Protesting Sexism
Body and Soul on Nicholas Kristof's NYT column about the protests in Ukraine:
Kristof: "The protest organizers have placed gorgeous young women in the vanguard of confrontations with troops, so the troops will be too dazzled to club them."
Body and Soul: "Kristof has always been one of those liberals trying to free the Democrats of all that peace, equality, and social justice nonsense it supposedly tied itself up in while believing in the McGovernment, but he finally seems to have found something from the Sixties that appeals to him: Chicks up front! For those too young to remember, when things got tense in anti-war marches back then, you'd hear the cry, "Chicks up front!" Women were expected to move to the front of the march, to put their bodies between the police and male marchers, because those leftist men, for all their supposed distrust of the police, assumed that the police and national guardsmen were gentlemen who wouldn't beat up or fire on women. They were wrong.
"For years, women had felt that their contributions to the civil rights and anti-war movements had been diminished, and that technique, that willingness to use women's bodies as a shield, was a wake-up call, a radicalizing moment. It helped make a generation of women on the left ask: Are you sure we're on the same side?"
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