The Global Sociology Blog

That’s unusual, but, I have to confess that it cracked me up (via the BBC):

“A South African woman divorcing her husband has tried to publicly shame him into paying her maintenance. She has plastered posters on her car detailing his infidelities. Passers-by in George, Western Cape, who stopped to read them, took out their phones to take pictures of the captions, Die Burger newspaper reports. “I decided to make a peaceful point for women everywhere who struggle to get their maintenance,” the woman, whose case is still in court, told the paper. A poster on the boot of her car read:

“If my soon-to-be-ex-husband thinks he can:
bed down cheap women,
buy them underwear,
wine and dine them in the best restaurants,
take them on five-star holidays,
take ‘excite’ tablets for erectile dysfunction,

go out boozing each night AND not pay me my maintenance as ordered by court,
and think I will take no action, he has another thing coming.”

Standing by her car, the woman explained that she had discovered her husband had been cheating on her after 36 years of marriage.”

Yeah, that sucks. That also means that this woman has to put herself through what Harold Garfinkel used to call a degradation ceremony in order to shame her husband into pay his alimony. Unfortunately, that is something not uncommon in a patriarchal context.