Power Relations

Another of the mighty has fallen.  Or so it seems.


Dominique Strauss-Kahn is the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and was mentioned as a candidate for the French Presidency in next year's elections.

Well, it looks like the latter is out of the question.  Even the French, who are sometimes charitably called "tolerant" when it comes to the sexual behavior of public figures, are saying they can't abide a leader who's done what he's accused of doing.  And it also looks like his IMF career is fini. Even if he's proven to be innocent, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to restore his reputation.


That's because he's been arrested for sexually assaulting a worker in the posh New York Sofitel.  Even if he's cleared of charges, the questions will linger because sexual allegations stick to even the most Puritanical figures.  And Strauss-Kahn has a reputation, even among the French and other Europeans, as a philanderer.


But he's not likely to end up destitute as a result of this.  With his wealth and power come connections that will help him to continue his life in more or less the style to which he's become accustomed.  Those, of course, are the very things that would allow him to behave as he is alleged to have behaved.


One thing that the feminists got right is that sexual relationships are about power.  Or, at least, they come to that.  That is the reason why wealthy and influential men so often prey on women who work menial jobs or are otherwise economically vulnerable. Why do you think an American President had an affair with a White House intern rather than a woman in a policymaking position?  (Of course, his wife was one of said policymaking women.)  And why have I heard so many stories from women who were raped by the owners or managers of restaurants where they worked as waitresses?


I'm thinking again of Dr. Mark Weinberg, the fugitive plastic surgeon who had an affair with a transsexual woman while he was on living on the lam, under an alias.  I can't help but to think that he wouldn't have felt the same lack of compunction about lying had she been a wealthy cis woman rather than a transsexual clerk in a grocery store.  Likewise, if Monsieur Strauss-Kahn indeed committed sexual assault, I somehow doubt he would have committed it against a guest rather than a worker at the hotel.  And Bill Clinton wouldn't have gone to a woman who was anything like his wife for oral sex.

First Love With A Fugitive

If you follow this, or any other, blog, you know that Blogger has been down for the better part of the last couple of days.  It's good to be back!


I've been very busy, as the semester is nearing its end.  It's that time of year when pieces of paper are like the brooms in Fantasia.  And I'm like the Sorcerer's Apprentice:  Every time I turn around, those papers multiply.


It's strange:  I've been sleep-deprived, yet people have been telling me I look "really good."  Hmm...Maybe the world really likes tired women!  I know that some men, anyway, are turned on by us!


Speaking of men and the women who turn them on:  When I got home tonight, I turned on the TV and caught part of Dateline.  Tonight's segment dealt with one Dr. Mark Weinberger, who defrauded patients (one of whom died as a result of his cavalier treatment) as well as Medicaid and, after dumping his wife, fled to the Italian Alpine town of Courmayeur.  


What's amazing is that he lived as conspicuously as he did, and was as careless about such things as his dealings with his rental agent, and went for as long as he did without getting caught.  And, while there, he fell in love (if someone like him is capable of love) with a clerk in a local store named Monica who, as it turns out, is transsexual.


He used a fake name and invented a past for himself--or, beyond a certain point, simply wouldn't talk about his past anymore.  Still, the clerk was charmed by her exotic American paramour--at least until she found out that he was on the lam.  In a rather nice twist of fate, she and his ex-wife have become Facebook pals.


What particularly intrigued me about that part of the story, though, was that he was Monica's first lover in her life as a woman.  In that sense, her story parallels mine, and that of some other transwomen I know.  To anyone else, those first loves in our new lives seem almost "too good to be true":  they're richer, more handsome, smarter or in some other way more than we imagined our first loves would be.  And we're all too ready to swallow their bait whole because, for many of us, that first new love validates who we are and what we want to be.  And that love, or whatever you want to call it, gives us a sense of security at a time in which, as happy as we are about finally living the lives we envisioned for ourselves, we are still very, very vulnerable.


So, as much as Dr. Weinberger deserves to be punished for the lives he ruined (or, in one case, ended altogether) with unnecessary or botched surgery, I have a particular ire over the way he, and people like him, manipulate other people through their vulnerabilities:  Something like that happened to me, too.