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Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
China's Mistress Dispellers: How The Economic Boom And Gender Inequality Have Created A New Industry
In China's Mistress Dispeller, The New Yorker staff writer Jiayang Fan shines a light on a curious phenomenon: an industry of private detectives, secret advisers, and love doctors that wives hire to save their marriages when they learn that their husbands have strayed.
The tactics of a mistress dispeller can take a number of forms: they might bribe the mistress to leave, or use their social networks to get her reassigned to a job in another part of the country. Or they might try to use shame to convince her to leave by sending notes about the affair to friends and family. Women mistress dispellers might try to become a confidante, and try to convince the mistress "as a friend" as to why they should leave. Male mistress dispellers might try to seduce them. Some wives even go to classes on how to keep their husband's happy - usually in secret, so their husbands don't suspect a "manipulation".
The author also makes a compelling case as to how the industry arose from a unique blend of China's rapid economic rise, and deeply entrenched gender norms and institutionalized patriarchy: laws that allow men (generally the property owners) to keep the homes they bought before their marriage and the social stigma of a woman divorcee ensures that "in divorces, women suffer disproportionately".
Though a rather disturbing read for Western feminists, Fan asserts that the mistress dispeller:
"Offers an odd vision of empowerment, achieved through pragmatic acceptance of a retrograde model of marriage. Husbands are to be flattered, seductive clothes worn ('a relationship necessity'), and all the work of the relationship done by the wife, without the husband ever being aware of it. 'Marriage is like the process of learning to swim,' Ming said. 'It doesn’t matter how big or fancy your pool is, just like it doesn’t always matter how good your husband is. If you don’t know how to swim, you will drown in any case, and someone else who knows how to swim will get to enjoy the pool'.”
