Move Over, Le Monde

The latest scandal-exposing machine in France is an online site unafraid to tackle secret government:

Mediapart operates from a newsroom in the Bastille area of Paris. It has 46 full-time investigative journalists and 75,000 subscribers who pay 90 euros ($117) for a one-year subscription. Mediapart cleared $1.5 million in profit last year. The feisty startup is beating the more established newspapers like Le Figaro and Liberation, which are limping along with the help of government subsidies but just half the number of subscribers.

Two very Dish-like features:

Plenel says that to his surprise, people read even lengthy pieces, and they comment on them. He says there is a dialogue between Mediapart and its community of subscribers. That flies in the face of the advice he was given at the outset: that the information had to be short, flashy and free, or nobody would bother reading it.

“Internet is a chance for journalism, not the death, a chance,” he says. “Because you can organize better journalism — more sources, more documented, deeper journalism.” Plenel says the site is shooting for 100,000 subscribers, but in its quest to get there, it will never accept advertising.

We haven’t taken such an absolutist stand, but we prefer being without ads. And it looks as if we may be able to finance ourselves without them – if you keep up the subscriptions. [tinypass_offer text=”Subscribe!”]

Monogamy: Gay Men, Lesbians, And Straights, Ctd

A reader quotes me:

Does this mean gay male couples should publicly challenge the social norm of monogamy? I don’t believe so. What we can do – and what some straight couples do – is contain the details of our relationships to one another. It’s called discretion.

I know you’re a conservative, and you’re framing this as a conservative stance. But as a woman in an open marriage, I think you’d really be doing us girls a solid by going ahead and challenging the social norm of monogamy. Monogamy is part of a larger set of stories that we tell women about how their desire works that are not particularly true because we want to control them.

My experience closely follows the experiences and ideas laid out in some newer books that take on female desire, including What Women Want and Sex at Dawn. My actual desire has an almost inverse relationship to the stereotypes and norms and expectations that surround me. I am visually stimulated. I get attracted to lots of different kinds of things. I walk around feeling kind of sexy all day long on most days. I crave casual sex. And most importantly, I need novelty, or my libido tanks.

Like a number of the women profiled in What Women Want, I did not have a very honest relationship to my sexuality for a long time. I assumed that I need romance and companionship in order to want sex, that I should therefore want my husband – and that if I don’t, I must not like sex. I’ve figured out how to listen to what I actually want, rather than what society tells me I want. And my conservative counterargument is that my marriage is stronger and more meaningful because I cat around.

My real issue, though, is with discretion.

If this were just about me and my pleasure, then discretion would be appropriate. But we control women by diminishing their sexuality, and this hurts! It is actively disempowering to feel as separated from your own desire as most women in our culture feel. It is terribly diminishing to assume that you’re messed up/frigid/broken because you don’t want to have sex with someone you love anymore.

Sex is social – this is why you talk about it so much on your blog! As a gay man, you live in a world where everybody gets the privilege of being straightforward about desire. Women, on the other hand, are charged with this impossible task of simultaneously inhabiting two social sexual spheres: the one that affirms your desire, in which short skirts or red lipstick are expected and rewarded because they signify sex, and the one that denies your desire, in which you are inexplicably expected to be wearing that lipstick for the same person that you regularly fart in front of.

Challenging monogamy challenges this double standard. Women deserve this!

Ask Michael Hanna Anything (About Egypt)

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Michael Wahid Hanna will join us to answer your questions related to the ousting of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as what’s next for Egyptians. Hanna’s Twitter feed continues to be a must-read for anyone following the events in Egypt. Additionally, this spring in Democracy, he outlined the seven “pillars” that he believes all Arab democracies need to stand on:

As we watch these riveting, often exhilarating, and sometimes horrifying events [in the Middle East], the bottom-line questions in all our minds are simple. Can democracy take root in the Arab world? How long will it take? Ten years, 20…50? We all hope for a great transformation, in which Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and their neighbors embrace democracy and pluralism and cast off autocracy and extremism. But is there reason to be optimistic?

While we cannot make specific predictions, we can say broadly that the ultimate success of the Arab uprisings will depend heavily on the development of seven core areas. They are: economic growth and equality; education policy; security-sector reform; transitional justice; decentralization; the development of regional norms on democratization; and—in many ways, the linchpin for everything—the flourishing of a more pluralistic politics. These are the seven pillars of the Arab Future. They are the yardsticks by which we can measure progress in the region in the coming years.

From Hanna’s bio:

Michael Wahid Hanna is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. He works on issues of international security, international law, and U.S. foreign policy in the broader Middle East and South Asia. He recently served as a co-director of The Century Foundation’s International Task Force on Afghanistan, co-chaired by Thomas Pickering and Lakhdar Brahimi. He has published widely on U.S. foreign policy in newspapers and journals, including articles in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, theBoston Globe,  Christian Science Monitor, the New Republic, and World Policy Journal, among other publications, and is a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy. He appears regularly on NPR, BBC, and al-Jazeera.

Our ongoing coverage of the developments in Egypt can be found here. To submit a question for Hanna, simply enter it into the Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care.

Santo So Subito

I have a feeling that when historians look back at the recent death-spiral of the Catholic hierarchy, they will note the radicalism of Benedict in a couple of respects: his sudden resignation, upending centuries of tradition; and his continuation of the absurd sanctification policies of his predecessor and ally, John Paul II. John Paul II canonized more saints than all the Popes since 1588 put together. Those new, desperate developments – showing how theoconservatism is, like neoconservatism, anti-traditionalist and radical in its new modes of thought and action – are culminating in the canonization of Wojtila just eight years after his death.

I agree with Catholic historian Michael Walsh, who sees corruption in all this:

My doubts are about John Paul being beatified by his successor, Pope Benedict. It appears incestuous and akin to the habit of deifying one’s ancestors.

The whole point of the very long and arduous process of canonization (pre-Wojtila) was to guard against the emotional judgment of contemporaries, and the narrow interests of Vatican factions, in order to wait for the cool reason of historical perspective. And it is far too soon to tell what John Paul II’s ultimate legacy will be. He radically transformed the papacy into a traveling rockstar world-tour, a precedent that made his successor seem even smaller than he was. He reversed the intellectual openness of the Second Vatican Council. The Catholicism he revered was very Polish and very anti-modern, even though his own intellect was considerable. There’s no denying his charisma, his charm or the depth of his faith and power of his example. His role in guiding Europe away from Communism was integral to the miracle of the late 1980s. But he also presaged the collapse of the church in Europe and presided over the worst scandal in the church since the Reformation: the rape of thousands of innocent children and the cover-up that protected priests rather than kids.

Unlike Ratzinger in Munich, Wojtila didn’t have a direct, personal role in enabling the rape of children under his direct supervision. But his refusal to see what was in front of his nose, and, more specifically, his long and passionate support for one the the greatest monsters of the scandal, Marcial Maciel, seem to me to argue for caution and time, rather than impulsiveness and a rush. Maciel was a bigamist and a drug trafficker and a multiple child rapist. He even raped his own children. He ran a cult devised to satiate his sexual appetites and bring in money in massive amounts. John Paul II was the prime obstacle in stopping this man’s corruption and evil – far more protective than even Ratzinger. The sheer amount of money Maciel was able to shake down from the wealthy was undoubtedly salient here, as was his ability to bring countless new, Francoite priest-bots into the Church. I just don’t see how a Pope with this on his record can be made a saint almost instantly.

Or not without putting the hierarchy once again on the side of the powerful – at the expense of the souls of countless children. Does this not merit at least some measure of circumspection rather than a rush to instant judgment? And does this process not feel like a sudden move to protect his legacy before its full details come to light?

The Tories’ Generational Challenge

It’s not just the American right that’s having trouble reaching younger generations. The Euroskeptic Tories face an increasingly Europe-friendly generation. A young UK Independence Party member wrings his hands:

Those of us who want to leave the EU face a stark reality: we face a generational time bomb which we must start doing all we can to defuse.

YouGov’s most recent EU poll demonstrated once again how voters were split on the EU by age. Forty-five per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds want to stay in the EU, compared to just 32 per cent who want to leave; similarly, those between 25 and 39 favoured staying in, by 47 per cent to 27. Older generations feel differently: 43 per cent of those between 40 and 59 want out, against 38 per cent, and among the over-60s a massive 56 per cent want to leave, compared to just 33 per cent wanting to stay in.

Without the euro, with huge trade benefits, and with easy travel, I can see why younger Brits see no reason to embark on such a radical change. Britain has been in the EU since 1975. Why do Tories want to rip up a relationship that is now entrenched for almost half a century? Can’t they just do what they’ve always done: grumble loudly and muddle through?

Now We Should Add FA To LGBT?

Well at least it would give us a vowel. And FAG-BLT maintains both a gay and faintly nutritious aura. But Anna Mollow argues that homophobia is very similar to the prejudice experienced by obese people:

Nor is fatness, as conservatives often claim about homosexuality, a “lifestyle.” Body size is determined primarily by genetics, and while diets and exercise programs may produce short-term weight loss, they have a 95 percent failure rate over the long term. Yet Weight-Loss Summer Camp For Students In Shenyanglike queer people living with HIV or AIDS, fat people are stigmatized for a condition that is imagined to be their fault. They are hectored by conservatives such as Mike Huckabee, mocked by liberals like Jon Stewart (who, of course, would never dream of making lesbians or gay men the butt of his jokes), harangued about their weight by medical professionals, and subjected to a barrage of advertisements promising “cures” for their supposed disorder.

Does this sound familiar? Remember psychiatry’s attempts to cure homosexuality? Our culture’s hand-wringing over the “obesity epidemic,” its hawking of one breakthrough diet or miracle weight-loss product after another, and its moralistic shaming of those it deems “too fat” are as conducive to self-hatred as “gay conversion therapy.” But while the harmful conversion therapy that religious conservatives practice on lgbtq people has rightly been the target of political protest and legal intervention, the medically sanctioned use of weight conversion therapy (a.k.a. dieting) has provoked far less outrage on the Left.

Camille Dodero has drawn parallels between the push for gay rights and the fat-acceptance movement:

Fat Admirers (FA) have historically adopted queer nomenclature for their self-discovery stages and preferences.

Men who openly pursue, prefer, and date fat women are “out.” Men who like fat women but more or less hide them from friends and family are “closeted.” Men who say they like both skinny and supersize women ones are “bisizuals,” a controversial term that’s regarded as disingenuous in various online circles.

Keith Ferguson, a 24-year-old FA from Westchester (“We had two African-American kids in our schools and one fat girl”), wonders if he would have been treated better if he’d been gay. “The immediate reception from my friends was, ‘You’re a fetishistic freak, and I can’t believe I hang out with you.’ ” He confided in a friend, who then spilled it to their freshman class. “It’s almost like the same level of stigma that a homosexual would deal with. But in high school, there were two ‘out’ gay kids before I turned 16. People were like, ‘Ah-hahaha, you’re gay.’ They were maybe on the outskirts of the socially accepted circle, at the end of the day, but enough people liked them that it didn’t really matter. For me, I was actually ostracized.”

Previous Dish on obesity here, here, and here.

(Photo: Overweight students attend military training during a weight-loss summer camp on July 30, 2009 in Shenyang of Liaoning Province, China. China saw a growing number of diabetics amongst children and adolescents in its major cities, approximately 12 percent of whom were found to be obese, according to a report released in 2008 by Ministry of Health. By Yang Xinyue/ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images.)