The following comes from a longtime reader (and friend), in response to my post highlighting Megan Stack’s article on her experience as a woman in Saudi Arabia:
I can’t believe you, of all people, would post that article on Saudi Arabia. I don’t mean so much about the content (although I do partly mean that, in some places) as to the whole way it was written. Parts of it read like Ann Coultier or whatever the fuck her name is. At least she is out and out nasty. This wolf in sheep’s clothing reporting.
I love the oh so subtle (and then sometimes not so) perpetuation of the idea that the great white race once again knows best how to ponder the shortcomings of the the inferiors, and feels defeat at not being able to liberate them. I loved the journalistic integrity in the piece that set such an objective tone right off the bat with the heavy abaya dragging her along and the comparison of sludgy Arabic coffee and the pure, clean American coffee. Â I wonder if she, like Bush, also likes the brown people.
And if the kingdom made her slouch, she maybe didn’t have much of a backbone to begin with. But then, it wouldn’t make for thrilling reading, would? Man, those chiropractors in SA must be shoveling in the money.
(I don’t claim to know anything about living day in and day out in Saudi Arabia, where I know women’s rights are far different and much more restricted, almost non existent[.]Â But really, what does an article like this which still reads as inflammatory towards its very subjects, the woman, while trying to seem so above it all, hope to achieve?)
I must be missing something from this article from the view point of someone not from the Middle East, or my anger at the tone is too much and I am not seeing something. Because otherwise, I don’t get it. I hate this kind of journalistic reporting. You could have posted something much better addressing the same issues. Or, if you didn’t have it, you could have waited. Not this. Not this piece of crap that reduces hostile situations to “glares” (her) and “baring of teeth” (them, always with the animal references of course.)
Amit
I wish you weren’t such a white supremacist. and why doesn’t your blog live up to the journalist standards of the Associated Press and Reuters. get with it man
Karen
I can see taking it that way, because it’s definitely a biased and angry report, not a measured, neutral kind of journalism. But I don’t think the author was trying to seem above it all, or to write an authoritative overview of the wider situation. It struck me as an openly personal piece describing her own experience. It didn’t aim to be unbiased; the whole point, as I see it, was to describe how she felt when she was there, how far the experience threw her off-balance. The opening lines about the coffee mentioned above, I read differently: I saw them as establishing and acknowledging right off the bat that the author would be writing from a highly subjective point of view, as an American feeling alienated by a culture she couldn’t fit into.
Ms. Stack clearly came away with so much anger and frustration that she was unable to reach past her own perspective and understand what the Saudi women were telling her about theirs. But it seems to me that in writing this, she did manage to recognize that. She made the decision not to try describing what it might be like for anyone else, but just to be honest about how it affected her. I think that’s worth doing.
freewheel
Actually, there’s way too little criticism of Saudi Arabia by American journalists. For example, it might have been helpful if American journalists had emphasized back in ’01 and ’02 that al quaeda is a product of Saudi Arabia (as opposed to say, Iraq).
MB
I agree, Freewheel. Given the American media’s track record with conveying an accurate picture of the region, though, I wonder if it would do damage or good.