Feb 24, 2023
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When Flawed Men Make Awed Art
by Doniphan Blair
Ashley Judd, one of the first actresses to speak on the record about Harvey Weinstein's attacks for the breaking NY Times story on October 5, 2017. photo: courtesy A. Judd WE'RE ON AN EXPOSURE ROLLER
coaster these days, hundreds of powerful men and a few women brought low by what will be called something like the “great sex abuse outing of 2017-18” (or ‘19, or ’20, or however long it takes).
Multitudes of women and some men, including this author (attempted rape, age twelve), have been injured, many severely. By prosecuting and/or publicizing sexual violence, intimidation and the myriad other ugliness blemishing human relations for generations, we are finally offering some relief and remedy.
The Harvey Weinstein Affair exploded like a social neutron bomb, despite recent revelations about Trump, O’Reilly, Ailes, Cosby, et al, because it was the liberal media finally exposing itself to itself. Weinstein was a central Hollywood figure whose predatory debauch was long concealed by people privileged to report or make art about such things, like pederasty among Catholic clergy.
By rights then, it fell to Hollywood’s women, like the brave Ashley Judd and others, to come out of the closet, force a profession-wide truth telling and take on the patriarchy itself—on top of exposing the perps and their bizarre behavior.
Who thought semi-public masturbation could be so much fun? Alas, it often is to beta men, who find themselves in positions of power over alpha women but fear to touch.
By making public what has been kept private for millennia, the #MeToo movement is a revolution in social mores, especially if it trickles down to beta women.
Fully acknowledging this, 300 Hollywood women, calling themselves Time’s Up, ran the “Dear Sisters” ad in various venues on January first. It was a belated response to the open letter expressing solidarity sent in November by 700,000 female farm workers. Very vulnerable to abuse, along with after-hours janitors and other laborers, they have been organizing for years, offering self-defense classes and legal assistance.
Time’s Up also formed a legal defense fund, $13 million and rapidly rising, and started lobbying for legislation against companies aiding or abetting abuse.
Dressed in black, Nicole Kidman takes the first award at the 2018 Golden Globes for HBO's 'Big Little Lies''. photo: courtesy USA Today In the film biz itself, there was an appeal for gender parity—more women’s stories, directors, leads—and red-carpet activism: the eschewing of bling and wearing of black during the just-started awards season, a Lysistrata-like blow against an industry built on the ornate stylings of its female stars.
At January 7th's Golden Globes there was almost 100% participation—but what black gowns they were! While professions of solidarity and Oprah-worship were a bit overwrought, there were strong remarks, like MC Seth Meyers’s opening joke, “Good evening ladies and REMAINING gentlemen,” or about the tragedy of Recy Taylor, an African-American Alabama woman kidnapped by six white guys and raped, powerfully told by Oprah herself.
These are fantastic and fantastically-fast developments, given it’s been only three months since the Weinstein expose in The New York Times (10/3/2017).
BUT as things get faster and more furious, and many more men, hopefully (especially by the "remaining gentlemen" hoping to benefit from the upheaval), are exposed and get their just desserts, tell me this:
Is there a difference between Weinstein, Alfred Hitchcock and Garrison Keillor?
Is there a difference between a grotesque-behaving and -looking sex fiend accused of rape, who happened to have an eye for cinema, and a sexually-frustrated artist, who spilled his romantic guts film by film, and a more modest but still-talented writer, humorist and singer, who may have groped but also advocated for literate romance, Americana music, slightly off-key singing and a liberal Middle America?
Should Keillor’s cultural activism and four-decade career careen down the toilet solely from a single, as-yet-unpublished report, which probably doesn’t include rape?
To be sure, there must be more than his hand slipping down a woman’s back—accidentally, as Keillor claims. If the report reveals long-term, serial groping, Minnesota Public Radio’s reaction would be mandatory in these full-frontal exposure times. But “there are no similar allegations involving other staff," the station said.
Will we defeat patriarchy by becoming more exacting and unforgiving than it? Do we risk diminishing egregious atrocities by fixating on frictions within the normative bounds of mature, romantic and playful people?
Garrison Keillor, creator and former host of Prairie Home Companion, in happier times, summer of 2017, two months before the GSAO. photo: courtesy Twin Cities.com Will we be purging movies, museums and libraries, as well as radio, of minor-league misogynists and once-in-a-while touchers?
Ridley Scott erased Kevin Spacey and reshot frantically with Christopher Plummer to release ”All The Money In The World” with a clean protagonist in time for the holidays. But Spacey, the lubricious, corrupt president on the hit-TV show "House of Cards" (2013-18), now in its last season, largely on his account, is an extreme case. He barely apologized for raping an underage boy and simultaneously came out as gay, a grotesque sympathy play.
Then there’s the symbolic chauvinism. The recent attempt to banish “Theresa Dreaming” (1938), Balthus’s painting of a young woman, legs akimbo, underwear exposed, led by a woman who works on Wall Street with 10,000 signed supporters, was rejected by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
How about the Museum of Modern Art’s “Ladies of Avignon” by Picasso, a notorious misogynist, featuring five naked women, two objectified as ANIMALS?!? Or Van Gogh’s fantastically popular and romantic “Starry Night”, even though sending a piece of your ear to a woman would obviously be traumatizing—you know what I mean, Vince!?! Or de Kooning’s aggressively-abstract and rather ugly “Women” series, or other distorted male views of romantic objects?
Gender tensions have been with us since the Garden of Eden, but hardly because of a god's decree. Life partners cannot help but antagonize “the genius” on occasion, by demanding actual work, say, or that he abide his lofty ideals.
Tolstoy’s wife rejected the elderly “great man,” author of two of Western Civilization’s top romantic novels and an inspiration to Gandhi (himself a partaker of suspicious bed-sharing with young women), because his ethical claims were contradicted by the smutty stories she read in his diary, a half-a-century earlier.
Even if male artists were abusive—and many, many were AND remain, art pertains to the more female, emotional and mystical side of society, and their aggressive insights might be essential to our culture's ability to restrain the more masculine business, political and military forces.
Keillor relished describing sexy women in his “Guy Noir” story series, suggesting the horndog interests of a self-described “man with a face for radio.” But he was ALSO quoting film noir, a muscular, masculine genre still very popular today, 75 years after it helped us not only heal from Nazism, by examining evil people up close, but liberate women to follow their wilder feelings.
Pablo Picasso's 'Ladies of Avignon' remains popular with women at NY's Museum of Modern Art, despite its objectification of five naked women. photo: D. BlairEven if Keillor went way, way too far (which this author doubts, but anything is possible after Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner and brilliant writer Eli Wiesel was accused of groping), “It is a disease, right? Do we fire people when they get sick?” as my 92-year-old mother remarked.
She was referring to Charlie Rose, the liberal media icon she’s known of for decades and who is accused of more outrageous behavior than Keillor—semi-public nudity, aggressive groping and lewd phone calls (which took me ten minutes to explain to her).
My mother is sympathetic to male “needs.” She would tell my father, “It’s OK, you can look at women.” In regards to recent accusations against Thomas Roma, a photography teacher at Columbia University, where she worked and went to school, she said: “What could he do? Those college girls are so attractive.”
Of course, rapists, abusers and entrappers must be outed and penalized. Weinstein himself should be tarred and feathered by a mob in medieval dress storming his Hollywood hills hideout, a fitting denouement to one of cinema’s darkest chapters.
But then the witch hunting and extreme sensitivity should shift to a normative outing, reporting and prosecuting as well as a unique rejiggering of gendered relations.
This is a radical time in human history when we can shift the private-public balance, review what happens to women, understand their needs and goals, and that of matriarchy in general. As such, we are also obliged to search for a functional romantic culture that could satisfy more women as well as men and gender nonconforming.
Many people are terribly lonely in today's atomized, diversified and over-computerized world, notably the unattractive, the poor, the outcast, the alienated. Visually-beta women go through entire lives without a single catcall, making the #MeToo movement largely about privileged alphas. It is hard enough to find and express love without overreaction, intolerance and a vicious circle of attacks, as most of us know from our own relationships.
The increased critique of men in the media, social media and face to face for major crimes has been accompanied by that for minor infractions, like over-sexualized gaze—BOTH the pain and the privilege of physically-alpha women—or acting rude.
Aziz Ansari, the world-famous comedian and television star ("Parks and Recreation", 2009-15, "Master of None", 2015-) but also "relationship expert," after he authored "Modern Romance: An Investigation" (2015), apparently subjected a photographer called "Grace," by the writer Katie Way, to "the worst night of her life" (see Way's article on the interestingly-named Babe site). Ansari's crimes: not offering her red wine and not obtaining a fully-articulated verbal consent to sex.
Comedian and television star Aziz Ansari, recently accused of being ungallant, on the cover of his book-long essay, 'Modern Romance' (2015). photo: courtesy A. AnsariMy 37-year-old daughter, who has been observing this phenomena, often on her Facebook feed, told me that she and her free-wheeling friends in the Northern California hill country find this over-reactive, self-demeaning, ridiculous, even.
What Hitchcock did to Tippi Hedren was deplorable, disgusting, demonic, even. But unlike Weinstein—who doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body, Alfred was a relationship dramatizer, a romantic visionary, a proto-feminist, even.
Yes, he was also an alienated, spooky soul who teased women and tortured his stars—Kim Novak, by dunking her repeatedly in the San Francisco Bay for “Vertigo” (1958), Hedren, by subjecting her to a week’s shoot pelted with live birds.
As an artist, however, Hitchcock placed women at the center of his films, morally and actively as well as visually and narratively, often having them catch or kill the bad guy (see cineSOURCE article rating his films along feminist lines: B average).
While “Vertigo” is NOT one of those matrifocal films, it has come to be considered the greatest film ever made (international critic consensus, 2012 on) because it is about a man seducing a woman into acting out his romantic fantasy. As such, it stands in for cinema itself as well as male fixations. It certainly exposes the latter for all to see, including actresses working for Hitchcock.
What Tippi endured was horrendous, horrific, criminal. Narrative-wise, however, it was almost inevitable, given the high noon duel between a powerful nerd, who lived his entire adult life in a candy store but was afraid to touch (while suaver directors routinely had affairs with their lead actresses), and the woman he discovered, educated and delivered to stardom and high art.
“What could be more romantic?” he must have wondered.
Hitchcock and Hedren achieved masterful levels of horror, humor AND romance in their first film together, “The Birds” (1963), along with a foreboding ecological forecast, but their second, “Marnie” (1964), was flawed— as a movie, not a window into Alfred. After reading the script, Hedren should have raced to her lawyers, if not the police.
“Marnie” follows a high-class, female thief busted by the titillated owner of the company she just robbed. Played by Sean Connery, the first James Bond and "the sexiest man alive," at that time, he proceeds to blackmail her into marrying him. On their honeymoon, he rapes her—protagonist-director conflation, anyone?
Alfred Hitchcock and leading lady Tippi Hedren on publicity tour for 'The Birds' (1963), she sporting a fake smile. photo: courtesy A. HitchcockInterestingly, the Great Sex Abuse Outing (GSAO) has revealed almost no rock stars, despite their notoriety for on-the-road one-night stands and kinky sex. The only big name is rapper R. Kelly, who has for years been accused and more recently arrested, if not yet convicted, for child pornography and preying on and sequestering young women.
“I was raped once,” joked comedian Sarah Silverman, “but, as a Jewish girl, I had mixed feeling. He was a doctor.” “If the guy is alpha enough,” some groupies have explained, “it’s not really rape.”
Yes, this sounds extremely insensitive, if not sexist, but it makes sense insomuch many women simply do prefer alpha men, who, in turn, often get their way through charisma and charm. It is the desperate betas who generally stoop to entrapment and violence to obtain the sexual favors they bitterly resent being reserved for alphas.
Sorry, Alfred, as you well knew, Tippi was an alpha (see cineSOURCE's Hedren interview). And most alpha women give themselves only for love and to alpha men.
When Alfred finally got up the nerve to proposition Tippi, she leapt up and slammed the door in his face, destroying her own workplace but setting an example for Hollywood and all women. Other actresses had rejected the rampant casting-couch tradition, derived from the actress-as-prostitute worldview of earlier theater, but they generally did so quietly, by quitting the job or film in general.
As Hollywood’s It Girl, everyone could see what Hedren had suffered. In a fit of monstrous pique, Hitchcock exploited his contract with her to destroy her career. Despite being at the height of his power and fame, he was gradually shunned and never made another great film. After Hedren waited politely until he died (she didn't want to embarrass him in front of his family), she told all in “The Dark Side of Genius” (Spoto, 1983).
Hedren is the matriarch and patron saint of standing up to sexual impropriety, of rejecting sex abuse, although it took 'til just recently to deliver her due: notably the for-television film “The Girl” and the lessor "Hitchcock", despite being a movie with bigger stars (both 2012).
When Tippi’s granddaughter, Dakota Johnson—ironically, the star of one of the biggest soft-porn films in Hollywood history, “50 Shades of Grey” (2015)—was asked on NPR if she was ever propositioned or abused, she said flatly, “No!” Johnson undoubtedly learned a lot at her grandmother's knee.
In our age of helicopter parents, late-blooming adolescents and expanded sensitivities, do we empower people more with victim narratives and nanny states or self-defense classes, assertiveness training and commonsense counseling to avoid dubious meetings with disgusting characters?
Drawing the line with slammed doors, kicks to the groin, loud shrieks or calls to the police or lawyers is absolutely necessary but there remains the basic problem of sex, our desire for it, and the romantic culture that accompanies it.
It is a highly complex and interactive endeavor; it often transpires in private between very different but equally determined individuals; eliminating all pervs will be hard.
Paparazzi at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival shoot Woody Allen and his 35-year-younger wife and ex-step-daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. photo: courtesy Cannes FFWhich brings us to the two hardest cases in the annals of “When Flawed Men Make Awed Art”: Roman Polanski and Woody Allen.
Dylan Farrow, Allen’s adopted daughter, continues to accuse him of unspecified pederasty (probably digital penetration), according to her recent Vanity Fair article and other writings and interviews.
Alas, in all conflicts, but especially those transpiring in private, there are grey zones, while extraordinary claims generally require extraordinary proof.
Not really the Jewish "schlemiel" of his standup or films, Woody Allen was good at sports, became famous by 25 and is ranked one of the top comedians of all time. He also wrote and directed over 50, often iconic, movies, transitioning from silly comedies to one of America's most serious and romantic filmmakers, notably “Annie Hall” (1977) and “Manhattan" (1979).
Along the way, he was examined and certified "mensch" by many alpha women. He became the boyfriend of Diane Keaton (star of the aforementioned movies) and husband of Dylan's mother, Mia Farrow, herself an alpha girl, who married super-star singer and actor Frank Sinatra, when he was 50 and she was 21. That gave her notable access to the upper echelons of the entertainment industry. Two years later, she began starring in what has become dozens of films, including eleven by Allen.
“Manhattan” also featured the young ingenue Muriel Hemingway and concerns a 16-year-old dating a 44-year-old, which the obsessed Allen attempted in real life, when Hemingway came of majority two years later. She rejected him.
Rule of law requires we treat everyone equally. But, as with the speed of light or pressure of air, things shift at high speeds or altitudes. Indeed, the Allen-Farrow family became a claustrophobic hot house of a wealth and celebrity, fired to an extreme by romantic passion, artistic imagination and Mia's matriarchal acquisition of children, as well as not a few other personality flaws.
With sincerest apologies to Ms. Farrow, 32, whose “J’Accuse” is frightening and duly noted, taking down Allen at 82 on a single account—a la Keillor—is a tall order, given not only his contribution to civilization (well, not “Bananas”) but that children are notoriously unreliable on the witness stand. They have been shown to imagine monsters to displace more immediate threats (see McMartin Preschool Case), a possibility suggested by authorities first examining the seven-year-old Dylan.
This point was also made by Dylan's brother, Moses Farrow, 39, a marriage and family therapist, as it happens, who believes Allen is innocent of sex abuse, while he himself experienced his mother's physical and emotional abuse (see NY Times article).
Yet another sibling, Ronan Farrow—there are 14 in all, four blood-related, ten adopted, and only Ronan biologically Allen's (although Mia has hinted he might be from a last tryst with Sinatra)—helped break the Weinstein case, in his November, 2017, New Yorker article, AND shed light on Dylan's accusations.
"I had worked hard to distance myself from my painfully public family history and wanted my work to stand on its own," Ronan, 30, wrote in The Hollywood Reporter (2016). "So I had avoided commenting on my sister's allegations for years and, when cornered, cultivated distance." But, "I believe my sister."
According to Moses Farrow, however, Dylan didn't flee Allen, as might be expected if he was abusing her, while Mia, in turn, could be very domineering, hitting Moses and forcing him to follow rehearsed "scripts." That technique could have been applied to Dylan, especially as Mia entered a vicious breakup and custody battle with Allen, involving lots of lawyers and court appearances.
On top of all this, Allen’s career survived what triggered his divorce from Mia: his sexual relationship with another one of her children, his own step-daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, starting when she was around 22. Legally married seven years later—because they were not blood related (making it not incest, technically speaking), they adopted two children, in keeping with their family tradition. The biggest Hollywood scandal of the '90s, if not the twentieth century—Fatty Arbuckle be damned, the Farrow-Allen family drama is beyond anything imaginable by Shakespeare and probably decipherable only by someone like, well, Roman Polanski.
Allen has been mostly re-accepted by New York, where he lives, and Hollywood, although many revile him and, with the #MeToo movement, an increasing number of actresses and actors vow they'll never work with him or are donating salaries from acting in one of his less-than-well-received, recent films to Time's Up or other charities.
Nevertheless, even though he destroyed his previous family, a stable marriage with children, which Woody and Soon-Yi appear to have (as far as I can see, through the cipher that is celebrity culture), is the main object of the romantic project and eventually trumps almost all, as Shakespeare emphasized.
The newly married Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, Los Angeles, 1968, one year before her tragic murder by the Manson Family. photo: unknownWhile Allen’s alleged crime involves one girl and Connecticut authorities elected not to prosecute (to avoid traumatizing Dylan, they now claim), Roman Polanski was famously fixated on young women AND was charged with drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13-year-old Los Angeles girl, in 1977. Since then, he has been accused of underage rape by five more women, including one who was ten (see article). His current wife, actress Emmanuelle Seigner, was 19 when they met—him: 52.
BUT, yet again, there are a few complexities. Aside from the fact that Polanski, now 84, created important, aggressive films, like “Rosemary’s Baby” (1969)—coincidentally starring Mia Farrow AND concerning her character being drugged and raped by Satanists (no less!)—he spent his adolescence in the Holocaust, is very short and remained boyish-looking, even as an old man.
Add to this an even odder constellation of facts: the Manson Family murdered Polanski's pregnant new wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969; some LA papers claimed he was palling around with Manson (a fabrication); the LA judge in the rape case dangled a plea deal for his 42 days time served but then switched it to 50 years; and a movie-career-obsessed mom left her daughter alone at a compromising time and place.
Not to blame the victim but it contributes to the complex farrago of celebrity, suffering, art, ambition and ethics, suggesting some understanding beyond that for an average serial rapist. Still under indictment, Polanski is unable to enter the US and didn't attend the 2002 Academy Awards when his film, “The Pianist”, about a skeletal Jewish pianist barely surviving the annihilation of Warsaw, took Best Actor for Adrien Brody and Best Director for him.
Felonies must be prosecuted. But is there any balancing social value in Polanski’s “Knife in the Water” (1962), a thriller about a powerful woman, her rich husband, a sexy hitchhiker and their weekend on a boat (set in communist Poland, no less); or “Repulsion” (1965), a rare horror film starring a woman (Catharine Denueve), with a story suggesting she endured sex abuse; or "Chinatown" (1974), nominated for a whopping 11 Oscars (taking only one: screenplay), which graphically exposed a Los Angeles riddled with corruption, replete with incest?
Yes, we need way more women's stories about abuse, male domination and the complexities of romance, including the attraction of young women like Soon-Yi Previn and Emmanuelle Seigner to powerful, old artists. Thankfully, 2017 was a banner year for women directors, including "Wonder Woman” directed by Patty Jenkins, "Mudbound" by Dee Rees, "Raw" by Patty Jenkins and many more.
But we also need aggressive, romance-related art by men simply to know what they’re thinking, as Alfred indicated. As it happens, women are significantly more interested in love and marriage than men. And, if men back away from the trickier sides of those topics in the post-#MeToo era, it will negatively impact the romantic research of some women.
Women have long been great novelists, starting with Jane Austen two centuries ago, while the last century has seen fantastic increases in their cultural output, from painting to performance, film and music.
Given that women play musical instruments as well as men, why the disproportionate number of male musicians? Sheer chauvinism or spite (since women invented music, according one Amazonian tribe, and men had to steal it)? Or is there an inherent need for men to perform, to act out, to impress the romantic object?
Charles Darwin and his adored wife Emma for whom he withheld publication of the Theory of Evolution for three decades, to avoid irresponsibly disrupting her romanticism. photo: unknownThe little known secret of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is that it has a second part, “sexual selection,” which provides a scientific basis for romanticism. Despite direct contradictions with survival concerns, romance remains popular even in over-the-top patriarchies, like Afghanistan, or among modern millennials, who often prefer solely-sexual hookups to exposing their personal feelings.
In these gender and sex fraught times, what if the GSAO discourages healthy aspects of romantic and sexual communication? It could make romantic risk-taking more difficult, especially for beta men and women, perhaps dampening the birth rate, which would be troubling for developed societies, where it is already low.
Squeaky-clean sexual relations will require more police and surveillance, which empowers the patriarchy, although there will certainly be corresponding increases in matriarchal activitsm, social work and education, like self-defense training and strategies (for example, traveling in posses, as Brazilian women do during Carnival).
To be sure, Louis CK abused his power and normative human boundaries, even those of presumably-tough female comics. But to insure everyone lives entirely free from witnessing male masturbation, especially in urban or rural areas, would require rolling back our age of gratification AND adding a lot more police.
Reducing uninvited sexual attention, remarks or looks to zero could prove difficult, a cure worse than the disease. At any rate, a related worldview has already been tried: the "metrosexual."
Metrosexuality emerged in the '90s, as men attempted to incorporate the liberated woman's needs by hybriding heterosexuality and gay. It is typified by the beloved comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who eschewed blue humor, dressed nicely and liked to vacuum.
Alas, if metrosexuals were so popular among women, they would rule today, given the raw power of attraction and sexual selection. Meanwhile it was generally "Seinfeld"'s bad-boy character, Kramer, who got the girl.
Romantic culture is always cutting edge because it decides the next generation, both genetically and culturally.
No wonder the GSAO is inspiring some men, notably the not-famous, to make public their crimes and apologize, as Louis CK did—albeit ONLY AFTER his public shaming. Confessions alone can not exonerate or heal—that requires action—but we can commend it, especially since so many accused men are attempting to deny everything. And granting forgiveness empowers the heart.
We don't want to become more puritanical and patriarchal, even as we struggle to offset those qualities.
Famous for miming masturbation, Louis CK was outed for actually doing so in front of two female comics, to which he immediately admitted and apologized. photo: courtesy Louis CKIndeed, that is the gist of some comments coming from Europe, where French feminists fashioned their own version of this gender revolution, #BalanceTonPorc, “expose your pig.” More aggressive than #MeToo, as the name suggests, it also includes more female agency and tolerance of men, perhaps due to their long experience with AND love for libertine fathers, who have public mistresses, two families, etc.
One thing the GSAO will undoubtedly reduce is our use of the nude in painting, photography and film (save, perhaps, in France).
Although nudes were male gaze only until Freda Kahlo started painting self-portraits in the 1930s, they still provided critical cultural elements. Indeed, they were how we learned about our bodies, and those of others, which the classical Greeks saw as fundamental to truth, beauty and democracy (see cineSOURCE article).
While it inflates beauty myths and female self-judgment, when skewered hyper-male, the application of aesthetics to sexual selection and romance is universal—we do it ALL the time, as do ALL animals! Meanwhile, the ancient human endeavor of understanding our bodies has been subsumed by the world wide web’s near-universal provisioning of porn.
While the GSAO is already proving important to female relief and agency, will it be balanced? Will we tolerate some peccadilloes, adventures and wild sex, which women only recently established that they were equally interested in as men?
Will women be making up the assertiveness differential by initiating sex, breaking separation barriers, embarking on long distance quests?
No matter how much we encourage girls to play sports and be more aggressive, boys still make up a great majority of risk-takers, due to sheer stupidity, first of all, but also higher testosterone levels and normative drives to romantic acting out, either to impress a specific female or advance the romantic project, in general.
The work place is one of the few places to strut your stuff, to meet like-minded members of the preferred gender, up close and personal, not digitized or in the distance, street or club, which is intimidating for betas.
Will the GSAO's vast calling out of male domination, perversion and crime, and the associated firing, exiling, and incarceration, accelerate the evolution of art, culture and romance, as well as women’s rights?
Surely, we can find a functional romantic worldview that insures female autonomy and pleasure without reducing us to legalese in our relations or patriarchy in our enforcement. Eventually, we will be able to delineate the difference between forgivable affronts and those requiring vigorous enforcement, healthy and hurtful advances, and the future and the past of our romantic project.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Jan 17, 2018 - 06:49 AM
by Doniphan Blair
Ashley Judd, one of the first actresses to speak on the record about Harvey Weinstein's attacks for the breaking NY Times story on October 5, 2017. photo: courtesy A. Judd coaster these days, hundreds of powerful men and a few women brought low by what will be called something like the “great sex abuse outing of 2017-18” (or ‘19, or ’20, or however long it takes).
Multitudes of women and some men, including this author (attempted rape, age twelve), have been injured, many severely. By prosecuting and/or publicizing sexual violence, intimidation and the myriad other ugliness blemishing human relations for generations, we are finally offering some relief and remedy.
The Harvey Weinstein Affair exploded like a social neutron bomb, despite recent revelations about Trump, O’Reilly, Ailes, Cosby, et al, because it was the liberal media finally exposing itself to itself. Weinstein was a central Hollywood figure whose predatory debauch was long concealed by people privileged to report or make art about such things, like pederasty among Catholic clergy.
By rights then, it fell to Hollywood’s women, like the brave Ashley Judd and others, to come out of the closet, force a profession-wide truth telling and take on the patriarchy itself—on top of exposing the perps and their bizarre behavior.
Who thought semi-public masturbation could be so much fun? Alas, it often is to beta men, who find themselves in positions of power over alpha women but fear to touch.
By making public what has been kept private for millennia, the #MeToo movement is a revolution in social mores, especially if it trickles down to beta women.
Fully acknowledging this, 300 Hollywood women, calling themselves Time’s Up, ran the “Dear Sisters” ad in various venues on January first. It was a belated response to the open letter expressing solidarity sent in November by 700,000 female farm workers. Very vulnerable to abuse, along with after-hours janitors and other laborers, they have been organizing for years, offering self-defense classes and legal assistance.
Time’s Up also formed a legal defense fund, $13 million and rapidly rising, and started lobbying for legislation against companies aiding or abetting abuse.
Dressed in black, Nicole Kidman takes the first award at the 2018 Golden Globes for HBO's 'Big Little Lies''. photo: courtesy USA Today At January 7th's Golden Globes there was almost 100% participation—but what black gowns they were! While professions of solidarity and Oprah-worship were a bit overwrought, there were strong remarks, like MC Seth Meyers’s opening joke, “Good evening ladies and REMAINING gentlemen,” or about the tragedy of Recy Taylor, an African-American Alabama woman kidnapped by six white guys and raped, powerfully told by Oprah herself.
These are fantastic and fantastically-fast developments, given it’s been only three months since the Weinstein expose in The New York Times (10/3/2017).
BUT as things get faster and more furious, and many more men, hopefully (especially by the "remaining gentlemen" hoping to benefit from the upheaval), are exposed and get their just desserts, tell me this:
Is there a difference between Weinstein, Alfred Hitchcock and Garrison Keillor?
Is there a difference between a grotesque-behaving and -looking sex fiend accused of rape, who happened to have an eye for cinema, and a sexually-frustrated artist, who spilled his romantic guts film by film, and a more modest but still-talented writer, humorist and singer, who may have groped but also advocated for literate romance, Americana music, slightly off-key singing and a liberal Middle America?
Should Keillor’s cultural activism and four-decade career careen down the toilet solely from a single, as-yet-unpublished report, which probably doesn’t include rape?
To be sure, there must be more than his hand slipping down a woman’s back—accidentally, as Keillor claims. If the report reveals long-term, serial groping, Minnesota Public Radio’s reaction would be mandatory in these full-frontal exposure times. But “there are no similar allegations involving other staff," the station said.
Will we defeat patriarchy by becoming more exacting and unforgiving than it? Do we risk diminishing egregious atrocities by fixating on frictions within the normative bounds of mature, romantic and playful people?
Garrison Keillor, creator and former host of Prairie Home Companion, in happier times, summer of 2017, two months before the GSAO. photo: courtesy Twin Cities.comRidley Scott erased Kevin Spacey and reshot frantically with Christopher Plummer to release ”All The Money In The World” with a clean protagonist in time for the holidays. But Spacey, the lubricious, corrupt president on the hit-TV show "House of Cards" (2013-18), now in its last season, largely on his account, is an extreme case. He barely apologized for raping an underage boy and simultaneously came out as gay, a grotesque sympathy play.
Then there’s the symbolic chauvinism. The recent attempt to banish “Theresa Dreaming” (1938), Balthus’s painting of a young woman, legs akimbo, underwear exposed, led by a woman who works on Wall Street with 10,000 signed supporters, was rejected by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
How about the Museum of Modern Art’s “Ladies of Avignon” by Picasso, a notorious misogynist, featuring five naked women, two objectified as ANIMALS?!? Or Van Gogh’s fantastically popular and romantic “Starry Night”, even though sending a piece of your ear to a woman would obviously be traumatizing—you know what I mean, Vince!?! Or de Kooning’s aggressively-abstract and rather ugly “Women” series, or other distorted male views of romantic objects?
Gender tensions have been with us since the Garden of Eden, but hardly because of a god's decree. Life partners cannot help but antagonize “the genius” on occasion, by demanding actual work, say, or that he abide his lofty ideals.
Tolstoy’s wife rejected the elderly “great man,” author of two of Western Civilization’s top romantic novels and an inspiration to Gandhi (himself a partaker of suspicious bed-sharing with young women), because his ethical claims were contradicted by the smutty stories she read in his diary, a half-a-century earlier.
Even if male artists were abusive—and many, many were AND remain, art pertains to the more female, emotional and mystical side of society, and their aggressive insights might be essential to our culture's ability to restrain the more masculine business, political and military forces.
Keillor relished describing sexy women in his “Guy Noir” story series, suggesting the horndog interests of a self-described “man with a face for radio.” But he was ALSO quoting film noir, a muscular, masculine genre still very popular today, 75 years after it helped us not only heal from Nazism, by examining evil people up close, but liberate women to follow their wilder feelings.
Pablo Picasso's 'Ladies of Avignon' remains popular with women at NY's Museum of Modern Art, despite its objectification of five naked women. photo: D. BlairShe was referring to Charlie Rose, the liberal media icon she’s known of for decades and who is accused of more outrageous behavior than Keillor—semi-public nudity, aggressive groping and lewd phone calls (which took me ten minutes to explain to her).
My mother is sympathetic to male “needs.” She would tell my father, “It’s OK, you can look at women.” In regards to recent accusations against Thomas Roma, a photography teacher at Columbia University, where she worked and went to school, she said: “What could he do? Those college girls are so attractive.”
Of course, rapists, abusers and entrappers must be outed and penalized. Weinstein himself should be tarred and feathered by a mob in medieval dress storming his Hollywood hills hideout, a fitting denouement to one of cinema’s darkest chapters.
But then the witch hunting and extreme sensitivity should shift to a normative outing, reporting and prosecuting as well as a unique rejiggering of gendered relations.
This is a radical time in human history when we can shift the private-public balance, review what happens to women, understand their needs and goals, and that of matriarchy in general. As such, we are also obliged to search for a functional romantic culture that could satisfy more women as well as men and gender nonconforming.
Many people are terribly lonely in today's atomized, diversified and over-computerized world, notably the unattractive, the poor, the outcast, the alienated. Visually-beta women go through entire lives without a single catcall, making the #MeToo movement largely about privileged alphas. It is hard enough to find and express love without overreaction, intolerance and a vicious circle of attacks, as most of us know from our own relationships.
The increased critique of men in the media, social media and face to face for major crimes has been accompanied by that for minor infractions, like over-sexualized gaze—BOTH the pain and the privilege of physically-alpha women—or acting rude.
Aziz Ansari, the world-famous comedian and television star ("Parks and Recreation", 2009-15, "Master of None", 2015-) but also "relationship expert," after he authored "Modern Romance: An Investigation" (2015), apparently subjected a photographer called "Grace," by the writer Katie Way, to "the worst night of her life" (see Way's article on the interestingly-named Babe site). Ansari's crimes: not offering her red wine and not obtaining a fully-articulated verbal consent to sex.
Comedian and television star Aziz Ansari, recently accused of being ungallant, on the cover of his book-long essay, 'Modern Romance' (2015). photo: courtesy A. AnsariWhat Hitchcock did to Tippi Hedren was deplorable, disgusting, demonic, even. But unlike Weinstein—who doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body, Alfred was a relationship dramatizer, a romantic visionary, a proto-feminist, even.
Yes, he was also an alienated, spooky soul who teased women and tortured his stars—Kim Novak, by dunking her repeatedly in the San Francisco Bay for “Vertigo” (1958), Hedren, by subjecting her to a week’s shoot pelted with live birds.
As an artist, however, Hitchcock placed women at the center of his films, morally and actively as well as visually and narratively, often having them catch or kill the bad guy (see cineSOURCE article rating his films along feminist lines: B average).
While “Vertigo” is NOT one of those matrifocal films, it has come to be considered the greatest film ever made (international critic consensus, 2012 on) because it is about a man seducing a woman into acting out his romantic fantasy. As such, it stands in for cinema itself as well as male fixations. It certainly exposes the latter for all to see, including actresses working for Hitchcock.
What Tippi endured was horrendous, horrific, criminal. Narrative-wise, however, it was almost inevitable, given the high noon duel between a powerful nerd, who lived his entire adult life in a candy store but was afraid to touch (while suaver directors routinely had affairs with their lead actresses), and the woman he discovered, educated and delivered to stardom and high art.
“What could be more romantic?” he must have wondered.
Hitchcock and Hedren achieved masterful levels of horror, humor AND romance in their first film together, “The Birds” (1963), along with a foreboding ecological forecast, but their second, “Marnie” (1964), was flawed— as a movie, not a window into Alfred. After reading the script, Hedren should have raced to her lawyers, if not the police.
“Marnie” follows a high-class, female thief busted by the titillated owner of the company she just robbed. Played by Sean Connery, the first James Bond and "the sexiest man alive," at that time, he proceeds to blackmail her into marrying him. On their honeymoon, he rapes her—protagonist-director conflation, anyone?
Alfred Hitchcock and leading lady Tippi Hedren on publicity tour for 'The Birds' (1963), she sporting a fake smile. photo: courtesy A. Hitchcock“I was raped once,” joked comedian Sarah Silverman, “but, as a Jewish girl, I had mixed feeling. He was a doctor.” “If the guy is alpha enough,” some groupies have explained, “it’s not really rape.”
Yes, this sounds extremely insensitive, if not sexist, but it makes sense insomuch many women simply do prefer alpha men, who, in turn, often get their way through charisma and charm. It is the desperate betas who generally stoop to entrapment and violence to obtain the sexual favors they bitterly resent being reserved for alphas.
Sorry, Alfred, as you well knew, Tippi was an alpha (see cineSOURCE's Hedren interview). And most alpha women give themselves only for love and to alpha men.
When Alfred finally got up the nerve to proposition Tippi, she leapt up and slammed the door in his face, destroying her own workplace but setting an example for Hollywood and all women. Other actresses had rejected the rampant casting-couch tradition, derived from the actress-as-prostitute worldview of earlier theater, but they generally did so quietly, by quitting the job or film in general.
As Hollywood’s It Girl, everyone could see what Hedren had suffered. In a fit of monstrous pique, Hitchcock exploited his contract with her to destroy her career. Despite being at the height of his power and fame, he was gradually shunned and never made another great film. After Hedren waited politely until he died (she didn't want to embarrass him in front of his family), she told all in “The Dark Side of Genius” (Spoto, 1983).
Hedren is the matriarch and patron saint of standing up to sexual impropriety, of rejecting sex abuse, although it took 'til just recently to deliver her due: notably the for-television film “The Girl” and the lessor "Hitchcock", despite being a movie with bigger stars (both 2012).
When Tippi’s granddaughter, Dakota Johnson—ironically, the star of one of the biggest soft-porn films in Hollywood history, “50 Shades of Grey” (2015)—was asked on NPR if she was ever propositioned or abused, she said flatly, “No!” Johnson undoubtedly learned a lot at her grandmother's knee.
In our age of helicopter parents, late-blooming adolescents and expanded sensitivities, do we empower people more with victim narratives and nanny states or self-defense classes, assertiveness training and commonsense counseling to avoid dubious meetings with disgusting characters?
Drawing the line with slammed doors, kicks to the groin, loud shrieks or calls to the police or lawyers is absolutely necessary but there remains the basic problem of sex, our desire for it, and the romantic culture that accompanies it.
It is a highly complex and interactive endeavor; it often transpires in private between very different but equally determined individuals; eliminating all pervs will be hard.
Paparazzi at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival shoot Woody Allen and his 35-year-younger wife and ex-step-daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. photo: courtesy Cannes FFDylan Farrow, Allen’s adopted daughter, continues to accuse him of unspecified pederasty (probably digital penetration), according to her recent Vanity Fair article and other writings and interviews.
Alas, in all conflicts, but especially those transpiring in private, there are grey zones, while extraordinary claims generally require extraordinary proof.
Not really the Jewish "schlemiel" of his standup or films, Woody Allen was good at sports, became famous by 25 and is ranked one of the top comedians of all time. He also wrote and directed over 50, often iconic, movies, transitioning from silly comedies to one of America's most serious and romantic filmmakers, notably “Annie Hall” (1977) and “Manhattan" (1979).
Along the way, he was examined and certified "mensch" by many alpha women. He became the boyfriend of Diane Keaton (star of the aforementioned movies) and husband of Dylan's mother, Mia Farrow, herself an alpha girl, who married super-star singer and actor Frank Sinatra, when he was 50 and she was 21. That gave her notable access to the upper echelons of the entertainment industry. Two years later, she began starring in what has become dozens of films, including eleven by Allen.
“Manhattan” also featured the young ingenue Muriel Hemingway and concerns a 16-year-old dating a 44-year-old, which the obsessed Allen attempted in real life, when Hemingway came of majority two years later. She rejected him.
Rule of law requires we treat everyone equally. But, as with the speed of light or pressure of air, things shift at high speeds or altitudes. Indeed, the Allen-Farrow family became a claustrophobic hot house of a wealth and celebrity, fired to an extreme by romantic passion, artistic imagination and Mia's matriarchal acquisition of children, as well as not a few other personality flaws.
With sincerest apologies to Ms. Farrow, 32, whose “J’Accuse” is frightening and duly noted, taking down Allen at 82 on a single account—a la Keillor—is a tall order, given not only his contribution to civilization (well, not “Bananas”) but that children are notoriously unreliable on the witness stand. They have been shown to imagine monsters to displace more immediate threats (see McMartin Preschool Case), a possibility suggested by authorities first examining the seven-year-old Dylan.
This point was also made by Dylan's brother, Moses Farrow, 39, a marriage and family therapist, as it happens, who believes Allen is innocent of sex abuse, while he himself experienced his mother's physical and emotional abuse (see NY Times article).
Yet another sibling, Ronan Farrow—there are 14 in all, four blood-related, ten adopted, and only Ronan biologically Allen's (although Mia has hinted he might be from a last tryst with Sinatra)—helped break the Weinstein case, in his November, 2017, New Yorker article, AND shed light on Dylan's accusations.
"I had worked hard to distance myself from my painfully public family history and wanted my work to stand on its own," Ronan, 30, wrote in The Hollywood Reporter (2016). "So I had avoided commenting on my sister's allegations for years and, when cornered, cultivated distance." But, "I believe my sister."
According to Moses Farrow, however, Dylan didn't flee Allen, as might be expected if he was abusing her, while Mia, in turn, could be very domineering, hitting Moses and forcing him to follow rehearsed "scripts." That technique could have been applied to Dylan, especially as Mia entered a vicious breakup and custody battle with Allen, involving lots of lawyers and court appearances.
On top of all this, Allen’s career survived what triggered his divorce from Mia: his sexual relationship with another one of her children, his own step-daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, starting when she was around 22. Legally married seven years later—because they were not blood related (making it not incest, technically speaking), they adopted two children, in keeping with their family tradition. The biggest Hollywood scandal of the '90s, if not the twentieth century—Fatty Arbuckle be damned, the Farrow-Allen family drama is beyond anything imaginable by Shakespeare and probably decipherable only by someone like, well, Roman Polanski.
Allen has been mostly re-accepted by New York, where he lives, and Hollywood, although many revile him and, with the #MeToo movement, an increasing number of actresses and actors vow they'll never work with him or are donating salaries from acting in one of his less-than-well-received, recent films to Time's Up or other charities.
Nevertheless, even though he destroyed his previous family, a stable marriage with children, which Woody and Soon-Yi appear to have (as far as I can see, through the cipher that is celebrity culture), is the main object of the romantic project and eventually trumps almost all, as Shakespeare emphasized.
The newly married Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, Los Angeles, 1968, one year before her tragic murder by the Manson Family. photo: unknownBUT, yet again, there are a few complexities. Aside from the fact that Polanski, now 84, created important, aggressive films, like “Rosemary’s Baby” (1969)—coincidentally starring Mia Farrow AND concerning her character being drugged and raped by Satanists (no less!)—he spent his adolescence in the Holocaust, is very short and remained boyish-looking, even as an old man.
Add to this an even odder constellation of facts: the Manson Family murdered Polanski's pregnant new wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969; some LA papers claimed he was palling around with Manson (a fabrication); the LA judge in the rape case dangled a plea deal for his 42 days time served but then switched it to 50 years; and a movie-career-obsessed mom left her daughter alone at a compromising time and place.
Not to blame the victim but it contributes to the complex farrago of celebrity, suffering, art, ambition and ethics, suggesting some understanding beyond that for an average serial rapist. Still under indictment, Polanski is unable to enter the US and didn't attend the 2002 Academy Awards when his film, “The Pianist”, about a skeletal Jewish pianist barely surviving the annihilation of Warsaw, took Best Actor for Adrien Brody and Best Director for him.
Felonies must be prosecuted. But is there any balancing social value in Polanski’s “Knife in the Water” (1962), a thriller about a powerful woman, her rich husband, a sexy hitchhiker and their weekend on a boat (set in communist Poland, no less); or “Repulsion” (1965), a rare horror film starring a woman (Catharine Denueve), with a story suggesting she endured sex abuse; or "Chinatown" (1974), nominated for a whopping 11 Oscars (taking only one: screenplay), which graphically exposed a Los Angeles riddled with corruption, replete with incest?
Yes, we need way more women's stories about abuse, male domination and the complexities of romance, including the attraction of young women like Soon-Yi Previn and Emmanuelle Seigner to powerful, old artists. Thankfully, 2017 was a banner year for women directors, including "Wonder Woman” directed by Patty Jenkins, "Mudbound" by Dee Rees, "Raw" by Patty Jenkins and many more.
But we also need aggressive, romance-related art by men simply to know what they’re thinking, as Alfred indicated. As it happens, women are significantly more interested in love and marriage than men. And, if men back away from the trickier sides of those topics in the post-#MeToo era, it will negatively impact the romantic research of some women.
Women have long been great novelists, starting with Jane Austen two centuries ago, while the last century has seen fantastic increases in their cultural output, from painting to performance, film and music.
Given that women play musical instruments as well as men, why the disproportionate number of male musicians? Sheer chauvinism or spite (since women invented music, according one Amazonian tribe, and men had to steal it)? Or is there an inherent need for men to perform, to act out, to impress the romantic object?
Charles Darwin and his adored wife Emma for whom he withheld publication of the Theory of Evolution for three decades, to avoid irresponsibly disrupting her romanticism. photo: unknownIn these gender and sex fraught times, what if the GSAO discourages healthy aspects of romantic and sexual communication? It could make romantic risk-taking more difficult, especially for beta men and women, perhaps dampening the birth rate, which would be troubling for developed societies, where it is already low.
Squeaky-clean sexual relations will require more police and surveillance, which empowers the patriarchy, although there will certainly be corresponding increases in matriarchal activitsm, social work and education, like self-defense training and strategies (for example, traveling in posses, as Brazilian women do during Carnival).
To be sure, Louis CK abused his power and normative human boundaries, even those of presumably-tough female comics. But to insure everyone lives entirely free from witnessing male masturbation, especially in urban or rural areas, would require rolling back our age of gratification AND adding a lot more police.
Reducing uninvited sexual attention, remarks or looks to zero could prove difficult, a cure worse than the disease. At any rate, a related worldview has already been tried: the "metrosexual."
Metrosexuality emerged in the '90s, as men attempted to incorporate the liberated woman's needs by hybriding heterosexuality and gay. It is typified by the beloved comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who eschewed blue humor, dressed nicely and liked to vacuum.
Alas, if metrosexuals were so popular among women, they would rule today, given the raw power of attraction and sexual selection. Meanwhile it was generally "Seinfeld"'s bad-boy character, Kramer, who got the girl.
Romantic culture is always cutting edge because it decides the next generation, both genetically and culturally.
No wonder the GSAO is inspiring some men, notably the not-famous, to make public their crimes and apologize, as Louis CK did—albeit ONLY AFTER his public shaming. Confessions alone can not exonerate or heal—that requires action—but we can commend it, especially since so many accused men are attempting to deny everything. And granting forgiveness empowers the heart.
We don't want to become more puritanical and patriarchal, even as we struggle to offset those qualities.
Famous for miming masturbation, Louis CK was outed for actually doing so in front of two female comics, to which he immediately admitted and apologized. photo: courtesy Louis CKOne thing the GSAO will undoubtedly reduce is our use of the nude in painting, photography and film (save, perhaps, in France).
Although nudes were male gaze only until Freda Kahlo started painting self-portraits in the 1930s, they still provided critical cultural elements. Indeed, they were how we learned about our bodies, and those of others, which the classical Greeks saw as fundamental to truth, beauty and democracy (see cineSOURCE article).
While it inflates beauty myths and female self-judgment, when skewered hyper-male, the application of aesthetics to sexual selection and romance is universal—we do it ALL the time, as do ALL animals! Meanwhile, the ancient human endeavor of understanding our bodies has been subsumed by the world wide web’s near-universal provisioning of porn.
While the GSAO is already proving important to female relief and agency, will it be balanced? Will we tolerate some peccadilloes, adventures and wild sex, which women only recently established that they were equally interested in as men?
Will women be making up the assertiveness differential by initiating sex, breaking separation barriers, embarking on long distance quests?
No matter how much we encourage girls to play sports and be more aggressive, boys still make up a great majority of risk-takers, due to sheer stupidity, first of all, but also higher testosterone levels and normative drives to romantic acting out, either to impress a specific female or advance the romantic project, in general.
The work place is one of the few places to strut your stuff, to meet like-minded members of the preferred gender, up close and personal, not digitized or in the distance, street or club, which is intimidating for betas.
Will the GSAO's vast calling out of male domination, perversion and crime, and the associated firing, exiling, and incarceration, accelerate the evolution of art, culture and romance, as well as women’s rights?
Surely, we can find a functional romantic worldview that insures female autonomy and pleasure without reducing us to legalese in our relations or patriarchy in our enforcement. Eventually, we will be able to delineate the difference between forgivable affronts and those requiring vigorous enforcement, healthy and hurtful advances, and the future and the past of our romantic project.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Jan 17, 2018 - 06:49 AM
