|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0571382010
| 9780571382019
| 0571382010
| 4.01
| 14,430
| Aug 31, 2023
| Aug 22, 2023
|
liked it
|
Cathal, the averagely nasty, averagely appalling jerk in this book, moans constantly about how much this thing or that thing cost him – for example wh
Cathal, the averagely nasty, averagely appalling jerk in this book, moans constantly about how much this thing or that thing cost him – for example when the jeweller presents a bill for the adjustment of the engagement ring he bought for his lovely bride-to-be, so that they have a row about it. (“Do you think I’m made of money?”) Alas, the spirit of Cathal was surely somewhere in the room when this tiny book plopped through the letterbox. Huh, 47 very large font pages and that’s it? I muttered. This better be real good! Well, it was pretty good but it was a short story. A nice bitter misogynyskewering short story, right up my street. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 13, 2024
|
Mar 13, 2024
|
Mar 13, 2024
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1473562252
| 9781473562257
| 1473562252
| 4.23
| 3,976
| Feb 27, 2020
| Feb 27, 2020
|
really liked it
| Girls just wanna have fun damental human rights - Slogan on a banner WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T I was after a history of feminism and in my male brain that woul Girls just wanna have fun damental human rights - Slogan on a banner WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T I was after a history of feminism and in my male brain that would be a cool judicious account of all the great names, you know, Mary Shelley, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, but nope, not at all, they only get some glancing references. This book is all about practical women, the feminists who did something to make women’s lives better, not the feminists who analysed why things were so terrible. You have to have both, but this book is about the doers. ANOTHER GREAT QUOTE FROM ANDREA DWORKIN Her definition of feminism: A political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don’t like, including all the women you don’t want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don’t want anything to do with anymore. WHAT IS DIFFICULT ABOUT DIFFICULT? It kind of seems as if everybody eventually finds every single other person difficult these days, it’s been an irritable decade. I see that mostly this book gets 4 & 5 stars but very occasionally 1 or 2 because predictably it has been judged to be transphobic due (it appears) to using the term “male bodied” in one chapter. I can see that for some Helen Lewis herself is a difficult woman to be writing the history of feminism as she’s too white, too posh and too rich and too often on the television. (I realised half way through I’d seen her many times – ah, THAT Helen Lewis!) NAMING NAMES The issues and the difficult women are : Divorce : Caroline Norton The vote : Annie Kenney Sex : Marie Stopes Play : Lily Parr Work : Jayaben Desai Safety : Erin Pizzey Love : Maureen Colquhoun Education : Sophia Jex-Blake Time : Selma James Abortion : Diana King, Colette Devlin and Kitty O'Kane Aside from Marie Stopes and Erin Pizzey, these were obscure names to me. Maureen Colquhoun, for instance, was the first out lesbian Member of Parliament in the 1970s and has been completely airbrushed from political history since then. I had never heard of her. (She died aged 92 in February this year.) HOW DIFFICULT IS DIFFICULT ANYWAY? ANSWER : VERY Erin Pizzey is the embodiment of the difficult woman. She is famous for establishing the first women’s refuge in Britain. She didn’t wait for any kind of official approval, she just went ahead and did it in 1971. Two years later a male MP got up in the House of Commons and opened a discussion on domestic violence, praising her Chiswick Aid Centre. She was watching from the public gallery. The chamber of the House of Commons was nearly empty. The MP said that if the debate had been about cruelty to dogs it would have been packed. Women’s refuges – couldn’t be more feminist, right? Right. But when Erin Pizzey met up with other feminists she took an instant dislike and refused to have anything to do with them. It seems they were ultraleft Maoist feminists, but you might have thought she would meet some non-Maoists later. By 2009 she was writing for the Daily Mail an article called Why I loathe feminism... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family describing feminism as “a lie” and writing that “we must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women”. And now she is “an advocate for the Men’s Rights Movement, serving as editor-at-large of the anti-feminist website "A Voice for Men”. The boss of that site, Paul Elam, has called feminists "human garbage” and says that he would never vote guilty in a rape trial if he was a juror no matter what the evidence was. (For more information about these vermin see the excellent book Men who Hate Women by Laura Bates*). So as Helen Lewis says “How does a woman go from founding England’s first refuge for domestic violence victims to hanging out with MRMs?” The answer to that deserves a book in itself. HL mentions her own experience of what she calls “purity politics” and also “The Intersectionality War” which broke out on the internet in 2011 after the publication of How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran : The next few years were bloody : feminism’s equivalent of a civil war. Fair and unfair criticisms blended into one giant screaming mass, fuelled by Twitter, and left everyone hurt and angry…. Online feminism became obsessed with language. A kind of priesthood had sprung up to adjudicate what terms could be used You can tell HL is still reeling from all this : Outrage had become prized for its own sake and online feminists had lost the ability to distinguish between genuine anger and mere spite. …My own trashing was a traumatic experience. I was accused of endangering lives because my rhetoric was so hate-filled that people reading it would surely kill themselves. I was a racist, I was a transphobe So there is a parallel between Erin Pizzey and the Maoists of 1972 and Helen Lewis and the trans rights movement of 2011, I guess. I think HL or someone else probably needs to write a whole book about how contemporary feminism became such a minefield.** SWIRLING, SURGING, EXHILARATING, DEPRESSING, UPLIFTING, LIKE FLOWING WATER, NEVER STILL FOR ONE MOMENT I liked this a lot. Not the book I thought I was going to read, and like being locked in a washing machine of ideas with the setting on FULL SPIN. [image] *https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4... **Has anyone tried to do this? ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 14, 2021
|
Dec 21, 2021
|
Dec 14, 2021
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 1620975858
| 9781620975855
| 1620975858
| 4.09
| 82
| Sep 08, 2020
| Sep 08, 2020
|
really liked it
|
Two years after her first book called Woman Hating along came a fake snuff movie called Snuff in 1976. [image] Andrea campaigned against it. No, she did Two years after her first book called Woman Hating along came a fake snuff movie called Snuff in 1976. [image] Andrea campaigned against it. No, she didn’t think it was real but by its very existence it suggests that sexual violence against women as entertainment and for profit will be condoned by a callous community and protected by a corrupt law This began the nearly lifelong fight. Andrea and a few others would campaign to suppress misogynistic pornography, and everyone else would vigorously oppose them and support the porn merchants in the name of free speech, aka the First Amendment. Andrea said whose free speech are you worried about here? The pornographer’s? Well, what about the bound gagged woman? What about her speech? Andrea would continually find to her eternal distress that those who enthusiastically agreed with her campaigns were the right wing moral majority Christian crowd, and those who vociferously opposed her were most of her fellow feminists along with every leftist liberal man in the USA. Whether it was fake snuff movies or violent pornography, most feminists and all leftist liberal men supported its right to be published freely. They would tell you they hated the stuff, but they hated censorship even more. Let Nat Hentoff sum up their position Cutting off thought, cutting off expression, for the greater good of us all, only results in the cutting off of more thought and more expression. Where does one stop after one has begun snuffing out expression, however repellent and frightening? Let Maureen Mullarkey chime in also : MacKinnon and Dworkin are mountebanks strutting on a feminist stage. Women have much to lose by submitting to the regressive "protection" of these neobarbaric thought police and self-appointed arbiters of "correct" sexuality. Despite the reservations we might have about pornography, the only proven danger to date is the censorship mentality itself. SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES Since 1976 there has of course been a steady stream of movies depicting women being tortured and chopped up. Nobody really can be bothered to raise much of an eyebrow anymore. [image] [image] [image] [image] Enough. Back to the story. ANDREA’S DISMAL CAREER She would painfully ferociously write a book, then her agent would finally pin down a teeny publisher who would put it out, then no one would review it except for three people who thought it was hysterical lunatic drivel or “hatemongering tantrums”. Then no one would buy it. Then she would painfully ferociously write another gloomy book. Martin Duberman, our brilliantly readable author, is a big Dworkin fan but even he says that sometimes her writing is over the top : The hyperbole itself is sometimes fetching, expressed with a power and certitude that prove captivating even when we blink in disbelief at the actual content. Sample quote from p 220: At age 42, with five substantial books behind her, Andrea had become increasingly well known, thanks to a trail of brutal, demeaning reviews, more as a figure of derision than esteem. She was in a life-long cohabiting relationship with a gay man named John. (That part of the story is very sweet and not at all dismal.) She was poor all her life. She always wore overalls. She never said all men are rapists. She never said all intercourse is rape. But she did say a whole lot of other stuff. She never once made life easy for herself. But apparently she was a terrific barnstorming speaker. Even that didn’t go down well with some. Susan Brownmiller called her style “dramatized martyrdom and revival-tent theatrics”. She tended to offend people. For instance John got a job at a writers’ retreat in Cummington, Massachusetts. But the residents and Andrea did not get along – A lot of ignorant, sadistic males and their colonized docile women She said. So then Andrea and John volunteered to reorganise the community library. They did this by dividing all the shelves into “books by men” and “books by women”. The result was 273 shelves of men’s books and 29 of women’s books. This annoyed the residents. THE PORN WARS We want a world in which men can live without pornographic incitements to “masculine” violence that now saturate male-controlled media. We want women to live without the fear and rage that come from seeing our humiliation sold as entertainment. And Pornography is not a harmless outlet for sexual fantasies. It is fascistic, misogynistic propaganda that fosters acts of violence against women [image] Well, naturally, this kind of nonsense really upsets all right-thinking men. More seriously, it’s true that many have tried and many have failed to find a causal link between fictitious representations of violence and actual violence. The quixotic attempt to suppress violent porn took up most of Andrea’s career. One main problem was that definitions proved impossible. The word “pornography” was used by everyone on all sides of the free-for-all as if everyone knew what it meant. (A similar thing happens in theological debates when people use the word “God”as if we all mean the same thing.) There were painful attempts to distinguish “erotica” from porn. Then there was a whole rigmarole about sadomasochism or BDSM as it is now called. Andrea thought lesbian women should not do it! Because in so doing They were profoundly conformist, offering strict allegiance to the pre-existing division of sex roles between those who dominate and those who submit Or in other words they were importing gross straight male violent sexuality into women’s lives. So THAT didn’t go down well with some people. It wasn’t just evil men yelling Hands Off Our Porn. There was a group called FACT formed – Feminists Against Censorship Taskforce. And there was an enormous tussle about the lack of non-white feminists in this group. Andrea constantly raged that middle class anti-censorship white women turned blind eyes to the exploitation of non white poor women. The comfy women, to keep what’s theirs, are prepared to let the powerless women be hurt forever… if this is feminism it deserves to die What a tremendous minefield all this was! Andrea was trashed, bashed and mashed – she was a fascistic ugly mad dyke! Etc etc. LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE HERE Professor Duberman lets the cat out of the bag on page 192: Of course in the era of the internet, with mounting billions being spent on pornography, the entire notion of trying to curtail its potential harm becomes something of a fool’s errand. So, Andrea, give it up. The game is over. EVENTUALLY I didn’t really warm to Andrea during this fascinating book. In spite of many people saying that in person she was kind and soft-spoken and a great listener, it seems she fell out with nearly everybody, she would not compromise on anything. And she did come across like a righteous pulpit orator, hopeless at persuading, only good at hectoring in a way almost guaranteed to lose the audience. It seems she was always driving 90 miles an hour down a dead end street. Her failed crusades against misogyny and the open hate she met with fill the reader with sorrow. I’m glad she has not been forgotten. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 14, 2021
|
Oct 18, 2021
|
Oct 08, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0525560343
| 9780525560340
| 0525560343
| 4.35
| 40,820
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
|
liked it
|
This is a strange book. The two authors spent weeks and months putting a huge story together about Harvey Weinstein but it was tough to get any women
This is a strange book. The two authors spent weeks and months putting a huge story together about Harvey Weinstein but it was tough to get any women to speak out, almost all of his victims were silenced by non-disclosure agreements, which were so restrictive that one woman’s husband had never heard of his wife’s problem with Harvey until our two reporters came calling. Now, after the first big story, dozens of other victims immediately surfaced. It became bitterly ironic. After scouring the country to find women willing to talk on record, the reporters were now overwhelmed with far too many abuse stories. The authors tell this part of the story in great detail, trying to keep the tone cool and unemotional for the most part. I was reminded of books about Watergate – there is a waterfall of names and a steady flow of legalese to negotiate. But after this first big story and its immediate aftermath in October 2017 – shazam! we skip forward to May 2018 and find Harvey being hauled into court and charged with rape and serious sexual abuse. Damn, I really wanted to know the whole sequence of events between him being accused by a few very nervous women to the cops dragging him into court. But the authors weren’t directly involved in that part, so I guess that’s why they don’t allow us to enjoy Harvey’s rapid decline and fall. Schadenfreude denied! (Okay, some schadenfreude is allowed to us. When Harvey is led into the courtroom to hear the charges one victim said “He’s now experiencing all the things he put everybody else through – humiliation, worthlessness, fear, weakness, aloneness, loss, suffering and embarrassment.”) What they spend the rest of the book on is the accusation of sexual assault made by Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. This is also recounted in great detail. And then the book ends. Very curious – it’s like the authors were presenting the reader with a Harvey counter-argument. With Weinstein many victim voices told similar stories about hotel rooms, Harvey in a bathrobe, coerced sexual contact, and so forth. But with Kavanaugh there was only one victim, and one incident, which happened when they were both teenagers, 30 plus years before. (“Others were likely to dismiss it as drunken horseplay”) BACK TO HARVEY One lawyer explained why the authors should maybe soft-pedal their Harvey story : Weinstein had started to see his previous behaviour in a different light. Powerful men of an older generation were changing their understanding of the meaning of the word consensual…and why “women don’t feel it’s consensual even if a man convinces himself it is” (That reminds me of what one cop said in a true crime book I read. The rapist told him “Well, she didn’t consent at first, but I pulled out a gun, then she consented.”) Another lawyer asked the reporters : Are you sure this isn’t just young women who want to sleep with a famous movie producer to try to get ahead? So I think there must be a whole other book out there which contemplates the big picture, this #metoo tidal wave, and investigates whether men’s behaviour has in fact changed. This book often finds itself throwing off excellent questions : Those who felt #metoo had not gone far enough and those who protested that it was going too far were saying some of the same things. There was a lack of process or clear enough rules. The public did not fully agree on the precise meaning of words like harassment or assault. …the feelings of unfairness on both sides just continued to mount. Ugh, enough of all this old stuff about Weinstein and Trump and Bill O’Reilly and all those dreadful old guys. I think things have improved now. Anyway, I’m tired of thinking about it all. Let’s see what’s happening at the Olympics. Oh wait, what’s this on the news today…. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been accused of sexually harassing multiple women, subjecting them to unwanted kissing and groping, in a damning independent investigation. The state's Attorney General Letitia James said Mr Cuomo had violated state and federal laws. In response, Mr Cuomo denied touching anyone inappropriately and vowed to continue as governor. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 31, 2021
|
Aug 03, 2021
|
Jul 12, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 172823624X
| 9781728236247
| 172823624X
| 4.34
| 16,039
| Sep 03, 2020
| Mar 02, 2021
|
really liked it
|
This is such a depressing book that I just didn’t want to review it because that would make me have to think about the disgusting creeps that Laura Ba
This is such a depressing book that I just didn’t want to review it because that would make me have to think about the disgusting creeps that Laura Bates writes about. But life is not always spring sunshine and little lambs gamboling in the fields. Some nasty things have to be done, so, onward. THE MANOSPHERE That’s what this book is about – various popular places on the internet where men groove around detesting and hating and being sickened by women, feminism and political correctness gone mad (it’s always gone mad - guys, was it ever sane?) and issue very frequent death and rape threats against any woman who gets in the news for anything at all, such as Dr Katie Bouman who was prominent in developing the algorithm that was used to capture the first image of a black hole in April last year. Seriously, these misogynists can’t stand women getting credit for ANYTHING. She got death and rape threats. Yeah. TAKE YOUR SEATS PLEASE So, welcome to your this specially ghastly tour of the manosphere, a place you maybe caught sight of out of the corner of your eye once or twice, and hurried by, shuddering. Your seat will be very uncomfortable. Please use the sick bag provided if you feel queasy during your tour. And you will. The main places of outstanding natural beauty we will be stopping at are : the INCELS, which is a word meaning “involuntarily celibate”, a state these men blame on women and not their own unattractiveness, so naturally they hate women the PUAs, which means pick up artists, which is guys promoting methods of picking up girls for casual sex, so naturally they hate women too a group called MGTOW – pronounced “mig-tau” (= Men Going Their Own Way) and these are men who have seen that the whole of human society is biased against white men, and this has been a tremendous revelation to them so they are going to fight back, so naturally they hate women. Sample blog post : “How to Choke a Woman”. the MRAs (=Men’s Rights Activists). Seems they used to be feminists but then there was a breakaway group that got much bigger than the original feminist men and yes, the new group hates women too. Trolls – you know about these little boys – Laura gives us a deeply unpleasant account (and none of this so far has been a stroll in the park you know) of the vicious trolling of women who have any profile at all online – where the mildest insult is that these annoyed men will kill your children in front of you and then kill you. When asked about this stuff they will titter and say it was all ironic, just for the lolz. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. And we wouldn’t want to miss out Actual murderers of women, wife batterers, homicidal stalkers, gang rapists, etc. Quite a few of those. ONLINE ANONYMITY You might think that if a guy threatens to rape and kill you dozens of times in a day and says he knows where you live he might get a visit from the cops, but this does not happen, mostly. The complexity of internet anonymity, the importance of freedom of speech, the international nature of the troll population, and the trolls’ technical skills at masking their locations and identities have all contributed to the fact that the problem is widely considered near-unsolveable. And later she says : Some of the world’s biggest social media platforms repeatedly throw up their hands and imply that the problem is too difficult to solve, claiming to take extensive action against harassment, but also refusing to disclose detailed records or procedures for tackling it. They release polished PR platitudes about working hard to keep everybody safe online, even as women reporting rape and death threats or graphic images of sexual violence are receiving automated responses telling them that the content “does not violate our community standards”. I would quote a few of these messages so you can see what we are talking about but they would violate my standards and I hope Goodreads’ standards too. CONCLUSION Laura Bates’ point is that this underworld of women hating is seeping upwards and outwards like a black mould on a wall into mainstream media. I won’t recap all her observations here, but I could see her point for sure. This book is like a jolt of electricity, no fun at all. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 06, 2020
|
Oct 08, 2020
|
Sep 09, 2020
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1928704115
| 9781928704119
| 1928704115
| 4.14
| 4,824
| Jan 01, 1983
| Jan 01, 1999
|
really liked it
|
The world according to Ted Bundy : People disappear every day. It happens all the time. .. I mean, there are so many people. It shouldn’t be a problem. The world according to Ted Bundy : People disappear every day. It happens all the time. .. I mean, there are so many people. It shouldn’t be a problem. What’s one less person on the face of the earth, anyway? Or, say, in his case, 30 less? What he is saying here is – get over it, so people like me like to kill women now and then. Why make such a big deal about it? He was kind of irritable. He thought the rest of humanity was being ridiculously sensitive about a few girls. But he did acknowledge that he saw things differently to the rest of us. Guilt. It’s this mechanism we use to control people. It’s an illusion. It’s very unhealthy. I’m in the enviable position of not having to deal with guilt. Ted is suddenly the Bad Person of the Month, what with Zac Ephron in the new movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and the documentary Conversations with a Killer - that one is based on the book of the same name, also written by the authors of The Only Living Witness and the taped conversations with Ted are the basis of this book too. HIERARCHY OF VICTIMS Why is Bundy so famous? It’s because of three things : 1. His crimes really were revolting. 2. His victims were young white women 3. He wasn’t a lowclass scumbag, he was a nicely spoken middleclass educated charming scumbag. Regarding point 2, if the victims had all been non-white prostitutes, we would have heard a lot less about Ted Bundy. The names of let’s say Gary Ridgway and Randy Kraft don’t ring out like Ted’s. They killed twice as many victims, at least, but Gary merely killed prostitutes, and Randy killed young men. The press just aren’t that interested in that stuff. The press loves young white women, the younger the better. But lest I sound too contemptuous, there was also the business of the charming. He seemed to be able to charm the young women of America right off the street and into his car. It was eerie how he did it. A lot of that was down to wearing a fake cast and pretending to have a broken arm and needing help to carry stuff to his car and then having a crowbar placed just right under the driver’s seat. THE HUNCHBACK INSIDE ME According to Ted, he was a normal sane person but he had what he called an “entity” inside him. The authors rather horribly call this “the hunchback”. As in “we caught a glimpse of the hunchback that day”. They probably wouldn’t use that term nowadays. You probably know this, but the authors were journalists who got to interview him for hours and hours and couldn’t get him to talk about the crimes because he was afraid of incriminating himself & was saying he was totally innocent of everything but car theft; so the authors had a lightbulb moment and said to Ted we know you have thought about these crimes deeply, so to help us understand, could you please speculate on the individual who might have committed them? So with this device, this thinnest of subterfuges, he was off and running. He speculated every which way. He described the murderer always in the third person : What really fascinated him was the hunt, the adventure of searching out his victims. And, to a degree, possessing them physically, as one would possess a potted plant, a painting or a Porsche. The authors asked him was there ever an occasions when he – sorry, when the murderer – might have decided NOT to kill a woman he was with. Yes, Ted said, he remembered – sorry, he imagined this person once picked up a girl in a bar, say, and brought her back to his apartment : Throughout the evening they engaged in voluntary sexual activity, and throughout the evening he felt himself being tested, debating with himself whether to kill her or just to let the situation run its course normally…. At certain parts of the evening he felt himself on the edge of taking her life. But the justifications were not there. DON’T LEAVE YOUR CAR KEYS IN THE IGNITION Bundy was on the run twice and found that if he kept looking, he was bound to find a parked car or a van with the keys still in the ignition. Who does that?? Answer : Americans in the 1970s. A WRY WIT There was a horrendous brutal night when he had escaped prison for the second (!) time when he broke into a sorority house, attacked 5 girls sleeping in their beds and killed two of them. He would never talk about that, even in the third person. That one was even a bit much for Ted Bundy. But he did jovially suggest to one of the authors that If you want your book to really sell, maybe I should write the first chapter – about Chi Omega. I’m the only one that can do it. The only one. ANYWAY This is a very straightforward telling of a very tangled tale. Recommended for true crime junkies and criminal psychology students and anyone wishing to find an example of misogyny in its purest form. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 11, 2019
|
Jun 13, 2019
|
Jun 11, 2019
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140481753
| 9780140481754
| 0140481753
| 3.54
| 12,167
| 1956
| Nov 18, 1982
|
did not like it
|
I think what happened was that after the huge horror of World War Two and the major effort to remake society in Britain (welfare state, National Healt
I think what happened was that after the huge horror of World War Two and the major effort to remake society in Britain (welfare state, National Health Service) there was a kind of national exhaustion, a slumping into armchairs, and those too young to have fought those battles took the exhaustion for complacency and in the early 50s got really fed up about it, and hence the Angry Young Men – Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (first produced in May 1956) was more or less the first of those. He arrived at the same time that the teddyboys were smashing up seats in cinemas when they went to see Rock Around the Clock (released March 1956). Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and the rest of the rockers were just around the corner, waiting to turn the anger into joy. So you might think that this angry play was just the kind of kick-start required – that’s what it was seen to be at the time. But when you get to actually read it, or see it or see the 1959 film, it’s like sticking your hand in a food blender. A really unpleasant experience. Jimmy Porter is a guy who pours out a constant stream of belittling bile and contempt over anything and everything in his poxy life but mostly all over his wife and her female friend. He’s almost but not quite the guy who when his wife undercooks the bacon gives her a black eye and then says look what you made me do. The wife meanwhile is a total doormat. She takes the hours upon hours of psychological bullying because she understands that really he’s a tortured genius who loves her and his pain is caused by the wicked world which persists in not recognising his genius and forcing him to live in a tiny one room flat and sell confectionary in a market place even though his brain is the size of the planet Jupiter at least and he’s really sensitive and watched his father die when he was 10, boo hoo. What Jimmy Porter needs is a solid pistol whipping from Sonny Corleone, but (spoiler alert) this does not happen. A FEW OF JIMMY’S AMUSING REMARKS Have you ever noticed how noisy women are? Have you? The way they kick the floor about, simply walking over it? Or have you watched them sitting at their dressing tables, dropping their weapons and banging their bits of boxes and brushes and lipsticks?. I’ve watched her doing it night after night. When you see a woman in front of her bedroom mirror, you realise what a refined sort of butcher she is. I know that the only way of finding out what’s going on is to catch them when they don’t know you’re looking. When she goes out, I go through everything – trunks, cases, drawers, bookcase, everything. Why? I want to know if I’m being betrayed. My wife… sweet and sticky on the outside, and sink your teeth in it, inside, all white, messy and disgusting. I’ve no public school scruples about hitting girls. Why why why why do we let these women bleed us to death? The plot of the play is pure male fantasy – he spends an hour bullying his wife, then her female friend arrives so he bullies her too, then the wife leaves him (hurray!) then the wife’s friend falls into his arms saying she just loves a bit of rough. Jimmy’s nastiness is all explained by his acute sensitivity and how he was a lonely little boy and now he’s an over-educated market trader in a world where he should be president of everything. So that’s why he hates women. Look Back in Anger was one of those famous British productions I had never read or seen before so I thought I’d tick it off, and now I’m sorry I did. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 30, 2018
|
Jul 02, 2018
|
Jul 02, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B00V7R08SY
| 3.62
| 8
| Apr 27, 2015
| Apr 27, 2015
|
liked it
|
What a lot of guides to horror movies there are to be sure and hardly any for such popular genres as romcoms or cartoons. And why is this? Two reasons
What a lot of guides to horror movies there are to be sure and hardly any for such popular genres as romcoms or cartoons. And why is this? Two reasons – first, because horror is the one genre that needs to justify itself all the time. As in the persistent question why do you want to put yourself through the ordeal of watching these movies? followed up by are you some kind of sick pervert bastard? And second because there are so many many many horror films made. When two film school graduates and their stoned cousin meet up and decide to make an ultra low budget movie they never make a romcom or a cartoon. They make Dead Hooker in a Trunk or I Spill your Guts or Slow Torture Puke Chamber. This guide gives us pretty good capsule reviews of around 300 recent movies, from mainstream hits like The Babadook and Hannibal and Let the Right One In to foreign arthouse madness like [REC] or Martyrs and Irreversible to American and British indie stuff like You’re Next and Eden Lake and The Devil’s Rejects all the way down down down to the ultralow budget shockers like The Manson Family and Twink and the August Underground trilogy. Concerning which, Mr Willis reports that it …left me feeling squalid for even having viewed it Now and again these degraded no-limits-to-what-we-will-show hardcore horror movies provoke Mr Willis into mini-rants: Valentine’s film affords him the opportunity to indulge in his own hardened fetish for all things vomit-related. …. The “vomit gore” films do lay down their gauntlets: for the mainstream, they provide “proof” that horror films are evil… for the seasoned seeker of the sick and twisted, their cod psychology and pop video shallowness will prove to be a test of even the most ardent fiend’s patience. And this does naturally take us back to the question why anyone would want to see some of these movies – say, Tumbling Doll of Flesh or Murder Set-Pieces or American Guinea Pig – given that their constant faithful theme is the explicit chopping up of young women. He never quite explains it. He distances himself from the true “gorehounds” who just simply love the sadism. He does draw the line somewhere. But it wouldn’t be a line recognised by the late Roger Ebert. We can see this when we compare their views of the Australian movie Wolf Creek (2005). This is Roger: There is a line and this movie crosses it. I don’t know where the line is, but it’s way north of Wolf Creek. There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty? This is a riposte by Mr Willis: Yes, Wolf Creek does get ugly. Once Jarratt has his victims trapped, it’s time for prolonged scenes of torment and violence. Some of these are delilivered with a level of sadistic glee that had critics such as Roger Ebert dancing around the word “misogynistic” in reviews. Is McLean’s film anti-women? I doubt it; it’s simply itching for commercial acceptance and is not above revelling in torture porn excesses if that’s what the masses demand. Gotta say that that does seem like a shrug to me, a moral bankruptcy. Yeah well, maybe it is misogynistic, I’m not a philosopher, but it sure packed them in, and that’s really what it’s all about, ain’t it. Is that not what Mr Willis is saying? I think so. So given all of that I have to knock off a fourth star; but it’s a very useful book. You just have to remember He who sups with the Devil should use a long spoon [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 18, 2018
|
Mar 19, 2018
|
Mar 18, 2018
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0099449218
| 9780099449218
| 0099449218
| 3.84
| 331
| 1993
| Jan 01, 2001
|
liked it
|
Henry Miller is a strange case. In the 1930s he decided to write books which put in what all other books left out, so that included a whole lot of rud
Henry Miller is a strange case. In the 1930s he decided to write books which put in what all other books left out, so that included a whole lot of rude crude sex and nasty behavior and four letter words flying about like rancid confetti. So he got banned right left and centre. You betcha. He wrote raving ranting autobiographical stuff which got called “novels” because he made a lot of it up. (Somewhat similar to Jack Kerouac 30 years later but Jack was a clean living Zen master compared to filthy Henry.) Anyway every other author rewrites his or her life for the first novel, that’s not exceptional, but most of them avoid listing all the boffing and freeloading and upchucking they did while they were doing stuff to have stuff to write about. Boy, what a monkey on your back, having to do a lot of stuff so you have something to write about. Hats off to Nicholson Baker – in his first novel he wrote a detailed account of his lunch hour. Brilliant. Better than Henry Miller. Erica Jong is a feminist and Henry Miller was a male chauvinist pig woman hater, so the cartoon goes. But when Fear of Flying, Erica’s first famous novel, was languishing in a tiny print run in 1973 Henry championed it all over the place and sent copies to all his friends and eventually it became a No 1 bestseller. He liked it because it was filthy and full of life. Erica and Henry became major pen pals. Henry was a major letter writer. (This shows you how long ago this all was. Ain’t no major letter writers around any more.) So the feminist ended up writing this book about the chauvinist to figure out this whole thing – essentially whether it was right to ban Henry from the 30s to the 60s (this ban imposed officially by the public authorities) and then ban him all over again in the 70s (this ban imposed unofficially by feminists). An interesting but uncomfortable fate for a writer. Erica has to admit she sees what the feminists were getting at, because it kind of stuck out like a big erect pink thing : Henry is best known for his worst writing…It was Kate Millett’s thesis that Miller’s entire apprehension of sex was misogynistic. In this she was not wrong…He does show the violence of intercourse no less than Andrea Dworkin shows it. He shows it from a man’s point of view as she shows it from a woman’s. The question is : is he advocating this violence? Or is he showing it because it exists? This is a primal question with Miller – and with all literature. The question comes up repeatedly lately because, I think, we have lost the sense of what literature is. Was Bret Easton Ellis advocating murder in American Psycho, or was he mirroring the violence of our culture? Erica concludes that Henry is doing the mirroring, not the advocating. But Erica is very nervous to be publicly defending Henry, she seems to feel beleaguered and backed into a corner by the hordes of Millett-and-Dworkin fembots, and this makes he come out with some crazy talk: Am I loving the fascist, the brute, the boot in the face? Kate Millett would probably say so. … (but) it is the role of the artist to express this violence. Art is pagan, wild, red in tooth and claw. It must be, in order to reflect the chthonic side of nature. It follows the furies, the Bacchae, the dybbukim – or it is not truly art. In what sense Erica? Are we saying that Francis Bacon is art (wild and violent, chopped up meat and screaming popes) but Claude Monet is not (lily ponds and light rain) ? [image] ("Not art" says Erica Jong) Henry himself defended his own filthiness thus: The modern writer, in using obscenity, is trying to rekindle the awe, the shock, the wonder that the ancients found at Delphi or Eleusis. This also sounds like shite to me. But of course Henry wasn’t living in an age where you can pick up copies of Space Raptor Butt Invasion, The Hottest Gay Man Ever Killed in a Shark Attack, Diary of a Virgin Stripper, Showers of Trump (A Billionaire Romance), Penetrated by Aardvarks and so forth. [image] Erica explains the violence : Men and women need each other so badly that they also hate each other when sex is at its hottest. Well, you might try telling that to the judge. Actually, I’m sure a lot of murders wind up with that kind of explanation. (I loved her so much I smashed her brains and drowned her – you heard it a million times.) Okay, you don’t like that explanation of Henry’s misogyny? Here Erica tries a different tack : Henry’s voice is the voice of the outsider, the renegade, the underground prophet – and isn’t that, after all, what women still are? She also tries a thin slice of psychobabble : Henry’s longing for the sweetness of his mother’s womb followed him all the days of his life. So did his anger at being cast out. (I mean, get over it Henry. None of us got any more time in the old womb than you did and look, we turned out okay.) Actually, says Erica, Henry didn’t hate women or want to do violence to them at all, this is a mistake. All that slagging off they get in his books is a bluff. The violence of his depiction of women is a secret tribute to the immense power women had over him. Actually, when all’s said and done – Henry was a proto-feminist! (Bet you saw that one coming.) Henry recognized at once that all male literature was frozen compared to the fecund delta of female prose. (Erica, what could that sentence possibly mean in any part of the universe?) A strange book all right. ****** Three books to re-read next (I read 'em years back and have, er, well, sort of forgotten them) : Fear of Flying by Erica Jong Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller Sexual Politics by Kate Millett ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 06, 2017
|
Jan 12, 2017
|
Jan 06, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B01AZVDM8A
| 2.50
| 4
| unknown
| Jan 31, 2016
|
it was ok
|
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. Noam Chomsky Another little self-published guide to s If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. Noam Chomsky Another little self-published guide to some extreme horror movies. [image] I would really really really not want to watch these movies (except one which I have seen) but I’m always interested in people who do want to see this stuff. I was interested to find out that all these movies except the ones marked with an asterisk are available on Amazon, our friendly parent company. These are the movies reviewed – let me know how many YOU have seen! The quotes are all from Alex Davis’ creepy little book, except where noted. You will spot quite quickly that Alex Davis' favourite word is "genuinely". A Serbian Film AD says : scenes that go further than many films would dare with violence against women [image] Aftermath He doesn’t need much of an invitation to find himself a female corpse, lock the door on himself, and Calvaire PB says: This is the odd one out – it’s a French art house film, which I thought was excellent – mad, grim, lyrical, gruelling, but I do recommend it! [image] Cannibal A detailed and uneasy display of killing, dismemberment and (of course) cannibalism Collar* The rape and murder is presented pretty realistically Cutting moments [image] I can’t think of anything I’ve watched through my fingers in a long time… I have to say I loved this film Debris documentar* It’s honestly more the kind of film you’d watch on a dare… if you really want to see one of the most horrible films you’re ever likely to see, check this one out Eat If you’re a tried and true gorehound you might find this a wee bit tame Feed [image] A website devoted to “feeders” and “gainers”… offering betting on maximum weight and when the women will die… some well and truly gross scenes Flowers* [image] IMDB says : An abstract, surreal horror film centering around six dead women waking up in the crawl space below their killer's house Frustre Guinea pig : the devil’s experiment 43 minutes of a woman being tortured by various methods…an interesting experiment Guinea pig 2 : flower of flesh and blood Remember me saying that The Devil’s experiment was pretty much 45 minutes of torture? Well here we have about 45 minutes of a woman being dismembered… it’s hard to get an awful lot if enjoyment out of this piece Guinea pig 3 : Shudder! The man who doesn’t die Guinea pig 4 : devil woman doctor Guinea pig 5 : android of notre dame Guinea pig 6: mermaid in a manhole Gutterballs [image] The teens gradually put together the fact that they’re been hunted down by a maniac wearing a bowling ball over their head [sic] PB says : why don’t self-published authors do some proof-reading? Headless* [image] The murders themselves are absolutely horrible and unremitting.. so no doubt by now you’ve gathered that I thought this one was pretty good Julia It’s 90 minutes that left me a little bit ashamed of my gender Megan is missing I struggle to think of something in recent memory that has left me quite this harrowed and upset PB says : I found this movie on Youtube, of all places. Men behind the sun In all honesty, there are only three or four scenes here that genuinely caused me to be upset or shocked… I’m giving it a pretty mediocre rating Necromentia Nekromantik [image] The corpse effects are pretty believable, and the sex scenes that are shown are genuinely difficult to watch Nekromantic 2 Why Mark would come back again after finding another man’s private parts in the fridge is even more beyond me Schramm Shaye Saint John : The Triggers Slaughtered Vomit Dolls [image] Does it deserve its reputation as a pinnacle of sick cinema? Yes, absolutely. It’s not something I would describe as enjoyable. … the message here is surely that men looking at – and treating – women this way is completely wrong… rating 8/10. PB says : Alex, you've been listening to those feminists again, haven't you! Slow Torture Puke Chamber [image] A sore test for even regular viewers of the kind of movies we cover at Film Gutter… some truly disturbing sexual violence… you could take the view that these are pieces of art, constructed for maximum impact on the viewer, an effort to push the envelope as far as possible. You could equally easily take the view that these movies are absolute trash, created to satiate an individual fetish and so deplorable and repellent as to be unwatchable… a very solid 8.5/10 for this one. Snuff 102 [image] Genuinely disgusting, reprehensible and practically impossible to watch.. I can’t lie, this film tested my resolve in a big way… it genuinely made me wonder what I was doing forcing myself into watching such extreme cinema… I can’t recommend this to anyone, even the most hardened extreme cinema viewer. There’s just nothing to like or enjoy here, nothing redeeming at all Subconscious Cruelty Thanatomorphose [image] A genuinely sickening slice of body horror that had me this close to hitting th stop button a number of times, which would have been the first time in my viewing history… rating 7/10 The eight immortals restaurant The girl next door PB says : this is an actual Hollywood movie, unlike these others The human centipede (first sequence) The human centipede (full sequence) The final 30 minutes of this movie are absolutely unflinching and genuinely horrible…It’s a truly repellent finale to a film that is absolutely twisted from beginning to end… none of the above, of course, is intended as a criticism after all, this is Film Gutter. We like that kind of thing here. Rating 9.5/10 The human centipede (final sequence) Tumbling Doll of Flesh Now, for anyone who considers themselves a lover of “torture porn” because they’ve watched a few of Eli Roth’s offerings and some of the Saw movies, well you’d be in for a distinctly rude awakening here. .. Sickened? Yes, absolutely. Horrified that it was given a release? To some extent, yes. Vase de Noces (Wedding Trough) [image] Postscript I was surprised Alex missed out some of the big names I have come across on “most disgusting film of all time” lists, such as The Poughkeepsie Tapes, Murder Set Pieces and American Guinea Pig. But heck, it’s nice he has something to look forward to. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 31, 2016
|
Jun 2016
|
May 31, 2016
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 054437343X
| 9780544373433
| 054437343X
| 3.56
| 22,034
| May 26, 2015
| May 26, 2015
|
liked it
|
Earlier this year a company called Protein World launched this advert in the London Underground [image] and over 50,000 women signed a petition calling Earlier this year a company called Protein World launched this advert in the London Underground [image] and over 50,000 women signed a petition calling for it to be banned for body shaming (and it was banned). The posters were defaced with many rude words. Other protestors offered alternative versions of beauty [image] Well, seeing as to how this is the Planet Earth and not the Planet Disney, you won’t be surprised to learn that sales of Protein World’s “Weight Loss Collection” products took off like a rocket after all the bad publicity. But that’s by the bye. So, you don’t have to look far to find examples of the female body as a political and psychological battleground. This book is all about that. It’s Fat is a Feminist Issue crossed with Fight Club. (Our author says this is pretty much a riff on Fight Club in her acknowledgements.) It’s the story of Plum, a 300 pound woman who has spent her life wishing she was “normal”-sized. She’s gone through all the diets, nothing has worked, and finally she decides to go for the stomach-stapling surgery. But before that happens she gets involved with a bunch of feminists, and then while we’re following the detailed account of Plum’s consciousness-raising, a brand new terrorist group hits the headlines – it’s called Jennifer and this part of the novel is a fantasy of feminist revenge, whereby porn barons and rapists are abducted, murdered and dumped in the desert. Oh, and their female aiders and abetters are killed too. It’s all more than a little cartoony, but that was fine by me. I love a bit of revenge. Along the way, we have accounts of Plum shoplifting from stores called V--- S--- … yes, like that. She says many rude things about V—S--. Well, I guess Sarai Walker was advised that if she actually said Victoria’s Secret she may get a writ. I didn’t have a problem with this being an explicitly political and not very realistic wish-fulfilment fantasy. The problem with this novel was that it just didn’t go far enough. To explain why will involve spoilers. (view spoiler)[ The lovely kind feminists enable Plum to accept her own body and to reject the stomach stapling. (This is all conducted as if Plum has never heard of any feminist writers ever, by the way. No mention of Susie Orbach or Naomi Wolf – gosh darn it, this book is specifically about The Beauty Myth so it’s like writing about a worker’s strike in the 1930s and never mentioning communism.) So the fat woman accepts that fat she is and fat she’ll be and she’s (finally) okay with that. But there’s a but. Why did she want to become thin in the first place? To avoid the endless rounds of daily humiliations, and to well, you know, if it’s not too much to ask, meet someone and experience love. Yeah, love. Why not? Plum finally sees that the problem is not her’s but the hateful world’s, i.e. the hateful men who mock her and hate her just for being fat. She realises that the hateful men hate many women – probably most - for one reason or another. The only ones they don’t hate are 18 year old sex zombies. So - just because Plum is now okay with her body doesn't of course mean that the rest of the world will behave any differently. the taunts and rudeness will still be there. The lack of relationships will still be there. So really, the idea of happy heterosexual love has to be ditched along with the stomach stapling. Sarai Walker in this novel appears to be suggesting that expecting happy hetero love from modern American men seems to be a like a mental version of foot binding. But she needs to come out and say it. We seem to be left with the resolutely 300 pound Plum striding about Manhattan in a perpetual fury at the way all the “normal-sized” women behave. Is Dietland saying that “normal” heterosexual relationships are just a psychological snakepit best to be avoided by any sane woman? If so, is the alternative living in some cosy commune with your sisters, which is the alternative presented here? If that is what Dietland is telling us, it’s inadequate. (hide spoiler)] DON’T GIMME THAT FATTITUDE In the end I needed more feminist terrorism, and particularly more investigation of the effects such a terrorist group would have on society – for instance, they issue a “Penis Blacklist” featuring the names of 50 misogynists – any woman having sex with any of these men will be killed, they say. Well, I want to know what happened then! What a luridly interesting idea! But it’s just kind of tossed off, if that’s not an inappropriate phrase. Heart in right place, keyboard not quite there yet. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 27, 2015
|
Jun 29, 2015
|
Jun 27, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0393328228
| 9780393328226
| 0393328228
| 3.28
| 40
| unknown
| Sep 17, 2005
|
it was ok
|
How strange to discover that John Phillips, main songwriter of The Mamas and the Papas, whom we associate with sunny harmonies and gentle hip-dippines
How strange to discover that John Phillips, main songwriter of The Mamas and the Papas, whom we associate with sunny harmonies and gentle hip-dippiness, should write a monograph on the works of the Marquis de Sade. I must have listened to “Monday Monday” a million times and failed to detect any hint of sadomasochistic cruelty lying beneath the plangent melody, but it’s clear from this essay that Phillips was steeped, soaked and smooshed in all aspects of the Marquis’ revoltingness. De Sade is famous for writing the four most-violently-pornographic novels of all time – only Brett Easton Ellis can really hold a lighted candle to these remarkable creations: Juliette, The New Justine, The 120 Days of Sodomy, and Philosophy in the Boudoir. But de Sade is confusing. His famous novels consist of vastly repetitive cartoonlike scenes featuring giant dildos, fountains of bodily fluids, coprophilia, burnings alive, disembowelments, babies, yada yada yada, the very stuff you were expecting, but more so. (John Phillips helpfully informs us : “Sadeian eroticism is not confined to the transgressive use of bodily waste” - a useful reminder.) How much of this stuff is supposed to be satirical, deliberately non-realistic or indeed straightforwardly pornographic is a matter of dispute. (But you would have to be a right sick bastard to get off on de Sade, really.) Breaking up the unpleasantness, there are many passages of elegant philosophical debate, which usually seek to skewer some commonly held 18th century view, such as that society needs laws, or that the weak should be protected, or that there is life after death. All this common-place wisdom is ripped asunder with gusto, much like the next virgin to enter the room. But – again – is this de Sade playing wicked devil’s advocate here? Will the real Marquis please stand? We may remember that in one of the most amazing twists of a truly amazing life, when de Sade was finally sprung from jail in 1790 after the revolution, this most haughty of aristocrats became a judge working for the National Assembly and an active member of a far left political party. Because the violent misogynistic fantasies are bundled together with the severe materialistic philosophy, I’d say de Sade, by being almost the first openly atheist author, put back the cause of atheism about ten thousand years. The godly sort were likely to conflate the two - as does de Sade and say there, if you don’t believe in the Lord you’ll be a-sodomising your own grandma in a trice. But this is false logic. You may indeed a-sodomize your own grandma, but your atheism did not lead you to this act – it was your incestuous gerontophilia. John Phillips does not even begin to address a central point raised by de Sade’s work, which is – why should pornography tend towards violence? Reading de Sade gives you the notion that the only way to live freely is to live violently, that if you reject the despotic state you are then able to become the despot to the weaker subjects in your own life, i.e. women, children and priests, because that’s nature’s way. De Sade’s libertines are all male, except for Juliette, who sports a giant strap-on a lot of the time and so becomes a ladyboy with a real mean streak. Instead of confronting this unacceptable and omnipresent aspect of de Sade, Phillips tries to kind of justify his methods: acts of violence in de Sade always have a philosophical underpinning and a philosophical context. Such acts are not presented for their own sake, as they would be in some modern forms of pornography, for example, but as exemplifications of a philosophical point, or as a pretext for a philosophical debate. (Yes, he does overuse the p word.) Phillips tries really hard to describes de Sade’s attitude to women as “ambivalent”, but he has to acknowledge that The overwhelming majority of de Sade’s female characters are consistently represented as objects : objects of desire, and yet of simultaneous contempt ("I get pleasure from women, but I despise them; more than that, I detest them as soon as my passion is sated" says Jerome in The New Justine)… the breasts and the vagina of their female victims are repeatedly bitten, pricked, whipped and stabbed. Sade’s libertines frequently declare their aversion for the female genitals, which they insist be kept hidden from view. Instead of calling a spade a spade and honestly admitting that de Sade’s work is misogynistic and – well, could be that de Sade himself was, too, if that’s not too much of a stretch - he faffs about in a ridiculous fancy mystical way, like this What Jerome and others hate about the female body is a kind of absence, one that is manifestly physical. Absence is equally characteristic of nature itself, which the libertine also hates because it works in an apparently motiveless and arbitrary fashion… Nature, then, is responsible for female absence, which itself inescapably becomes a metonym for nature’s absent causes.. The female body is the sign and symbol of nature’s disappointing nullity… What bollocks, Mr Phillips, what pure bollocks. I should stick to “California Dreamin’” in future. * Note : my review of Justine is here and my review of a great biography of de Sade is here. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 19, 2015
|
Jan 21, 2015
|
Jan 14, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0230319416
| 9780230319417
| 0230319416
| 4.07
| 30
| Jan 01, 2013
| Jul 09, 2013
|
really liked it
|
UPDATE: Some things are beyond comment - I went to see Dear White People last night at my local art house, Broadway in Nottingham, and found out they a UPDATE: Some things are beyond comment - I went to see Dear White People last night at my local art house, Broadway in Nottingham, and found out they are doing a special screening of Human Centipede 3 : THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 3 (FINAL SEQUENCE) (18) with special guests, Dieter Laser, and creator of The Human Centipede, director Tom Six + AFTER PARTY The 100% politically incorrect sequel is here at last! The final chapter of the most controversial trilogy of the 21st Century launches at Broadway with the star of both the first film and the final chapter, and the creator of the trilogy here in person. Hilarious, graphic, mad and inspired, the new film is sure to please every fan of the previous instalments. Come in costume – as a character from the trilogy, as part of a human centipede (or just as a centipede) and win CASH prizes, including for best costume, person who travelled the furthest to be here! I'd add in here an illustration of what the Human Centipede movies are like but I don't think either you or Goodreads would appreciate it. ***** There wasn’t any porn but there was a lot of torture involved in reading this book. Man, those academics, huh? Prevaricating, tergiversating, cavilling, equivocating, evading, hedging, tacking, jiving, beating around the bush, soft shoe shuffling, anything to avoid telling us what they think in plain terms. ACADEMIC LANGUAGE It’s a world of its own. It’s the ugliest and most stilted, most inelegant, most cramped prose you will ever read. Here are two examples. The whole book is like this : Morality is a means of elucidating how torture porn centralises interdependency rather than nihilism. This interpretation of Torture Porn both essentialises gender and supports a dichotomous vision of gendered power. Such argumentation intimates that gender conflict is natural and unavoidable, which is one reason that these paradigms have been rejected by numerous third-wave feminists. and That is not to suggest that torture porn’s depictions of castration simply gainsay hegemonic suppositions about gendered violence THAT SAID, 100% RESPECT TO THIS AUTHOR Dreadful language aside, I have total respect for Steve Jones of Northumbria University. He has written not just an analysis (which is what I was expecting) but a DEFENCE of what most people would consider indefensible. And he has walked the walk – the movies this guy has seen! I hadn’t heard of 70% of them. (“In Carver , Inside , 2001 Maniacs , and The Book of Revelation , male genitals are mutilated without any provocation at all.” – wow, who else could write that with confidence? ) You would have to pay most people to watch these movies, and then pay for the therapy they would then need, but Steve appears to have seen ‘em all. He has plunged to the depths of degradation and retained his sanity. Or has he? Maybe he is just a little bit mad: Because it is a social interaction that entails deliberately exploiting power, torture is inherently a moral issue. (p58) No, Steve, because torture is TORTURE, torture is an inherently moral issue! I don’t understand why anyone would write that sentence. ACTUALLY, STEVE, I GOTTA COME RIGHT OUT AND SAY IT : THE ARGUMENT OF THIS BOOK IS COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS But it will take me some time to explain why. So, for the few of you who are interested in one of the most lurid strands of modern popular Western culture, I will try to summarise Steve’s arguments. INTRODUCTION : WHAT IS TORTURE PORN? [image] Defining torture porn is, according to Steve, difficult. This is because it’s not a category, as such, it’s an insult, used by people who disapprove of the thing they’re referring to. It’s a case of I know it when I see it, and Hostel is it. The term first began to appear after Saw and Hostel in 2003. He says The vast majority of torture porn’s detractors have failed to adequately engage with the subgenre’s content. and ‘Torture porn’ misrepresents the films themselves then, but the label has also been utilised to incriminate the subgenre’s filmmakers and fans. Derogatory responses remain remarkably consistent, despite the genre’s continual evolution and The analysis will demonstrate that torture porn is not constituted by mindless sadism…. these films are more complex than has so far been accounted for in the vast majority of responses to the subgenre. and Torture porn’s men are customarily presumed to be sexually violent agents who victimise women. This supposition again stems from a lack of detailed engagement with the films themselves. There is, for example, far less nudity and sexual violence in films that have been dubbed ‘torture porn’ than the label connotes. BE MORE SPECIFIC – WHAT MOVIES ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? Torture porn initially gained attention from the mainstream press due to its relative success in the multiplex The stuff he is talking about is mainstream extreme-horror, so your Saws and Hostels, Wolf Creek, Wrong Turn, remakes of I Spit on your Grave and The Hills have Eyes - multiplex horror, as he says. But - there’s a whole OTHER world out there. There are 100s of extreme horror movies which wouldn’t get within 100 miles of your local multiplex because they would never get a certificate. WAY, WAY BEYOND HOLLYWOOD Steve says that the critics have been lazy, ignorant or venal in their hounding of “torture porn” movies – they have either not noticed the entire genre of what he calls “hardcore horror” or have chosen to ignore it because , since it is never encountered in a multiplex, it’s beneath notice. Hardcore horror films befit many of the accusations inappropriately levelled at torture porn, demonstrating how inapt it is that torture porn has been scapegoated In regard to this unseen-by-non-fans world of hardcore horror, here’s one of Steve’s many classic lines: Slow Torture Puke Chamber’s forced-abortion necrophilic-pederasty is especially offensive THE CASE AGAINST TORTURE PORN Poster for Hostel Part II [image] Eli Roth (director) commented : Any time people see women in a horror film they say, 'Oh, these girls are just pieces of meat.' And, literally, in Hostel Part II, that's exactly what they are. They are the bait, they are the meat, they are the grist for the mill. So I thought it was actually a really smart poster ... and really, really disgusting! I love it. Back to Steve : First, some objectors claim that torture porn is constituted by violence, nudity, and rape. Second, violence is read as pornographic. Third, the ‘porn’ in ‘torture porn’ is interpreted as a synonym for ‘worthless’. Since the films are allegedly preoccupied only with ‘endless displays of violence’, they are dismissed as throwaway, immoral entertainment. Finally, it is proposed that the films are consumed as violent fetish pornography: that viewers are sexually aroused by torture porn’s horror imagery. Six adjectives regularly used to describe these movies: Gratuitous Graphic Gruesome Grotesque Grisly Gross THESE CRITICS ARE SUFFERING FROM GENERATIONAL NARCISISM First, horror tends to be marketed primarily towards young adults. Second, pundits frequently respond more favourably to horror they saw in their youth than to horror they encounter later in life. This certainly elucidates why there have been few positive responses to torture porn in print media, while younger online reviewers, ‘are significantly more enthusiastic’ about the subgenre. So, the critics of Saw and Hostel are old farts. (“These new torture porn movies are awful, remember the great old days of Cannibal Holocaust and Driller Killer?”) MORAL UNEASE : OUR GUARD DOGS ARE ASLEEP Steve mentions that earlier banned films like Cannibal Holocaust or I Spit on your Grave from the 1970s are now allowed to be released uncut on dvd. Rather than perceiving this trend as evidence that films once considered worthy of banning lose their propensity to shock over time, torture porn’s opponents have characterised these shifts as confirming that horror films are more violent than they once were, and that censorial bodies have become too liberal THE CRITICS ARE JUST WRONG Steve’s defence of torture porn movies goes like this : Quantitative analysis of torture porn’s content will be employed to evince that sexual violence is nowhere near as widespread in torture porn as the subgenre’s detractors have propounded. Torture porn does not simply entail ‘luxuriating in the sight of another human being’s suffering’, as numerous detractors have claimed. The characters’ struggles advance torture porn’s narratives. Such battling involves physical violence (torture), but it also shifts the characters’ positions relative to one another. Physical brutality reifies the characters’ symbolic grappling for control. The characters’ initial relationships are unmoored by violence, resulting in role-slippages…. Torture porn’s violence does not fix power. Rather, torture porn films depict the contestation of power. BUT WHAT ABOUT MISOGYNY? DO THESE FILMS HATE WOMEN? [image] torture porn filmmakers are routinely charged with misogyny. Reviewers recurrently assert that the subgenre’s violence is ‘directed primarily against women’…. [that the films] specifically centre on men victimising women. Many of torture porn’s detractors replicate these complaints rather than engaging with filmic content, taking this well-established discursive correlation between porn, horror, and misogyny for granted. Here are some facts and figures to contradict that. In the 45 films that have been referred to by three or more major International English language publications as ‘torture porn’ (at the time of writing), 244 males and 108 females are killed. 293 male characters and 144 female characters are severely injured. More than twice the number of males than females die or are injured in these films. 206 incidents of males harming females are nearly equalled by 155 occasions of females harming males. Furthermore, these figures are dwarfed by 351 instances of males harming other males. Patently, torture porn is not as skewed towards men harming women as disparagers have suggested. THE PENNY BEGAN TO DROP In the middle if the chapter defending torture porn movies from the charge of hating women, a big penny dropped. However, that is not to say that Penance is plainly misogynistic. ‘Misogyny’ denotes hatred for women, but also implies a bias: that men are not also represented negatively (otherwise the representations would be ‘misanthropic’ rather than ‘misogynistic’). So, if movies portray the suffering of women in great detail, but the movies clearly show the perps to be evil, and not to be emulated, then they aren’t misogynistic. Penance ’s plot-synopsis sounds irredeemably misogynistic. In practice, the film is unpleasant, yet the narrative is directed towards vilifying Geeves’s sexual violence rather than ogling Amelia’s terror. Murder-Set-Pieces does not promote sexual torture, since the film’s horror derives from the Photographer’s sexual cruelty, and is intertwined with his other unacceptable traits. Murder-Set-Pieces is ‘extreme’ insofar as the representations contravene social taboos regarding flagrant displays of misogyny in culture. The filmmakers rely on viewers understanding that misogyny is anathema in order to manufacture shock. Consequently, Murder-Set- Pieces implicitly endorses the idea that misogyny is objectionable, despite its antagonists’ behaviour. Murder-Set- Pieces ’s ‘extremity’ is contingent on the norm that is infringed: if misogyny and representations of sexual violence were acceptable, its imagery would fail to shock I can’t agree – this is like a great big get-out-of-jail-free card. It means NO horror films can ever be called misogynistic. The director can say well, I am showing what women-hating serial killers really do, I am, of course, not endorsing their behaviour, what do you take me for? Everyone could say that, even Satoru Ogura, the director of Guinea Pig. (IMDB plot summary : A group of guys capture a young girl with the intent of hurting her. They torture her in many ways, from beating her to putting a sharp piece…. Etc etc) Even the movies which portray untrammelled male superiority and triumphant violence against women, like August Underground, Tumbling Doll of Flesh, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, Murder-Set-Pieces, oh, so many) will be said to be ironic, like Swift’s Modest Proposal. This is the defence usually put up for American Psycho. Or maybe not ironic, maybe some form of protest. The prosecution points out that the audience is having their cake and eating it – they get to enjoy the anti-female gore and they get to feel that they are part of the exposure, dissection and criticism of misogyny. MORAL COMPLEXITY Steve argues strongly throughout that all these movies are telling morally complex stories with political resonances…. Torture porn’s drama organically involves audiences in moral contemplation. The subgenre’s narratives provoke such cogitation because the characters face emotionally challenging situations in which their intuitive responses clash with moral reasoning The consensus is that torture porn comments on the War on Terror: encompassing 21st century terrorism, 9/11, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the Bush Administration’s torture sanctions. Critically invested readings of torture porn’s significance have developed from such linkages, and so the allegory interpretation constitutes an important branch of ‘torture porn’ discourse Steve also finds merit in the bleakness of these movies. They portray a landscape where justice is rarely done, where the bad guys triumph or where everyone dies. Much of this book is taken up with discussions of the moral ambiguities in these movies. Critics say that these movies simply revel in gore and pain for the sadistic gaze of their giggling teenage fanboys. Steve gets into the intricacies of how in many of these movies the tortured person becomes the torturer or the witnesses become morally compromised, and what all. Torture porn narratives are not ‘morally duplicitous’ or ‘morally degraded’ as numerous reviewers have professed, but neither are they one-dimensional moral propaganda. Torture porn dramatises difficult ethical questions: is it ever necessary to take another person’s life? To what extent does self-preservation outweigh one’s obligation to others? What pressure could lead one to knowingly commit immoral acts? LET’S HAVE A LAUGH WITH ANOTHER CLASSIC LINE From p 68 his admittance that ‘I usually have the biggest boner on set when we’re shooting gore stuff’ is detrimental to Roth’s case for Hostel ’s cultural worth WHAT DO THE FANS SAY? [image] Since torture porn has been widely presented as irredeemable, horror fans may feel compelled to condemn torture porn in order to defend the horror genre and horror fandom itself against detractors’ accusations. But the soi-disant gorehounds don’t actually care much about any of this high falutin justification. They’re happy to revel in their gross taste for violence and pain. Check out this Goodreads author J A Saare https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... She reviews extreme horror movies on youtube and finally, after many questions, she put up a video which asked the question : Why do people want to watch sick twisted movies? I summarise a few of the points she makes : I am a devoted wife & mother, average girl, I have an obsession with horror, I don’t want people to be murdered & don’t want to torture anyone. Extreme horror is like the thrill from a switchback ride, for fans. Us fans just like this stuff. I do not see anything to be offended by these movies – if you don’t like them, don’t see them. You have a responsibility not to watch stuff which will offend you. Leave us gorehounds to our own fun. It’s a matter of taste. In one of her videos she reviews Grotesque and comments: “if you enjoy gore and sick demented stuff then I’m sure you’ll enjoy Grotesque” – she apologises about the brevity of this particular video review because there’s a kids’ birthday party going on and she has to go and look after them. You can hear little kids playing hide & seek and counting down in another room. So some regular people just happen to enjoy watching torture and the gory deaths of young women (the victim of choice). Here’s another example. A review of one of the most notorious hardcore horror torture porn movies, August Underground Mordum, from www.atrocitiescinema.com : Rarely, if ever, has this reviewer been truly "disgusted" by a film...but "Mordum" certainly comes close to doing just that. It's gritty, dark, gloomy, and totally disgusting. I can't, in good conscience, say that you'll "like" this film, but I still strongly recommend it. In fact, I think it represents the state-of-the-art in cinematic depravity and gore (for the sake of depravity and gore). So often on this site, we horror fans try to find subtext or social critique in the films we so love, if only to help distance ourselves from the sheer ickiness to which we constantly and instinctually expose ourselves. With "Mordum", that isn't possible. To watch this film is to be an "accomplice" of sorts. To view "Mordum" is to look into the eye of disease. To experience "Mordum" is to experience the very meaning of "extreme horror", and for that reason, I give it my highest possible recommendation. However, be forewarned that you will never be the same again. It's powerfully sick stuff, and it really does make you feel dirty, but it's for those very reasons that it's such a supremely effective and satisfying horror film. IN CONCLUSION Although I don’t agree with Steve Jones, and I positively hate his dry and painful prose style, this is a crucial book about a significant subject. Are modern Western people becoming morally unmoored? Are we becoming more like our 18th century counterparts, who queued round the block to see something like the drawing and quartering of Robert Francois Damiens? Are the hundreds of torture porn movies being churned out each year part of a rising sea of misogyny which is breaking over the levees in many parts of the cultural landscape? Do these horror movies bring us the truth about human beings, all else being hopeful propaganda? If moral philosophy is your thing, maybe you’d like to put Immanuel Kant to one side and consider BAD MEAT [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Oct 26, 2014
|
Oct 17, 2014
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1608463869
| 9781608463862
| 1608463869
| 3.83
| 79,743
| Apr 14, 2014
| May 20, 2014
|
really liked it
|
This book is so depressing that I had to read this one at the same time to prevent me from spiralling down into despair. You may have heard of the titl This book is so depressing that I had to read this one at the same time to prevent me from spiralling down into despair. You may have heard of the title essay, which is funny and deservedly famous. But in the second essay the floor suddenly drops away and we’re falling into the vile pit of misogyny. The second essay is called “The Longest war” and is about men hating, silencing, injuring and killing women. Ah misogyny, men hating women. It’s like oil – every time you think we may be running out of it vast new reserves are discovered. Recent new geysers of hatred have been spouting forth from the internet and why? Because some women just do not know their place. Imagine – some of these women actually had the temerity to suggest a woman’s portrait should feature on a British bank note. So naturally, they got rape and death threats . Well, what did they expect? Then some other women had the gall to suggest that many computer games are misogynistic. After the by now standard rape ‘n’ death threats came the bombing threats. The writer Caitlin Moran has a reply to those who say aw, stop whining, just block the trolls. For those who say “why complain -just block” on a big troll day it can be 50 violent /rape messages an hour. Gotta love that internet. In other countries the men don’t just talk the talk, they shoot 15 year old girls in the head if they have the temerity to speak publicly about the education of girls. When they’re not actually raping & killing & trolling, men make movies in which men torture women to death, movies which some other men ban and others enjoy. Here's a few interesting titles (there are sooooooo many more) http://www.movie-censorship.com/repor... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Set-Pi... http://www.horrorsociety.com/2011/01/... http://severed-cinema.com/g-reviews/g... Well, in the interest of fairness, some women also like this sort of movie…. Here’s Goodreads author J A Saare explaining where she’s coming from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCUqMf... But I’d say it’s mostly men, by a long long shot. Anyway. Rebecca Solnit lays this all on the line in this series of essays. But - maybe by sheer will power, she manages to end on an optimistic note, which I was very grateful for. She says that at least this is all known about & made public now; and the genie of feminism can’t be put back in the bottle, and even though the road is 1000 miles long the woman walking down it isn’t at mile one. I don’t know how far she has to go, but I know she’s not going backward, despite it all – and she’s not walking alone. Hmmm. Here's a little bit of good news from Britain : we have begun to jail men who threaten rape. Labour MP Stella Creasy tells of ordeal as Twitter troll is jailed for 18 weeks STELLA Creasy has described feeling "frightened" and "terrified" as a result of a hate campaign by a Twitter troll who was today jailed for 18 weeks. Delivery driver Peter Nunn bombarded Stella Creasy with menacing messages including threats to rape her. Nunn, 33, used social media for a series of vile statements after Ms Creasy supported a bid to put Austen on the bank note. The campaign was launched by feminist Caroline Criado-Perez, a court heard. She was also a target of threats from Nunn, City of London Magistrates' Court was told. He retweeted one sickening message to the Walthamstow MP, which read: "You better watch your back, I'm going to rape you at 8pm and put the video all over." Ms Creasy told 5 News Tonight: "I can't pretend that it hasn't had an impact on me. Of course it makes you much more wary of strangers, it makes you frightened, it makes you terrified because somebody has fixated on you and wants to cause you suffering and pain. Nunn, from Bristol, was found guilty at an earlier hearing of sending indecent, obscene and menacing messages by a public electronic network between July 28 and August 5 last year. Jailing him for 18 weeks today, District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe dismissed Nunn's defence that the messages were meant to be satirical. She said: "This was extreme language with substantial threats to Ms Creasy. I do not accept that this was free speech and jokes," she added. Earlier the judge had remarked: "I can't see that this is anything other than grossly offensive and menacing. "I am told that a lot of people joke about rape, I don't know if I'm sure that this is a common form of humour in any form of media." ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 17, 2014
|
Oct 18, 2014
|
Oct 03, 2014
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1471131572
| 9781471131578
| 1471131572
| 4.26
| 11,812
| Apr 10, 2014
| May 23, 2014
|
really liked it
|
Update! I had to share this with you all, you'll see why. I was listening to a cd of hit songs from the 1910s and 20s and came across this GEM. It's ca Update! I had to share this with you all, you'll see why. I was listening to a cd of hit songs from the 1910s and 20s and came across this GEM. It's called "Wait till you get them up in the Air, Boys" and it's all about why any young man should learn how to fly a plane..... Sometimes you try to love a girl And she says no to you; It makes you feel so blue, But there's nothing you can do! You take her for an auto ride And start that mushy talk, But if she doesn't like it, She gets out and starts to walk. They've fooled us ever since the world began, But listen boys, I've got a little plan! Wait till you get them up in the air, boys, Wait till you get them up in the air. You can make them hug and squeeze you too, For if they don't, Just say you won't Come down until they do! Wait till you get them up in the clouds, boys, There won't be anyone to watch you there! You can loop the loop and she can hardly get her breath, It isn't hard to reason with a girl who's scared to death! So wait till you get them up in the air, boys, Up, up, up up, way up in the air! Do you remember when you took the girlie out to dine? You used to buy her wine, It made her feel so fine! She'd always hug and kiss you 'cause she felt so light and gay, And I suppose you're worried since they took the wine away! But boys, it's not as bad as you expect, An aero ride will have the same effect! So wait till you get them up in the clouds, boys, There won't be anyone to watch you there! When you get her way up high, have all the fun you can, There never was a girl who'd fall that far for any man! So wait till you get them up in the air, boys, Up, up, up up, way up in the air! Wait till you get them up in the air, boys, Up, up, up up, way up in the air! Recorded: 1919 ********************** Well, I have to quote this little rant. The subject is breastfeeding in public and the ranter is a BBC DJ in a locally broadcast phone-in show on 12 August : Couldn’t mums just stay at home and do it? I’m not offended by it, I’m just made to feel uncomfortable about it. You wouldn’t get ‘yummy mummies’… breastfeeding in public. Those kind of women wouldn’t do it because they’re very image-conscious and they know it’s not a great look. I blame the Earth mothers, you know the ones I mean, the ones with the moustaches, the ones who work in libraries, the ones who wear hessian, the ones they’re always on Radio 4 on Women’s Hour, they are always pushing the boundaries and making us feel uncomfortable. Breastfeeding in public is unnatural. It’s the kind of thing that should be done in a quiet, private nursery. It was OK in the Stone Age when we knew no better, when people didn’t have their own teeth… but now I just think a public area is not the place for it and fellas don’t like it. So there - ladies, just don't do it. It makes us fellas ... well... uncomfortable. You know? Just stay in your libraries and oil your moustaches. ****************************************************************** So are you actually going to review this book? Well, yes. But it’s difficult. I’ve been putting it off. Why’s that? It’s either a good book or a bad book. Do your usual thing. Well this is more than a book, it’s a movement, it’s a whole thing. It’s too big to think about. The whole thing depresses and defeats me. It reminds me of Shot by Both Sides by Magazine. Do you know that one? No. It’s a great single from 1978, some days I think it’s my all time favourite single. Although the guy can’t sing at all and half of the lyrics are indistinguishable. But you can hear him sing I wormed my way into the heart of the crowd I was shocked to find what was allowed And then later They have to rewrite all the books again Well I see from the title of this book that it’s about everyday sexism because that’s the title. So haven’t we been down this road many many times already? What makes this any different to all the 3rd wave 4th wave millions of books by feminists? Haven’t all these battles been fought and either won or some sort of compromise has been found – you know, like paternity leave, all women shortlists, blah blah ? Well that’s what Laura Bates and her website & book is all about – the awful fact that not a lot has changed on a daily basis. The sheer amount of crap that girls and women have to wade through. Maybe some quotes will help here to give you the idea. Laura Bates says this : If we think we’ve cracked this equality thing – that we’re bringing up our sons and daughters to believe they can be whatever they want to be – we really need to take a reality check. Some randomly chosen quotes – I love her but when I first told mum I wanted to go into politics she said “Oh yes! You’d make a wonderful politician’s wife!” At school a teacher said that women were only there (in parliament) because men let them, to shut the feminists up for a bit. As she expounded her tough stance on immigration she stood in shoes worthy of the front row at Paris fashion week. (from the Guardian) In the Brownies (when she was 7) we sang songs about potential careers. One verse I remember went : “typing letters, sitting on the boss’s knee” When I was in the first year (age 11), my form teacher held a beauty contest – asked the boys to vote for the girls and ranked us on the blackboard. (note – that’s how Facebook started). A male friend said to me “9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape”. I called him out on sexism, calling him disgusting, he shrugs and says it was a joke. My younger brother’s 13. He had his friends round last weekend and I couldn’t believe it when I heard them sitting in the front room discussing girls in their class in three categories : “frigid”, “sluts” and “would like to rape”. Well, what do you expect from brain dead kids. This stuff doesn’t really affect educated people. Oh, you think so ? I have a few more quotes. David Gilmour (Canadian literature professor, not Pink Floyd guitarist) said he’s “not interested in teaching books by women”. German artist Georg Baselitz said : “Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.” Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko said that men will always be conductors because orchestras would be distracted by “a cute girl on the podium”. Seth MacFarlane sang “We Saw Your Boobs” at the 2013 Oscars ceremony to the various actresses in the audience. It was just funny banter. It’s all just funny banter. The Oscar ceremony organisers all thought so. Boris Johnson, mayor of London, said women just go to university to find suitable marriage partners. It was just a bit of humour. This is just depressing me. That's what I'm saying. I'm not even going to quote the sexual assault and rape stuff in here. It's too much. That’s why I really didn’t want to review this book. There’s a cheer-up-men chapter at the end which says not all boys and men are like this (although the ones who aren’t are probably regarded as gay by the ones who are). When you read it it’s like being told you’re one of the good Germans who didn’t vote for Hitler. Actually, I felt like Hamlet : I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me I suppose we have to try to regard things as they are, and not as we would wish them to be, but Lord knows it's a constant struggle. The optimist inside us all makes us want to think better of half of the human race than the dreadful picture presented here. Although we need this book, it offers no way forward. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 17, 2014
|
Apr 21, 2014
|
Apr 10, 2014
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1783560363
| B00H7G1DMY
| 3.86
| 497
| Dec 08, 2013
| Dec 08, 2013
|
liked it
|
Campaign after campaign, website after website, petition after petition, slutwalk after slutwalk. And no end in sight. Because misogyny is the gift th
Campaign after campaign, website after website, petition after petition, slutwalk after slutwalk. And no end in sight. Because misogyny is the gift that keeps on giving, a bubbling wellspring of merry dancing hatred. This is an extended essay of 70 pages and very useful as a summary of the first three waves and a survey of the one we’re in the middle of now. But just so you know, you have to be okay with sentences like this: Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism project tells me that what fuels her campaigning is both the young girls who write in with their stories of being raped or assaulted, and the men who send her descriptions of the many ways they plan to mutilate her. BRITISH BANK NOTES Let me mention this story, which is kind of where-we’re-at-now. In Britain they print the portrait of notable British persons on banknotes, like you do. And they change them every so often. Last year Elizabeth Fry (prison reformer) was the only woman left on a British banknote and she was going to be replaced by Sir Winston Churchill, who was a man. A journalist and writer called Caroline Criado-Perez thought they should keep at least one woman on one banknote so she started a campaign and the new governor of the Bank of England (a Canadian man) perked up and listened, and lo, Winston has been bumped and Jane Austin will be on the new £10. When Caroline’s campaign got going she became the target of a sustained 24 hour day in day tidal wave of abuse via Twitter. kill yourself before I do; rape is the last of your worries; I’ve just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried; seriously go kill yourself! I will get less time for that; rape?! I’d do a lot worse things than rape you. This was one post (quoted in the Judge’s summation) – there were hundreds of other rape and death threats. Over, apparently, the matter of putting the portrait of a woman on a banknote. Two people were eventually arrested. They were the worst offenders, sending the most violent threats. From the Judge’s summation: She had to spend substantial time and money ensuring she is as untrackable as possible. She gives a detailed and personal account of the physical effects of the fear on her. The emails from Sorley and Nimmo (she says) are imprinted on her mind – “I don’t think I will ever be free of them”. The misogynists got two years in jail. One was a woman. YAY It’s a good two thirds of the way though this 70 page essay before you finally get something to cheer feebly about. Facebook was resisting all feminist calls to get rid of images of misogyny from their vast site. Feminists finally figured out the way forward: take a screenshot of the worst pages, and email them to the big companies whose adverts adorn these pages. That got their attention. Yay. THE TALIBAN OF THE WEST The hypocritical posturing of military spokespersons is a consistent source of bleak fun. Reading the news about troop withdrawals, anyone might think that the only reason for the Western invasion of Afghanistan was to enable Afghan girls to go to school, or to improve women’s rights in general. That’s what they always mention. But I don’t recall that the education of girls was the number one reason for invasion back in 2001. I don’t think it was mentioned at all. So we all know that the Taliban are very anti-women, don’t we. Well. If the American and British governments were so concerned about protecting females from domestic violence, domestic slavery, forced marriage, rape and sexual humiliation they should have invaded their own countries. Send troops into Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Detroit, San Francisco, Paris, Toronto. Occupy those places. Enforce women’s rights there. There’s a Taliban operating right here, right now, alive and well in the west. The Taliban of the East likes women to wear the burkha and stay indoors; the Taliban of the West likes women to walk around in miniskirts. Otherwise they’re the same. Look at what they say. PERPS You never get the perps to talk. The guys who pour forth their rape threats on line, the rapists (solo or group), the abusers. Once apprehended, they maintain a mafia silence. It’s beneath their dignity to explain why women must be punished for stepping out of line. It’s obvious, any real man would understand. No explanation required. SMILEY FACE I’m glad to say that Kira Cochrane ends with a burst of positivity about the vigorous state of feminism, but it’s like being glad there are so many doctors because we’re all so ill. THE LIGHTER SIDE OF CAMPAIGNING AGAINST FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION The Daughters of Eve hung a banner with the words “you wouldn’t cut off your dick so don’t cut off my clit” and handed out vagina cakes, with Maltesers standing in for the clitoris. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 2014
|
Mar 2014
|
Feb 25, 2014
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| 1894815351
| 9781894815352
| 1894815351
| 3.39
| 535
| Mar 01, 2002
| Jan 01, 2002
|
did not like it
|
ON MISOGYNY : No 6. AN UNHAPPY INTRODUCTION As you may know, every so often I do a review about misogyny, just because it is the gift that keeps giving. ON MISOGYNY : No 6. AN UNHAPPY INTRODUCTION As you may know, every so often I do a review about misogyny, just because it is the gift that keeps giving. There’s always something to say, its adherents are constantly finding new and unexpected opportunities to express themselves. Who would, for instance, have thought that the recent Wimbledon Ladies Singles final would have sparked off such a torrent of grisly hatred on Twitter, but it did. The focus of the male rage was the winner, Marion Bartoli, who was perceived to be fat and ugly and therefore offensive to the male viewers. That was her crime. This is she [image] These are some of the comments [image] [image] but out of respect to my fellow Goodreaders I will not be quoting the worst of them. Check it all out here: https://twitter.com/EverydaySexism/st... Next up, Caroline Criado-Perez. In the UK yesterday a 21 year old guy was arrested for sending out on Twitter (again) a number of threats to rape and torture her. What was her crime in his (and other men’s) eyes? Well, it was that she recently campaigned successfully to get a woman’s portrait put on to a British banknote! (They have selected Jane Austen.) When she reported one rape threat to the police, who took the threat seriously, there was “ a massive 24-hour backlash of misogynistic slurs, threats of physical violence and rape”. A DISMAL REVIEW I kind of think of reading something like Suffer the Flesh and Topping from Below as anthropological field trips. Plus, I can’t talk about this stuff unless I do. So : this is a very short novel which begins in the famous Barnes and Noble bookshop in Union Square, NYC, where an overweight woman named Zoe is approached by a thin, pretty woman who tells her that she’s been selected for a new, effective weight loss program and that she’s sorry for her. Within a couple of pages Zoe is kidnapped by fake cops and driven to an underground torture complex – so this is like Hostel for fat girls. The concept here is, apparently, that a diet of rape and torture and little food dished out by a bunch of faceless cruel men for six months will make these women lose a lot of weight. Does this sound insane? Yes, it really does. ( Quote : “This is an extreme weight loss plan.” p92.) So that is the concept of the plot. But really, this novel is barely a novel at all, it’s a little bit silly to use that word; just as porn films are barely films at all, they’re rearranged beads on a string abiding by the strict rules of the genre. Anyway, we then get a hundred pages of the usual torture ‘n’ rape, of which I will spare you the details, but I must mention that it includes the second appearance of a Great Dane in my misogyny series (p58). I don’t think it’s the same Great Dane from Topping from Below but surely there aren’t many that will do this kind of thing? AND THE POINT IS ? Well – is all this horrible torture-porn of fat women a) A strong protest that the male oppression of fat women is equivalent to being tortured and raped on a daily basis b) a series of repulsive vignettes with no purpose other than to please the torture-porn audience (99% male, I assume). c) An expression of profound self-loathing on the part of the author d) All three ? In the debate on American Psycho it became clear that there are many readers who believe that page after page depicting the torture of women can be a morally good thing, because that makes the satire of American capitalism/eighties consumerism/Wall Street yuppies so much more biting and pungent and what have you. I disagree. On a good day I’ll say that this is not being able to see the wood for the trees, but on a bad day I will say that this hatred of women being displayed for a greater good argument is just a polite figleaf for what is, in fact, merely the blatant display of the hatred of women. (Is there a whole stream of movies being made by women featuring the torture and rape of men? If so I’ve entirely missed it. This is one way traffic.) On page 101 some violence begins to be directed against the male characters. After 10 pages of that, it’s back to the women again. And right at the end, the bad guys get caught – oops, now I spoiled it. Dearie me. So we can agree that misogyny has never been in better health. It surely does not need any help from a woman. This author ought to be up on a charge of aiding and abetting. Quote from the author : I get that a lot, how people are surprised a woman could write something so extreme. I’ve been told I “write like a guy". Yes, a guy that hates women. *** Previous entries in the misogyny series American Psycho The Reader’s Guide to American Psycho Spare Key Topping From Below Beyond the Darkness ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 28, 2013
|
Jul 29, 2013
|
Jul 28, 2013
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 9781477534
| 3.77
| 57
| Feb 10, 2012
| Jun 05, 2012
|
liked it
|
Additional note : Well, this is a strange one all right. This self-published book from 2012 was republished in an expanded edition with a new title and Additional note : Well, this is a strange one all right. This self-published book from 2012 was republished in an expanded edition with a new title and a new author name in 2018 but without telling anyone. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3... New title : 1001 Movies that Shocked the World New author name : Vincent Kapner I think Vincent is Phil Russell. All the reviews in Beyond the Darkness appear in the new much bigger book, but it's not credited anywhere or mentioned in the new book's bibliography. Most odd. Original review follows . ********** At first I was disappointed when this self-published book plopped through the letterbox. I had thought (there being no reviews around to check with as it's brand new) that this would be a survey of the large field of "cult, horror and extreme cinema" from an objective film-theory/socio-psychological point of view. No such thing – not with that cover!! Phil is a fan and this is his blog-into-book (blook?). So I had to change course and regard this book as a case study of Phil the unrepentant, in-your-face gorehound and what makes him the sick boy he is. On Forced Entry (1973) : Even in those glory days before the PC spoilsports came along, this film stood out On Grotesque (2009) : Easily one of the most sick, twisted and realistically executed torture porn movies I've ever seen… excellent performances, top-notch gore and splatter, and the production values are superb. To see a grubby little torture film like this looking so nicely lit and glossy is a rare treat And further : While many of the films covered here have their own social and artistic merits, an equal amount of coverage is given to films that possess no such thing. First, a book review : Phil is not the best writer about movies but what he lacks in style, panache and grammar he almost makes up in enthusiasm and fanboy knowledge. So just to be clear, for fans of the horror genre, this is a ***** Five star book. Why I myself can only give it two stars will become apparent. Here's a challenging question from Phil : Exactly what difference does it make if something like Baise-Moi or Irreversible are granted certificates because these films have something other to say than to merely excite and disturb their viewers? Grotesque may not be art but it's a bloody good piece of torture porn. Human Centipede 2 is crude and explicit, but is jolly good fun nonetheless. He's very clear – he wants to see gory uncut movies in which people are tortured to death and he doesn't see why he shouldn't. That's what he likes. He's not ashamed of it! He's not trying to say that Human Centipede 2 has any merit, it's vile, degrading and makes people feel sick, and that's exactly why it's good! Dario Argento, director of Suspirio and many others, quoted by William Schoell in "Stay Out of the Shower" “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man”. I feel as if I don't have an answer for this. It makes me very sorry that a number of individuals in this rich and pampered part of the planet Earth like to spend their time watching movies which portray cruelty and pain which some of them prefer to see inflicted on women of the young, pretty and white type. But I have noted recently that your serious novels also seem, often, to be engaged in documenting the various forms of unhappiness human beings can cause each other - examples from recent novels read : Therese Raquin, Hate List, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Saturday, Micka – none of them "horror fiction" – and females raped and/or killed in each one. This fits into a larger point. I think there has been a very pervasive artistic attitude, starting with Modernism in the late 19th century, to try to be more honest in all the arts, and especially in the narrative arts like novels, plays and movies. So much of human life was unprintable (and unfilmable) for decades. It forced writers and directors to lie about the nature of, for instance, violence, such as, that a single bullet kills a person clean as a whistle with no blood, like in Western movies, until Sam Peckinpah came along. Emile Zola tried to be more honest in his novels (but often toppled over into melodrama, which is another form of unreality). Upton Sinclair tried to show what happened really in one particular industry, Norman Mailer tried to show the actuality of World War II in Naked and the Dead and they made him modify the soldiers' language – Tallulah Bankhead : So you're Norman Mailer? You're the young man who can't spell fuck? And we see what trouble a writer like James Joyce got into – for decades - when he put ordinary human activities into Ulysses – going to the toilet, masturbation, menstruation, nose picking! All considered profoundly offensive and worthy of censorship. The censors, up until the middle of last century, were united in saying that yes, all humans experience various bodily functions all the time but we must never talk about them between ourselves. It's very interesting to note that sometimes it was the actual footage of actual ordinary events which got some horror films banned. In Cannibal Holocaust a couple of animals are slaughtered for real. In Men behind the Sun, real autopsy footage in used in one scene. In one of Nick Zedd's movies, an actual burns victim who was a friend of a cast member was used as an actor – this got the audience reeling. Autopsies and slaughterhouses and burns victims are ordinary. But if you drag them into the spotlight and film them, they're extraordinary, just like Molly Bloom's thoughts. These days, novelists revisit earlier periods of history and put in what the contemporary novelists were forced to leave out, such as The Crimson Petal and the White, or Sacred Hunger. And now a word from our sponsors : Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd; Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl'd: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! - Alexander Pope, 1734 Back to the programme... So some might say that movies like Murder Set Pieces are the more-realistic depiction of what actual serial killers do and we shouldn't be sanitising this stuff like in most s-k stories. Well, of course, I would never wish to hinder the pursuit of self-knowledge. But there's this whole other thing going on – the gorehound's gleeful relish of cruelty. Phil : Sometimes the horror, the gruesomeness and the sleaze is reason enough to watch these films, and there is nothing wrong with that. I've noticed that my dismay at the apparent female self-hatred displayed in Story of O, Topping from Below, and A Whiter Shade of BDSM in which women actively participate in men's desire to inflict pain on them, brings out my worst censorious attitudes, and I'm sure watching a few of the 180 movies Phil Russell reviews in this book would have the same effect. (I think everyone should see a couple of "transgressive" movies, to get the drift of what we're dealing with here.) And they're not all the same kind of thing – Martyrs is not the same kind of thing as Tumbling Doll of Flesh (Japan, 1998 – "none of the special effects are remotely convincing" says Phil) or Lolita Vibrator Torture (Japan, 1987 – "this wretched piece of celluloid crosses some serious boundaries" - that's Phil talking!). But these gorehounds, they watch hundreds. It makes me wonder if it isn't just sadism. Yeah, we're sadists – why shouldn't our tastes be indulged too? You go watch your romcoms, I'll stick with Stop The Bitch Campaign (Japan, 2001) : Outrageous fun from start to finish…Kenichi Endo is superb as the out-of-control rapist; the scene where he deflowers and tortures a first-time whore is dark, misogynistic, and funny as hell! What's wrong with that? ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 2012
|
Jun 17, 2012
|
Jun 14, 2012
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0312144350
| 9780312144357
| 0312144350
| 3.43
| 1,829
| Jun 1995
| Apr 15, 1996
|
did not like it
|
What's a nice reviewer like me doing in a book like this? Well, I have been disturbed recently by the gradual infusion of BDSM into popular culture, cu What's a nice reviewer like me doing in a book like this? Well, I have been disturbed recently by the gradual infusion of BDSM into popular culture, culminating in the chart-rogering 50 Shades of Grey, and the song by Rihanna called S&M ("pain is my pleasure… chains and whips excite me") which was No 1 in various countries, enjoyed by millions of teenyboppers. Reviews of 50 Shades and co-incidentally or not Story of O have been popping up all over Goodreads lately. BDSM has gone mainstream. It's all very well, and I would be the last to rain goldenly on anyone's parade (I mean, this stuff was being lampooned amusingly by Tom Lehrer back in the 60s : You can raise welts like nobody elts As we dance to the Masochism tango) but it's beginning to bug me now. Because – surprise!! - 99% of the Ms in the S&M relationships are women.* Yes, these are all stories of men beating and humiliating women and women wanting men to beat and humiliate them. How delicious! So the message, whether intentional or not, is : some women like pain. And further : when some women say no, really they mean yes. Aka she was asking for it. This was the kind of unreconstructed misogyny bandied around in the 1950s, before feminism. Now it's rebranded itself as transgressive and daring and it's big. I looked at some reviews of 50 Shades of Gray and was immediately put off reading that one. One review said something like this book is crap, the really good no-holds-barred BDSM novel which is actually really well written is Topping from Below. And I thought well, I can't get on my soapbox again without reading an example of this stuff, so here I am. Ugh. Blech. Sick bag! No, a bigger one please. Thank you. Please note – what follows is full of spoilerish comments and allusions to some very unwholesome practices. If you take the S&M stuff out of this novel you have an adequately written stupid thriller. A strong independent woman suspects that her sister's boyfriend murdered her, as do the police. But they can't get any evidence. So she befriends him (like you would). He immediately tells her – ah, you think I killed your sister and you're going to try to find evidence! She says – yes, I do, you bastard, you killed my sister. So they start sleeping together, like you would. Well, you would if you were in an erotic thriller, because it's compulsory. You can see that the plot is the usual silliness. But the sex is serious. The villain is referred to as M thoughout the novel. M likes to beat women, tie them up and that kind of thing. He describes what he does as consensual. Question : What is consent ? Use example of mummification in your answer. Example 1 – The boyfriend proposes mummification. The girlfriend smashes him over the head with a dinner plate, and the dinner is still on it. The bouillabaise goes everywhere. The stain on the wall will puzzle future residents. The girlfriend storms out and never sees the guy again. That is not consent. Example 2 – The boyfriend proposes mummification. The girlfriend asks what it is, it sounds intriguing. Boyfriend explains that he wishes to wrap her body head to toe in clingfilm: " You'll be completely immobilised. You won't be able to see or hear. The only thing you'll have is air holes. Total sensory deprivation. It might last for hours, time will mean nothing to you, and I won't unwrap you until it sounds like you're beginning to breathe funny." Girlfriend says, ooh yes, let's do that now! That's consent. Example 3 – The boyfriend is rich & handsome, the girlfriend is on the plump side and generally not that personable. She knows she'll never get anyone remotely like this again, it's a one time thing. She's in love, really. So he suggests mummification. She hates the idea, she's afraid of it, she thinks he's a freak, but she's not going to smash him over the head with the dinner plate. She murmers dubiously, suggests counter-proposals ("just bandage my feet"), he brushes them all aside. He says look, you do this or you're out that door. She never says yes. He pushes her into a room and mummifies her. She's absolutely terrified. Is this consent? "Hey, M - You know, she really didn't consent, did she? " "Well, she could have walked out the door. I wouldn't have stopped her. " (Cops say: Some guys think that if the woman gives him a blow job while he's pointing a gun at her, that's consent. The guy will say – "she consented! She coulda not consented." Yeah? But you would have shot her. "Yeah well – she consented." - quote from a book called "What Cops Know") Consent is the thing this novel plays around with the most – Nora never consents to being tied up and whipped but M does so anyway and she fights and screams and all of that and - oh really well I never - after he's done beating her she finds that she –in some mystical way – really enjoyed it – as he knew she would. So she consents in retrospect. (p167) I'm not sure how the pain figures into all this, but on some sexual level I enjoy being dominated, being controlled by another person. I can't explain it. As a feminist, it goes against everything I believe. Nora continues to consent to all this by continuing to turn up at M's house. So all the S&M scenes give the strong idea of NON-consent, but the consent is always given in retrospect. And the apparent illusion of non-consent is what makes the thrill so great for both parties. Aargh, my head is hurting. Just to make us all feel better, Laura Reese throws in two psychological explanations for these sisters' acquiescence to all the whippings and torture – the younger one always felt responsible for the death of her younger brother , and the older one feels guilty about her former indifference to the younger one. So you know on some level this is why they want a man to beat them! But then she also throws in stuff like this speech by M : You're going to enjoy this, Nora. Immensely. Once your freedom of choice is removed, once you give yourself over to me, you'll experience a new kind of liberation : complete abandon, no responsibility, no choice but to accept the pleasure and the pain I give you. Okay, now here are a couple of quotes from the blurbs on the back: Fiendishly horny, unexpectedly affecting – Mary Gaitskell Sex is kinky and love is twisted. A daring erotic thriller – San francisco Chronicle The plot is sparked by a dangerous current of eroticism – Harpers Bazaar A compelling plot intertwined with steamy scenes. When's the last time you read raunchy sex and a good mystery in the same book? – Playboy Devilishly pornographic – Publisher's weekly See how they're sort of all going oo-la-la this is so naughty but nice? Aren't we wicked? Well, now I must mention that on p180 M pulls out a video and asks Nora to watch it – "there are only two actors in this film, a man in his forties and a young girl . She appears to be nine or ten." That's right, Mr Naughty but Consensual Bondage likes kiddieporn. It slightly bothers Nora but she sleeps with him anyway. Then later, this fiendishly horny novel gives us a detailed scene between our heroine Nora and M's Great Dane. That's right, it's a dog, not a euphemism. I found that scene unexpectedly affecting, as Ms Gaitskell says. I should hastily mention that the Nora/Great Dane encounter is presented as entirely consensual and "the taboo nature of the act aroused me immensely". So, you know, no harm done! (So according to Mary Gaitskell kiddieporn and sex with animals is fiendishly horny. I'm so glad I've only ever given Mary Gaitskell bad reviews.) One last point - it's hard to know what Laura Reese thinks about people. Does she really think a woman would get into a sexual relationship with a guy who she thinks tortured her sister to death in order that she might be able to find out something incriminating? Honestly, this is that kind of unbelievable rubbish people only do in thrillers, which is why I mostly dislike thrillers. Or am i wrong? Do you know anyone who has deliberately slept with someone they thought murdered a close relative? Maybe it happens a lot and I just live a sheltered life. Please let me know! Add a message in the space provided! It just seems to me that thrillers attempt to portray a realistic believable world (no magical realism, no talking animals) with lots of convincing local details (this takes place very specifically in Davis, California, and, you know, I think the city should sue!) but then populates it with crazy unbelievable characters. Maybe the thrillers wouldn't be thrilling if people behaved normally in them. I can't think of a way to end this review so I'll just say - don't read this book. I hope I spoiled it for you. * e.g. in these movies Belle de Jour Last tango in Paris 9 ½ weeks Damage The Night Porter In the Realm of the Senses The Piano Teacher Blue Velvet Secretary A Serbian Film The Killer Inside Me ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 13, 2012
|
May 17, 2012
|
May 13, 2012
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0980593808
| 9780980593808
| 0980593808
| 3.47
| 75
| Feb 01, 2009
| Jan 01, 2009
|
did not like it
|
***REVIEW RATING : NC-17 (18 IN BRITAIN) for scenes of extreme violence , constant sexual references and an insulting and high-handed tone of voice***
***REVIEW RATING : NC-17 (18 IN BRITAIN) for scenes of extreme violence , constant sexual references and an insulting and high-handed tone of voice*** The debate about female equality here in the west has got tired and stale, everybody knows all the arguments, and it bogs down into long-winded stuff about the need for more child care provision and glass ceilings and gender pay gaps and having-it-all discussions (you can have it all, no you can’t, you can if you re-introduce the concept of domestic servants – ah, yes, then you can! – but see how the domestic servants are all low paid women… aw heck…). The economic arguments are still all there – how many publicly quoted companies have women CEOs? – Well, if you really wanna know, 12 of the Fortune 500 companies. That figure rockets up to 25 out of the Fortune 1000 companies. So that’s on one level. A whole category of argument, and that goes on and on and on. But there’s a whole other level. There’s an amazing throbbing gushing onrushing river of misogyny which flows on unabated throughout this planet of nine billions humans. A quick riffle through any recent newspaper will get you trafficking of females, female genital mutilation, stoning of women, etc. But I never watch the news, it’s boring. Let’s watch a movie instead. Crack open a tube of liquid gold, and settle back. I’ve been shopping on the internet and I found some movies which look pretty interesting. So, in no particular order, I got IRREVERSIBLE (2002) – let me read out what this review says… It was also noted for its excruciatingly-long, almost-unbearable, nine-minute real-time beating and anal-rape sequence - shot with a static camera - of Alex (Monica Bellucci) in a deserted Parisian underpass tunnel lit by a reddish glow, by a stranger What’s that? You don’t wanna see that one? Oh, okay. What about ICHI THE KILLER (2001)… er, it says “A wild parade of murder, mutilation and sexual violence. The BBFC were unamused, demanding 3 minutes and 15 seconds of cuts before granting it an "18" in 2002, the most cuts to an 18 rated movie since 1994. The Board took umbrage with what they called "erotically explicit violence" which "could have a harmful effect on certain viewers". They stated that the violence against women "seemed to have no function other than the pleasure of the onlooker." Hmmm, no good? Okay… what about The Human Centipede (2009).. here’s the review… In his horrific midnight movie, two American girls Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) traveling in Europe on a road trip experienced a flat tire at night in the rain, and came into contact with demented retired Nazi-Germany surgeon Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) at his luxurious modern villa. After drugging the drinks of the two girls, and tying them up on hospital beds in his basement operating room…. No? Man alive, you’re hard to please. Okay, well, here’s another French movie, you usually like those..Inside (2007)… the review says À l'intérieur is written and co-directed by Alexandre Bustillo offers only a few minutes of introduction before launching into a melee of intense violence and gore. It tells the story of a pregnant woman whose husband has recently died in a car accident. On Christmas Eve, a she prepares to go the hospital to give birth, a strange woman appears at her home and attempts to take her unborn child. Throughout the night, the stranger violently terrorizes the pregnant mother… No ? Then I suppose "Tumbling Doll of Flesh" (1998) by Tamakichi Anaru is gonna be right out. Shame, this one sounds really good. Listen : a Japanese shocker about three thugs who sexually abuse,torture and dismember a young woman whilst filming their horrible actions. Typically twisted Japanese porno sickie that offers plenty of sadistic sexual violence and grisly gore.There is no plot to speak of,just plenty of hard core sex scenes and lots of blood.The special effects are quite impressive-the dismemberment of Japanese porn actress is shown in unflinching detail Okay, I could go on. But what do you make of this quote from a movie fan site? I had some pretty high hopes for Philosophy of a Knife (Andrey Iskanov, 2008). Like, really, really high. When I chose it for review, I was assured it was “fucking brutal.” Of course. How could it not be? The DVD case cover alone depicts the image of a naked, disemboweled, curiously nipple-less woman bound and gagged with nothing but barbed wire as the shadow of a scalpel-wielding surgeon looms ominously. The back of the case proclaims the film as “truly one of the most violent, brutal, and harrowing movies ever made.” It sounded like it was right down my alley. IMDB user reviews said – nay, promised – I would walk away feeling violated from the sheer level of gory blasphemy. I like gore. I love gore. And torture. And the vicious, inappropriate use of vintage medical implements. This film seemed to have it all! Philosophy appeared to have all the makings of a truly brutal film-watching experience. Sounds like he was really disappointed that the film didn’t live up to the hype. This other fanboy sounds happier: Folks, trust me, Andrey Iskanov does torture, mutilation, rape and dismemberment like nobody in the genre. It’s truly a work of absolute beauty and psychotic inspiration; not unlike a Picasso painted in blood and feces We turn our sickened eyes away from such stuff – actually, we probably don’t ever get to hear about them in the first place, who’s going to announce in the office that they saw Tumbling Doll of Flesh last night, you wanna borrow it? Nobody. I think this stuff must be bought and watched in secret. So, let us consign the movies, where modern directors like to make movies like Irreversible and call them transgressive or essential or some such euphemism, to a special circle of hell, and retire to the library and the bookshop. Ahh, that’s better, I see on my shelf the famous novel 2666 by Roberto Bolano. I’d like to read it , I’m fascinated, everyone says it’s great stuff, but what’s this goodreads review saying? In the fourth part of 2666, “The Part About the Crimes,” Bolaño chronicles these deaths of females in horrific and exacting detail. Spanning nearly three hundred pages, this may be some of the most haunting, harrowing writing in modern literature, as Bolaño’s descriptions of murder, rape, and mutilation are all the more unsparing in their effect per the clinical, detached tone he employs. “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them,” a character asserts. Incomprehensible in their brutality, it seems even Bolaño was at a loss to make sense of the (still) ongoing “feminicidios.” Later in part four, “…the inspector told him he shouldn’t try to find a logical explanation for the crimes. It’s fucked up, that’s the only explanation.” I’m thinking – do I need this? I’ve already had the American Psycho experience, I don’t need an update. Hnh! 2666 and American Psycho are the Irreversible and Funny Games and Dogville of books. The violence against women is tricked out as art. Hey, don’t come after me with that nail gun, it might even BE art. Look at my forehead – does it say Art Professor? No, it don’t. But underneath those books, those high profile big name books, far below, swirling and burbling around, is stuff like The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum, The Seven Days of Peter Crumb by Jonny Glynn, and the slim volume of which this vomitous diatribe is ostensibly a review, Spare Key. In which a cute guy in his 20s has been in the psycho ward for slaughtering ten women but is then released because his doctor is experimenting on a new drug. (Keep taking the tablets, Ben! But guess what, he doesn’t. That’s a surprise.) Like that would ever happen in ten trillion years. I mean, psychotics have indeed been released and killed again, that always makes the paper, but they weren’t inside for killing ten women. Those guys are not released. Ever. But R Frederick Hamilton, our first time author, doesn’t care about that because he wants to get to the gore . So Ben’s revenge fantasies against his mother begin to surface & take over. Why his mother? Well, it’s the usual sad story. His mother liked to do all this nasty sex and violence to him when he was just a little lad. I’ll spare you the details. But anyway, our serial killer was the real victim here, wasn’t he. It was a bad woman what done it. The brutalised son is fated to revenge himself repeatedly against his mother through his female victims. And Ben’s detailed daydreams of the happy slice, dice, meathook and Bateman-stylee soft part-meets-power-tool sessions – that’s the stuff our author really wants to write about. You get pages of that. You get your money’s worth. Why did I read this? Because folks are inclined to say that you shouldn’t judge something until you’ve experienced it yourself I guess. Although I have no intention of checking out Tumbling Doll of Flesh any time soon. Well, perhaps this river of misogynistic shit which floweth and floodeth everywhere one looks is the price we all pay for freedom of expression. Don’t wanna go back to the fifties, do we? No sir. Moreover, finding myself tut-tutting at the moral depravity and swirling filth of these books and movies makes me sound like all the people I don’t want to be. What do we want? CENSORSHIP OF MISOGYNY!! When do we want it? ER, WE’LL GET BACK TO YOU ON THAT!! This is my dilemma. One of them, anyway. Nick Lowe once asked in song: What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding? and now I ask: What’s so funny about suggesting that men stop writing novels where a man chops up and sexually tortures a bunch of women? and What’s so funny about suggesting that men stop making movies where a man chops up and sexually tortures a bunch of women? In fact there’s nothing at all funny about that. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 18, 2011
|
Jan 21, 2011
|
Jan 18, 2011
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.01
|
liked it
|
Mar 13, 2024
|
Mar 13, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.23
|
really liked it
|
Dec 21, 2021
|
Dec 14, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.09
|
really liked it
|
Oct 18, 2021
|
Oct 08, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.35
|
liked it
|
Aug 03, 2021
|
Jul 12, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.34
|
really liked it
|
Oct 08, 2020
|
Sep 09, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.14
|
really liked it
|
Jun 13, 2019
|
Jun 11, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.54
|
did not like it
|
Jul 02, 2018
|
Jul 02, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.62
|
liked it
|
Mar 19, 2018
|
Mar 18, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.84
|
liked it
|
Jan 12, 2017
|
Jan 06, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 2.50
|
it was ok
|
Jun 2016
|
May 31, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.56
|
liked it
|
Jun 29, 2015
|
Jun 27, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.28
|
it was ok
|
Jan 21, 2015
|
Jan 14, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.07
|
really liked it
|
Oct 26, 2014
|
Oct 17, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 3.83
|
really liked it
|
Oct 18, 2014
|
Oct 03, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 4.26
|
really liked it
|
Apr 21, 2014
|
Apr 10, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 3.86
|
liked it
|
Mar 2014
|
Feb 25, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 3.39
|
did not like it
|
Jul 29, 2013
|
Jul 28, 2013
|
|||||
|
| 3.77
|
liked it
|
Jun 17, 2012
|
Jun 14, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 3.43
|
did not like it
|
May 17, 2012
|
May 13, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 3.47
|
did not like it
|
Jan 21, 2011
|
Jan 18, 2011
|
Loading...
