Ils ne regrettent rien
Good old Gallic wit, eh?
Jean-François Kahn asked what was the big deal about DSK’s alleged assault on a hotel maid – it’s just a “troussage domestique” – lifting the maid’s skirt, a tussle with the help, you know the kind of thing.
Jack Lang asked what was the big deal when after all nobody died.
Gilles Savary asked what was the big deal:
Mr Strauss-Kahn, he said, was a “libertine” who enjoyed the “pleasures of the flesh” but this was not tolerated in a “puritan America, impregnated with rigorous Protestantism”.
Actually not; there’s quite a lot in the way of the pleasures of the flesh around here; what’s frowned on is rape. Rape, you stupid git; not sex, rape.
I was actually more struck by a section in one of the articles you linked earlier.
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
They’re practically admitting that he’s guilty.
Well, upstate New York is pretty in the fall. I’m sure his friends will time their visits to coincide with leaf season for the next 15 – 20 years.
Recalling now our priapic president, WJC, who regularly received a pass when making passes on the job, courtesy of liberals and feminists of the convenient, occasional kind. Serial sexual predator-harasser meets with enabling silence from those who need his political clout. At least GWB, for all his conspicuous failings, didn’t see low-status working women as a buffet line, and for that I have to allow a begrudging one-up. The French have their mode of hypocrisy and we have ours, it seems.
At least the US and France are still grudgingly united by the great gorgeous gift of the Statue of Liberty, sticking her torch up high.
That should give some impetus, or illumination, or something, yes?
I guess we’re not that puritan if we got impregnated, eh? Really poor choice of wording, considering the charges. And an idiotic mind-set.
This really passes intelligibility! Not one word for the suffering of the maid, but all this angst over the “suffering” of poor old DSK. And they caught him at the airport trying to leave the country. It’s not as though he didn’t know that he had crossed over a very important line, and deserved to be punished. Of course he did. That’s why he ran. So having all this sympathy expressed for a sexual predator is really too much!
I can imagine him frowning and shrugging his shoulders while making his remark.
Droit du l’argent perhaps? After all, he could have been wearing an IMF T-shirt, if nothing else.
A good report in “Le Monde” about the terrible pronouncements by a number of well-known people and newspapers about this whole situation:
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/carnet/2011-05-23-rhetorique-sexiste
Best,
Pierre.
Yes. One can classify people a number of ways: on class, ethnic, linguistic and other lines. But sexual predation cuts across them all.
Thus the one I favour most is givers vs takers. Sexual predators are takers par excellence.
Gilles Savary and his and his compatriots (including the appropriately initialled JFK) will be delighted to learn that this sort of rape apologetic exists on this side of the pond, taking the form of “boys will be boys”.
After reading Ben Stein’s arguments (I won’t dignify him with a link), I am convinced Ian MacDougall is completely right in his comment above; nothing brings men of different backgrounds and politics together than the defence of their common privilege.
Epic empathy fail.
These loathsome things can imagine being in DSK’s place, he’s another wealthy man after all. But they don’t even seem to consider the working class woman might even have a point of view, let alone try to empathize with her.
Rape is rape; sex is sex. What’s the difference? Consent, which should never be assumed.
Say what you like about Anglo-Saxon hyposcrisy but no UK equivalent of these guys – the editor of the New Statesman, say, or a controversial philosopher (Eagleton perhaps would be the equivalent of B H Levy?) would come out with anything resemblng this kind of indifferent dismissal of the victim of sexual asault. Even Assange defenders wouldn’t play down an attack on an immigrant chambermaid. There are some allegeds in those sentences.
In other rape news, we have state Rep. Pete DeGraaf (R) of Kansas saying women should plan ahead for potentially being raped,
I haven’t been able to find any video of this to verify context, but I’m not to hopeful the video would help him.
And maybe he has a bit of a tired iron. But he still doesn’t have to carry the cabbage patch baby, ‘cos he’s already covered, innit. Where the rubber hits, and so on.
I vill not buy zis wrecord, it is skratched!
(Eagleton perhaps would be the equivalent of B H Levy?)
Except that Eagleton isn’t a philosopher. He fancies himself one, but that’s a reason not to let him. Maybe Ted Honderich. BHL is way more of a media don though, but there probably just is no Anglphone equivalent of that.
Anyway…I don’t know…People said disgusting things about Assange’s accusers, and then there’s what Ben Stein said about DSK’s, so I’m not so sure. (Mind you, I can still barely believe Stein said what he said.)
“Jack Lang asked what was the big deal when after all nobody died.”
He has a point there: how many people have died as a result of I.M.F. policies carried out by M. Strauss-Kahn?
There isn’t really an equivalent of BHL in the UK. The best known intellectuals would probably be Germaine Greer and Richard Dawkins – not philosophers as such. GG is quite capable of saying something barmy on any subject. I think though the alleged victim’s position and status would make her a bit less open to slagging off by the bien pensants than some Swedish women.
Anyway, I thought this was interesting.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/24/dominique-strauss-kahn-unions
One very important fact has been largely absent from the coverage of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, until latterly, leading candidate to be the next president of France. The hotel housekeeper whom he allegedly assaulted was represented by a union.
The reason that this is an important part of the story is that it is likely that Strauss-Kahn’s alleged victim might not have felt confident enough to pursue the issue with either her supervisors or law enforcement agencies, if she had not been protected by a union contract. The vast majority of hotel workers in the United States, like most workers in the private sector, do not enjoy this protection.
This matters because under the law in the United States, an employer can fire a worker at any time for almost any reason. It is illegal for an employer to fire a worker for reporting a sexual assault. If any worker can prove that this is the reason they were fired, they would get their job back and probably back pay. (The penalties tend to be trivial, so the back pay is, unfortunately, not a joke.)