My Weekend Crush

This isn’t so much just a crush, since merely calling it a crush sounds silly or superficial, but an expression of deep admiration. By now, you have probably heard about CBS News correspondent Lara Logan and the terrible sexual assault she suffered while covering the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt this February. The terse yet horrifying statement CBS released at the time read that she had “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating.” The word “sustained” chills me still. After the news broke, the same tired cycle of victim blaming began again. Women shouldn’t cover wars. Women are asking for negative attention in certain cultures. Women who are beautiful should be more careful. It’s a little-known fact that many news organizations automatically turn off commenting on stories about sexual assault and rape because the things people post are so offensive it’s beyond the pale of decency. For some reason, we haven’t yet evolved past this stigmatization of the victim. We humans can be so inhuman sometimes.

But that’s where my respect for Lara Logan comes in. I’ve written about her before, back in 2008 when her sex life inexplicably became the headline instead of her professional abilities. Now the veteran war correspondent is going public about her sexual assault, sometimes she does not have to do. The identities of sexual assault victims are not routinely publicized in media accounts. This is to protect survivors from further victimization. But in other ways, it stigmatizes them again. As if it’s something so shameful to must be carried around in secret. I’m not saying, necessarily, that this policy should be changed. But I commend women who speak up publically about what has happened to them. Rape, as we know, has nothing to do with sex. It’s about power, subjugation, dehumanization. It’s been a weapon used in war for centuries, but not one you’ll hear read bout in the history books. And it is something that female journalists have encountered again and again when working in combat zones. You may not hear about it much, but it happens and the risk is very real.

And that often unspoken reality is one of the reasons Logan said she wanted to come forward. She said she wanted to break the silence for the “millions of voiceless women who are subjected to attacks like this and worse.” She has given an interview to The New York Times and will also appear on “60 Minutes” this Sunday. You can read her account of her ordeal yourself, but it involved by her estimation a mob of 200 to 300 men. She said, “What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence.” And that’s an important thing to note. Because by showing the lack of humanity involved in this heinous act, we hopefully wake up our own universal humanity. She has said these two interviews will be the only one she gives on the topic, because she does not want it to define her. And that’s understandable, too. But that she is speaking out at all is commendable. It’s easy to call her decision brave, which it is, but what it really is is strong. Women are strong, they can survive this and much worse, but they should never have to. Happy weekend, all.

Girl reporter this

If you watch a lot of network news, you probably already know Lara Logan. The 37-year-old South African native is an Emmy, Overseas Press Club and Edward R. Murrow award-winning journalist. She was recently named Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent at CBS. She has reported for the “CBS Evening News,” “60 Minutes” and “The Early Show.” She has been embedded in the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war correspondent almost non-stop since 2001. She is smart, tough, funny and a vocal critic of the press coverage of the war. She is also beautiful.

That last bit tends to get in the way with some folks. Like, say, The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. His column yesterday wasn’t about her new promotion. It wasn’t about her perspective on the war. It wasn’t about her many accomplishments. No, instead it was about her sex life. You see, while stationed in Iraq for the last four years, Lara had the audacity to have a personal life. And now, she is unexpectedly pregnant. Her partner and father of her child is a married, but separated, American contractor she met while in Iraq. Alert the press! Quelle scandal! Where are those Scarlet Letters when you need them!

The tabloids latched onto this “story” first. But Kurtz’s column reads more like the National Enquirer than the paper of Woodward and Bernstein. Before he gets to anything more than her cursory job title, I know the names of and circumstances surrounding her last three relationships. First there was her husband, though they had long-ago separated. Then she had an “intense relationship” with another journalist in Baghdad that ended in November. And then her new partner, a federal contractor she had been friends with before.

Kurtz makes sure to assure us that they “plan to get married eventually” and then, only then, does he bother to list any of her actual credentials. His column dissolves further into the kind of tawdry he said/she said ugly divorce trash normally relegated to the pages of supermarket rags. We even get a quote from her partner’s estranged wife who called Lara’s promotion “a slap in the face to everyone who believes in marriage.”

The thing is, would they ever run a story like this on a male correspondent’s personal life? Would the specter of “homewrecker” come up with a male reporter? Would an “unplanned” pregnancy be an issue for a male journalist? Would any of this even be on The Washington Post’s radar if Lara wasn’t beautiful?

I’ve never read any mainstream press coverage of the fact that Keith Olbermann has a 24-year-old live-in girlfriend. He is 49, by the way, which means the age difference between them is older than she is. No mainstream media has had the nerve to poke through Anderson Cooper’s closet to see exactly what he has hiding in there. (My guess, chaps and a harness – who’s your daddy, Coop?) And the sundry details of Bill O’Reilly and his loofah fetish are, well – OK, actually I’m glad those never got more widely publicized. Shudder.

What makes Lara’s story different? Because she is a woman? Because she is unwed and pregnant? Because she is beautiful? What fucking century is this, again?

The only good news out of this is that Lara, clearly, has bigger and more important things on her mind than the salacious selling of her private life. Her appearance last month on The Daily Show showed that she is the kind of woman who has, what my grandma used to call, “a good head on her shoulders.” Sure, my grandma might not like all the cussing, but I fucking love it. I think I might also love her, just a little. OK, a lot.

Seriously, how fantastic is she? So fantastic I’m going to have to start watching CBS News again. No wonder the good ’ol boys media club is up in arms about her. She is smarter than them. She is stronger than them. And she is a hell of a lot sexier than them.