Category: Sexual Politics

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Be Careful Little Eyes What you See

In the category of “you couldn’t make this stuff up” is the story about a North Carolina police department that arrested a 17-year-old boy for having nude pictures of himself on his cell phone.

This is in a country in which 3/4 of the population will admit they don’t know what the 3 branches of government are.  They certainly don’t know what a marginal tax rate is.  And they will never know what common sense really is; they will think they have it, but they will be wrong.  Sense is anything but common in America.  And they will never, ever be able to independently assess the question of what is terrible about a teenager having nude pictures of himself on his smart phone.  You just have to say “nude”, and “pictures”, and “teenager”, they will howl with outrage.

We live in a world in which we can be surrounded by morons who say, “but that’s what the law says” or “it may seem strange, but that’s what the law says”, or “we are complete morons so we only do what the law says”.

Are you telling me there would have been serious consequences for a sergeant or a detective who said, “I don’t care what the law says, no, we are not going to prosecute a teenager for taking pictures of himself”?

A young mother in Utah who took her shirt off in front of her family has been charged with lewdness.  Her husband took his shirt off too, but he is not being prosecuted.

Of course not.

That would be stupid.

Do you have a mirror in your bathroom?

 

 

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Klute: The Devilish Film

“Klute” is a devilish movie.

If you asked any man to candidly express his biggest frustration with women, you are likely to get an answer like this: “I don’t know what they really want.”

“Klute” is too specific and particular to answer that question cleanly.  All it does is raise the possibility that men are generally being hosed when they think they have been given an answer.  It also indirectly raises the question of whether women are being hosed when they think they have been given the question.  All in that dark brain of that self-possessed, insidiously clever woman, Bree Daniels.  (She is variously called “Bree Daniel” and “Bree Daniels” in the film– check it out.)

Here’s a summary:  Tom Gruneman, a businessman in Tuscarora, PA, disappears one day.  After six months of frustration, his boss, Peter Cable, and family, hire a private detective and family friend, John Klute (Donald Sutherland, who is wonderful in the role), to undertake an investigation to try to determine what happened to him.  Their only real clue is an violently obscene letter found in Gruneman’s desk, addressed to an escort named Bree Daniels in New York.  In this well-made film, the family does not appear to be totally shocked– they’re more concerned about the disappearance, than they are shocked by the indiscretion,  at the moment.  But that colorful little detail adds a murky, dark texture to the quest.  What was he up to?

Klute goes to New York and contacts Bree Daniels.  She refuses to see him at first.  So Klute takes an apartment in her building, below hers, and succeeds in tapping her phone and recording her calls.  He uses the recordings as leverage to get her to agree to meet with him.  When she does, she tries to entice him in the most predictable way imaginable, but he is clearly unmoved by her exotic allure, and her sexuality.  Instead, he persuades her to lead him on a dark exploration of the world of drug addicts and prostitutes in New York, to gather information from anyone who may have had contact with Gruneman, including the  prostitute who gave him Bree’s name.

At one point, she asks him what he thinks about her glamorous life in the city and her friends: he tells her they are pathetic, and she is wounded.  She liked to think she was somehow shocking and roguish (oddly, like the Sally Bowles character in “Cabaret”, who also seemed to take a special pleasure in the illusion that she was somehow shockingly outrageous).

This narrative is periodically interrupted with Bree’s therapy sessions with a female  psychiatrist.  Bree tells her how she feels about her job, how it gives her control and power over men, how they are easily manipulated, and how she needs to know that they desire her.  These are some of the most corrosive passages in the movie.  They are among the most corrosive passages in any movie (the only serious competition probably comes from “Carnal Knowledge”).  Do you think you know your wife?  Even worse is the “You Don’t Own Me” aspect of it: Bree is consummately independent, self-contained, needless.  She wants life on her own terms.  She doesn’t need or expect anyone to enter her life to protect or manage her.

She thinks she might become a model or an actress: in another caustic scene, she goes to a cattle call for actresses, and we witness how the women are lined up, examined, and judged clinically, and rejected.  And we learn how Bree sees the way society judges women.

Here’s brilliant artistry: we aren’t give the “Shawshank Redemption” treatment here, and asked to be shocked and outraged at Bree”s treatment at these auditions.  Instead, we become aware of how deeply embedded this kind of objectification is– it is casual and routine, and Bree herself isn’t shocked.  It is a far more powerful statement than the more usual Hollywood treatment, in which Bree would demand attention, receive it, and glow with triumph while earning the grudging respect of the cruel casting directors.

There’s nothing caricatured or mean about this scene, other than the subject: the casting directors act in a way that is a caricature of how we judge beauty and worthiness.  It’s just the way we do business.  Bree understands that and plays along with it when necessary, but you can see how her options are really limited.  How different, really, is the industry that also dehumanizes the subjects of our gaze, manipulates them like objects, punishes them for not matching our illusions about beauty and privilege.

It raises the question though– why doesn’t Bree just get an education and look for a regular job?  She’s smart and attractive.  “Klute”  answers that question: because it would only result in her being used in different ways, being pressed into conformity, and forced to sacrifice her independence.  It would be part of the package that Gruneman and John Klute himself represent, and they illustrate to her that even the powerful members of that society are drawn to the outliers, the rebels, the divergent.

It challenges the most fundamental assumptions about sex and sexual relationships and power and privilege and desire.

Spoiler Alert

In the end, perhaps as a concession to the audience, Bree does decide to take a chance on a more conventional lifestyle.  It doesn’t feel totally plausible to me, but it doesn’t hurt the story very much, artistically, because it doesn’t anesthetize the viewer with drippy music or a pastel sunset.  They both know it won’t be easy.

And the astute viewer knows that it probably won’t work.

[updated 2019-09-23]

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The #Metoo Crucible

“Stratford Festival decided to put on a sure-fire crowd-pleaser this year: “The Crucible”, one of the greatest, and certainly the most powerful, American drama.

“The Crucible” is about a group of young girls in a small town in Massachusetts in the 1690’s who are caught dancing naked in a woods.  Think about the cultural climate– puritanical New England.  The upstanding leaders of the devout community are beyond horrified, and this is immediately apparent to the girls so they connive to persuade the town elders that they were, in fact, bewitched.  Their deception is helped by a particular girl who seems to be having fits and hysterics and claims to see apparitions.

Who bewitched them?

They begin to name names, including upstanding members of the community.

One of the girls, named Abigail, was a handmaid to a couple, John and Elizabeth Proctor.  John had an affair with her, which Elizabeth knows about.  John and Elizabeth reconciled and evicted Abigail but are terrified that the community will find out about the affair and disgrace John.

Abigail is convinced that John really loves her.  What were the girls doing in the woods?  Abigail had persuaded Tituba, a black slave, to show them how to cast spells, so she could curse Elizabeth Proctor and win John back.  With the community in hysterics, and her own position in the community under threat, she seizes the opportunity to accuse Elizabeth of witchcraft.

When some in the community become suspicious of the girls’ motives, they too are named.  Eventually, 20 citizens are hanged, and one is “pressed” to death because he refused to enter a plea.  Yes, this really happened– the historical record is unmistakable.

Years later, the magistrates who condemned them would– astonishingly– come to the realization that they had been in error and issue an apology.  How often does that happen?

Arthur Miller wrote the play in 1952 and he clearly intended to draw a parallel between the Salem witch-hunts and the McCarthy communist witch-hunt that was taking place at that moment, and which had snared Miller himself.  Miller was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and admitted that he had been a communist at one time in his life.  That was not enough for them.  They demanded that he identify fellow-travelers.  He refused and was black-listed.

In the play, as in real life, a man named Giles Corey discovered that some of the accusers stood to benefit by acquiring the land of the accused (if convicted of witchcraft, a citizen’s possessions were forfeit).  He is then accused of witchcraft himself.  He refuses to plea because doing so would result in a conviction and the land he hoped to pass on to his sons would be forfeit.  He is sentenced to be “pressed”: placed under a board with the weight on it increased gradually with rocks.  He dies under the torment, mocking his accusers.

Do you see a problem with this play?  I don’t see a problem.  The play is historically accurate.  More importantly, it is psychologically accurate: I find the portrait of a community that is fearful and cowardly and not really virtuous in the sense that they all believe it of themselves to be quite convincing even today.  (Think of how we symbolically recycle, and conserve, and care for the environment, while doing absolutely nothing that will have any real impact on global warming.   Think of how women go on national television to tell the world how ashamed they are of having been sexually assaulted.)

But the #metoo movement saw a big problem.  You see, a credo of the #metoo movement is that girls are ALWAYS to be believed.  They never lie about abuse or rape or assault, even if it is assault by the devil himself, as in the case of Salem.  (I am not exaggerating: I heard three women on the CBC discussing the issue and they all insisted that women never lie about abuse and there is never any “collateral damage” (ie. innocent men accused).  Do women ever lie about rape?  Judge for yourself.

And the play makes it clear that the girls are sly, conniving, convincing liars, and that they are responsible the deaths of 20 innocent victims.

So the #metoo movement demands an adjustment.   And the Stratford Festival Theatre made it.  Here is their description of the play from their website:

His (John Proctor’s) refusal to take responsibility for his actions leads to an epidemic of fear and suspicion that engulfs the guilty and the innocent alike. Inspired by historical events but no less pertinent to our own times, this American classic stands as a timeless tragedy of abusive behaviour and its all-consuming consequences.

This is worse than a distortion of the play.  It is an obscenely malicious reversal of it’s meaning.  It is all John Proctor’s fault.  The girls are innocent.  Abigail was forced to lie because she was oppressed by the patriarchy.  They were justified in causing 19 innocent individuals to be hanged to death.

Abigail didn’t enjoy seeing those people hanged.  Not at all.

Or maybe the girls were telling the truth after all: maybe there really were witches.

No young woman or girl would ever lie about that.

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Pro Life

An anti-abortion activist wrote, “I will kill every Democrat in the world so we never more have to have our babies brutally murdered by you absolute terrorists.”

This is what the so-called pro-life position has come to.  I will kill you all to prove that I believe life is sacred, given by an all-powerful God who will reward me for my virtuous thoughts.

It has been resounding clear for many years that most people in America who pronounce themselves to be “pro-life” are not.  Politically, they support a strong military, the nuclear deterrent (founded on the premise that we would rather have everyone die than allow you to defeat us), capital punishment, and guns.  There is nothing remotely about these positions– wrong or right, from a practical point of view– that can be considered reflective of a value you could call “pro” life.  The hypocrisy is so obvious that it hardly needs to be stated.

So why do so many people, especially evangelical Christians, go around pounding their chests and declaring themselves “pro” life when they are not?   Because what they are really is anti-sex.  Because what they want, really, is to control women’s bodies.  And what makes them really angry is the thought that you or I might be enjoying something that they think obsessively about and which they have denied to themselves.  Sex sex sex.

An unwanted pregnancy is their revenge on the women who defy their views on social order.  You can almost visualize them sneering at the unfortunate teenager whose life is now ruined.  You deserve it.

They do not care about the six-week-old fetus.  They do not care about old people in nursing homes.  They do not care about the Iraqi mothers and children who were slaughtered in George Bush’s invasion.  They only care about making you pay for the sheer arrogance of your condescension towards their credulous views on morality and God.

 

 

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Janet Jackson Gets Her “Due”

According to the New York Times, Janet Jackson has been unjustly deprived of accolades and esteem because of the scandalous event known as “nipplegate” in which a piece of her wardrobe fell away from her breast while Justin Timberlake was trying to put it back during a performance at the Superbowl in 2004.

No– the act was Justin Timberlake pulling the wardrobe away from her breast.  But what was supposed to happen– after the audience got their titillation out of the way– was that the pulled away fabric would just reveal more fabric.

The Superbowl is already a triviality, a monument to nothingness, a mammoth orgy of absurdly boring sport and vulgarity.   The half-time performances are already obscene: most artists lip-sync and gyrate to inane pop inanities while tanned boobie commentators ravish them with praise.

The song Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake was performing was about getting somebody naked.  Why was that acceptable but the real thing was not?  Because there is nothing in the world more appealing to hypocrites than titillation– literally!  The enjoyment of things they believe to be taboo without the actual thing.  Janet Jackson’s sin was that for a brief moment she dispelled the illusion that millions of viewers thinking deeply about tits would be exposed as actually thinking deeply about tits.  The secret about “nipplegate” is that the real offense was exposing just how dirty America’s minds really are.  Someone will have to be crucified in order to expunge this dirty secret and restore middle-America’s sense of respect and decency!  I will not tolerate a naked breast on tv!  I am a moral person!  But, go ahead and dance and wiggle your clothed hips and sing about getting naked– I love it– but I am a decent, moral person who will only vote for non-outed political candidates.

Was there “blame”?  What are you talking about?  They were doing exactly what the audience wanted.  The costumes, the lyrics, the gyrations, the rhythm– all were aimed at creating the largest sense of arousal possible while pretending to be enjoying the music and the artistry– and the sport– instead.

Shunned because of “nipplegate”?  I am astonished that anyone really cares about the wardrobe malfunction, for many reasons:

  • it was trivial– there is nothing horrifying about the human body, to children or adults;
  • Janet Jackson is trivial: there is not, among her products, not a single performance of anything, that matters in any sense: she is merely a pop artist of no particular originality or insight;
  • attributing indifference to an artist who is a woman and black can’t always be blamed on the fact that she is a woman and black: for heaven’s sake, she never was or is anything other than a pop artist of mediocre achievements;
  • how did she get to be an artist in the first place?  Did someone in the music industry notice this very talented singer somewhere and decide she should be a star?  Or, could she have had some privileged connections?  Do you need to ask?
  • Even Janet Jackson, or mediocre artistic achievement, deserves better than to be treated like that for a trivial indiscretion, even if it was intentional or her fault.

The Bush Administration tried to punish CBS for not preventing the mishap.  Last I heard, the courts had thrown out the case.

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Punk Puritans

This Podcast

Hanna Rosen is the host of this interesting podcast about punk rockers in Richmond, Virginia.   Emily Nixon is a young woman who was a member of a group called I.C.E. Motherfuckers.  Do they sound tough or what?

Emily Nixon: “All that mattered was hanging out and making music and making mischief”.

Emily Nixon: “You always feared for your life at the shows but that was part of the fun”.

Emily Nixon was the front man for the band I.C.E. Motherfuckers– if I have that right.  (Yes, I said “man”.  Punks don’t care.)  Emily Nixon is the subject of the podcast (above) that allegedly addresses issues of “calling out” people for sexual misbehavior.  No other misbehaviors need apply–as we shall see– just anything sexual.  Anything, you know, “dirty”.  Because then we can all be automatically outraged, horrified, and extremely, extremely upset.

Emily was proud of having assaulted an audience member at a gig.  Apparently, he chose to dance in the mosh pit during one of her songs about liberation and equality and empowerment.  She jumped off the stage and punched him hard.  That is assault.

We do not get called out for assault.  Nothing wrong with the assault.

Emily Nixon said “You always feared for your life at the shows but that was part of the fun”.  What a ballsy chick!  Then she recounted how she made out in her bedroom one night with someone from another band and then, mid-make-out, changed her mind and told him to stop because his bandmates were in the next room.   And he did stop, but then he locked the door so his bandmates wouldn’t walk in on them making out, and that creeped her out and then they slept in the same bed together but in the morning he touched her suggestively but stopped when she didn’t respond.  She froze.  She didn’t know what to do.  She froze.  He stopped probably because there was no response.

No mischief there.  No punches.  Not much of that punk attitude either.

She was fearless at her shows in which she feared for her life, but was so terrified of the hand on her ass that she could not even croak a single word like “no” or “fuck off”.  So she froze, and he stopped.  So, he needed to be called out.   Yessiree.  But “the feeling” was that “there was a sense” that if she did call him out, he would be “protected”.   You know– white male privilege, I guess.  So–  unlike the guy she destroyed soon afterwards who mysteriously was not defended– she didn’t try to get this guy ostracized, castrated, or evicted.  She didn’t even punch him.

But then we have the second guy.  I have no idea why she didn’t “have a sense” about the second guy.

Which is too bad because a guy who puts his hand on your ass while he is bed with you in the morning should really at least lose his job.  Or get punched.   At the very least, I think that if I were Emily Nixon, I would at least ask him to go find his own bed.

There was another guy.  Her best friend in the world.  A real friend.  And he was in another band.  And then she found out that he did something really, genuinely, viciously awful– far worse than putting a hand on her ass in her bed in the morning:  this guy sent a picture of himself naked to a girl unsolicited.  Oh my gawd.  Even a girl who is used to fearing for her life at her own concerts was just overwhelmed with the gravity of this horror.  Oh my gawd!  He had to be stopped.  But wait– we’ve been best friends for, like, forever.  Oh my gawd!  Out he goes.  She “outed him” on social media.

I like the word “outed” here.  It conveys– erroneously, in my opinion– the idea that men hitting on women is something they are all trying to keep secret and that only brave, courageous, gutsy women who risk their lives at punk concerts will have the nerve to expose them.  So they are revealed, exposed, displayed, excoriated.  So she did.

But it also suggests that a lot of women are secretly obsessed with the idea that all the men around them are secret plotting all kinds of devilishness and should be exposed whenever possible.  Because that is how women get power over men: by shaming them.  That is what some women said about Louis C. K.  He wasn’t ashamed enough.  He needed more correction.

He was kicked out of his band.

Seriously?  A punk band expelled a member for misbehavior?  For violating social norms?  For being inappropriate?

And he was kicked out of the clubs.

And ostracized.

And un-friended.

And evicted.

And fired.

He disappeared somewhere– she heard that he “wasn’t doing that good”.  I wonder if, at that point, Emily was more than a little intoxicated with her newfound power.  Was it as exciting as punching the man in the mosh pit?

Satisfaction!  I am impressed with Emily’s ruthlessness and cruelty here.  No sense being coy about it– I see this as just an amazing expression of sheer sadistic cruelty.  If you think it’s something else or think it should be called something else, I’m calling you out: it’s cruelty and you should own it.  It’s mean.  It’s brutal.  It’s a little psychotic.  It is psychotic, by my definition, which is the capacity to inflict enormous pain without empathy for your victim.  Psychokiller, as the Talking Heads used to say.

You really owe it to yourself at this point to watch the documentary “Dig!”, about Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.  Just to give you an idea of how punk musicians ought to behave.

She admits– with enthusiasm– that this is “vigilante justice”.  “It felt so good… that’s what he deserved”.  I am the instrument of God’s almighty wrath!

“I’m not okay with it”, she said.  That phrase is now a kind of mantra for the new Puritans.  There are things I am not okay with too, but I haven’t been able to start a movement yet against people who attend leadership training seminars and love Disney.

Then we have Hanna’s impenetrable snark: Emily did the courageous thing even though it cost her.   I was not able to determine what it “cost” her other than the risk of “the feeling” that someone might disapprove of disproportionate consequences for mildly rude behavior.  You know how things are.

Then along came Herbert.

It’s hard to discern Herbert’s motivations here.  Maybe he thought she was a tad self-righteous.  I hoped that he might have been motivated by a desire for justice after the disproportionate punishment meted out to the guy she “outed” but it was more vicious than that.  Herbert knew Emily.  Herbert knew that Emily, in high school, had added a nasty emoji to a nude picture of an acquaintance that someone had posted on social media.  Yeah, I don’t get it either.  Apparently, she did other nasty things.  She saw a girl having sex with someone at a party and slut-shamed her at school.  Herbert revealed all this on social media and implored Emily’s friends to shun and ostracize her and implored her band– I.C.E. Motherfuckers– I’m not making this up— to expel her.

They all said, hey, a lot of us were creeps and mean and rude in high school, and made mistakes, and if she apologizes, we’ll all just move on and hope that we have learned to be better people.

Of course not.  They all did what Herbert implored them to do.  Emily Nixon was suddenly persona non grata.  Her friends shunned her.  Clubs banned her.  Her band fired her.  They even issued formal instructions on how she was be punished.  This is a the punk community in Richmond, Virginia.  We are so rebellious.  We are so rogue.  We are so uncompromising.  We are so virtuous.  We are pure.  We are the wrath of God and you shall pay for your transgressions!

Hanna interviewed “Jay”, the girl in the nude picture.  She was much kinder than anyone else in the podcast.  She accepted Emily’s apologies as genuine.  How nice.  Let’s get back to the guy who texted the nude picture and ask him to apologize.  No?  You want him to rot in hell?  Well, she didn’t say it, but if you broadcast Jay’s generous gesture you really need to address the issue of why Emily gets this consideration but nobody else.

We also, by the way, have a clue as to Emily’s character and psychosis in that “slut-shaming” of someone in her high school who had sex with a boy.  Seriously, Emily?  You were disgusted that she had sex with someone?  You assumed everyone else would be disgusted too?  You thought it would make you cool?  What kind of person thinks like that?

Herbert was not forgiving.  He openly declared that he didn’t care if Emily lived or died.  She deserved it.  Then, perhaps with some misgivings about coming off as too vindictive, he related how he had been abused as a child by his father.  He actually got tearful.  I thought, you have got to be kidding.  No.  He cried.  But he now has a great relationship with his parents because, well, it got better.  So, apparently he gave his father a chance to apologize and make it up to him.  Very nice.  Very kind.  Very reasonable.

Emily, on the abuse she then suffered: “It just wouldn’t stop”.   Oh, that was touching.  It just wouldn’t stop.

She is referring to the relentless attacks she suffered on social media.  She retreated to her job and her apartment and her boyfriend,  a shell of her former self.  “I’m not allowed to come to shows anymore.  I’m not allowed to make music anymore.  This was my entire life since I was 13.”

Hanna sly implies something about Emily’s horrible behavior that she never offers to any of the males in the story: that it is forgivable.  That she deserved the chance to make it right, to apologize.”  I suspect Hanna would have felt quite comfortable with the CBC panel that announced that, in the #metoo movement, there was never “collateral damage”.  All men are guilty.  All women are telling the truth.  She tries to cover her tracks but her selectivity is telling: Jay thinks Emily’s remorse is genuine.

Hanna calls the abusers “brutal or cruel”.   Communities have always punished severely those who violate the rules in order to  “enforce the moral code” and “keep the community safe”.   She said, “maybe we’ve not given pain enough credit for all the ways its helped us”.  “The community decides”… no law or police or judges.  No proof required.  Hanna declares that inflicting pain on others is not only acceptable– it’s great!  There is “no other way… it’s just what humans do.”

This has crossed over into hysteria.  It has the hallmarks of hysteria.  It is taking on the characteristics of an irrational, extreme reaction out of proportion to the real weight of action that precipitates the reaction.

Then Hanna Rosen has the chutzpah to complain that Herbert didn’t care about Emily at all– excuse me?  I didn’t hear that violin playing when you described how Emily crucified her best friend.

Hanna idiotically concludes that this shows pain is good.  It moves you forward.

Pretty well everyone in this podcast, including the host, with the exception of “J”, is appalling.

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Nathan the Politically Correct

In the play “Nathan the Wise” an elderly Jewish man teaches Saladin and a Knights Templar the meaning of tolerance and wisdom and love.  So, in our increasingly matriarchal world, he must now be played by a woman.   At least, he is, at the Stratford Festival next year.

The Windsor Star cast this decision as wonderful liberal boundary-shattering audaciousness.  Seriously?  From a company that will also be putting on “Billy Elliot”,  “Little Shop of Horrors” , “The Front Page”, and Noel Coward’s “Private Lives”.   Last year: “The Music Man”, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”,  “To Kill a Mockingbird”, and “An Ideal Husband”.  Well, how cutting edge can you get!  They’ll never sell any tickets to those challenging productions!  Couldn’t we at least get some Neil Simon to lighten things up?

“Boundaries help define who we are; they can either protect or confine us. Whether they’re imposed on us by others or we draw them ourselves, they represent the limits of what we think is acceptable, advisable or even possible,” Cimolino said in a press release.

You might think Cimolino thinks there are hundreds of theatre-goers out there who will be shocked that “Billy Elliot” seems to encourage boys to take up dance.  I feel confident that when they come out to see “Billy Elliot” next year, they will change their minds.

Of course, the truth is that “Billy Elliot” is just about the safest production Stratford could present.  It is blindingly, mind-numbingly safe, just as “The Green Book”, supposedly about a courageous white thug who has his mind blown by a black classical pianist, is the safest, least controversial movie of the year.   Both of them play to our fantasies about being courageously tolerant and open-minded and better than the foils in these films and plays.  Generally, they confirm the rather high view of ourselves we hold as liberal theatre-goers.

Stratford Festival cast a woman as Prospero in “Tempest” last year.   The esteemed Martha Henry got the part.   Why?  I’m not clear on the argument for casting women in men’s roles, though we certainly have long had men in women’s roles, in Monty Python, and “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “La Cage Aux Folles”.  I’m not opposed.  Perhaps they were short of male actors.  Perhaps it was a tacky sop to liberal feminist audiences from Toronto who want to make sure that all their friends see the review of the play they went to see. 

It was not the fact that Marthe Henry was a woman playing a man’s role that bothered me.  It is that she didn’t really do anything with the role.

I didn’t care for Henry’s performance.  My wife wonders how I get the nerve to not like such a famous serious actress in such an audacious role when everyone calls her “acclaimed” and shouts “don’t miss it”.  Who do you think you are?   You didn’t want to like her.   On the contrary, I thought it might be a gas.  But it wasn’t.  It was boring because Henry, in this play at least, gave an unaccountably weak performance, without nuance or shadings, without inflection or color, and without interest.  But some people find it just so liberal to cast a woman in a major male role that I believe she got a pass from most critics.  Think about it.  You are writing a piece on this production for the Toronto Star.  You didn’t like Henry’s performance.  Are you going to write that?  And count on all those broad-minded, tolerant progressives to stand up for your right to your own opinion?   And humiliate all those well-paid elitists who paid over $100 for tickets to a show that didn’t get a rave review?   No, you are not.

Is this a statement that women are just as smart as men and therefore should be allowed to play the roles that smart men created for men?  That’s a shortcut, of course.  What you really want, if you’re such a feminist,  is for women to play women’s roles in plays written by women.   And fill the theatre.  And fill the theatre because of the women’s roles in women’s plays, and not because some man built up the theatre’s reputation first.  You don’t want to be piggyback riding on a man’s work, do you?

Quick– name a play written by a woman that you want to see.

Okay– just name any play by a woman.  Come on– at least one.

I had to google it too.  The only one I recognized was “Raisin in the Sun”, a very good play about a poor black family living in Chicago in the 1950’s who receive a large sum of money and don’t know what to spend it on.

They will probably get better parts at SoulPepper Theatre now that the theatre company, founded by a man, built by a man, driven to a high level of excellence by a man, has been hijacked by female cast members and board members and major donors and will now be able to provide a shortcut to prestige roles for the privileged women who are friends of the women who drove out Albert Schultz, and buy a nice cake for Ann-Marie MacDonald who was cruelly exploited when she worked there by being forced– under threat– to go out to dinner with large donors.  The nerve.

Let’s do “Julius Caesar” with a woman as Brutus.  Let’s do “King Lear” with a woman as Lear.  Let’s do “MacBeth” with a man as the murderous Lady MacBeth.  Let’s do “Hamlet” with a woman who can’t make up her mind as Hamlet!  Let’s do “50 Shades” with a man as the submissive!  Let’s do “Atlas Shrugged” with a man as the mediocre novelist.

Let’s do “Evita” and take the beautiful aria away from Peron’s mistress and give it to Madonna!  Well, why the hell not?  That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?  The unearned accolade.  The appropriation of the work of men by privileged women who treat male sexual desire as psychosis and have, temporarily at least, been rewarded with the collusion of the liberal establishment: the CBC, the Toronto Star, Stratford.

Let’s do “Huckleberry Finn” with a woman as Huck, and a woman as Jim, and a woman as Mark Twain.

 

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Freddie Mercury

Freddie Mercury was a very talented singer and performer.  He is ranked 18th on Rolling Stone’s roster of great rock singers.

Seriously: 18th.  Behind Bob Dylan.  Behind John Lennon.  Robert Plant?

(Ahead of Van Morrison???  Way ahead of Art Garfunkel and Tom Waits???  It’s a strange list.  I love Bob Dylan, but number 7 on this list?  And if Dylan is 7th, why is Bono 32nd and  Neil Young 37th?  What really is the criteria here?   It appears to be a mix-up and random blend of “greatest vocalist” and “greatest artist”.  Is Mick Jagger really a better singer than Janis Joplin or Nina Simone?)

All right– he did have a good voice.

A research team undertook a study in 2016 to understand the appeal behind Mercury’s voice.[39] Led by Professor Christian Herbst, the team identified his notably faster vibrato and use of subharmonics as unique characteristics of Mercury’s voice, particularly in comparison to opera singers, and confirmed a vocal range from F#2 to G5 (just over 3 octaves) but were unable to confirm claims of a 4-octave range.  (Wikipedia)

So it must be conceded that technically he had a terrific voice, a terrific instrument at his command.  What did he do with it?

So, quick, name one of his songs that really mattered.

Me neither.

Let’s be clear here: people who regard Queen as a great band will cite “We Are the Champions” as one of the greatest rock recordings of all time.  If you are in that camp, I am talking a foreign language to you.  How can “Bohemian Rhapsody” not be one of the great songs of all time?  It’s epic.  No, it’s not even a great song.  It’s not even in the same league as “Anchorage” by Michelle Shocked, or “Homeward Bound” or “The Boxer” or “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Tangled up in Blue” or “Thunder Road”.

Gosh, Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli both attended his 20th April 1992 tribute concert.  Both of them!

What he did do was kill several people by refusing to accept the diagnoses of AIDS, and refusing to disclose to his numerous sexual partners that he probably had it.

When asked whether he altered his behavior, Freddie responds, “Darling, fuck it, I’m doing everything with everybody.”  Poz

He also refused to “come out”.  Not that anyone has a duty of any sort to “come out”, but it would have been honorable for him to do it at the time of the AIDS epidemic, to do what he could to increase public awareness of the issue and help those lobbying for more funding for research and treatment.  Unfortunately, he appears to have been more concerned about selling records and tv appearances and not offending his family than about the lives of other gay men.

Was that his worst sin?  Or was inflicting “we will, we will, rock you” upon millions of sports fans even worse.  Or “we are the champions”.  Or– please– “Another One Bites the Dust”.  And another one.  And another one.  And another one.  Seriously, folks, it’s a insecticide commercial gone bad.  Really bad.

Or, worst of all, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, an absolute marvel of inane kitch which they never could perform live, because that would have really required musical gifts beyond Freddie Mercury’s grasp (they cheated with tapes of the choral and other parts).   I mean, obviously it could have been performed live, but it would have required a choir and more musicians and– here is the crucial part– that would have diluted the attention paid to Freddie.

NME rightly called it “a masterful, if ludicrous, six-minute suite of operatic cock-rock about a lad who’s killed someone, sold his soul to Beelzebub and wants to know if Scaramouche can do the Fandango”.  Well, I’m not sure about “masterful”.  It was really produced by a bunch of engineers in a studio.  It’s not hard, apparently, to convince people that there is something brilliant about that but surely a lot of those people were disappointed when they saw Queen live and they couldn’t do their most famous opera.

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Decidedly Blue

A few years ago, I saw a movie called “Blue is the Warmest Color” about a lesbian relationship between a younger and (relatively) older woman, which disintegrated as the younger woman decided she was not sure of her sexuality.

It was a beautiful, incandescent film, full of startling sequences of physical intimacy.  It was a landmark.  It attracted favorable critical appreciation, and made it’s two stars famous.

And now we have this.

Why now?  Why not the minute you experienced this harassment?  Why didn’t you leave the set and go to the police?  Why did you wait until the film was released, until it was acclaimed?

And why is the author, Julie Maroh, more concerned about getting recognition for her source material than she is about making her own film, if she really believes she could make a better one?

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Actuarial Love

This story didn’t really surprise me, but it should have.  A modern, educated, liberated woman is bored of dating progressive, enlightened men, and finds herself strongly attracted to a man who believes that he should control the finances in a relationship because he is the man, and only he should initiate sex.  She is very sad when he breaks it off, partly, at least, because he finds that she earns more money than he does.

This is real.  It’s not made up.  It’s not from Fox News.   It is a real, educated, affluent young woman declaring that there is something about a man with conservative values that appeals to her on a visceral level, something she isn’t sure she herself comprehends.

At the same time, some men who behaved the way she describes are being excoriated by feminists.  The question is, how far from “abusive” behavior is the style of a conservative man who believes, as she described, that the man always initiates sex?  That means he makes the first move.  That means he doesn’t ask for her consent first.  He makes a move.  And if the woman is receptive, she makes that clear with her body language and sounds– not with verbal consent.  In fact, that is one things she clearly doesn’t wish.  And she’s not the first writer on the subject in the Times to say so.

Consider this:

My idea of a hero is not someone who comes and sweeps the woman off her feet and turns her into a princess, but a man who cares about what a woman has to say, who listens to her, who pays attention to her needs and wants,” Guillory said when we recently spoke over the phone, adding that the ideal romantic lead would also then ask “what she wants, just to make sure that he’s right” in his assessment.

Well, that pretty well sounds exactly like the one thing Jasmine Guillory in The Atlantic denies she says she wants: to be treated like a princess.  She wants someone who listens, pays attention, addresses her needs and wants only what she wants.  Your highness.

Jesus, that does sound exactly like a princess.  It certainly doesn’t sound like a partnership.  It doesn’t sound like two people of equal abilities and capacities and potential and strength of character coming together for a mutually beneficial relationship in which obligations, responsibilities, and assets are shared equally.  But yeah, doesn’t that sound kind of boring?

Just imagine this:

My idea of a lady is not someone who comes and sweeps the man off his feet and turns him into a prince, but a woman who cares about what a man has to say, who listens to him, who pays attention to his needs and wants…”