All Posts Tagged as 'Respect'

Was it the whipping up of white working-class voters in Trump’s election campaign? Or the toxic debate around immigration during the Brexit referendum? Or was it as early as the birth of social media, when a platform was handed to racists? However it happened, public discourse around race in the last decade slowly morphed from polite political correctness and justified outrage at even a hint of racism in public to a slow accommodation with extremist views on the far-right – setting up 2020 to be the year that the veil lifts altogether, finally normalising racism in ways that we haven't seen for decades.

Racism has long existed in politics and academia, and persists in structural discrimination and everyday bias. But the idea that the ideology driving racist actions and rhetoric should somehow be given space for discussion has only recently (re)gained currency. In recent years far-right intellectuals have subtly and skilfully changed the rules of engagement, arguing for “viewpoint diversity” in the disingenuous insistence that they have been unfairly silenced. They argue that racial differences are so profound that the mere presence of immigrants is damaging a country’s genetic stock and cultural fabric.

Who killed the sex symbol?

It's no mystery that in the era of #MeToo, the rules of combat have changed on the sexual battlefield. Women will no longer tolerate condescending or degrading treatment that was once business as usual in the workplace or dating arena. But in this long overdue push-back against sexual coercion and exploitation, has something valuable been lost?

The sex symbol was arguably Hollywood's most brilliant artifact, propelling the young movie industry to world impact from the moment that Theda Bara flashed her coiled-snake brassiere in Cleopatra (1917). Sex was great box office. With its impudent populism, Hollywood crashed through stuffy proprieties lingering from the Victorian age and stationed itself at the bold forefront of the modern liberalization of sex. Movies were in sync with the radical new spirit of American women, who won the right to vote in 1920 and kicked up their heels throughout the flapper decade of the Roaring Twenties.

The great sex symbols of Hollywood were manufactured beings, engineered by trial and error, with the mass audience as their ultimate judge and jury. Decade by decade, the movie industry rediscovered primal archetypes that have animated myths around the world since the Stone Age. Major male sex symbols like Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Sidney Poitier have a mesmerizing natural authority onscreen, a supranormal power of personality and density of being that transcend their roles. Like their antecedents in ancient hero sagas, they inhabit and explore physical space, whose frustrations and dangers they endure but ultimately defeat.

The female sex symbol, however, commands emotional or psychological space. Her sensual beauty is an alluring mirage, hypnotizing and sometimes paralyzing. Never entirely present, she is attuned to another reality, an extrasensory dimension to which we have no access. There is an unsettling aura of the uncanny around the major female sex symbols, who channel shadowy powers above or below the social realm.

Today we have a tiny number of true sexual compulsives who do things like getting repeatedly arrested for public masturbation. We also have a large number who fear or believe or have been told they’re sex addicts. But oddly, when surveyed about what purported addicts actually do sexually, they don’t have any more sex or any wilder, less controlled sex than boatloads of people who feel certain they’re psychologically fine.

Many women cannot fathom why so many men feel such a deep need to polish pipe. Many also believe that only evil men watch porn. Actually, almost every man has and does. Canadian researchers wanted to compare sexual attitudes among men who had and had never watched porn. They couldn’t find a single adult man who hadn’t—not one.

Porn is not evil. It’s a cartoon version of men’s fantasies of effortless sexual abundance. Virtually every Internet-connected man on Earth has seen porn, many frequently, some daily or more.