Watching the manhunt unfold on Twitter, I’m struck by the fact that I have nothing clever to say.
When I first heard that a policeman had been shot at MIT, there was no impulse to tie it to the marathon bombings. I thought these guys would be smarter, somehow, and that they would have left the city right now.
I keep coming back to that photo of Martin Richard, a little boy watching the marathon – one of the alleged bombers looming behind him.
These guys were kids themselves recently, is what I keep thinking. They most likely cried over scraped knees and took lunchboxes to school. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was born in 1993. He’s a 90s kid, for God’s sake.
I keep thinking that having a city on lockdown is normal and reasonable. No one is questioning that decision and I don’t question it myself. But background checks for weapons, though? Totally irrational and out-of-this-world.
As a P.S. to all of this – while everyone was watching Boston, a coffee shop bomb in Baghdad killed 27 people.
There’s nothing good to report. Days like this make me want to do nothing – just shut off the phone and sit on a park bench somewhere with Lev, and watch him chase pigeons around. It’s finally warm in Moscow, and he is wearing his new little keds.
This episode made a lot of people very uncomfortable, with good reason. I thought this was excellent television, because I fully believe that TV *should* make us uncomfortable. Obviously, I cringed as well.
What I took from it is a nice reminder that consent doesn’t necessarily equal great sex. The elephant in the room here is that sometimes, sex sucks. Some people are bad lovers. Others have the capacity to be good lovers, but, at one point or another, reveal themselves to be capable of seriously messed-up behavior.
Bad sex can be violating. It may not necessarily cross over into sexual assault in the legal sense, but it can be more than just unpleasant, it can be profoundly hurtful. It can leave emotional scars, physical scars, you name it.
I didn’t see a rape scene in the latest “Girls” episode, but I did see a woman clearly unhappy with how her new boyfriend was treating her. And I saw said boyfriend using her body to prove something to himself. It was very ugly, and it was very real. This stuff happens, even if people hardly ever talk about it. Who wants to admit they were treated like dirt by someone they had trusted?
The fact that Adam is an alcoholic who has just had a relapse is a crucial factor. He seems disgusted with himself, and it’s as if he is trying to make his girlfriend feel similar disgust. The scene starts with her making a few light-hearted, but somewhat critical comments about his apartment. He clearly seems insecure about having her over at his place. Insecure enough to punish her for it, in fact.
Dude, you have no idea.
For me, the key to this scene comes immediately after Adam is done. His girlfriend, Natalia (a “cool girl name,” obviously) tells him that she “really didn’t like that.” What does he do? He gets sad and angry. He’s concerned about whether or not she will leave him now. It’s all about him, you see. If he gave a crap about her in that moment, he would comfort her, or at least apologize. But he isn’t thinking about her. He was trying to work on his insecurities through her, and that has failed, and all that worries him is possible rejection.
That’s the other thing about bad sex – it happens, and you can’t take it back, but there are different ways of confronting it. If your lover complains to you afterwards – something that Natalia did immediately – you listen and discuss, understanding that they just did you a favor. If your lover is in distress, you comfort them, or give them space, should they need space. You absolutely do not get to make it all about you, jackass.
For me, that has always been just another dull fact of life to contend with, but lately, I’ve been thinking about how little is actually said on the subject. We tend to gloss over the amount of trust a woman puts into them every time she allows herself to be vulnerable with a man. And in many ways, we set women up to lose. Too vigilant? She’s obviously a “psycho” then. Get hurt? Well, clearly, the bitch had it coming – stupid enough as she was to trust the wrong person.
I hate to go all “Spiderman” on you guys, but great power? Great responsibility? Hello?
They messaged me asking for my picture, I suggested they take one off my Facebook page. They used a picture of Russian actress Natalya Antonova instead. I mean, I get it, I’m the tired mother-of-a-toddler here, but still! I’m allowed to do cardio again! I’m taking iron supplements! *sob*
Also, apparently I’m the deputy editor and the acting editor-in-chief of The Moscow News. At the same time. Makes so much sense.
But, as Humbert Humbert put it, society columns and the like should contain mistakes. And if Humbert Humbert said it, you know it must be true.
P.S. OK, granted, Natalya Antonova is a brunette in that picture, and I also recently became a brunette. It all makes sense. Somehow. A director also recently mistook me for her online and bitched me out for something random, and then apologized. So Duke Magazine is in good company here.
Anna Arutunyan, my illustrious colleague, did a story this week on the Dyatlov Pass incident. The “incident” is really whatever it was that killed nine hikers on the appropriately named Mountain of the Dead in the Urals, in 1959. A new book has come out in Russia, and a new movie by Renny Harlin is coming out soon – so it only seemed appropriate to dig into the past again.
Whereas before I was pretty certain that, in spite of all of the entertaining conspiracy theories out there, it came down to an avalanche and the bizarre behavior that’s commonly associated with hypothermia, now I’m not so sure.
Maybe I’ve lived in Russia for too long – but military testing gone awry seems to be the more likely theory to me now. They did abandon their tent in a hurry – but they were also cutting it from the inside at first, making efforts to peek out and take a look at something. If the government was testing rockets in the area, they may have been confused about what they were seeing.
After that, it’s possible that panic set in when they left the tent. As Anna’s story notes, investigators concluded that at least three of them were trying to make their way back to the tent when they died. Still, their injuries, some of them downright strange (like skull damage with no visible bruising) invite other possibilities.
The conspiracy theories often obscure the sad awfulness of this story. You’ve got a bunch of student hikers off on an adventure – and you end up with this, with journalists still trying to pore over the details of the deaths decades later. A lot of the case files still remain top secret, in the meantime. I mean, yeah, this is Russia, where your grandma’s knitting patterns might wind up being labeled top secret, but still. I wish they would make more stuff public – though probably not under this administration.
The Dyatlov Pass story is a good reminded that the landscape never belongs to us. Especially not in Russia – but really, it doesn’t belong to us anywhere. It can turn on us in a second. So much of our art, so much of what we produce, is ultimately about that.
Natalia A. 