"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Victims Are Not To Blame

EXTRACT: In reality, it is common for rapists to get away with their actions. Between half and four-fifths of sexual assaults are never reported to the authorities in the first place - maybe even as many as 95%, as suggested by various department of health reports. If so, a truly appalling statistic. And of those tiny minority of accusations that do come to light, only 6% result in a conviction on the full charge of rape. Conviction rates once formal charges are brought are, of course, higher, 59% in 2009, but most of these come from guilty pleas - meaning that far fewer are found guilty by a jury, underlining the extremely difficult problems posed by ‘her word against his’ trials.
Yet, for all that, the most ignorant and abominably backward attitudes remain stubbornly in place. So in France the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was frequently referred as a “ladies’ man” or the “great seducer” - which now seem to be euphemisms for sexual predator, if not a violently inclined rapist. We now have allegations that nine years ago Strauss-Kahn sexually assaulted a French journalist, Tristane Banon, like a “rutting chimpanzee”. Indeed, numerous stories are circulating that ‘alpha males’ prowl the IMF buildings for sex like something out of the “pirates of the Caribbean” - the women employees, from top to bottom, having to be constantly “on their guard” from sexual harassment and intimidation. Institutionalised sexism, IMF-style.
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