Tag Archives: blame

Jian Ghomeshi Part II: What Should We Do With Our Monsters?

It’s been a little over a week since the news about Ghomeshi went viral. Since the news first hit, nine women have come forward anonymously to the media and three have already reported their case to the police.

The increasing number of testimonies has pretty well solidified his guilt in the public eye, and everyone from the PR firm he hired to the musician he managed have withdrawn their support from him.

Since Ghomeshi was a familiar presence in most Canadian homes, many Canadians felt personally betrayed by his actions. When my husband, John, tried to identify his own interest in the case, he explained it like this,

“When you hear someone’s voice so often, you start to feel like you know who they are. So when you discover the truth about terrible things they have done, it’s shocking to realize that you never really knew them at all.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve have heard about the terrible things familiar faces (or in this case, voices) have done. The difference is, in the past, we have tried to forget the monsters hidden in the public men and women we admire. Continue reading

Stripping Jennifer Lawrence: Not What She Did, But Why

Okay, so Jennifer Lawrence. Kat and I actually discussed her in one of our first Culture War Correspondences ever, back when the actress [or actor, I haven’t decided how I feel about the term being gender neutral] and the positive attention she was garnering online was creating an equal if not greater amount of backlash. However these days people aren’t talking about how much she loves food or her general sense of coordination when walking up to receive an Oscar.

Kat’s most recent post delves into the perception of the leaked nude photos of Lawrence, falling firmly on the side [the same one I do] that the people who should really be blamed are the ones who invaded her and many others’ personal privacy. To once again quote the same two sentences from her Vanity Fair
interview that so many have been latching onto, and rightly so, “It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime.”

Here’s that cover again.

I could have easily left it at that, except that her interview with Vanity Fair went just a little bit further. Lawrence explained that she had no reason to make any apologies to anyone, which I continue to agree with, but justified
the action of taking the pictures in the first place she said:

“I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you.”

Continue reading