I Don't Care Who You Are. Oh Wait, Yes I Do
Pop quiz! Who is the woman in this photograph?
A. Selling her cute native wares in a market somewhere.
B. Someone's grandma.
C. Probably poor.
D. A Nobel laureate.
Answer: she'sRigoberta Menchú, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. There was some controversy when it came out that some parts of her autobiography were (depending on your point of view) fake / composites of the Guatemalen Quiché experience, presented as having happened to her personally in order to better represent a broader truth than her own personal experience. (Interestingly, this sort of fictionalized element in the autobiography of a member of an oppressed group who knows he or she is writing not only as an individual but as a representative of his or her race isn't unique--here's another quite recent example of scholars trying to disentangle biography and history.)
The arguments over Menchú's autobiography are pretty significant, as the linked news story above hints:
Staff at Cancun's five-star Hotel Coral Beach appear to have assumed this was another street vendor or beggar, so without asking questions they ordered her to leave. Except the woman was Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel peace prizewinner, Unesco goodwill ambassador, Guatemalan presidential candidate and figurehead for indigenous rights.
Is she "just" a typical Indian bag lady? Or is she "someone who matters"? The important thing about the story is less that hotel staff didn't recognize Menchú; it's that once they found out who she was, their treatment of her changed.
The attempted eviction, an example of discrimination against indigenous people common in central and south America, backfired when other guests recognised Ms Menchú and interceded on her behalf.
In other words, once people who "matter" vouched for her--which they did because they knew she is "important"--everything was hunky dory.
Which of course, it isn't--hunky dory, I mean. It addressed the immediate problem, but not the larger issue that identifiable members of low-caste groups are automatically assumed not to belong in five-star hotels. In Guatemala it's Mayans; in South America more broadly it's Indians; in America it might be "Mexicans" (i.e., identifable Central or South American natives); everywhere it's people who look poor.
Menchú's pretty awesome. Not least because pretty much everything she does directly involves this problem of what "representative" means. Is Menchú the representative of her people because she's exceptional--or because she's not?
Bitch_PhD is fascinated by the problem of representation and thinks that it points straight at the problem of what happens when people assert their rights by demanding that they be treated as isolated individuals rather than members of a group.
Pole Vaulting, Public Exposure, Privacy, and Rape Defenses
Those of you who read and talked about Saturday's and Tuesday's posts might be interested in this absolutely appalling bit of background information: apparently the father of the pole vaulter whose photographs got tossed around (and over) across the internet is, himself, a criminal defense attorney--a noble calling--who, in the course of his duty, has offered up some pretty disgusting defenses of his clients.
defense attorney Al Stokke argued that Park wasnt responsible for making sticky all over the womans sweater (after a traffic stop). He insisted that she made the married patrolman make the messafter all, she was on her way home from work as a dancer at Captain Cream Cabaret.
She got what she wanted, said Stokke. Shes an overtly sexual person.
.... A jury . . . found Park not guilty.
And, in another case,
Defense lawyer Al Stokke, who replaced lead trial attorney Joseph G. Cavallo, questioned any link between the rape and the victim's claim of mental anguish. Stokke also mocked the girl's physical injuries, finally conceding she was unconscious but then trying to use that against her. "There's [no pain] that is felt," he said, "because she was unconscious."
Awful stories, but beautifully illustrative of a larger point: the culture that enables people to defend rape by arguing that unconscious women are there for the taking isn't at all cut off from the culture that thinks it's okay to make one's opinions about which women are hot into a public game of male bonding. Both rely on the idea that, in the end, women are things, not people. And if it turns out that a given woman hasn't fully internalized that message, and she has the huevos to complain about being treated like an object, way too many of us will just tell her to toughen up, that it's inescapable, what do you expect?
Same fucking thing. Women don't need to get used to being treated like shit. Guys need to get used to the idea that women are human beings.
Bitch_PhD wants to point out that there are men who get it--but that it was feminist women who did the digging and broke the story.
When the Internet Sucks
During my morning blog rounds today, I ran across this post on one of my favorite take-no-prisoners feminist blogs, about a young pole vaulter (a California Interscholastic Federation champ, with a 13'7" career best vault and five national records--damn!) who became an internet celebrity when a photo of her was posted (without permission from her or the photographer, by the way) on a sports blog along with the following comments:
Hubba hubba and other grunting sounds.
. . . as best as I can tell from my rudimentary Internet sleuthing, Allison turned 18 less than two months ago, and she's still a senior at Newport Harbor, which last time I checked -- and I check often -- is a high school. Writing these kinds of posts are precisely why I keep getting mysterious, threatening voicemails from someone that sounds like Chris Hansen. "I'll get you, Ufford!" "You disgust me, sicko!" "Seriously, put some pants on." Et cetera and so on.
Oh, and there's also this: Miss Stokke is one of the best young pole vaulters in the country. She set the U.S. record for a freshman girl at 12'8", and her present personal best is a couple inches off the best high school girls mark. So, that's why I'm honoring her with a post. Because she's an exceptional athlete. Yes.
. . . she takes pole vaulting so seriously that she's unable to detect sarcasm. Which is too bad, because missing sarcastic remarks ends our steamy, illicit romance before it's even begun. That, and the age difference. And the restraining order.
The sports blogger has since posted an apology--of sorts--and a request that his readers "treat (the pole vaulter*) with respect." But by his own admission, his tendency to virtually leer at women athletes is kinda gross.
The pole vaulter and her family certainly think so: realizing that her pics had gone around the world and that there were "unofficial fan sites" about how "hot" she is and the like, they decided not to just take it lying down, but to try to get the pics and comments off the internet. Obviously a futile goal, but they've had some success: the unofficial fan site is down, with an apology to the pole vaulter "for having contributed to the unwanted attention"--a classy move. And, with the help of the WaPo article linked above, her story's started a bit of internet self-examination about an obvious problem: the ability of online publicity to make public figures of private people, often in degrading, embarrassing, or even threatening ways.
According to the WaPo, the pole vaulter had been getting tons of phone calls and comments on her MySpace page; gets started at when she goes out; tries not to leave the house alone; and her dad tries to keep on top of "potential stalkers" on the internet. All of which are, alas, real problems, as Kathy Sierra, among others (including yours truly) can testify.
For a lot of people, the upshot of this kind of thing is "eh, what can you do: assholes exist." Which is true. But for people who get caught in the asshole vortex, that's not a particularly helpful response. As the pole vaulter says remarkably clearly,
Even if none of it is illegal, it just all feels really demeaning.
This is the thing. Promising athletes, tech and academic bloggers, and fat kids caught on video, really shouldn't have to have their names and images dragged through the mud. And we really shouldn't shrug when it happens, any more than we should shrug when people are targeted by stalkers in "real," non-internet life. There may be little one can do about it legally (although I really do think that cases like the pole vaulting thing should be covered somehow under internet stalking laws), but surely there are things we can do about it morally, as members of a human community.
The bottom line for civil society really isn't what you can get away with under the law. On the internet, in particular, there's a fiercely independent streak that tends to boil things down to arguments that one's freedom to say whatever the hell one wants is the most important moral value. But y'know, we might occasionally do a little cost/benefit analysis: is a sports blogger's right to talk about how hawt a pole vaulter is *really* more important than her right not to be harassed? Is the hilarity of passing around YouTube videos of fat little kids really worth what it must feel like to be a fat little kid with the entire internet pointing at you and laughing? Are we really incapable of understanding the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at them?
And hey, when we make mistakes and it turns out someone we think is in on the joke doesn't find it funny, the least we could do is offer a proper apology and, if necessary, pull the links.
Bitch_PhD has certainly been guilty of using the internet to say bitchy things she'd never say to someone's face, but this story has made her think that she should try to be better about this.