Not-So-Great Danes
From that excellent compendium of media gosip and all you wanted to know about the ad industry, Ad-World :
It’s election time again in Denmark, this time for the local major and city elections, and as usual the election posters scattered all over town have to be messed with. During the last government election an artist on N?rrebro painted almost every poster in his neighbourhood so that they became colourful portraits, works of street art, instead of the usual smiling politicians. This time someone decided to unveil a particular politicians past.
Louise Frevert, best known for her dumbass comments a few weeks ago where she suggested that all muslims in Denmark should be placed in Russian prisons, has a past as a belly dancer and “erotic model”. That’s right, she was a porn star in the seventies. Someone thought that all the voters should know this, and defaced almost every one of her posters in Copenhagen, replacing her posed politician portrait with her decidedly raunchier porn poses from the past. Louise was of course, not amused – but man on the street says it won’t change their opinion of her. She can’t “drop any further below the freezing point” as a poll in Politiken.dk revealed. Her blast from the past can be seen here not safe for work link, unless you work in a porn shop.
Yes… but what does the woman in the street think? And, no matter how reprehensible her racist political views are, what relevance does Frevert’s sexual history have to her policy positions now? If, for example, she’s suggesting a crackdown on porn, then she ‘d be a hypocrite and deserving of that particular type of attack. If it’s just common or garden racism, what relevance has her sexual history? Unless of course the porn was of the interrracial kind, in which case the previous also applies.
Or is this another example of a woman’s gender and sexual history being the weapon of choice against her, as though evidence of supposed sexual laxity trumps all other considerations? ‘She’s a slag, therefore she’s not entitled to an opinion’. That bothers me as a feminist.
Yesterday I was arguing that DOS attacks on rightwing hate sites could be a valid tactic, on the grounds that the right would not hesitate over some obscure moral scruple about cultural vandalism to use any means in its power to gain political advantage, (Viz the whole Swiftboat thing) and that the left needs to grow some spine. That’s how the right defeats the left effortlessly every time, by using our own ethics against us. So fuck her, she does not deserve my sisterly sympathy.