What is one rape worth?

A harsh question, but here's the problem.

According to Focus Taiwan, new laws meant to strengthen protections for foreign workers include provisions punishing labor agents and employers (such as the people who employ home aides to care for their elderly parents) who sexually assault, abuse or traffic foreign workers:

In addition, the official said, if a labor agent is found guilty of sexually abusing, sexually harassing or engaging in the trafficking of foreign workers, a fine of NT$300,000-NT$1.5 million will be handed down and the individual banned from working as a labor agent.

That's a start, though I'm not convinced the fine is high enough. The article doesn't make it clear, there are also laws that carry prison sentences already on the books. 

But then there's this: 

If employers or care recipients are found guilty of sexually abusing or engaging in the trafficking of foreign workers, they will be ineligible to employ such workers for 2-5 years, and repeat offenders will be ineligible for life.

Emphasis mine, because excuse me?

There are surely also sexual assault laws that would see any one of these employers go to prison if convicted which are not mentioned in this article, but how is it that someone convicted of sexually abusing or trafficking a foreign worker might be allowed to employ another one in the future?

How is it that one assault is not enough to see them not only pay their debt to society in terms of jail time, but also be banned for life from hiring foreign workers?

How about one rape? Is it somehow more acceptable to sexually abuse than to rape, or do they face the same weak penalty?

Remember, almost - but not all - of the foreign workers whom this law would specifically protect are women who work in homes as domestic helpers and home health aides. It is already a very personal situation, to live in someone's home as their employee. Do the people drafting these new protections really think that someone who has abused such a worker should be allowed to bring another into his (or her) home?

Is there really a calculus for this? One assault isn't enough, that was just one rape you guys, five whole years ago! We should totally trust this guy to hire another worker in the same situation because come on bro, statistics surely don't show that rapists are likely to be repeat offenders, right?

Oh, they actually are?

Oops. 

According to foreign labor regulations, raping one woman is not enough, but two...well, two rapes means something. Authorities apparently can't do anything to prevent that second woman from being raped, because to them it's not a real problem until it happens twice.

So rapists are like children who are put in the time-out chair for stealing cookies?

Seriously, though. We obviously can't repeatedly punish the same crime - you serve your sentence, and you get another chance. That's how it works - but that doesn't mean criminals should have a totally clean slate. I support giving ex-convicts work and allowing them to live more or less normally, but I would not give a convicted thief or embezzler a job in a bank or finance company. I would not give a rapist, child abuser, child pornographer or pedophile a job in a school. I would not give an arsonist a job at a gas station and I certainly would not let a murderer work in a gun store. I wouldn't even let a Taiwanese fishing boat operator convicted of forcing his foreign employees to work without pay - which does happen - hire them to work on a fishing boat again.

It follows that a convicted rapist, especially one who likely specifically raped a woman living in his home who was under his employ, should be barred from bringing another woman into his home, under his employ.

How is it that one rape is not enough to make that official?

It's not even as difficult as when to bar an ex-convict from a certain type of work: it's barring someone from employing someone else for in-home services. This shouldn't be difficult.

I have to ask. are the women these one-time-rapists allowed to hire going to be told of their new employer's history? Will they have any way of knowing they are being hired by someone who was once convicted of raping someone just like them, under the same circumstances? I doubt it.

If only this were surprising: this is the same country where an Indonesian domestic worker taped herself being raped after none of the authorities she spoke to took action - her brokerage firm even saying "do what you want" (as though it were consensual!), "just don't get pregnant." She later tried to commit suicide - she'd been raped so often that authorities could not determine how many times it was. That same story was picked up by Liberty Times who made it all about how this was such a loss of face for Taiwan, rather than about what the woman had suffered and bringing her rapist employer to justice. Reporting elsewhere on this incident was hardly better, with much of the focus of the story being on the woman's "emotional irritability" and "extreme instability", which apparently made it hard for police to get a full statement.

Of course she'd be extremely irritable and emotional after not only having been raped repeatedly, but also treated dismissively by the brokerage firm. How many rapes did it take for her to be able to make that video and finally, slowly, start to seek justice? How bad was it, that she tried to kill herself? And yet, the press makes it all about Taiwan, almost implying that her "emotional instability" was part of the problem when the case came to light.

What if she'd been raped once, and hadn't made that video, because nobody expects to be raped by their employer?

Would that have been enough, or would one rape not be worth the currency needed to get the attention of authorities.

Would her rapist be allowed to hire another Indonesian care worker after a few years, bringing them into the same situation, if he'd only raped her once?

How can anyone think such an attitude is acceptable?

As much as I tout Taiwan as being ahead of the curve when it comes to women's rights and women's equality in Asia, we still have a long way to go, including - perhaps especially - in the way society treats foreign female labor.

Guess who thinks the government is being "fascist"

The former president

Right, this guy. 

Remember him? （The one in the middle, before he started to look like a white decorative gourd).

“After the DPP gained control of both the executive and legislative branches of government, it has completely transformed into a fascist regime. As the party in power, it has been persecuting the opposition and making the public foot its bills,” Ma said.

lol*

No, like, seriously lol.

How much of a jag-off do you have to be to not see the hypocrisy of this statement?

This guy, apparently.

Yeah, this guy.

That's the one.

Uh-huh.

The one who pays tearful homages to a former dictator as though he were a great man. 

The guy who worked for actual literal no-exaggeration dictators, who now acts like they worked tirelessly in service to Taiwan, who cultivated an image of being squeaky clean while being corrupt the whole time, the one who used his tenure as president to ram all sorts of garbage through the legislature and then lose his temper like a big fat baby when the people stood up and said "enough". The one accused of working professionally to report on opponents of the Chiang dictatorship while a student at Harvard. The one who, despite knowing full well the horrors Taiwan has experienced at the hands of the KMT, talked about the "moral principles" of the party that have guided them "for the past 120 years". As though most of those years were not spent as a brutal dictatorship helmed by a murderous despot.

Sure, whatever, okay bro.

What I can't get over is that in 2012 the voters chose him for re-election over now-president Tsai. I think it might have been on account of his having a penis, but also the tendency of Taiwan to re-elect its leaders and choose the seemingly safest way forward in terms of who they put into the highest office had something to do with it.

Four years later they were all "oops sorry lol the nerdy lady was better after all" and elected her, and the guy everyone now hates for acting quite literally like a minor warlord in a feudal society is bitching about her being the problem?

And this ostensibly not-as-bad-a-guy agreed with him, for some fucking reason:

KMT Legislator and former legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) read a statement with other KMT lawmakers at his side.

“It is essential for a democracy to practice the separation of powers and democratic principles. The Legislative Yuan is the Republic of China’s national assembly, not the Executive Yuan’s lawmaking bureau,” he read.

Dude. DUDE. The former president, who is in the same party as you, literally violated that exact principle vis-a-vis you by trying to oust you as speaker for being insufficiently obedient to his demands.

And he didn't even succeed because he's just that impotent.

And you are saying that Tsai is not practicing separation of powers between the legislature and executive?

I mean...

...lol?

Like, how do you not lol at that?

Anyway it's interesting that now that they are the opposition, suddenly the party of (formerly) actual literal fascism who opened new boundaries when it came to subverting democracy is whining and crying like little babies about the party the people elected to replace them being "fascists" and has suddenly cultivated a deep love and reverence for democracy, all because they're not happy that the party currently in power is acting within the law in a way they happen not to like. The same party that stole left and right from the country and is now blubbering because they've been told they have to give it all back.

All I can say is that I don't know why I still loathe Ma to such an irrational degree, even now, but it might have something to do with his continued garbaging up of Taiwanese public discourse with this trash nonsense. He just can't take a hint that everybody sees through his melty waxen face mask to the cold dead eyes inside, and knows him now for the weasel he is. 

Shut up, Ma Ying-jiu. Go home, nobody likes you and nobody wants to hear your garbage.



*unconfirmed, but who even cares

Women are not your cultural ambassadors

Please "enjoy" this (mostly bullshit) article in the Japan Times.

What he says about his relationships to the women he has dated is striking, if not a bit annoying:

In my early relationships with Japanese girlfriends — I’d dated a Kyoto University student when I was 20 — I’d followed the standard pattern of being the curious Western male being introduced to the intricacies of the Japanese language and culture by a helpful girlfriend. But by my late 20s — when I was a graduate student in Japanese literature at Kobe University — I’d discovered that the dynamic of that type of relationship had started to fail.

Slowly it dawned on me that my language and cultural proficiency had finally come to the point where I no longer needed to be “tutored” by a girlfriend. Liberation!

By then I felt quite comfortable — indeed, slightly bored — in an exclusively Japanese world. I was spending all week in university libraries, taxing my brain, reading Japanese books. The last thing I wanted to do in my spare time, at the weekend, was indulge in more “Japanese.”

I can relate to this guy's desire to want to have his relationship to a culture be on his terms rather than deal with the ins-and-outs of expectations and obligations that come with dating someone from that culture, I couldn't help but feel squicked out by the whole article.

Yes, it is a common enough dynamic: man discovers exotic new world through woman he dates who giggles at his adorable cultural mishaps as she leads him to better knowledge of the secrets of this foreign place. I won't say it's essentially wrong - frankly, what goes on in a relationship I am not a part of is not my (or anyone else's) business. I'm not even sure it's always a bad thing. But there is something icky and 'conquering explorer'-y about it that rubs me the wrong way. 

Perhaps it would be different if a whole raft of gender expectations and stereotypes shaped by culture didn't run right up against a (mostly white male) power differential in terms of white privilege and, in some cases, socioeconomic development. It is impossible, however, to remove those from the equation.

Although this scenario can happen between any two cultures - I could just as easily imagine someone thinking a cute young girl they meet from, I dunno, Amsterdam will introduce them to European culture - I can only best describe what I see in Asia. However, I can imagine someone treating a non-Asian woman this way too, and I certainly don't want to make it sound as though I think all Asian woman/Western man pairings have this problem. The problem is the problem, not who chooses to date whom. 

 I have a lot of Taiwanese female friends and more than once I have heard, essentially, that they are whole human woman, not reducible to some foreigner's Cultural Attache.

What other reaction can one have to a man who says he "doesn't date ______ women" because he doesn't want the "cultural ambassador as girlfriend" role to play out again: why would he decide before he knows her not to date her, based on a role he doesn't want her to play that she likely didn't want anyway because she's a whole person? Why would he assume she would want that role in the first place?

It just bothers me that some men still seem to think women, from anywhere, exist primarily to highlight, change, influence, brighten or complicate the lives of men, rather than those women having their own lives. I am not qualified to comment on what happens when that attitude of treating women as an accessory or catalyst on your own journey, rather than as wholly realized human beings on their own journeys. They're trying to beautify their life paths by adding a partner to it, rather than looking for another person whose own life path is compatible with theirs. A tagalong, not a travel companion.

Again, this is not limited to one culture. I've had (mercifully brief) dating experiences where it felt as though the man was looking more for someone to liven up his journey, rather than respecting mine. Or as though I were there for his benefit, in service to his life plans: to entertain, teach, free or enlighten him, rather than being a full human being who has her own life going on. And I'm a boring white lady, not even a conventionally pretty one at that! And kind of acerbic, frankly. Why anyone would think they could shove that role on me is beyond me - if it happened to me, it could happen to anyone.

And while there are certainly women out there who do the same thing to the men they date, I've just observed that for the most part, it's men who treat women this way. I could comment on the way this attitude intersects with the whole "Western guy 'finding himself' in Asia" narrative (that is to say, "privileged guy using someone else's country, culture and society as a stage for their personal life drama in which they are the star and the 'foreigners' bit actors" narrative), to the point where this particular writer seems to first categorize all Japanese women as, I dunno, Manic Pixie Dream Asians.

And then, after casting them all in a role they never said they wanted, paints himself as the better guy for not wanting them to play it. Barf. He is even so kind as to acknowledge that there is more than one kind of Japanese woman, before categorizing all of his relationships in them as, well, kind of the same.

Are we supposed to applaud?

But I'll stop there, not only because the commentary coming from that wouldn't be particularly enlightening, and not only because I'm not really qualified to comment, but also because this is just one guy whose relationship to a foreign country and to the women in that country seems deeply problematic, and cannot be used as a treatise against all Western men who live and date in Asia, nor all cross-cultural relationships.

But this guy, creating in his head and then trashing "Manic Pixie Dream Asians"?

Fuck this guy.

Women, of any race or background, are not your cultural ambassadors. You invented that role for them, and it doesn't fit.

So stop it. 

Look at this postcard I sent to Taipei, Thailand from Vienna, Australia!

Why, I had a lovely vacation in Australia, thanks for asking!

It's really too bad that I didn't see any kangaroos in Australia, I mean I thought there would be a lot, as kangaroos' natural habitat is in the Alps, which separate Australia from New Zealand.

I guess I can't blame Australians for not knowing geography very well. I mean they are basically a huge island nation in the middle of Europe. But their capital city, Wienertown, is really lovely. I was surprised that it was so warm in August, what with it being in the southern hemisphere and all.

But seriously, my vacation in Greater Germany was great. The Prussians are so friendly!

There are so many famous Australian cities I didn't visit, such as Geneva and Europe. I thought it would be really cool to go to the outback or the Crocodile Dundee Theme Park (he's a famous Australian folk hero, everybody in Wienerville knows about him) but there wasn't time.

Did you know the people of Vienna, Australia are called "Vietnamese"?

Anyway next time I go to Australia, I will definitely be sure to send some postcards to Thailand so they'll be sent to Taiwan and therefore arrive faster - or maybe that only works in one direction. I'll also visit some famous cities such as Melbourne, Salzburg, Berlin and Kinshasa. I really love traditional Australian food, such as Sachertorte, Wienerschnitzel and emu jerky.

They have such a vibrant and mystical culture! So mysterious and inscrutable! It's really an exotic place to visit, it will change your life. Next time I want to really understand Australian culture on a deeper level by doing some castle tours and also kangaroo hunting. Bonjour! 

Maybe I can teach them how to say "你好", which is a traditional Thai greeting. I don't think anyone in Greater Wienerston knows how to speak Thailandish.