}

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

What the?

An Indian runner who won a silver medal at the Asian Games was stripped of the medal when she failed a “gender test”. Apparently, the tests revealed the runner “appeared to have ‘abnormal chromosomes’ …the test revealed more Y chromosomes than allowed.”

Meanwhile, The AP reports that a rapist is attacking young men in the
Houston, Texas area. According to the report:

“Some victims may be reluctant to come forward because of their ages and ‘a pride thing’ that makes men more reluctant to acknowledge being the victim of a sex crime.”

Could that be because the media insists on reporting sex crimes and rape in particular as crimes of sex instead of violence? If so, could it also be, just possibly, that the media makes it harder for men acknowledge being a victim of this sort of crime?


And why is it that I suspect that what the cop is getting at isn’t “truth” when he says of the rapist, “I think he just sees one that he prefers…” The only "preference" involved in these crimes of violence is that predators seek easy targets—young men and women in particular. Maybe that’s what the cop meant to say and suggest.


What both these stories demonstrate is the continuing trouble the mainstream media has in reporting anything it doesn’t understand, especially if it deals with gender or sexuality. It would be nice if they at least tried to understand what they were writing about.

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