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Woody Allen is just the beginning: Why we can’t hide from the truth anymore
Roxane Gay
I’m sick of hearing, thinking and talking about Woody Allen. Nonetheless, the allegations against him continue to capture our national attention because so much of the story is strange and sordid. These are the lives of celebrities and their children, so we feel perfectly entitled to sort through details and offer up our own pieces of evidence, court transcripts, interviews, rumors and so on, as if we are playing a national game of Clue.
For many people, this week has been difficult and triggering. Something about this case is reaching people somewhere deep, probably because we identify, so strongly, with one party or another. We are earnest. We are righteous.
Dylan Farrow wrote her letter (and Nicholas Kristof used his New York Times column) to share her testimony with a broad audience. It stands to reason that Woody Allen would have some kind of response and that the New York Times would feel obligated to publish that response.
Despite where I stand, I do recognize that Woody Allen was trapped between a rock and a hard place when it came to how, if at all, he should respond. But his own letter, published by the Times on Friday, is erratic and desperately ill advised, no matter how you feel about this situation.
At no point in the letter does Allen demonstrate genuine concern for Dylan. There is a telling callousness in the way he chooses to defend himself, offering up various self-serving pieces of evidence, many of which have been convincingly rebutted elsewhere. It’s hard not to think, “This makes him look even worse.” Though Allen is purportedly declaring his innocence, he takes exquisite care in making his feelings about Mia Farrow clear. The acrimony between the ex-lovers has clearly not tempered with time.
Allen’s desire to speak in his own defense is understandable. And there was no right way to respond, because the situation is so fraught. There were, however, less vindictive, less narcissistic ways of responding. There were ways of responding that might take Dylan Farrow’s feelings into account, and that might respect her emotional well-being.
But in truth, I don’t have the energy to pore through Allen’s letter, line by line, pointing out everything that is troubling, petty, or downright sleazy. Plenty of people will be doing that, and how.
I have realized, though, that we’re avoiding a more difficult conversation by focusing so intently on the sensational details of this Woody Allen travesty. When the dust settles, we are going to have to consider the choices we are willing to make when we learn just how human those we admire actually are.
How do we respond when we learn that someone capable of creating great art is also capable of wrongdoing? There has been talk of boycotting Woody Allen, of no longer contributing to any financial success or critical acclaim he might reap from his work. Is a boycott enough of a stand? What else might be required of us? And Woody Allen is but one man. Now that the court of public opinion has addressed Woody Allen, we must, I suppose, excavate the misdeeds of every artist who has captured our imagination.
Writing for the Times of London, David Aaronovitch notes that, “Caravaggio was a predatory pederast.” He also tells us Carl Orff was a Nazi. Wagner was anti-Semitic. If we look too closely at many historical figures, we won’t like what we see. At Gawker, Tom Scocca pointedly reminded us that Bill Cosby was accused of multiple counts of sexual assault less than a decade ago. As I read Scocca’s piece, I had no recollection of these accusations. I was somewhat mortified. Did I will myself to forget? How do I reconcile what “The Cosby Show” meant to me growing up with this painful reality that Cosby is an alleged criminal who has the audacity to offer correctives to the black community while expecting his audience to look the other way where accusations against him are concerned?
There are no easy or comfortable answers here. We mean well, but many of us let ourselves off the hook when it is inconvenient to do otherwise. I cannot offer a definitive set of guidelines for what kinds of bad behavior or criminality are acceptable in our artists and what kinds are not. I can demand more of myself, though. I can consider not only great art, but the context in which that art has been created. I can consider the people who paid a price for that art to be created and whether or not I want to appreciate that art on their backs. I can try to make better choices in the future.
Lately, we’ve been referring to to our social-media-saturated era as “the age of outrage.” I think what’s going on is more complex than that. We don’t get to hide from the truth anymore. We don’t get to hide from the possibility of multiple truths. This is the age of knowing, of Pandora’s box blown wide open. This is the age of being unable, or unwilling, or having fewer opportunities to look away. This is the age of being confronted with what we are willing to do in the name of what we believe.
Project Willow » Mon Feb 10, 2014 9:58 pm wrote:It is sad, and hammers home the point, along with the statistics SLAD posted, child rape is epidemic and epidemically accepted. It is so widespread and so resistant to change, I have to wonder, what function does it serve? Who benefits?
Feminists theorize that it's yet another instrument that helps maintain male hegemony, but I think that view is too simplistic and doesn't account for a number of issues.
I've been doing a little research, and was largely frustrated in my efforts, but I did find a paper from 2006 that asked roughly the same question, but from a biological standpoint. It concluded that the epidemic must be the result of various (behavioral) pathogens, inter-generational lack of attachment mainly. The author said after consulting with several zoologists and primatologists that an analogue of child sexual abuse was not found in any other primate.
IOW, we're just a seriously fucked up species.
I'm seeing a resurgence in feminist activism in my local community. Perhaps out of it a renewed effort against child rape will also grow. I just hope the younger generation is prepared to confront the pedophile lobby and its memory rhetoric. I noticed that in the comment section of nearly every article and blog post on this OP, there was at least one comment warning of the perils of hysteria and false memories and citing McMartin. They all looked remarkably similar, as if written by a crew of trolls who'd been issued talking points.
Male hegemony may be simplistic but in my opinion it accounts for a great deal.
Powerful men infantilize themselves by indulging their every whim. Inevitably, indulging sexual whims while frozen in a state of infantile emotional development involves damaging children, girls and boys. The damaged boys however are left free to grow into power--in whatever sphere in which they find themselves-- and to continue the cycle of indulge/infantilize/damage. The girls are simply left vulnerable, body and mind, to serving the needs of powerful men who are free to continue indulging their infantile sexual whims, not only because society has generally internalized the 'rights' of men to do so, but women specifically have internalized the 'rights' of men to do so.
I don't know where and exactly when this vicious cycle got started but it's been past time to break the cycle of abuse for a long time.
I've been doing a little research, and was largely frustrated in my efforts, but I did find a paper from 2006 that asked roughly the same question, but from a biological standpoint. It concluded that the epidemic must be the result of various (behavioral) pathogens, inter-generational lack of attachment mainly. The author said after consulting with several zoologists and primatologists that an analogue of child sexual abuse was not found in any other primate.
Project Willow » 11 Feb 2014 18:14 wrote:Thanks for those book refs. brekin. I wondered if the author of the article I read had heard of bonobos.
Although it's obviously unfair to diagnose at a distance, the picture emerging for me of WA is of the standard pedophile, meaning "lover of children", in that on some level, involving sexuality, he relates to and feels safer bonding with them, because of the power dynamic, but also only when they happen to have characteristics he likes in any potential partner. I'm not overly familiar with his work, but isn't much of it a study of women in various stages of life and romantic predicaments, combined with his own running commentary and failures with them? Sort of like obsessing over the object you most desire, yet fear and so cannot obtain? This is all speculative of course and I'll willingly take any deserved criticism.
justdrew » 11 Feb 2014 17:54 wrote:I'm thinking there may be some grey area here, where one person can feel violated and another can feel they did nothing wrong. If they could talk to each other, there might be room for reconciliation and everyone could get passed this. Maybe. Can we consider that possibility?
Diane Keaton was suffering from a crippling eating disorder when she was playing some of the funniest roles of her career.
In her autobiography, “Then Again: A Memoir,” she admits that binging and purging took over her life while she was dating director Woody Allen.
"The demands of bulimia outshone the power of my desire for Woody,” she writes. “Pathetic, but true."The 65-year-old actress recounts how she began suffering from the eating disorder in 1968 when she was asked to lose weight for the Broadway show “Hair.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... e-1.977833
According to Diane Keaton, Woody Allen always said she wouldn't know a joke if it hit her in the face. She always laughed at his, though.
What man could fail to feel flattered? From the moment they met in late 1968 — at an audition for his play, Play It Again, Sam — it must have been obvious that she had a huge crush on him. In fact, she'd fallen for Woody long before, while watching him do his act on TV.
Soon, the little-known actress from California had appointed herself his goofy sidekick. She was fun to be around: not classically beautiful, but possessed of a radiant smile and an engaging way of groping for words she could never quite remember.By the time the play had opened, Woody Allen was in love.
It was Diane's good fortune that she met him just as he was about to enter his creative peak, when he produced one hit movie after another — such as Sleeper and Annie Hall. Both onscreen and off, they became such an iconic couple that few now recall that their affair lasted only five years — or that we never really knew that much about it.
Now, however, Diane Keaton has broken her silence with a self-lacerating memoir, published today, which reveals that their relationship was not quite as joyful as their classic comedies may have led us to suppose. She also rakes through later romances with Warren Beatty and Al Pacino, concluding wistfully that she never married because she was always drawn to 'unattainable greats'.
The biggest surprise is to discover that an actress feted for her highly individual charm has suffered most of her life from a fear of failure, a low sense of self-esteem and a cringing concern for what others may think of her.
Indeed, Woody fell for her in the first place, she thinks, because he loved 'neurotic girls' — yet even he had no inkling of just how neurotic she really was. Did he notice back then how often she seemed distracted? Did he wonder why she was curiously reluctant to accompany him to film screenings? Even if he did, Woody Allen may well be learning for the first time today that he once had a serious rival for his lover's attention.
Whenever she could, Diane tried to wriggle out of their dates. Then, in the privacy of her New York studio flat, she'd mutate into a kind of primitive being, ravenously munching her way through barely imaginable quantities of food.
Afterwards, she'd make herself sick. 'The demands of bulimia,' she says, 'outshone the power of my desire for Woody. Pathetic, but true.'
Even now, at the age of 65, she can remember with a former addict's precision the content of the stupendous meals that she ate during her five years as a bulimic.
For breakfast each day, she'd shovel down a dozen buttered corn muffins, three fried eggs with bacon, pancakes and four glasses of chocolate milk. For lunch: three buttered steaks with charbroiled fat on the side, two-and-a-half baked potatoes with sour cream, apple pie and two chocolate sundaes with extra nuts.
Dinner almost defied belief: a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, several orders of chips with blue cheese and ketchup, a couple of TV dinners, chocolate-covered almonds, a large bottle of 7Up, a pound of peanut brittle, M&Ms, mango juice, one Sara Lee pound cake, and three frozen banana-cream pies.
Why did she do it? Many mental health experts cite lack of parental affection as one of the main reasons that bulimics try to soothe themselves with food. But Diane's parents — a civil engineer and a housewife — were nothing if not affectionate.
Attempting to find an answer, Diane recalls her resentment as a child that money and treats were always in short supply. By the age of 11, she was also developing a complex about her looks.
Her body, she was dismayed to discover, looked big in the bathtub and her features failed to measure up to those of Audrey Hepburn, the radiant subject of a feature in Life magazine.
To help matters along, Diane slept with a hair-grip on her nose, hoping to reshape it into a straight line.
By the time she landed one of her first acting jobs — in the rock musical Hair — she was a bag of insecurities and a furtive glutton. While other cast members got stoned, she'd be down at Tad's steakhouse, where you could eat as many steaks as you liked for $1.29.
Her weight soared to 10st — dangerously wobbly for a musical that required actors to shed their clothes. Then, one day, she overheard an actress talking about a woman who made herself throw up in order to remain slim. Was this the answer?
It wasn't, of course: eating and purging around 20,000 calories a day gave Diane heartburn, indigestion, irregular periods, low blood pressure and 26 cavities in her teeth. The psychological effects were arguably worse: she was using food to escape reality.
Woody suspected nothing, though he often marvelled at her extraordinary appetite. Assuming she was just desperately insecure, he packed her off to a psychoanalyst, whom she saw daily for 18 months. Then, at 25, for no apparent reason, she suddenly began eating normally again.
It was a new beginning. Publicly, she started making a name for herself in Woody's films — first Play It Again, Sam in 1972, followed by Sleeper and Love And Death. Privately, she was happy simply to be with him.
'We shared a love of torturing each other with our failures. He could sling out the insults, and so could I . . . His insights into my character were dead-on and — duh!— hilarious.'
Strolling around New York hand-in-hand — always wearing hats — they'd often sit for hours watching passers-by and speculating on who they were and where they were from. As a couple, she says, they had no need of friends.
She loved his thick glasses and 'cool suits', his way of gesturing with his hands and the self-deprecating way he told jokes. And he had a great body, she insists — though she called him 'White Thing' because he treated it 'like it was a strange assortment of disembodied appendages'.
For his part, Woody had a store of affectionate nicknames for Diane — among them 'Major Oaf', 'Worm', 'Snookums', 'Lamphead' and 'Monster' — and teased her relentlessly. In fact, she reveals, they positively thrived on demeaning each other.
'We shared a love of torturing each other with our failures. He could sling out the insults, and so could I . . . His insights into my character were dead-on and — duh!— hilarious. I had him pegged as a cockroach you couldn't kill.'
Why did they eventually break up? She won't say. But their friendship endured, and in 1976, two years after they'd parted, she took on the starring role in Annie Hall, which he'd written specially for her.
The movie was, she admits now, to some extent the story of their relationship, with a heroine who — like her — was semi-articulate, dreamed of being a singer and suffered from insecurity. Feeling she'd done little more than play an 'affable version' of herself, she was astonished to win an Oscar.
<Snip, lots of info about her relationships with Al Pacino and Warren Beatty>
Similarly, she makes no secret of her feelings for Woody Allen, now married to the adopted daughter of his previous wife, Mia Farrow.
In a bittersweet aside, Diane confesses: 'I miss Woody. He'd cringe if he knew how much I care about him, but I'm smart enough not to broach the subject. I know he's borderline repulsed by the grotesque nature of my affection.
'What am I supposed to do? I still love him.'
The author said after consulting with several zoologists and primatologists that an analogue of child sexual abuse was not found in any other primate.
In a variety of animal species, individual males pursue females and, if they can catch them, restrain them and force them to copulate
For example, in wild orangutans, Pongo pygmaeus, most copulations by subadult males and almost half of all copu- lations by adult males occur after fierce female resistance has been violently overcome by the male (Mitani 1985).
Similar cases of forced copu- lation have been observed in other vertebrates (McKinney et al. 1983; Emlen & Wrege 1986; Westneat et al. 1990) as well as in invertebrates (e.g. Thornhill 1980; Arnqvist 1989).
Fallow bucks, Dama dama, for example, persistently court and attempt to mate with females that initially reject their advances (Clutton-Brock et al. 1988).
in northern elephant seals, Mirounga angustirostris, where males may be up to eight times the weight of females, females run a risk of being crushed by the male (Le Boeuf & Mesnick 1991; Mesnick & Le Boeuf 1991).
In sea otters, Enhydra lutris, males hold mating partners by the nose with their teeth or claws, often injur- ing them and, sometimes, drowning them during mating (Mestel 1994).
At least one in a thousand female elephant seals that leave the (comparative) safety of the harems of dominant bulls are killed by non-territorial males (Mesnick & Le Boeuf 1991).
Female ducks are sometimes drowned by competing males (McKinney et al. 1983), while female lechwe, Kobus leche, and fallow deer may be killed in fights between males (Clutton-Brock et al. 1992; J. M. Fryxell, personal communication).
In some animals, males punish females that refuse to associate with them, or that associate with other males, with various forms of physical viol- ence (Smuts 1986b; Westneat et al. 1990; Smuts & Smuts 1993).
Male hamadryas baboons, Papio hamadryas, that defend harems will initially threaten females that stray with an eyebrow flash, but if they fail to return immediately will bite them on the neck (Kummer 1968).
Goodall (1986) describes how male chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, will repeatedly attack females in the early stages of consort formation until they become more cooperative and follow the male closely.
In most of the social primates that live in multi-male groups, males sometimes attack females that reject their attempts to mate, hitting or biting them (Nadler 1982, 1988; Nadler & Miller 1982; Smuts & Smuts 1993).
Male Japanese macaques, Macaca fuscata, that show aggression to females during the mating season were signifi- cantly more likely to mate than males that did not (Enomoto 1981).
Detailed studies of captive lowland gorillas, Gorilla gorilla, suggested that females learned to present (for copulation) more frequently to more aggressive males, thereby reducing the frequency with which they were attacked.
It is clear that all three forms of male coercion (forced copulation, harassment and intimidation) are common in animal societies and that they can be expected to evolve to a point where they have appreciable costs to both sexes.
Forced copulation is obviously restricted to species where males are capable of catching and restraining females; harassment is ubiquitous though, in some cases, territorial males can protect females from its consequences; and, like reciprocal altruism, intimidation may be restricted to species where males and females form stable social groups, with the effect that individuals encounter each other in successive reproductive attempts.
smiths wrote:Turning men into an enemy of women and children is destructive and ignorant.
P.S. Not implying that you are Hanibal Lecter justdrew. But just using him to illustrate that there are many people who victimize others and feel they did nothing wrong. That is why the law is actually a handy thing sometimes.
P.S. Not implying that you are Hanibal Lecter justdrew
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