Thursday, May 23, 2013

Nation & World

Hey, we're all victims here

By John Leo
Posted 11/30/03
Page 2 of 2

-Catherine Zeta-Jones and husband Michael Douglas sued the British magazine Hello! for publishing unauthorized photos of their wedding that allegedly made her look fat and frumpy. Zeta-Jones said she was devastated by the photos. Defense lawyers noted that the couple might be concerned about money: They had sold exclusive rights to photograph the ceremony to another magazine for $1.6 million.

-In February, a giant representation of the most prominent feature of male anatomy appeared on the Harvard campus, built out of snow by members of the men's crew team. Amy Keel, class of '04, decided that the snow sculpture was an assertion of male dominance as well as an implied threat to women. So she and her roommate knocked it down. In sympathy with the knock-down, Women's Studies lecturer Diane Rosenfeld lamented that the sculpture follows on a long line of public phallic symbols, including the Washington Monument and missiles. Wendy Murphy, a lawyer and visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, deplored the administration's silence: "What if students had built a snow sculpture of a Nazi swastika or a Confederate flag?" This may have been Harvard's first suggestion that all men are born with the equivalent of a Nazi-Confederate symbol built right in.

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