jj could not possible be more right.  There are places women just can’t go.  It’s got nothing to do with women; it has everything to do with the occupants of faraway places.

This reminds me of a conversation I heard on the radio quite a ways back.  I think it was the Hugh Hewitt show.  The topic was assigning women to submarine crews.  Hugh was pointing out why it was a really bad idea:  extremely close quarters, little to no privacy, and men are men.  One girl called in and said they had to let women serve on submarines in the name of justice and if men couldn’t handle it, they should just evolve.  That was her word:  men should just evolve.  I’d like to have this silly girl explain this evolution to the animals that raped Lara Logan.

We used to call her “True Grit” because of her resolution and the risks she was willing to take. (Even though she was far from being a Puritan, she also reminded us a lot of the Kim Darby character in the original version of “True Grit.”)

Still, Maggie was a girl. Her guy friends asked her once why she ran the risk of being raped or worse on one of her solo ventures. That’s when she revealed that she always wore two shirts and two pairs of pants, a corset and heavy-duty boots with an 8-inch knife sheathed in one whenever she took off solo. She acknowledged that she couldn’t entirely fend off danger, but she could make it hellaciously hard for somebody to assault her.

My point is that even a hardass like Maggie knew that if you takes your chances, you can’t be surprised if you sometimes lose the wager. Unless, of course, you’re a clueless dolt member of the Western media.

(This is not to pooh-pooh what Lara Logan went through. My Maggie did not have to make her way through a landscape populated by emasculated, women-hating boy-men.)

Amen, JJ, Amen.  I think the US needs to wake up to this fact: that women are NOT seen as equal to men in most of the world.  While it can be useful to emphasize that we think they are/should be, it can be a dangerous thing to assume that others will think like we do.

It can especially be dangerous for the women who think that they can go anywhere or do anything a man can just because the Western world allows them the same equality as men.

And you do not need to go outside the US to see this – several years ago women were assaulted in New York during the Puerto Rican Day parade. What the hell kind of a mother raises her sons to be that way?  I wish I knew the answer.

Danny:  “I am sure that that CBS reporter that just got raped had reasoned to herself that she could reason herself out of any situation because, hey, all people are reasonable…right? I hate to say it, but I suspect Daniel Pearl had the same problem.”

Yes, I could tell several stories of Americans who thought the same way and were surprised that things didn’t work out the way they expected.  Fortunately, none of my stories end in death or even violence where someone got seriously injured.  But I know several women who did get harassed because, as you say, they thought they could be reasonable and others would be reasonable too. When the reality is that “reasonablemness” should tell you to not be there in the first place.

Lastly, there have been recent reports that the Peace Corps has had a problem with covering up rapes of several of its volunteers over the years.  I think these rapes were more of the same mindset – women can go anywhere it would be safe to send a man.  And we can see the result of such ignorance.

Larua Logan

Sad day indeed.