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Tuesday, January 27, 2004
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An Addendum to “Fisking Rhonda Garelick” [see post below/scroll down a bit]:
An Example of the Right Kind of Wakeful Political Literacy The cover of this Sunday’s New York Times magazine seemed all wrong - a teasing, prurient shot up the dress of a pudgy young girl as she sat on a bed. The language of the featured article as I scanned it in a rapid, aversive way was all fevered sensationalism - something about how thousands of underage sex slaves are stashed away in bland suburban homes up and down this land of ours... Sex slaves in America! The language reminded me of the unfortunate Richard Berendzen incident about ten years ago. Once the popular, mediagenic president of American University in Washington DC, Berendzen was caught leaving rambling messages about his sex slave fantasies on the phone machines of arbitrarily chosen women. In an ass-saving effort, Berendzen published a quickie Mom Sexually Abused Me book, but it didn’t work. (Today he would have gone on David Letterman and laughed along with the audience as he read a top ten list which turned his most humiliating lusts into cheap jokes.) He fled the scene for awhile and has since resurfaced as a simple unadorned astronomy professor... But that’s another story. What I mean to get across about Sunday’s story in the NYT is that from the get-go it smelled to me like pure unadulterated shit (to quote the superannuated rock star in the film Love, Actually). Not that poor teenagers aren’t pressed into prostitution here and abroad - I know that they are. But that the lurid accounts and hypertrophic claims in the magazine were... well... off in some way... I didn’t pursue the matter - visually and stylistically, the article even at a cursory glance felt malsain: heavy-breathing, pushy, untrustworthy. So I didn’t read it. How nice then that Andrew Sullivan and two other news bloggers (see andrewsullivan.com), having felt the same way, decided to pursue the matter for me. All of them do a close reading of the piece and reveal a questionably sourced, anecdotal, overwritten piece of journalism which at the very least fails to reveal what it claims to reveal. I’ve studied and written about prostitution, and I think it’s a sadly ignored phenomenon here and abroad. But my emotional desire that it be brought out of the shadows does not extend to a willingness to certify any press treatment of it. Indeed sexed up accounts like the one in today’s paper undermine efforts to think seriously about it. Sullivan and the others who pursued this article were displaying wakeful political literacy. UPDATE January 30 04: A Boy Named... SUE The merde's hit the ventilateur on the NYT sex slaves story -- all sorts of observers are dissecting it and finding problems with its claims (see Jack Shafer's recent articles in Slate online). Among other things, it turns out that a primary informant has multiple personalities disorder... But anyway, the writer's certainly all pulled together - he's apparently gonna sue the shit out of at least one of his detractors... |