Despite not being able to be away to physically participate in those door-buster Black Friday shopping deals last week, finally accepting that there’ll be only one woman for Barack Obama, and grudgingly admitting that my reason for watching daytime talk will be gone come 2011, there’s nevertheless still a lot to be thankful for during this holiday season.

Like the fact that I’m a woman, which means I enjoy the prerogative of being wonderfully complex and neurotic and conflicted and a little crazy and, best of all, I can share all of this with you, dear reader.

Someone on Facebook recently shared that an American student posed this question: How do you celebrate Thanksgiving in Jamaica? Most responses were the typical, knee-jerk accusations of American brainwashing. How do they celebrate Emancipation Day over there? one person sniffed defensively. That student may in fact have been naive in his or her assumption that every country celebrates Thanksgiving, but I wondered for a minute. How do we remain thankful in a country that increasingly makes it difficult for the citizenry to be optimistic that we won’t go careening over the edge into the wide black hole called Nowhere? (Seriously, are there any more institutions that would like to step up and downgrade us? Seriously.)

One has to pull on one’s inner reserves to retain an attitude of gratitude, I suppose. For my part, as I mentioned before, I’m thankful that I’m a woman, and all the zaniness that entails.

Case in point: I’ve been considering Roman Polanski and trying to understand my own vacillation on the issue.

The fugitive director, a convicted rapist who has recently been in the news for finally being arrested in Switzerland, after jumping bail and fleeing to Europe before he could be sentenced for the 1977 crime against a then-13-year-old girl, is being lambasted by some and supported by others in the States, where they want him extradited.

I’ve been accused of partiality because he’s a famous and brilliant Academy Award-winning Hollywood director or that my sympathies are with him because of the fact that his then pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by the Manson family in 1969. But this isn’t true. I think part of the pleasure I take in being a woman is the right to not be shackled by labels like “feminist”. True, Polanski has had an outstanding US warrant for his arrest, not for the rape of Samantha Geimer, as some people seem to think. The warrant is actually for skipping bail. Although he claimed sex with Geimer had been consensual, Polanski actually pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse, a charge synonymous with statutory rape, under Californian law. The judge then received a psych report on Polanski and a recommendation that Polanski should not serve jail time. However, when his lawyers got wind of the judge’s intention to jail and possibly deport him, that’s when the French-born director bolted. He’s been on the lam ever since, avoiding living in European countries likely to extradite him. The chickens came home to roost, though, when he was arrested in September of this year by Swiss police, upon entering the country to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Zurich Film Festival.

Apparently, because this is such a big ‘women’s issue’, I’m supposed to join the chorus of people condemning Polanski. Where is my righteous indignation? Why am I not frothing at the mouth, like Whoopi Goldberg, at liberal apologists’ distinction between “rape” and “rape-rape”? But I find Geimer’s own point of view telling. Geimer, who was actually some months shy of 14, the age of consent, when Polanski had sex with her, wants him to be left alone. She doesn’t want to do an Oprah interview, she doesn’t want to speak of the matter in public. I don’t believe in exploiting victims. But what if she’s not quite the victim the world sees her as? Sure, Polanski was wrong to have had sex with her. But what if she’s since acknowledged some culpability in the situation? Maybe I’m being a cynic, but I’ve seen how Hollywood mothers scheme to get their children famous. Geimer was a young girl hired for a photographic shoot that a rising Hollywood director was doing. What if she was simply used as a pawn by an ambitious stage mother? We’ve seen it happen many times before, haven’t we? Those boys Michael Jackson allegedly molested? Where were the parents when they were being invited to Neverland? Hollywood is a hard place. It’s hypocritical to pretend that the rules that apply to us in the real world apply there. For decades, America has turned a blind eye to what happens there. How many Hollywood actresses have admitted to living shocking lifestyles while they were still in their early teens? Drew Barrymore, for example, was smoking cigarettes when she was nine, and weed when she was 12, and snorting coke by the time she was 13. At 14, she’d attempted suicide and entered rehab, and a year later she petitioned the court to be emancipated and was legally living on her own.

It’s not a normal existence.

I’m not condoning what Polanski did, but I do believe that people are victims of their circumstances. If a man lives in an environment where flesh peddling is acceptable, who’s to say that his moral compass won’t be just a little skewed? It’s like those people, so-called upstanding citizens we see on the nightly news who, under normal circumstances, would not consider the crime of murder… until they’re caught up in an angry mob of machete wielders out for justice and somebody’s bloodied, severed head. There have been no reports, since Polanski fled Hollywood, that he abused other underage girls. Of course not, his environment changed.

In 1993, Polanski agreed to pay Samantha Geiger $500,000 as part of a civil settlement to a suit she brought in 1988, for “sexual assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress and seduction”. Geimer and her lawyers have confirmed the settlement was completed. I’ve asked myself countless times, whether I could accept a monetary settlement from a man who supposedly raped me. I’d like to think not. I’d like to think I’d want to see the worthless sack of garbage exposed for the animal he was. Even 30-odd years after the fact. But that’s me. I was never raped so I can’t possibly know what my reaction would be. Geimer says the case is closed for her. I think we should respect that.