Maybe an excess of cultishness will just always disgruntle me. It's not like I've read every last online analysis of last week's episode of Mad Men—of course not, because I'd still be at it at age 90. But I got irked anyway when I couldn't turn up any heretics willing to opine that the big shock of Christina Hendricks's Joan consenting to be pimped out by her bosses at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce for the sake of landing the Jaguar account was kind of, how you say, jiveass.
I know you're shocked, shocked to learn that there are more allegations of sexual assault against our good pal Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a.k.a. DSK. The experts on sex crimes tell us that most men behave well—but very small number are serial offenders, assaulting regularly. The latest allegations, according to TheNew York Times, come from his involvement in that pimping ring in Lille. According to one of the women prostituted there, DSK wasn't content to just pay for sex; he also had to force her into "certain sexual acts without her consent.”
Finally, Sewer [sic] seems to have misunderstood the origins of sex-selective abortion: It begins not with lower- and middle-class families, who need to worry about girls being a financial drain, but rather with wealthy elites, for whom finances are a much lower-order concern. The behavior then filters down the socio-economic ladder to the middle and lower classes, which do have to worry about money. Hvistendahl makes this all quite clear in her reporting.
Courtney Martin writes that this International Women's Day, we should look at gender inequality in our own communities. Each day this week on TAPPED we will run a profile of an organization doing exactly that.
It seems that everywhere you look these days someone is speaking publicly about the urgent, international issue of sexual trafficking. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof goes undercover in foreign brothels. HBO creates whole miniseries out of the devastation and drama, replete with Eastern European thugs. Heck, even Ashton Kutcher twitters against it.
But how often do you hear about domestic sex trafficking? Rarely, if ever.
