Eve Ensler and the warlords behind the warlords
Eve Ensler is the producer of the Vagina Monologues and last May she went to the DRC where she was “witness to the profound human suffering and unprecedented sexual violence”. Keith Harmon Snow comments on Ensler’s campaign to end sexual violence against women in the DRC and exposes the hypocrisy behind this campaign and others who literally feed on the suffering of others, assigning guilt to victims whilst managing to remove their white selves, their corporate money and power from any responsibility in that suffering.
He in my opinion, rightfully, makes the connection between the sexual violence against women in the DRC and what he describes as the “travesty of violence against women” to be found in pages of Glamour Magazine and Vanity Fair both of which carried articles on Ensler’s campaign and interviews with Christine Schuler Deschryver, “described as a human rights activist”.
Why are there gala UNICEF “fundraising” benefits—the Annual Snowflake Ball—in New York hotels with white-tie U.S. Presidents as honorary ambassadors and state department officials from the National Security Council—and $10,000 tickets—held by and for officials who remain silent about genocide in Ethiopia or northern Uganda or the U.S.-backed coup d’etat that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 or Zaire (Congo) in 1996?
What we know to be true is that Eve Ensler was lucky to get this article in Glamour at all. The magazine is a travesty of violence against women—cosmetics, luxury aids, “health” and “beauty” products, liposuction, breast implants and sexually seductive advertising peddling the “perfect” female body and great American culture of sexual violence—and yet Glamour offers a platform for Ensler’s message about sexual brutality of unprecedented human proportions.
What Eve Ensler and Glamour have not addressed are the warlords behind the warlords, the corporations and white collar crime which is never—or selectively, now and then expeditiously, if ever—reported on the pages of Glamour, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, or the other promoters of popular propaganda brought to us by the Conde Naste corporate empire.
Harmon Snow goes on to expose Christine Schuler Deschryver whose family history in the DRC goes back beyond the days of Mobutu to independence and Patrice Lumumba, her “conservationist” husband, and other establishment and corporate players who remain unnamed in Vanity Fair and Glamour magazines.
Tags:
DRC
Eve Ensler
Vanity Fair
Glamour Magzine
I concur with with Keith Snow that the role of western corporations and goverments and their proxies in the continent’s conflicts has been overlooked not because of normal oversight but a continous effort by these individuals to hide, by whatever means.
This include obliging journeying activists with articles in magazines such the one in Glamour knowing that the furore if any will die down after a while.
That Eve Ensler is oblivious of these, being the person that she is, is truly sad.
To refer to cosmetics or cosmetic surgery as “violence” trivializes the very real violence faced by women in the DRC. The article makes some other points which are more valid (though really boils down to “this humanitarian campaign doesn’t look at all the contextual issues that I think are important, and so I refuse to commend it”), but this trite comparison really undermines it.
-James
James @ I dont think it trivialises violence. It is quite clear what the author is saying and yes the cosmetic industry and all the examples given are a form of violence against women to distort our bodies and hate our real selves unless covered in chemicals etc.
The person who wrote that article did something that many people try to do — reduce a complicated patriarchal epidemic to a class and race issue alone.
April @ I do not see this! On the contrary I think the author highlights the complexity of patriarchy, race,globalisation and how these link historically with the colonial project.