As long as they're bought and paid for...
Feminist Law Profs points to this truly disgusting excerpt from the Economist's obituary for Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda.
The Americans, fed up at last with his wiliness and his human-rights abuses, began to part company with him in the late 1970s. Paraguayans as a whole, however, were much slower to be disillusioned. It was true that he treated the country as his fief, to the point of picking out teenage girls for himself when he presented school diplomas; but he paid for the girls, set them up in houses, and gave their relatives money.
Get that? So long as you provide housing and pay for your teenage sex slaves, it's not such a big deal. Good to know.
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I didn't read it as saying it wasn't a big deal because he paid for the girls, I read it as saying that Paraguayans put up with it because he paid for the girls. The obit is pretty unfavorable (they were a lot nicer in the obit for his successor some years ago, who was primarily praised for getting rid of him).
>>>I read it as saying that Paraguayans put up with it because he paid for the girls.
Oh, that's how I read it, too. Doesn't make it any less upsetting.
Women as property - it's OK so long as their owners get paid fair market price? Says bad things about their values...
I agree with Ann here. The problem is in the wording of the Obit. And the entire sentence beginning "It is true...is odd and somehow out of place. The practice was monstrous, a throwback to the Middle Ages and "Droit de Seigneur," a practice in which the landowning gentry were allowed to claim the virginity of girls on their land. Also, and on another issue, Stroessner was a Nazi sympathizer. Not only did Stroessner shield Mengele and other Nazis but Paraguay observed Hitler's birthday as a holiday during his rule.
I read the sentence as lacking the unsaid. As in:
It was true that he treated the country as his fief, to the point of picking out teenage girls for himself when he presented school diplomas; but he paid for the girls, set them up in houses, and gave their relatives money...as opposed to the usual practice of taking girls against the wishes of their parents and ansuring that protesting families "disappeared."
Sort of a lesser-of-two-atrocities standard. It's really disgusting though.