After Hollywood's Girl Power orgy of lectures and flamboyant virtue signaling at the Golem Globs, some sanity from France:
"Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not -- nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack," said the letter published in the daily Le Monde.
"Men have been punished summarily, forced out of their jobs when all they did was touch someone's knee or try to steal a kiss"
Source: French star Deneuve defends men's 'right' to chat up women
Please go read the short article. You can also read the even shorter Letter, English Translation.
I find the candor refreshing. What the hell is wrong with our society, and why can't we speak frankly as the French women did in their letter?
Interesting article. Views from women that are obviously more liberated and tolerant. Good post Silver.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, there is no substutes for good taste and knowing your audience. If you get my drift 😉
On French tolerance and good taste...
DeleteIt's a good illustration of how clickbait ruins discourse. Re-establishing healthy norms of behaviour in politics and entertainment industries (and others?) was a good thing to do, and long-overdue. The algorithmic manufacture of cheap journalism has obscured that, and it's tragic. I don't know how we can guard against this within a commercial news model, though.
ReplyDeleteI've already mentioned it to SF, but I'm recommending Dave Chapelle's netflix special "The Bird Revelation" to everyone for his treatment of this subject.
ReplyDeletefyi - Your original "Source" link was "unhelpful as it linked to an evolving newspaper "front-page".
ReplyDeleteThanks -FJ
DeletePersonally, I think that the #MeToo women are a bunch of c*ck-blockers who wish to prevent men from taking any kind of sexual initiative and reserving all such "rights" for themselves on the basis that many of men's overtures are too crude or clumsy (and only they can "Prometheanly" decide the likely success and/or failure of these overtures, in advance).
ReplyDeleteThe only difference between the "preliminaries" associated with "assault" of a failed pass and a successfully consumated sexual act is whether or not the woman responds in an affirmative manner towards them.
If men would behave as gentlemen, and women as ladies, we wouldn't have pro-con #metoo movements.
ReplyDelete...we also wouldn't any actual human beings on this planet.
DeleteObscene - Ob skene (off the "stage")
If everything happened in the panopticon, there'd be naught but 24/7 virtue signalling.
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DeleteLime Ricky said
DeleteWhy should the mere thought of buggery
Inspire desire for thuggery
In those whose sweet ass
Never entered by crass
Pederasts suffered any skullduggery?
~ The Wonderering Minstrel
The great mistake in dealing with this (M/F) opposition is to search for a proper measure between two extremes. What one should do instead is to bring out what both extremes share: the fantasy of a peaceful world where the agonistic tension of sexual difference disappears, either in a clear and stable hierarchic distinction of sexes or in the happy fluidity of a desexualized universe. And it is not difficult to discern in this fantasy of a peaceful world the fantasy of a society without social antagonisms, in short, without class struggle. -Slavoj Zizek, "The Sexual is Political"
ReplyDeleteI think you can guess as to which of the two options enboldened above that I would prefer...
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteChildren? What does sex have to do with children?
DeleteSlavoj Zizek, "The Sexual is Political"
So what is “transgenderism”? It occurs when an individual experiences discord between his/her biological sex (and the corresponding gender, male or female, assigned to him/her by society at birth) and his/her subjective identity. As such, it does not concern only “men who feel and act like women” and vice versa but a complex structure of additional “genderqueer” positions which are outside the very binary opposition of masculine and feminine: bigender, trigender, pangender, genderfluid, up to agender. The vision of social relations that sustains transgenderism is the so-called postgenderism: a social, political and cultural movement whose adherents advocate a voluntary abolition of gender, rendered possible by recent scientific progress in biotechnology and reproductive technologies. Their proposal not only concerns scientific possibility, but is also ethically grounded. The premise of postgenderism is that the social, emotional and cognitive consequences of fixed gender roles are an obstacle to full human emancipation. A society in which reproduction through sex is eliminated (or in which other versions will be possible: a woman can also “father” her child, etc.) will open unheard-of new possibilities of freedom, social and emotional experimenting. It will eliminate the crucial distinction that sustains all subsequent social hierarchies and exploitations.
One can argue that postgenderism is the truth of transgenderism. The universal fluidification of sexual identities unavoidably reaches its apogee in the cancellation of sex as such. Recall Marx’s brilliant analysis of how, in the French revolution of 1848, the conservative-republican Party of Order functioned as the coalition of the two branches of royalism (orleanists and legitimists) in the “anonymous kingdom of the Republic.” The only way to be a royalist in general was to be a republican, and, in the same sense, the only way to be sexualized in general is to be asexual.
The first thing to note here is that transgenderism goes together with the general tendency in today’s predominant ideology to reject any particular “belonging” and to celebrate the “fluidification” of all forms of identity. Thinkers like Frederic Lordon have recently demonstrated the inconsistency of “cosmopolitan” anti-nationalist intellectuals who advocate “liberation from a belonging” and in extremis tend to dismiss every search for roots and every attachment to a particular ethnic or cultural identity as an almost proto-Fascist stance. Lordon contrasts this hidden belonging of self-proclaimed rootless universalists with the nightmarish reality of refugees and illegal immigrants who, deprived of basic rights, desperately search for some kind of belonging (like a new citizenship). Lordon is quite right here: it is easy to see how the “cosmopolitan” intellectual elites despising local people who cling to their roots belong to their own quite exclusive circles of rootless elites, how their cosmopolitan rootlessness is the marker of a deep and strong belonging. This is why it is an utter obscenity to put together elite “nomads” flying around the world and refugees desperately searching for a safe place where they would belong–the same obscenity as that of putting together a dieting upper-class Western woman and a starving refugee woman.
Reading about Aziz Anzari's agony, I pity 20-somethings and I am glad I grew up in the 80's.
ReplyDeleteI hope he comes out of this OK. One consensual sexual encounter with a cray-cray should not ruin a man's career.
I would venture most folks would say the same Silver. People tend to be a product of their early environment. Ultimately.
DeleteIt sounds like it was bad for him, too.
DeleteI can remember some occasions when [she(s)] seemed to express disappointment when no overt advances were made.
ReplyDeleteDeneuve has been criticized but she's largely held her ground.
ReplyDeleteWe need to make it clear that the most egregious examples (Larry Nassar, Roger Ailes, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer) are more about an abuse of power than sexuality.
Fantasy vs. reality? Might be a good time to watch Deneuve in Belle de Jour
What is your point with regard to the fantasy vs. reality comment?
DeleteSome of these matters are imagined. There isn't any offense intended.
DeleteDeneuve played a character who couldn't tell the difference in several films.
Genderella Bentafella said
Delete__ Christine's Cry __
My hiney is so tiny
It makes a lousy 'giny.
The government should pay me
To alter me and spay me,
So I can then enjoy a whirl
Pretending I was born a girl.
Though my teats be made of plastic,
And new 'giny's quite elastic,
I hope this change so drastic
Will prove to be fantastic.
And a real man will unfurl
His sword, and boldly pierce
With thrusting power fierce
This new made plastic girl!
~ Christine Jorgensen
Now there's calls for Gov. Eric Greitens to step down in Missouri because he cheated on his wife, then tried to blackmail his mistress when they got caught by her husband.
ReplyDeleteMy take: Greitens campaigned for the Governorship with ads showing him firing machine guns saying he would go to war with special interests and Democrats and that useless smack talker hasbmn't even shot anybody much less pulled a gun. Effin liar.
Can't blame the good people of Missouri for falling for war porn. It's been all the rage since 9/11...
DeleteWell, I'd be willing to overlook his cheating on his wife and threats to revenge porn his mistress if he'd have lit up some tannerite on the Democrat side of the Missouri legislature but he hasn't so much as waved a knife at them.
DeleteI mean damn. Even Yasser Arafat waved a stick and a pistol at the UN Security Council, and we can't even get a Navy SEAL governor to pop smoke on some effin BLM waterboys.
Tired of feckless Republicans.
You're just now tired of the Repubelicants?
DeleteIt became depressingly clear to me quite awhile ago that we are living in a progressive frame and events are unfolding within that frame, and we all know that whoever successfully frames an issue wins the debate
BTW, "pop smoke" is SF and SoF slang for getting the hell out of somewhere, leaving, extraction.
PC = People Control
ReplyDeleteGlandula Davis said
Delete4 Stars for Kid. A smart man who never wastes words.
Kid,
DeleteUpvotes for that comment!
I take issue with her support for Polanski, as if we should disregard his rape because he makes great movies.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I take issue with her promulgation of a sexually libertine lifestyle.
But that's just me.
There are some interesting cross-sections in this debate.
DeleteA religious person would spoil the fun by pointing out that the entire environment and cultural attitude this all plays out in is so dysfunctional that all you will get is intellectual incoherence and emotional angst and confusion.
Ed,
DeleteYou're sorry? For what?
Spoiling the fun. :)
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ReplyDeleteRabelais Manqué said
ReplyDeleteWhy do prudes
Always pick on nudes?
'Twould be far better, I find
If each cleaned up his filthy mind.
There's nothing calculated to annoy
More than the thoughts [X-rated!] of the typical killjoy.
];^}>
FreeThinke is a genius. That's why nobody appreciates his in;credible store of wit, wisdom and creativity. The world as always treated its geniuses with contempt
ReplyDeleteThat should make FreeThinke feel honored by this hopelessly stolid community.
??? Nobody appreciates FT's genius???
DeleteWe LOVE FT!
Who doesn't appreciate FT? Just because I don't always comment doesn't mean I don't appreciate the wisdom.
DeleteThe Obama administration will be forever known as the most criminal in US history, but we are only finding out NOW as evidence is exposed that Obama created his own little 'Secret Society' that met the day after the election to conspire and commit treason...and the evidence is being exposed proving Mueller, Comey, McCabe, Lynch, Hillary, and even Obama himself were involved
ReplyDeleteStrozok knew all the time that President Trump didn't collude with the Russians and told Mueller in an e-mail. YET they went forward with the farce anyway. The Department of Justice and the FBI needs to start prosecuting the RIGHT people and sending them to jail. .
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question. 1. We don't teach history anymore (except from a Marxist perspective of presentism, judging yesterday by the standards of today) and 2. Way to much soy consumption producing low testosterone levels.
ReplyDeleteJWMJR,
DeleteNumber 2 is an interesting point!
Thank you for stopping by and commenting.