Men and boys

Algiers streets at night are something between a fraternity row at an all-boys school and a crime scene. Girls and women stay home at night leaving the streets testosterone-soaked, loud, vaguely threatening. Boys in groups and rows lean against buildings, sit on curbs. They punch each other in good humor, smoke, laugh, talk into cell phones, spit, just hang out.


Gender-separation is simply not healthy I'm beginning to think.


The male reporters at our newspaper are inordinately obsessed with stories about prostitutes and pornography.

In the past few weeks there have been stories about country girls who enter the university only to succomb to rich men willing to pay for their young charms and about teen-agers crowding the city's internet cafes to watch porn sites underwritten by Israelis out to undermind Islam (Ok, I managed to get them to take out the part about the Israelis because they couldn't show me any proof that a. the sites are owned by Israelis or b. any proof that the pornographers' motive, regardless of nationality, was blasphemy rather than greed).


One of our reporters -- and this was part of the story he wrote -- went to prayer to gird himself, then visited a street in the city where residents have complained to police about a brothel. He was approached by a woman with dyed blonde hair in pants and a tank top who gave him directions to this brothel. A picture of that encounter ran in the newspaper along with the lurid story. The photographer had gotten other shots but they were so racy the photo editor, who is a woman, had to send them by email to the managing editor to look at. She could not handle them herself.


The woman in the picture came to the newspaper the day after the article, in a veil and accompanied by her veiled grandmother and neighbors. She wasn't a prostitute, she said. She was married and employed in a government office. She'd thought the photographer and reporter were just more men bothering her house instead of the brothel next door and so had come out, inappropriately dressed notwithstanding, and done nothing more than send them to the right place. Crying, cursing, screaming she demanded an apology from the newspaper for an article that had caused her big problems with her mother-in-law and husband.


Was she lying or not? Hard to say. But what wasn't hard to say is that the reporter/photographer assumed the woman was a prostitute on little more evidence than the fact that she wore a sleeveless shirt and had talked to male strangers.

The reporter told them he would run a statement saying they were unrelated to the activity described in his article. Only, amazingly, he didn't.

The women came back a second day.




I've said before it's hard not to scream at the disregard for women in our workplace. When they do a good job it is pnly what is expected and so goes unremarked upon. There is little thought to giving them more authority or supervisory concern.



I thought this was neglect until I remembered all those boys on the streets at night