted to thank everyone for there [sic] support and for getting this story out there. We just wanted everyone to know what Daniel Tosh had done and if you didn't agree then to stop following him. My friend is surprised to have gotten any form of an apology and doesn't wish to press any further charges against [him]." What? Press charges? Rape is a crime. Rape jokes aren't. They are the risk of free speech. The blog concluded, "She does plan on returning to comedy shows in the future, but to see comedians that she's seen before or to at least look up artists before going to their shows."
Wait 'til she finds out Dane Cook suggested that she kill herself. What's funny is always subjective but not incapable of alteration. Now, over forty years since I stopped presenting my concept about a rape-in of legislators' wives, I have changed my mind about that decision in the process of writing this post. I sent the first draft around to several friends, and I was particularly touched by a response from Emma Cofod, production manager at my publisher, Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press:
"Thank you for sharing this! I truly appreciate your thoughts here. I read about this woman's complaint last week, and the whole event turned my stomach. What Tosh did was personally threatening, which is not OK. But even though I fall neatly into the feminist camp, I think your original joke is hilarious -- within context, and coming from a comedian whose philosophy I identify with. Color me conflicted."
I think that kind of conflict is healthy. And then the other shoe of my epiphany dropped when I saw Louis C.K.'s appearance on The Daily Show. This is what he told Jon Stewart between interruptions:
If this [controversy about Tosh] is like a fight between comedians and bloggers -- hyperbole and garbage comes out of those two places, just uneducated, unfettered -- it's also a fight between comedians and feminists, because they're natural enemies, because, stereotypically speaking, feminists can't take a joke, and on the other side, comedians can't take criticism. Comedians are big pussies. So to one side you say, 'If you don't like a joke, stay out of the comedy clubs.' To the other side you say, 'If you don't like criticism, stop Googling yourself every ten seconds, because nobody's making you read it.' It's positive. To me, all dialogue is positive. I think you should listen.If somebody has the opposite feeling from me, I wanna hear it so I can add to mine. I don't wanna obliterate theirs with mine, that's how I feel. Now, a lot of people don't feel that way. For me, any joke about anything bad is great, that's how I feel. Any joke about rape, a Holocaust, the Mets -- aarrgghh, whatever -- any joke about something bad is a positive thing. But now I've read some blogs during this whole thing that made me enlightened at things I didn't know. This woman said how rape is something that polices women's lives, they have a narrow corridor, they can't go out late, they can't go to certain neighborhoods, they can't dress a certain way, because they might -- I never -- that's part of me now that wasn't before, and I can still enjoy the rape jokes.But this is also about men and women, because a lot of people are trading blogs with each other, couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes -- that's what I've been reading in blogs -- but they're both making a classic gender mistake, because the women are saying, 'Here's how I feel about this,' but they're also saying, 'My feelings should be everyone's primary concern.' Now the men are making this mistake, they're saying, 'Your feelings don't matter, your feelings are wrong and your feelings are stupid.' If you've ever lived with a woman, you can't step in shit worse than that, than to tell a woman that her feelings don't matter. So, to the men I say, 'Listen to what the women are saying about this.' To the women I say, "Now that we heard you, shut the fuck up for a minute, and let's all get back together and kill the Jews.' That's all I have to say about it.
The audience laughed and applauded, as they did fifty years ago when Lenny Bruce ended a riff on prejudice: "Randy, it won't matter any more even if you are colored and I'm Jewish, and even if Fritz is Japanese, and Wong is Greek, because then we're all gonna stick together -- and beat up the Polacks."
My notion of a rape-in of legislators' wives in order to impregnate them was no more to be taken literally than C.K.'s killing the Jews or Lenny's beating up the Polacks. Rape-in was a misunderstood metaphor; a pro-choice parable that, unfortunately, has become timely again.
 Some US conservatives are "trying to control" the bodies of women, Wolf says [Reuters] | |||||
| Naomi Wolf is a leading feminist and the best-selling author of number of books, including The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood. Wolf told Al Jazeera English her views on abortion changed when she became pregnant years ago. She considers herself “pro-choice, but with many caveats”. Zeina Awad spoke to the author in New York, while filming “The Abortion War,” next week’s Fault Lines episode. Naomi Wolf - When abortions [were] illegal, a lot of women’s fiction from the 1940s and 1950’s had scenes of the horrible back alley abortion, the botched abortion; It was a very terrible thing in women’s lives. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was protected in a landmark case, Roe v. Wade. Since then, there’s been a relentless effort by the pro-life lobby to fight that decision. There are a lot of states now in the United States, where abortions are legal on paper, but it’s really hard to get one because you have to travel for hours and hours. And if you’re young and poor, that’s especially difficult. There are some states in which there are so few abortion providers, because they have been systematically harassed, sometimes targeted violently, and I’m sorry to say killed in this country for providing abortions. Zeina Awad: Are you surprised at the length that it’s gone?
Also since the Bush administration there’s been a systematic assault on autonomy and freedom. The state has gotten into the business of controlling citizens, and the ultimate frontier is the control of the female body and the control of men through their most intimate choices. For instance, there was legislation introduced that would mandate a trans-vaginal probe that has no medical value [and would mean] putting an object in a woman’s vagina – if she wants to have an abortion. ZA: Is what we are seeing only about the sociology of America or is it also tied to a far-right fundamentalist movement that doesn’t leave much room for negotiation? NW: Well certainly part of the crackdown has to do with the extremism of Christian fundamentalism in this country. They are on a rampage and they are heavily funded. I see religious fundamentalists as very similar, they all want to control the sexual choices and the intimate decisions women make about their lives and their families. But I also want to problematise this a bit: Christian fundamentalists do see Western liberation and the sexual revolution as out of control, so it’s not just a bunch of crazy people. It’s some crazy people in a leadership position, and some frightened, worried, more mainstream people who have been seduced by the crazy, fanatical leadership into thinking this will solve the problem of chaotic social change. ZA: Why is abortion still an issue in the US, when in most other western countries it is seen mostly as a medical procedure? NW: I think it’s partly because of the nature of our abortion laws, which are not well thought through. In England, and I believe in France and all over northern Europe, you can quite easily get an abortion through your first trimester. And since most of these countries have government-funded healthcare, you don’t even have to scramble to pay for it. The difficulty is that, because of the way Roe is worded, you could actually have an abortion in America through the second trimester. So you’re aborting fetuses that are six or seven months along. And anyone who has been pregnant knows that it’s a baby. ZA: But you have a movement in this country that effectively wants to circumvent a woman’s access to contraception. Their position is that the state shouldn’t be subsidising contraceptives. So, is it really about Roe versus Wade, or is it about a fundamentalist streak in America that’s gaining more power? NW: I can’t deny that there is that, yes, there is a fundamentalist streak in America, it is a Puritanical streak. There’s always been a problem in America about pleasure. Americans are weird about sex. ZA: How have you seen anti-abortion movement evolve over the last few decades? NW: They’re more sophisticated and they’re using a language that’s more feminist. They’ve reached out to activists around the world that are fighting forced abortion, like the Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng, who was supported by right-wing pro-lifers in Congress because of his activism. They hype up the emotional trauma of the process. At the same time though, the pro-choice movement does not talk about personal responsibility. We don’t acknowledge that some women may feel a loss for the rest of their lives. We make no space for it. It’s just choice, choice, choice. It’s very legalistic and that doesn’t resonate with most women’s experiences.
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