CBS said it remained unclear whether the attackers were from the regime targeting a reporter, or whether it was simply a criminal mob.posted by jepler at 2:32 PM on May 8, 2011
Logan: We had two Egyptian drivers with us who were purely there to act as security and bodyguards. And then we had a security person, Ray, who's done security all over the world.posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:55 PM on May 8, 2011 [1 favorite]
What is the survey question exactly picking up with "harassment"? Is it what US law would characteise as sexual assault?Last time we had this discussion, I hunted down the survey, and the answer is no. The most-common form of harassment to which Egyptian men admitted was "ogling women's bodies:" about 50% admitted to that. The second most common form was "whistling or shouting comments:" about 25% admitted to that. So at least some of what they call sexual harassment would be characterized as sexual harassment, not sexual assault in the US.
By "calls" you mean one unenlightened commenter?At least two, actually: golfus and legion. And they had too many favorites to just be favoriting each other.
Lara was dragged along by the mob until they were stopped by a fence. At that spot, a group of Egyptian women were camped out.The women were in a group and they were wearing the chador so this was what probably kept them safe from being raped by the crowd.
Logan: And I almost fell into the lap of this woman on the ground who was head to toe in black, just her eyes, I remember just her eyes, I could see.
Pelley: Wearing a chador.
Logan: Yes. And she put her arms around me. And oh my God, I can't tell you what that moment was like for me. I wasn't safe yet, because the mob was still trying to get at me. But now it wasn't just about me anymore. It was about their women and that was what saved me, I think. The women kind of closed ranks around me. And I remember one or two, maybe three men standing with them and throwing, the women were throwing water in the crowd.
As much as I'm for equal rights, letting female journalists have access to the same stories as the boys, etc., the people at CBS had to KNOW that the level of danger in this assignment would be increased if they sent a (white, blond, pretty) woman into the heart of the fray, especially given dgaicun's data.Well, being a war correspondent is a very dangerous job.
I find myself wondering how much of this is the result of the insistence by US media producers that whatever they create be pushed around the world in pursuit of the almighty dollar.That's pretty ridiculous.
It's a football player's job to want to go into the game no matter how injured they are.First of all, WTF? It's not an athletes job to play injured. Secondly while injuries might happen in football Logan wasn't "injured" when she went into Egypt. You're basically arguing that being an attractive woman is like a disability for covering these kinds of things and they shouldn't be allowed to do it.
It's the coach's job to say, "no, you can't."
Fuck, even the ONLY channel we have regularly available in the US which is supposedly a window onto another culture, BBC America, has devolved into endless reruns of Top Gear and Gordon Ramsay shows, interspersed with supposedly "British" movies such as Superman II (selected because the actor playing Zod is from the UK). Bla bla bla something about german tv (what?)WTF does this have to do with anything? Complete derail. Rape happens everywhere in the world. The idea that somehow we should control the media in other countries to prevent rape in an extremely rare circumstance (rape of white women in a giant party with no police presence after the downfall of a government) is just bizarre. Beyond that, it's not even clear that white women in Egypt are more likely to be harassed then Egyptian women. Rather then "the media" it could be something as simple as thinking that any women with her hair uncovered is a "whore" just like western men might think about a woman who was scantily clad compared to his cultural expectations.
They were also in a huge group. One thing I noticed during the coverage of the protests, etc was that usually women in the crowd were in large groups. There wasn't much mingling between men and women. I think that the Egyptian women were more attuned to the cultural situation and grouped together for safety (I noticed this even before the Logan assault happened)In the 4 pages recounting the incident which I read, I don't recall any mention of the local women who worked to protect Lara from assault being raped. Maybe that point was left out. Or maybe those women weren't raped because they aren't white.The women were in a group and they were wearing the chador so this was what probably kept them safe from being raped by the crowd.
American media is to blame? Not the historic, ingrained cultural attitudes of Egyptian men? Gilligan's Island and Mad Men turns Egyptians into rapists? It's beyond mind-boggling.No no no. not the shows themselves, but rather the greedy corporate media companies who force these shows to be popular in Egypt, because obviously there's just so much money to be made in an impoverished country like Egypt with a $5.4k per capita GDP.
I would say that rape is universally a biologically consistent potential human male behavior, as evidenced in the fact that virtually every human culture has some customary means of addressing it.Every culture has a means for dealing with murder and theft (assuming they have any concept of property), too, and yet when people commit murder or theft, nobody ever brings up the biological imperative to kill or steal. Nobody reacted to Daniel Pearl's murder by asking whether Jews should be permitted to be foreign correspondents in Pakistan, either. People respond to crimes against women by arguing that women's opportunities should be limited for their own protection. People minimize crimes against women by pretending they're rooted in biology. This is about hatred, oppression, and marginalization of women, period. And I'm not just talking about the people who assaulted Lara Logan when I say that.
Suppose it was scientific fact that "male sexuality is naturally violent" -- what then? Would that mean that women should have to cover up their bodies lest they trigger this natural, biological instinct?No one is saying that.
would that mean that men should not be allowed to leave the house without a female chaperone, congregate in groups with other men, serve in the police forces, nor hold public office?I don't see anyone saying anything like that.
Hmm, maybe I am seeing something that isn't there. I associate (from past experience) "it's biological" with "men can't help themselves once triggered" with "therefore women shouldn't wear short skirts." Can someone explain why "male sexuality is inherently violent" entered the discussion then?I think the argument is that there is an intrinsic drive to do this kind of thing that's controlled by social rules, so you shouldn't claim that there is something uniquely awful about Egyptian culture that could cause this to happen where it wouldn't happen in the U.S. In fact, it does happen in the U.S. So the point is completely moot.
How many of them are field journalists that enter riots to report on location?I dunno, but a lot of the prominent "citizen journalists" reporting from Tahrir Square were women: people like Gigi Ibrahim and Israa Abdel Fattah.
My other question for the "biological drive" people here is: does this biological drive absolve individuals of responsibility? After all, it's how they were born, and it was society that failed to control it.The problem with that argument that the answer can't have any effect on whether or not there is a "biological drive". It's a matter of science, not morals. Whether you think it would be bad or good has no baring on whether or not it's true.
Delmoi, don't be disingenuous. You know full well that even were this "drive" to rape somehow be proven (and once again, I emphasize that this is NOT current theory), salvia is speaking of "responsibility" in a legal sense.I'm not really concerned about what salvia is or is not talking about. I'm only pointing out that morality has no impact on the truth or falseness of a fact. Obviously I think men who rape women should be put in jail.
Logan: Oh yeah, not trying to pull out my hair, holding big wads of it, literally trying to tear my scalp off my skull. And I thought, when I thought I am going to die here, my next thought was I can't believe I just let them kill me, that that was as much fight as I had. That I just gave in and I gave up on my children so easily, how could you do that?She most certainly is not talking about her choice of profession as "abandoning" her children!
Pelley: Why are you telling this story now?posted by bitteschoen at 7:24 AM on May 9, 2011 [3 favorites]
Logan: One thing that I am extremely proud of that I didn't intend is when my female colleagues stood up and said that I'd broken the silence on what all of us have experienced but never talk about.
Pelley: What did they mean by that?
Logan: That women never complain about incidents of sexual violence because you don't want someone to say, "Well women shouldn't be out there." But I think there are a lot of women who experience these kinds of things as journalists and they don't want it to stop their job because they do it for the same reasons as me - they are committed to what they do. They are not adrenaline junkies you know, they're not glory hounds, they do it because they believe in being journalists.
How many Klan rallies did she walk into to report on?Walter White attended Klan rallies. He could pass for white, which is what allowed him to do the reporting that he did, but it was incredibly dangerous, and if he'd been discovered it's very likely that he would have been killed. Generally, people think of that as heroic, not stupid, but maybe that's just because he got away with it.
But whichever camp they find themselves in, this unprecedented moment in Egypt's history has also been a momentous time for Egyptian women, who I saw in droves at both the anti- and pro-Mubarak protests.Then again, things did get ugly when there was a demonstration on Women's Day on March 8 in the square (just quoting from the first search results):
Over the last week, women joined men in the square and on the streets, calling for an end to the Mubarak regime. They brought their children—including young girls. Some even camped out in the cold. (...)
Egypt has a sexual harassment problem. In a 2008 study, 86 percent of women said they had been harassed on Egypt's streets—any woman walking through a crowd of men in Egypt braces to get groped. But in the square, crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, men apologized if they so much as bumped into you. After wandering around the protests for days, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't been groped, a constant annoyance when I'm faced with large crowds in Cairo. When I pointed this out to other women in the square, we all took a moment to reflect. "I hadn't even thought of that," one woman in Tahrir told me. "But it's because we're all so focused on one goal, we're a family here."
More than 200 men charged on the women – forcing some to the ground, dragging others out of the crowd, groping and sexually harassing them as police and military figures stood by and failed to act.Now, here's something to ponder: if we're wondering whether Logan's reporting at the antiregime protests is like "a black reporter covering a Klan rally", what does that question become in relation to Egyptian women themselves demonstrating on Women's Day and then getting attacked by men? Should they have stayed at home instead?
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posted by Baldons at 1:54 PM on May 8, 2011 [7 favorites]