In his Sunday New York Times’ piece “The Unexamined Male Libido,” writer Stephen Marche offers this revelatory thought: “Men arrive at this moment of reckoning (about sexual harassment) woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience.”
Translation: Men live with women. Men sleep with women. Men father women’s children. But they don’t know them. ...
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Is there any man left in America who hasn’t groped, assaulted or raped some girl/boy/woman?
From Capitol Hill to Hollywood, they’re dropping like proverbial flies. The latest to drop – Democratic Sen. Al Franken, who apologized – awkwardly to say the least – for groping a woman in 2006.
Question: What is the difference between a Democratic assaulter and a Republican? No, it’s not a setup for a joke. ...
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Among the questions to emerge from the Harvey Weinstein scandal is one that human beings of conscience have been grappling with forever: Is it ethical to support the work of a scoundrel?
At first glance, the answer would appear to be simple: Art transcends biography. You wouldn’t rebuff a child because his father was a murderer, would you? So why hate the brainchild of a Weinstein or a Woody Allen – who, tellingly cautioned about a “witch hunt” against Weinstein – or a Mel Gibson or any other artist/athlete accused of heinous behavior?
But it’s more complex than that, isn’t it? ...
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I once had a movie producer kiss me on the neck.
How’s that for an opening sentence? Pretty good, huh? Got your attention, right?
It was at the end of an interview when, shaking my hand goodbye, he suddenly lurched forward and kissed me on the neck. (It may have been more of a bite than a kiss, but I don’t actually remember and don’t want to overstate what was a pretty bizarre sendoff.)
Afterward, the embarrassed publicist apologized, concerned that I would be writing about this. But I was a young journalist and had, as a woman, been raised to soldier on. So I said, wrote and did nothing about this. And I hadn’t thought about it until Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment of, well, just about every woman on the planet opened the floodgates of ew-ness. ...
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A shout-out to Frank Bruni of The New York Times for a truly terrific column about President Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin and the bromance of the century (although French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may yet give them a run for their money).
Brilliant though the column is in comparing Pump (Putin-Trump) to the great love stories (“Romeo and Juliet,” “Casablanca”), Bruni missed one, “Brokeback Mountain.” When the haunting movie of Annie Proulx’s sparely beautiful story came out in 2005, much was made of the gay love story. ...
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Much has been made about how Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” is a feminist reimagining of a 1971 Clint Eastwood movie that was itself an adaptation of Thomas P. Cullinan’s Southern Gothic novel, “A Painted Devil.” But the well-crafted remake turns out to be less about feminism and the female perspective than about the sacrifice of the individual – male or female – to the survival of the group. ...
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Years ago, I worked with a woman who was a very good writer. I remember one piece in particular, a column about a woman dying on the streets of Manhattan attended by strangers who belied the image of the cold-hearted New Yorker. It was a terrific piece of writing and I told this colleague as much. She snorted and shot me a look that suggested that and $1 would get her a cup of coffee. I took no offense. Her defining quality was a bitter frustration that stemmed from her being the mistress of one of the company’s higher-ups. Ironically, though her situation had gotten her foot in the door, it had also locked her into a clerical job for fear of the appearance of favoritism that the staff writing job she coveted would’ve surely provoked.
Apart from the clerical job, all her sleeping her way to the middle had really earned her was the contempt and merciless gossip of the women she worked with. I being a newbie and of a different temperament didn’t hate her. But I pitied her, which was perhaps far worse. ...
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