Greenblade - creation - faith - justice

I just scrolled through some of the comments on Kristof's facebook link and his blog to this video and there was a pretty diverse range of responses.  I'm not going to diss Nicholas Kristof's credibility - I've read and supported a wide range of his work.  I still think this video is patronizing.  Trying to pick up the load of these women for a few moments for comic relief does not equate trying to understand their lives for me.  Of course these women were laughing at his antics - he was being a clown!  (And they were probably also annoyed that he loaded his camera crew back into their Landrover and drove off without offering to give anyone (and their heavy load) a lift!) 

Kristof almost always gets my stamp of approval: from his bestselling book Half the Sky, which was phenomenally succesful, to the issue of the NYT magazine that Susan linked to, to his smaller video blogs like this one on such often-overlooked topics as fistulas, he's one of the strongest allies women have. I agree with Giffen that it was probably the title of the article that distracted from the overall topic, but I'm working on a screenplay, and the title's one of the hardest things to come up with! So if he just had a momentary lapse of creativity, I think that's forgivable - the rest of his body of work is dedicated almost exclusively to the rights of women, especially poor women.

I was looking at the women in the video, like Susan did, and they did indeed seem delighted. I'm inclined to trust that they can tell a jerk when they see one, so that they were yelling with laughter and clapping makes me feel they were going, "this white dude's OK," and thought he was coming at his story with respect. The men on the other hand... some of them looked pretty grumpy. Perhaps they were shamed, seeing a man unable to do a woman's work, or shamed, seeing a man emasculate himself by trying to do women's work to begin with.

Don't be ired, Stephanie! Kristof's a good egg! :-)

 I'm with you, Stephanie.  I'm usually an admirer of Kristof's, but found the tone of this video clip to be unsettling, to say the least.  Perhaps it was the framework of The Congo Exercise Plan that got me.  I'm not adverse to using humor to raise awareness (I keep thinking of a line from an interview I heard once:  "you have to laugh at yourself, because you'd cry your eyes out if you didn't"), but in this case, the humor seemed self-aggrandizing (or at least self-focused) rather than drawing (much) attention to the women Kristof was engaging.

I'm not sure I see the problem. Nicholas Kristof is well known for his advocacy so we can be assured he is not doing this as a joke. He walked - even if only a few inches - in these women's shoes to make a point and in that I think he was successful. The women seemed to love it that this tall white man could not do what they do with such grace. On his blog page he introduces this video and ends, "I'd welcome your thoughts about why it is that some of the hardest physical labor in poor countries is reserved for women." 

For something more in depth from Kristof in the New York Times see The Women's Crusade. This is in a special issue of the New York Times Magazine called Saving the World's Women.