A haunting photo, rape and ridicule remind us of the dangers of misperception
 |
|
||||||||||
Even now, more than a week later, I can't stop fretting about the girl in the photo. How she will explain it to her family - and to herself?
Because the picture will haunt her. People will wonder how she could stand there, smiling beatifically, her shirt pulled up to her neck like a prom corsage while strange hands pawed her bare, bead-strewn breasts, and a phalanx of cameras captured it for the ages.
Its impact on the ages, though, was felt in just 48 hours - the time it took to get the Mardi Gras photo in this newspaper.
I felt it in my stomach, in my heart. I am struck by its bitter irony: Where do I place this image with all the positive ones sprinkled through the news lately?
Friday's sports page featured the University of Washington women's basketball team, tied for first-place in the Pac-10.
Thursday was International Women's Day.
In Manila, new Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo faced reporters for the first time, confident and strong. (Of course, they had to ask if she was going to have a beauty mark removed, and if it was true she called her husband "Dreamboat.")
But the most significant clip on my desk is dated Feb. 22, reporting that a United Nations war-crime tribunal convicted three Bosnian Serbs of "crimes against humanity" for the rape, torture and enslavement of Muslim women during the Bosnian war.
Rape, an issue that dwells far too often in the gray areas of America, was clearly defined by The Hague: Even in the savagery that is war, it is a violation of human rights. Amen.
The ruling felt like a buoy in this sea of mixed messages. And I couldn't resolve it with that single picture of what should have been bare-breasted freedom - but looked like a huge stumble backward.
In an attempt to get my bearings, I called Brenda Hollis, who had a hand in the Serbs' convictions: She just left her position with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, where she consulted with the three prosecutors who won the case.
"I think they were in a climate where they were allowed to do what they wanted to do and they did it," Hollis said of the soldiers. "And that's true with most violent crimes."
I told Hollis about the recent violence here. I told her about Jennifer Blasingame, 21, one of several women beaten in Pioneer Square the other night.
"I am not a man," Blasingame told a television news station. "And a man shouldn't take a beating like that, either."
But that is some of the fallout that comes with stepping onto the level playing field, said Hollis, who is now living in Denver. Sometimes you end up on the sports page and sometimes you end up on the news page, a victim instead of a victor.
"I think that the new freedoms that women are demanding, and that society is giving to them, are moving us from a very traditional, well-defined role into a new role that is very mixed," Hollis said. "It's the chaos of the transition, and we don't know how to play the game as well as we used to."
Amid the troubling physical, racial and political battles that erupted in Pioneer Square on Fat Tuesday, there were also sexual battles.
Some women fought off assaults; others fought for a few moments of individual liberty.
And, at core, that is what the Hague ruling was all about.
Whether it's a heartless, ancient conflict or a street brawl, women are never to be the spoils.
"Rape, pillage and plunder are all crimes, and they are not part of the benefits of war that go to the victor," Hollis said. "You can't say that boys will be boys and it was wartime." It's sad to call that an advance, Hollis said, "but we now realize as an international society that free access to women is not what men get during war."
Translated into life during peacetime, in this country and our society, the Hague ruling should equal "a heightened awareness" that a woman's body is her own and that it isn't the right of a man to take that body, for any reason, unless it's freely given.
That said, it's up to women to make that choice, and to make sure we are understood.
"We need to make the point that if we want to have sex we have to make it clear," Hollis said. "And do the same for when we don't. It takes away some of the coyness and flirtatiousness of dating, but that's my take on it."
As for the girl in the photo, Hollis told me to get over it.
"Some women just like to show their breasts," she said.
Women will become presidents but keep their beauty marks and call their husbands "Dreamboat."
Women will survive earthquakes but fret they didn't have their makeup on.
Women will serve on an international war-crimes tribunal but decline to reveal their age.
What needs to change, Hollis said, is how that is all perceived.
"It's not the woman who lifts up her shirt, or the woman who would never do that," Hollis said. "It's the person standing back, watching, saying if this woman is that way, then all women are.
"Categorizing each other is at the core of so many of our conflicts," Hollis said.
"At the heart of it, we are all individuals."
Nicole Brodeur can be reached at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. She wants the bead girl to call.