A Facebook site that trivializes rape and publishes comments promoting it is free expression, says a spokesperson, and the group will not be removed.
But breastfeeding photos, again according to Facebook, are obscene. In fact Facebook banned a popular site promoting breastfeeding, restoring it only after a considerable outcry.
Meanwhile Stephen Harper’s new rock’ em, sock’ em crime bill will punish marijuana-growing more severely than child molesting.
The message seems clear: in what feminists rightly decry as our “rape culture,” sexual assault is just not to be taken very seriously.
Anyone who thinks we’ve progressed very far in the last fifty years should take a closer look at the details of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. The acres of commentary are just as relevant as the legal machinations involved. A woman’s “previously chaste character” is still the determining factor in prosecution, and in the popular mind, even if the notion is no longer explicit.
It’s the old whore/madonna complex writ large, of course: still one of our more powerful cultural pathologies. But even madonnas, as Facebook has so eloquently demonstrated, are too shameful for the public gaze.
In other news, Switzerland and the Netherlands have joined France and Belgium in banning the burqa.
[H/t James Morton]