I confess I have very complex and conflicted feelings about #MeToo’s virtual movement.
Nation
“Gigi” in a Gay-Friendly Age
Every year produces a gay sensation, and you can tell a lot about the preoccupations of the day from the story it tells. The current candidate, on track to be a Best Picture nominee, is Call Me By Your Name, a gushy–or, if you prefer, alluring–tale of lust between a 17-year-old boy and a man in his mid 20s.
Multiculturalism Versus Identity Politics
Multiculturalism preceded identity politics and has become identified with it. I think it important to distinguish between the two, even oppose them.
The Shape of Things to Come
There are no excuses…forced, non-negotiated sexual encounters are repugnant. Promises of career advancement or threats of career derailment used as a weapon in a war of desire, are repugnant. All such behaviors are repugnant. What about lesser transgressions?
With Reservation
Wild River, recently available on pay-per-view, centers around the gang rape-murder of a young Native American woman on a Wyoming reservation.
Fox and Foes
Imagine that you are writing a book which opens with your central character, “a powerful, 6’2″, finely dressed man of proud stature and handsome face,” leaping “like a lion” from a bus to save a woman from two knife-wielding thugs. Imagine that, within the next page, you have further described your protagonist as “a musician, and artist… quick in mind and step… (with) an unusual grace of movement… magnetic charm,” and a “creamy” skinned Afro-American, bearing a “noteworthy resemblance” to Clark Gable.
Imagine that your book is a first-person narrative, whose central character is describing himself.
General Kelly’s Devolution
General Kelly is back in the news. He yesterday announced that he has no reason to apologize to Congresswoman Wilson, also that Robert E, Lee was a hero, since “It was always loyalty to state first back in those days.” This last pronouncement would have startled both the 115, 000 Southern whites who enlisted in the Union Army and their 180,000 or so black comrades, the vast majority of them southern, who also bore arms for the United States.
Notes From the Sisterarchy
Post-Weinstein Facebook posts by Laurie Stone…
Feasting on a Fiend
And so, the monster that is Harvey Weinstein has been banished, and soon, perhaps, he will be incarcerated. Troops of celebrities have rushed to condemn him, some claiming ignorance about his m.o. and nearly all expressing horror. It’s been a long time since the word disgusting was used by so many men who, if the tropes of pornography are to be believed, harbor fantasies very close to what Weinstein acted upon. I suspect that the conflict between what men and women feel sexually (which isn’t a single thing) and what we feel politically (which is) reflects a climate of anxiety amplified by social media and by newspapers and TV shows that have everything to gain from scandalizing. The result has been a two-edged sword. There’s a real struggle against sexual oppression and a more ambiguous fostering of uneasiness about sex that is potentially as oppressive as the situation it is meant to address.
Eminen and Trump: Fratricide in the White Imagination
The figure of Slim Shady haunts the moldering corridors of the Midwest. In every town you’ll meet them–tall, pale young men in hoodies on the margins of the mainstream economy. They roam the busted landscape of blue-collar America, enacting private sagas of self-destruction in search of some lost myth of unsullied masculinity.