RALEIGH – I read The Independent Weekly in Durham fairly regularly. It’s not because I expect to see much with which I agree in the left-wing newspaper. I do, however, expect to read half-way serious arguments about issues and useful information about the local political and cultural scene. Never could I have expected the gross-out planted right on page three of the most recent issue (Read it…).
Under the heading “Old Wounds” was an opinion piece by one “Judith V.” on the war in Afghanistan. Having read a number of anti-war pieces since 9/11, and more than a few anti-war screeds, I braced myself for the usual pap. What I got was something else.
“The pains in my vagina have come back,” she begins the piece. “Shooting pains throb up the left side every few minutes and I cannot figure out why. Awake most of the night, finger on the painful place, I breathe tenderness into the hurt. Then I remember.”
What Judith V. remembers is being raped at the age of 12. Truly a horrendous experience, as I can only imagine, but to write about it in such graphic terms is a bit weird. Then things get weirder. It turns out that she is not writing about the problem of rape per se but is instead equating the American war in Afghanistan, as far as I can tell, with rape.
She states that the women of Afghanistan were terrorized by the Northern Alliance, raped and forced into marriages with military commanders, before the Taliban took power. She seems to be suggesting that Afghan women are now more at risk because America helped the Northern Alliance overthrow the Taliban, which is at best a counterintuitive premise and is at worst a pathetically ignorant one. Apparently she is unaware of, among other things, the extent to which Afghan women under the Taliban were forced to perform sexual services to feed their children because the Taliban kept them unemployed prisoners in their homes and killed off their husbands and sons.
The author then makes an explicit comparison between rape and waging war. “People understand that rape is not any kind of solution, ever,” she writes. “So how come everyone doesn’t feel the same way about war?”
Because, Judith V., with respect for your personal pain but not your weak argument, most of us understand that killing a rapist is morally distinct from – and preferable to – committing the crime of rape. Men (and some women) with guns are what stand between innocent victims of rape, murder, terrorism, and banditry and the thugs who want to perpetrate such acts.
The author of this piece should be embarrassed. But the Independent has even more reason to be, for running a column that not only made no coherent point but used gross and inappropriate imagery to do so.