Breaking my sunglasses and lying about it is not cool dude. Mommy is blind without them.

When I get home tonight with a rocking migraine due to sunlight exposure, I hope you feel shitty enough about it to fess up. Not cool.

This is a guest post by The Other Elizabeth (Elizabeth’s are generally the best people, in my humble opinion.)

Tiger Beatdown used a recent protest against sexism in France to muse on feminist ethics. Without communicating with the women involved, Tiger Beatdown constructed and knocked down a straw feminist, a hypothetical creature whose protest was a hollow neocolonialist exercise—and this based on a single slogan, NOUS SOMMES TOUS DES FEMMES DE CHAMBRE (We Are All Chambermaids.) Tiger interprets this as false equivalence leading to erasure, saying that the white protesters are sidestepping the colonialism inherent in Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s act of domination over a woman of color’s body.

Tiger’s point about colonialism, and the domination of colonialized women’s bodies, is true. Colonialism in France is as thorny a subject, as deep a trauma, as slavery in the United States, and will require the same multigenerational political and social process for its resolution. Like the US, France has seen wave after wave of immigration—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Sephardic Jewish, North and sub-Saharan Africans, and Chinese—and experiences xenophobic convulsions in response. And just as in the US, women in France are not a monolith. They have a wide range of experience and are divided by class and race conflicts. But Tiger speaks of the French feminist as a single type.

Feminists in France did exactly what the Toronto Slutwalkers did: respond to an anti-woman emergency. When Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested, the mask momentarily fell from the faces of many in the elite. Women listened horror-struck as top journalists, intellectuals and political figures shrugged off the crime of which DSK stands accused. Jack Lang, a prominent Socialist and minister of culture under Socialist president Mitterand, decried a “lynchage” (note to Tiger: this is what outrageous appropriation of an oppressive, colonialist phenomenon looks like) and said it’s not so serious, “il n’y a pas mort d’homme” (No man died.) Purported intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote as impassioned a defense of DSK as of his teen-raping friend Roman Polanski—and the mainstream media saw fit to pay attention to him. Jean-François Kahn, cofounder of the political magazine Marianne, went further (translation mine): “I’m practically certain there wasn’t a violent attempted rape. He just felt up the help, which isn’t good, but…” Felt up the help: the phrase he used was un troussage de domestique. That hit a nerve. No one was fooled. “Bonnes à tout faire”, women “good for anything,” were common in bourgeois households up through the 50s and 60s and sometimes her duties included enduring assault from the man of the house and his son. “Troussage de domestique = viol” (rape) tersely commented one reader of L’Express. The phrase appeared in news stories and stickers attached to lampposts alike. The outrage was so palpable he resigned from the magazine he founded and quit journalism altogether.

French women are coming forward to tell their stories. Clementine Autain, feminist and former Communist elected official, revealed on her blog that she had been raped. The newspaper Liberation ran a major cover story on sexism in politics, with testimonies across the spectrum, from the Greens to the right-wing UMP. A female UMP député made a point of not being in the National Assembly when the député seated next to her was present. She would ask him for documents and be answered, “Je te les donne si tu baises avec moi” ( “I’ll give them to you if you fuck me.”) Another official, Georges Tron, was just forced to resign after charges of rape and harassment. Rachida Dati, former justice minister, hopes the door won’t slam too quickly on this story, because there’s much more to tell. And these are powerful, privileged women. There’s a sense of before and after DSK here—that somehow shit has got to change.

It’s also come to light that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was an equal-opportunity rapist. Social position meant nothing to him if he sensed an opportunity to overpower a woman. A French journalist from a highly privileged background, Tristane Banone, recounted her assault by DSK—the ex-husband of her godmother–on television as far back as 2008. Her own mother, Anne Mansouret, a Socialist elected official, dissuaded her from pressing charges; they went to then leader of the Socialist party, François Hollande (now a leading candidate after DSK’s downfall). He listened sympathetically and did nothing. She had depression and professional problems as a result, and DSK’s arrest has re-traumatized her: she will not speak to the press or testify. The fact that Banone is not poor, an immigrant, or a woman of color does not make her assault any less life-changing than Diallo’s was.

Yet Diallo has exercised a power that the most well-off of DSK’s French victims could, or would, not—she pressed charges. The fact that this was even possible is due to the groundwork laid by American feminists a generation ago; New York City’s Special Victims Unit, which handled this case, was established in the 70s. This has not gone unnoticed here in France. I attended the rally that Tiger dismissed and spoke with several women. One told me American feminists have done good work (“elles ont fait du bon travail”).

Let us return to the anonymous sign-bearer, a pretty ordinary looking person in a crowd comprising militant lesbians, trans women, leftist parties and male allies, all present to speak out publicly against the sexism and in defense of the victim. When, in the few harried days of organizing, between work, dinner and laundry, was she supposed to resolve France’s colonial legacy? The promulgators of Françafrique, the dictator-friendly policy of France towards its former colonies, were all men with names like DeGaulle, Mitterand and Giscard D’Estaing, but it’s an anonymous woman bearing a sign who is singled out for scolding. Tiger’s attitude towards her isn’t dialogue-opening or coalition-building. It’s just more of, You’re a woman, you’re supposed to solve the world’s relationship problems, you didn’t do that, so you fail.

This isn’t zero-sum. Colonized women need freedom, rights and agency. Women need to be able to participate in society without attacks on their person. Degradation, violence and oppression based on sex is always wrong.

Do feminists relish the opportunity to become more self-aware and aware of others, increasing our effectiveness in the world? Yes. Is it easy? No, it’s hard. Do we respond to local problems with locally appropriate tactics? Yes. Should we worry about bloggers half a world away while we’re busy fighting a wildfire? Probably not.

A rape occurs in France every 15 minutes. We are all chambermaids, indeed.

I will close with another, media-unfriendly sign I saw at the same rally:

“In a Catholic bourgeois milieu
– Beaten by her father as a child
– Raped by a stranger at 16
– Attacked by an aroused voyeur at 19
– Subject to raciste and sexist ostracism by a boss at 45
I DID NOT BEND
I GOT MAD
I DON’T STRUGGLE WITH IT ANYMORE
BUT I AM NEITHER ASHAMED NOR AFRAID”

I said to the bearer “Vous êtes une femme de courage.”
She answered, “C’est mon coming-out.”

—————————–

“Ophelia”, le comité de soutien à Nafissatou Diallo. Text in French and English equally condemns the sexism, racism and Islamophobia revealed by the reaction to DSK’s arrest.

“La Françafrique: 50 années sous le sceau du secret” Documentary on French policy in Africa. The one female name on the DVD cover is Eva Joly, formerly and investigating judge who put the CEO of a major oil company behind bars and now a prominent Green.

Comité de soutien à Nafissatou Diallo – comité de soutien à Nafissatou Diallo
Site officiel de l’écrivain Claude Ribbe

When I first met Semi-Boyfriend (Turbomuffin to you all, but we’re going with Semi-Boyfriend now) I joked to Sylvie that “his voice is so sexy, he could read me the back of a cereal box and my panties would hit the floor.”

So today I get an MP3 in my email of Semi-Boyfriend reading me the back of a box of Kellogg’s Oat Bran.

Peeps, I don’t know that I’ve ever met a person who made me giggle and guffaw and straight up belly laugh quite so much.

There’s a breakout in e-coli poisoning in Germany that has killed 11 people.

The produce responsible for the outbreak is thought to have originated in Spain.

Spain is currently experiencing mass protests against government austerity measures.

My wild dots lead me to think that perhaps those austerity measures included cuts in food safety monitoring. Or perhaps overworked farm laborers are even more fearful of taking bathroom breaks when there are few jobs and no safety net. Or. Or. Or.

Maybe the dots aren’t so wild when businesses MUST cut every possible corner and a few dozen deaths are thought to be just the invisible hand of the market pointing a finger at what not to buy.

Today is the day we are supposed to think about the troops who have given up so much to protect us. It’s a bit like Mother’s Day, one day a year so we can push their existence to the back of our minds the rest of the year.

Or you can go the other way. You can angrily rail about the troops and war crimes. But I find people who blame low level soldiers for high level murder to be a bit classist. They are, after all, picking on mostly poor kids for taking the designedly ONLY job where they have a chance of promotion and education. I can’t fault them for that.

We ask these men and women to risk their lives and to follow orders above all else. It is therefore our job to make sure that they are only risking their lives for noble causes and only following orders that will not make us ashamed. We fail them on those lines all the time. We are now at war in 4 places. Because our soldiers cannot question their orders to go into these places and fight, we MUST. That is the job of all citizens, that is our responsibility. And we fail them. Over and over. We fail to give them opportunities to do something other than soldiering. We fail to keep them from being sent in to war for financial betterment of our elites rather than the safety of ourselves and/or our allies. We are their protectors as much or more so than they are ours. And we fail them every time we let shady politicians find new ways to expand warfare.

Barack Obama was supposed to be the anti-war candidate. Some of us knew he was full of shit from the very beginning, but we should hold him to his lies none the less. We need to come home from Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to stop bombing Libya and droning Pakistan. It’s been 10 years of war. 10 long years, with no end in sight. Our troops have sacrificed lives and limbs and families and too often sanity. We have sacrificed our tattered social services to pay for never-ending war. We are not safer. It is long past time for us to end this. Think about that this Memorial Day.

Found yesterday in Seattle’s Central District. Perhaps Satan has deleted all references to the rapture so that us evil sinners will continue on in our wicked ways? That’s my theory anyways.

you seemed like a grown up. I know you have a job, so someone thought you were responsible enough to pay you for work on a regular basis.

So can you please explain the 6 fucking hang up calls I got in the middle of the night from you? The last time I called someone and hung up I was 15 and I had a crush on them. Is that what you were doing? Sorry, you’re not my type. I don’t date children.

And by “those types” I mean the permanently-housed (for now) and furniture owning.

Yes my friends, I have a mattress and boxspring to put the retro 80’s peach duvet on. It’s been 6 months since I slept in a bed and not on a couch or air mattress.

Do you all remember the story about the homeless young woman who got an internship at Elle? She’s got a story that’s pretty universal as far as homeless folks go; had a job, lost a job, had a crappy family and friends in the same boat she was. Ends up living in a trailer in a Wal-Mart parking lot (since we don’t have a Wal-Mart in the city, trailer folks park under I-5 near Greenlake. Last time I was over there I saw 10 to 15 trailers parked on the side of the road.) And now she’s coming out with a book, “The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness”. Good for her, too bad the tiny advance is already spent.

But it’s the comments that show the various reactions we have to abject domestic poverty. There’s the “can’t be as bad off as she says, she has a laptop” and the suggestion to become an escort (I’ve gotten that suggestion in comments before too- thankfully I have a mighty ban hammer). Bootstraps! Spoiled Brat! You all know these lines.

But there’s also a lot of “damn government giving our money to banks instead of to the people”. Damn government indeed.

I have half a dozen semi-finished posts on Important!Shit! that I can’t seem to be assed to finish this week.

Let’s talk movies instead. Specifically how much I want to go see The Whistleblower. It’s like a custom-tailored RQ flick. It’s based on the true story of a Nebraska cop who went to work for Dyna-Corp as a sub-contractor to the UN and discovers a great big nasty human trafficking nightmare. It stars Rachel Weisz, and we all know I’d go watch that woman read shopping lists, and is directed by a woman, Larysa Kondraki. It passes the Bechdel test in the trailer, multiple times even. Oh and new Sherlock Benedict Cumberbatch is in it along with a bunch of other big fricken names.

So peeps, whatcha watching? Whatcha wanna be watching?