It’s one thing for Abhijan Choudhury to pose this troubling contradiction because it raises the issue of racism & its nexus with violence against women: “Can’t help but wonder, why did it take a bunch of famous millionaire women from Hollywood, with every possible comfort & luxury in the world that life can offer, access to lawyers & money & evident social support, to spark the ‘me too’ movement?
“Not a girl gang raped in Delhi, or a Dalit girl raped by an upper caste man in a remote village in India, or some other woman raped by a religious leader, or an ISIS sex slave raped spanning months, if not years, or a woman raped by UN peacekeepers in an African war zone, or the Iraqi men & women sexually humiliated & raped by US soldiers, or not even a Rohingya woman raped by Myanmar army soldiers, since that is currently in the news, not even the women Trump assaulted. Were all these other women not famous or rich enough?”
It’s an entirely misogynist & contemptible thing to refer to the women victims of Weinstein as “whiny little girls prostituting themselves to live in luxury.” They are white & Black actresses, not prostitutes, who were victims of sexual harassment, assault, & rape. Coming forward with deeply painful & courageous testimony is not ‘whining’ but a political protest. Feminism at its best & most uncompromising has a broad, inclusive vision which demeans no women because of gender, ethnicity, or class.
The testimony of privileged women exposing the scope of sexual crimes among the elite can be used to highlight the monstrous sexual crimes against unprivileged, mostly black & brown women & children including women of the oppressed castes in India & elsewhere; women under military occupation or in war zones as in Palestine, Kashmir, Iraq, the Congo, Somalia, Syria, & elsewhere; women subjected to genocide as the Rohingya & Mayan women; women subjected to forced sterilization all over the world.