is it the predictable tide of the Sexual Revolution going back out to reveal what the flood wrecked?[1]
Public domain snipped of Gone With the Wind. In the film Butler is portrayed as a womanizing cad, but a charming one, who become entangled with Scarlet O'Hara, who is a scheming, not very nice, person. It's not often noted, but the two central characters of the film are extremely flawed, while the really admirable ones meet with bad ends.
Not that evidence of wreckage was really needed.
Consider this.
Starting some years ago, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, dob 1952, was revealed to have engaged in an entire string of really icky behavior concerning women, ranging from rape, to pressuring them in sexual matters, to simply being gross. He's now in prison. Weinstein's behavior in regard to women was well known inside the industry and even the subject of at least one on stage joke at an awards ceremony before it all broke.
Following Weinstein, or more or less contemporaneously, Bill Cosby, dob 1937, legendary family friendly comedian was revealed to have engaged in serial rapes, basically drugging women and then, well. . . Apparently rumors about Cosby, who was a pal of uber creep Hugh Hefner, had been circulating for years before they finally broke out into the full media and prosecution results. They resurfaced when made the target of a routine by another black comedian. Frankly, the frequent hanging out at the Playboy Mansion, something not consistent with being "America's Dad", should have clued somebody into something.
Andrew Cuomo, dob 1957, appears to be going down in flames, career wise, after a string of accusations have been made against him. They're not, so far, like the Cosby and Weinstein accusations, however. He's mostly accused of inappropriate touching and behavior.
Matt Gaetz, dob 1982 who doesn't have the appearance of being the mostly manly of men, is now accused of taking a 17 year old across state lines for immoral purposes. Just in the past few days an associate of his plead guilty to procuring.
Al Franken, dob 1951, a few years back, saw his political career ruined overnight when it was revealed that he'd engaged in unwanted contact, but not sex, with a string of women.
Now, Tom Reed, dob 1971, a New York politician, has faced accusations that in 2017 he unhooked the bra of a female lobbyist and ran his hand up her thigh, accusations that he at first denied, and then admitted but attributed to alcoholism, which he says he's now defeated.
We'll see, I guess, how Bill Gates does, now that its shown that the super rich philanthropist didn't have just philanthropy on his mind.
Now, also consider this.
Weinstein's behavior, however, isn't all that different from that of Harry Cohn's (1891-1958) who was the long time head of Columbian Pictures. Cohn pretty much demanded sex from actresses and caused Jean Arthur to retire from acting from a time due to his attacks on actresses. Not every actress yielded to his advances, however, with the tough as nails Joan Crawford actually stopping by his office and telling him to "keep his pants on" as she was having lunch with his wife and sons the following day.
Natalie Wood, it was revealed after her death, was raped in a hotel room by "a big star" when she was 16 years old. Her mother told her to keep it a secret, which she did, as revealing it would wreck her budding career. It should be noted that while there is speculation on who the rapist was, there's no real evidence of that person's identity at all.
John F. Kennedy's conduct with women was so flagrant and abysmal that we have to hardly even go into it. Frankly, it's not only gross, but if it broke today, he'd never survive politically. His worst conduct was with Mimi Alford, who was an intern, age 20, whom Kennedy made a mistress, but whose actions today would, at least in regard to their initial encounter, would be regarded as rape today. Oddly, he remains a national hero in spite of his behavior generally being well known.
Bill Clinton, dob 1946, survived a series of sex related scandals, one of which is so famous we need not go into it. Having said that, Clinton's White House behavior was mild in comparison to Kennedy's.
And of course, as we all know, the Teflon Don, dob 1946, survived some accusations as well.
What's the point of all of this?
Well, I guess this depends a bit on how you interpret the evidence. One simple thing that you can gain from it is that men have been taking advantage of women for a really long time. After all, we've been looking at things a century past and we just passed the centennial of the inauguration of Warren G. Harding. Harding was a popular President at the time with a wife that pushed his career (he'd never really wanted to be President). He also had a long running affair for much of his married life that only avoided being a scandal, his mistress had German sympathies and may have been a spy during World War One, as the Republican Party bought her off and sent her packing. That didn't stop Harding from taking on besotted Nan Britton as his mistress. The mid 20s Britton was employed as his secretary and became pregnant, later writing a kiss and tell book with the sordid details of their affair, which included Harding posting Secret Service guards at the door and taking her into a closet for, um dictation.
So, once again, we can take this evidence and conclude that men have been acting badly in this department for a long time.
But something is different about this here maybe.
It's hard to define, but it's the sense of shame that goes with all of this, which is only now just returning.
Thomas Jefferson pretty surely kept Sally Hemmings as a bedmate after his wife died and until he died. People gossiped about it, but in an era when private lives were truly private, it never really came out into the full light of day until many, many years later, and was only really confirmed, pretty much, after DNA testing became available (there's a string of thought that it could have been Jefferson's brother, but that's probably wrong). Jefferson and Hemming's relationship was really close to that of a common law, but very weird, marriage and probably the interracial nature of it kept that from every actually occurring, together with the scandal that would have attached to it at the time.
It's interesting, by the way, to note that when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down restrictions on interracial marriages it did so in the case of Loving v. Virginia, giving Virginia bookends on this matter. I.e., Hemmings may have been an enslaved mistress, or an enslaved wife, but the relationship was illegal and slavery massively immoral, with the Supreme Court ultimately striking down the illegality of interracial relationships many decades later through a case arising in Virginia.
Anyhow, I don't want to sweep under the rug the icky nature of this. Hemmings may have been Jefferson's late wife's half sister, but she was also a slave, and there's a lot that can be said about the nature of a slave and her "owner" in this context, that I'm not going to as others have and it doesn't really have to be said anyhow.
The point is, Jefferson kept this a secret and it would have been a scandal at the time, and not simply because of their racial diversity, but because they weren't married in addition.
Hamilton's affair, which did break out into the open, was a major scandal that his reputation has never fully recovered from. It was, we would note, weird, and it was the set up for blackmail.
Grover Cleveland's illegitimate child by Mary Halpin did cause a major scandal as he was running for office, but his opponents political scandals also did. Cleveland managed to overcome what should have been a career destroying event and went on to be a well known and well liked President. In the background of that were two different version of the event which were extremely different. Cleveland ultimately admitted to the paternity of the child, but his supporters managed to portray the incident as resulting from "youthful" indiscretion, when in fact Cleveland was nearly 40 years old when the event occurred, which wasn't a lot younger than his age at becoming President. Halpin alleged that the child was the result of a single encounter which amounted to rape after Cleveland had pursued her relentlessly. Her story after the birth of her child, who went on to live in obscurity and who seems to have become a physician, was extremely tragic, which in part probably helped to discount her veracity at the time, but which would not now. The story here probably is that this even would normally have destroyed Cleveland's political career, but the nature of his opponent and his ultimate stepping up to the plate, combined with a societal presumption that Halpin was a bit nuts (which she probably wasn't), ended up weighing in his favor. Conventional morality was challenged, but certainly not discarded.
In contrast, a long running affair of Franklin Roosevelt's was simply kept quiet by everybody who knew about it, and John F. Kennedy's really creepy moral depravity was wholly buried by everybody who knew him while he lived even though the rumors regarding it could barely be contained due to his flagrant tomcat behavior.
In the Old Testament we're told of the story of the two lecherous elders who make an accusation against a young woman bathing in her garden, in an effort to pressure her into sex. They're cross examined separately by a profit, who reveals their lies, and they accordingly go on to be stoned to death.
That's the age old ancient standard in the West, and that's pretty much the one we're returning to.
It isn't the universal global standard.
The Old Testament also provides that men who saw a comely widow in a conquered land, whose hatband had died in battle, could be acquired by a victorious Jewish man, but only have he observed an entire series of concessions to her and her family that were so extensive, it has to be wondered if anyone ever pursued such a conquest. They included her right to honor the fallen husband and to mourn for him, as well as concessions to her family. In contrast, Muhammed simply advised his combatants that they could take conquered women as slaves.
That standard was pretty much the global one. Romans feared conquering barbarian tribes in their late history for a wide variety of reason, but standardized rape was one of them. Arab tribes raided as far as the Atlantic and hit Ireland for female slaves in raids that had no other purpose. The Vikings took female slaves for obvious purposes wherever they went. Even into the 20th Century national armies for some non Western nations conducted themselves in this fashion. And beyond that, armies that fought for nations whose leaders had severed the ties with Christianity also did, the Red Army being the most notorious in this area, and being guilty of the largest mass rape of all time and the largest rapes per capita since ancient times, something that the reputation of that army still has to contend with.
This is not to say that no soldier from a Western nation ever behaved this way through 1945, or later, but it was much rarer and in contrast to the Soviet example, soldiers who were caught were prosecuted, and perpetrators generally tried to keep their conduct as secret as they could, so much so that some of the odder historical examples remain uncertain matters. Did Custer take a Cheyenne girl as an effective sex slave or not? [2]. Russian officers, in contrast, actually stood by while mass rapes of Germen women occurred and egged their soldiers on, with the deaths of the repeated female victims being common[3].
And then came the Second World War.
And we're not simply talking about Russian sexual assault on entire cultures, including their own, or of Japanese sex slaves.[4].
We've presented this thesis before, although we're certainly not welded to it. Something about World War Two impacted global morality and culture everywhere. Having said that, in this area, things were undoubtedly evolving prior to the war.
Indeed, so much so that I've had some doubts on my thesis here, although not so much that I've discarded it. I think it's still valid. But what is undoubtedly the case is that when photography became less cumbersome, which is right about World War One, an evolution in the objectification of women really started. There was already at that point pornography, but it wasn't hugely widespread. The war had a role in spreading it, however, through in part cigarette cards and other photographic distributions. Advertising didn't stray into it rapidly, however, nor did popular depictions.
Movies seem to have started the acceleration of the evolution. When movies really started to break out following the war, there were no restrictions on what they depicted at all, and film makers, including some really famous ones, picked up on that quickly. Even Cecille B. DeMille, famous for such films as The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur, issued an early movie ostensibly on the suffering of the saints which is regarded as outright pornographic in its depiction of torture of female subjects.
The Hays Production Code of course took that all on, but by then there was something going on. The World War One era had yielded to The Roaring Twenties, which was in large part a huge sigh of relief for the Great War being over and the accompanying post war recession having ended. Coming when it did, when women were living away from home in increasing numbers, and the farm economy of the United States, and indeed the entire Western World, was increasingly yielding to a rootless urban culture, it created a certain libertine atmosphere that lead naturally to exploitation of women. For the feel of it, the most recent The Great Gatsby really does it well.
It's easy to say that this all came to a screeching halt with the Great Depression, and people do say that, but just looking at the evidence shows it isn't so. Magazine covers leading up to World War Two are shockingly revealing in comparison to those of teh 1910s and 1920s, even when done by the same artists. Some of the female figures on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post from the 30s, and then into the 40s, are pretty revealing really. When looked at that way, it isn't a long trip from Norman Rockwell in the late 30s and the 1940s, to Vargas in the 1940s, to Playboy in the 1950s.
Move poster from 1942's Casablanca. Regarded as one of the best movies of all time, there's not a single sex scene in it, and for a movie based on protagonists who are dispirited and dispossessed, their actions are classically moral.
What is I suppose different is that even though popular culture as okay with exploiting the female figure, or just outright exploiting women, in the 20s, 30s and 40s, it wasn't at the point where it was willing to regard women purely as objects and it wasn't willing to give outright license to men. Things happened, of course, and Hollywood was an absolute moral sewer right from the onset, but there was no public celebration of it like there would be later. Indeed, a lot of the female leads in movies from the 30s and 40s, are of the femme fatale variety, and are more than a little scary in some ways. It wasn't until Marilyn Monroe that we're really offered a female lead who is both beautiful and portrayed as dimwitted. Lauren Bacall may have been beautiful, but she certainly wasn't portrayed as dimwitted, and always seemed close to being ready to hurt you. Ilsa Lund in Casablanca is definitely vulnerable and torn, but she almost shoots Rick and Rick never takes advantage of her.
Indeed, while it may be a cheesy way to do it, Casablanca provides us a really interesting example of how things started changing in the 1950s. The movie was made in 1942 and we know that Rick and Isla had been a couple in Paris, but we aren't provided any sordid details at all, and indeed the way the film portrays that, we'd be better off believing that there aren't any, other than Ilsa's mistaken belief that her husband, Victor Lazlo, is dead. When presented with the opportunity to lead Ilsa astray, he doesn't, instead rising to morality fully in spite of his own checkered past. The film is practically a morality play. A huge hit from the following year, The Song of Bernadette, is outright hagiography about a real life saint, something that is almost impossible to imagine Hollywood filming now.
By the 1950s, however, we were getting the Seven Year Itch and by the 1960 we were getting The Apartment, the latter being a criticism of a male dominated culture of economic seduction. Indeed, The Apartment, for all practical purposes, illustrates most of the negative conduct complained of above, all the way
Wilder, as this poster notes, had already directed Some Like It Hot by this time, a film which not only would be regarded as mild by contemporary standards, but which couldn't really be made now as the gender bending comedy of the film would be regarded as offensive. In this film, however, he took a distinct turn as both of the protagonists are trapped in situations they don't like and made miserable by the sexual misconduct of others.
A person could, and by this point probably is, asking what the point of all of this is. To try to get there, we'll note that maybe what the Church was concerned with which caused it to convene Vatican II was correct, although I don't know that their reaction to it really worked. There's some evidence that it didn't fully. At any rate, what seems to have occurred is a combination of things actually following World War One, not World War Two as we've earlier suggested, got rolling, some caused by the war and some by the onset of new technologies, that disrupted human society for the worse. We've been paying for it every since.
The Great War took millions of men away from home for a prolonged period of time and exposed them all to death, and most to vice, in varying degrees. It's no wonder that the Communists came up violently starting in 1917, and its no wonder that there was massive social disruption in continental Europe following the war. An established sense of order was grossly disrupted in nearly everything. At the same time, photography in particularly developed to the point that it was comparatively cheap and easy to use, where as moving images became fairly easy to make. What had before been a fairly difficult process to make use of, which by extension means it was a fairly difficult thing to misuse, suddenly became the opposite. Once the technology was around the only think that could be done was to regulate its misuse, but that's always problematic.
At the same time social changes that had been in the works for some time began to accelerate. Young women increasingly were away from home for the first time in appreciable numbers. Young men were away from home in much greater numbers. In both instances the "leaving home" was not accompanied by the shove into the adult world which is otherwise extremely distracting and time consuming. The Roaring Twenties came around with a hedonistic emphasis that the Great Depression only partially abated. By the 1930s the covers of magazines routinely featured young women in ways that would have been regarded as scandalous in the prior decade, and which are often cheesecake by contemporary standards.
That's the state of evolved society at the time the US entered World War Two. Like all American wars, people look back on them and claim the time prior was "an age of innocence", but it really wasn't, and indeed it particularly wasn't, although it was nothing like the current era in that regard. World War Two's amplified the uprootedness that the First World War and the Great Depression had already caused and made it worse. A popular illustration and photography industry that crept up on cheesecake constantly made it easy for illustrations to cross right over into pornography during World War Two. Hugh Hefner, post war, merely picked up on a development that had already occurred, but repackaged it in a slick and socially acceptable fashion, while at the same time radically attacking conventional morality. By the 1960s his assault had become massive, and by the 70s it was copied and expanded.
It was in that last period of time that women went from being portrayed as objects of desire, but smart ones, to simply objects.
Its from that status that women now are struggling to get back and away from. And its the current status which creates a situation in which a Republican Congressman can be accused of having sex with a very young minor and defend himself not on the basis that it didn't occur, but that what she received wasn't payment.
[5]And that latter fact is really remarkable, and evidence of the transition. Jefferson's transgressions were kept secret by Jefferson, but whispered about by those who knew him. Hamilton came clean about his, but he was openly mocked by his political opponents due to them. Cleveland survived his scandal but only by ignoring what became an open political topic and subsequently marrying a (rather young) bride. Roosevelt simply kept his long running affair secret, taking a page out of Harding's book, but without the human byproduct that the latter incident produced. Everyone around Kennedy operated to keep his dalliances secret, which was a monumental chore, given their nature.
Even as recently as Al Franken, with the rise of the "Me Too" movement, politicians faced with allegations of sexual immorality resigned, and quickly.
Now we're seeing that they don't. Gaetz and Cuomo are not going quietly. Cuomo isn't saying anything at all, but following Trump's lead, he's just ignoring the accusations. Gaetz sort of isn't, actually noting how generous he was to his illicit lovers.
And now, following this, we have the story of Anthony Bouchard and his first wife, although in fairness the events in that tale took place some 40 years ago. The remarkable thing there, however, is that Bouchard, in breaking the story prior to it being broken on him, by the British press, isn't apologetic about what in Wyoming would amount to statutory rape (it occurred in Florida, where seemingly nobody can determine what the law was at the time) and rather praises himself for stepping up to the plate to deal with the situation. While he does deserve some credit, and maybe even praise, for not resorting to abortion, under prior retained standards his political career would be over. There were some bridges that you could not cross and come back from, and that was one. Now, nothing seems to be a bridge too far.
Women, on the other hand, are now calling on virtue and have been since launching the Me Too movement, although I don't that this is what they realize they are doing. Indeed, I don't think that the prime movers in the movement are aware that this is what they are doing.
And hence the problem of the era. You can't correct this sort of abominable behavior without a resort to an ultimate standard. And ultimate standards are unforgiving things. You can't go halfway with them, you have to go all the way.
Until you do, you are left participating in an element of hypocrisy, sort of in the Godfather II type manner where Michael Corleone notes to the Senator Pat Geary that "you and I are engaged in the same hypocrisy". And without that ultimate standard, there's always a way for the counter reaction of boys just being boys to come in.
In other words, I suppose, its not only demanding favors in the garden, it's averting your eyes to start with, and trying to make sure that you have privacy in the garden bath.
Footnotes
1. I started this thread after the news on that Gaetz figure got rolling and that's what inspired it.
After that, however, some news/gossip, or whatever it would be, circulated a little more locally which gave me pause on the same topic as I slightly knew one of, well more than one of, the characters involved.
It's pretty revolting and gross actually, but it sheds some light, I think on the situation we find ourselves in.
Following that, moreover, we had the entire Anthony Bouchard flap here locally, which ended up being a national, and even international, story.
2. There's certainly reason to believe he may have.
In contrast, the commanders of the Corps of Discovery's commanders, Lewis and Clark, studiously avoided all such contact with Indian women even though the offering of them was somewhat of an odd cultural courtesy with some of the tribes they encountered in their trip to the Pacific. They did not restrain their men, however, and as a result treating them for venerial disease was a constant medical problem for the Corps.
3. Sometimes missed in this is that Russian women were likewise the victims of Russian soldiers on a pretty wide scale.
Rapes by Soviet soldiers make up a well known story but are usually given in the context of rapes that started once the Red Army entered Hungary. At that point they did reach a really massive scale that continued on into Germany. Missed in this story, however, is that Red Army soldiers engaged in this conduct, but on a less massive scale, inside of Russia itself and Russian brutality towards the German population continued on some time after the war.
Setting aside the Germans, for which there's a cultural revenge angle to this, by and large the Red Army had real elements of simply being an armed mob.
4. Japan, as is also well known at least in regard to Korea, kept sex slaves for their troops. Less well known is that women from conquered Southeast Asian regions were also forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers.
5. "I have definitely, in my single days, provided for women I've dated. You know, I've paid for flights, for hotel rooms. I've been, you know, generous as a partner. I think someone is trying to make that look criminal when it is not." Matt Gaetz.
