This is a comment text. The author is responsible for the analysis and positioning in the text.
You have to love men very much, wrote Marguerite Duras in the book “Everyday Things”.
“A lot, a lot. Love her hard to love her. If you don’t, it won’t work, you can’t stand her.”
I spent an already busy month of February delving deeply into the Epstein and Pelicot cases, and never have Dura’s words felt more urgently relevant.
But the year started with another cultural debate as Amanda Romare’s new novel Judas was dissected as an unattractive woman’s project to reinvent her boyfriend based on her own neuroses: he has too many comfort pounds and breathes in a way she doesn’t like.
Most women let a similar whine end up on their friend’s wall of complaints. Romare’s alter ego in the novel forces her husband Ozempic to do this.
A man who describes in detail how he tries to get his girlfriend to lose weight is met with loud objections.
I imagine women here enjoy a little space for revenge after a centuries-old patriarchy falls apart.
When that happens. Much evidence suggests the opposite.
How can you understand that the most powerful more or less mangrant in the world stood by a convicted pedophile for several years?
The Debate About “Judas” I just had time to finish when the latest Epstein files were released in late January. Three weeks later we are still looking for solid ground:
How can you understand that the most powerful more or less mangrant in the world stood by a convicted pedophile for several years? Been to his parties, been served by his trafficking victims, and probably in some cases – I know that no one is doomed – The young girls’ buffet on site provides catering.
I’m thinking of Tiger Woods’ defense speech after the Elin Nordegren infidelity scandal came to light in 2009.
– I had worked hard all my life and felt that I had the right to enjoy all temptations. I realized that the rules didn’t apply to me.
Woods was never suspected of anything other than adultery, which is an important distinction. But here too the idea of earning lots of women is repeated – in the plural, without ever seeing them as individuals. As if the ultimate reward for long success stories in Hollywood, technology, politics, and diplomacy was sitting on a Caribbean island with a nameless seventeen-year-old girl on your lap.
For a few weeks Then I met Gisèle Pelicot, who was drugged and raped by her husband and at least seventy others for ten years.
I don’t think it’s worth trying to understand how a beloved family man, grandfather and grandfather, could commit such a bestial crime for so long.
The complicity of other perpetrators, on the other hand, says something about what a woman is worth in our time.
The Pelicot men do not belong to the upper echelons of society. Compared to Jeffrey Epstein’s circle, they are pathetic petty traders.
But the idea of a woman’s body as a kind of vessel – someone into whom one “jerks off”, as Ola Söderholm and Jonatan Unge aptly explain in the podcast “The Evolution of the Storm” – is repeated in both cases.
Is this love in the 21st century? Women take a misplaced responsibility for the person they have chosen and try to bring his appearance to the absurd, while men prefer to simply… relieves the pressure?
Nothing seems to have a lower status among men than identifying others as perpetrators
Maybe it’s important It’s also about men’s inability to assert themselves when other men cross the line with women.
Of the seventy people who passed the Pelicots’ test over ten years, not one called the police. At Jeffrey Epstein’s countless events, as far as is known, only one man alerted authorities without receiving any response.
Top dogs such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, director Woody Allen, left-wing icon Noam Chomsky and a long list of dignitaries from around the world closed their eyes tightly or downplayed the spectacle.
Nothing seems to have less importance between men than singling out others as perpetrators.
Do they not dare because they are afraid of committing an unforgivable crime against a male omertà? Or do they just think they’re worth losing themselves to little girls after all the sacrifices they’ve made on the path to world domination?
I honestly don’t know which option is more depressing.
Read more chronicles and other texts by Johanna Frändén
