Gray Lady's "Pussy" Hypocrisy

These days reading newspaper coverage of Russia, particularly of Russian President Vladimir Putin, one could easily think that somehow the Cold War, minus communism and the Red Army, has returned.

The two remaining members, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, of the Punk performance group Pussy Riot were released yesterday after the Duma approved an amnesty bill. This provided another golden opportunity for the Western media to congratulate itself on its superior values: its purported championing of homosexuality and iconoclastic forms of artistic expression in opposition to the atavistic, traditionalist, authoritarian Putin.

This is of course a lie. Elites in the West could give a rat's ass about Pussy Riot's right to express themselves. If the Russian Punk collective had been in the United States during Occupy performing at any of the encampments spread throughout the country they would have been the subject of surveillance and security sweeps like everyone else. But as exemplars of Putin's gulag they are indispensable.

No better example of the West's rank hypocrisy can be found than Ben Ratliff's review of a Hardcore Punk show at NYU earlier this month. The Gray Lady cannot even bring herself to print the word "pussy" when it comes to describing the set performed by up and coming band Perfect Pussy from Syracuse:

The Internet has also been central to the quick rise of that band with the unprintable name, led by the singer Meredith Graves, and not just because of what that name, a good gender-studies provocation, turns up online. In less than a year — and with the release of only a four-song cassette, “I Have Lost All Desire for Feeling” — it has become identified as the next crucial punk band to know about, a distinction that Ceremony and White Lung have already passed through.

It is permissible to plaster "Pussy Riot" all over the frontpage of the paper of record, but it is not permissible to print "Perfect Pussy" in a small Saturday Arts section review of a college campus Hardcore show. It is so bizarre it is laughable.

The Gray Lady champions artistic expression in Russia but it can't seem to utter its name here in the homeland.