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Debbie Nathan, super-smart journalist documenting issues of gender and international politics, notes an interesting discrepency between the print and Internet versions of a New York Times story about a collection of porn novels based on the notion that there was a secret sex slave block in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
the Times quotes Israeli holocaust researcher Na’ama Shik saying, K. Tzetnik’s tales of sex slavery are myth. “It was fiction. Block 24 didn’t exist,” she comments.
Actually, Shik says a little more in the version that appears online today at the Times web site. “There were no Jewish whores in Auschwitz,” she adds there (click to see the onine article).
Lots of interesting material to think about just in that short passage. For one thing, it certainly makes no sense to conflate sex slavery and whoring. Whoring is paid work. Slavery is not. Of course not all whoring is voluntary. Some is coerced. But the terms should not be used interchangeably. Second, what happens to our "paper of record" when its own print and 'net versions differ?
There's more of course, so click here to read ther rest of Nathan's post along with comments by Susie Bright, Judith Levine, and others.
While you're there browse through some of Debbie Nathan's other writing. Her work on immigration and the US/Mexico border is fantastic.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
"One thing I have in common with the late Andrea Dworkin is that whenever we would get off a plane in a new country, we would seek out a sample of the nation's pornography. Why? Because it's like stepping into the sticky pool of a community's greatest historical burden."
Click here to read the whole thing. It's well worth it.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
