{"id":2381,"date":"2017-12-11T09:30:34","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T16:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/?p=2381"},"modified":"2017-12-11T09:30:34","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T16:30:34","slug":"sex-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/archives\/2381","title":{"rendered":"Sex & Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"340swept\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Swept<\/em> diptych by Max Greenstreet<\/p>\n

\u201cAs if layers of lies could replace the green illusion; or the sophistries of failure, the stench of success.\u201d John Fowles<\/i><\/p>\n

As part of my anti-anxiety regimen, I avoid mass media news. Even so, I still hear about the ongoing criminal acts of Congress and the Supreme Court, as well as the latest ecological disasters. And the main thing I\u2019ve been hearing about lately are the movie stars, celebrities, politicians, and people in positions of power in arts organizations and corporations and universities, mostly men, accused of egregious sexual misconduct.<\/p>\n

To which I say, \u201cSo what else is new?\u201d<\/p>\n

My mother grew up in Los Angeles. Her mother, Goody, was a close friend of Freda Sandrich, wife of the movie director and producer Mark Sandrich who directed Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat<\/i> and produced and directed many other movies. Goody\u2019s husband, Casey, hobnobbed with movie people, too. Which is to say, when she was a young woman with aspirations to be an actress, my mother imbibed lots of insider information about the movie and theatre and music world, most of that info having to do with who was a homosexual, who was having an affair with who, and who did what to get ahead\u2014and that what <\/i>was usually sexual, and we\u2019re not talking romance here.<\/p>\n

My siblings and I did not want to believe our mother\u2019s nasty lowdown on the many actors and actresses we admired, and on several occasions we protested, \u201cOh come on, Mom, not everyone got to be a star by having sex with the producer or the director or somebody who was already a star.\u201d<\/p>\n

To which she would reply, \u201cWhy do you think they call it the casting couch and not the casting stage or the casting chair? They call it a couch for a reason. I know. I was asked to audition for parts. But I wouldn\u2019t lie down on that couch, and if you won\u2019t let them screw you, you don\u2019t get the part. It\u2019s not nice, but it\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to my mother, nearly all of our favorite male movie stars were homosexuals or notorious heterosexual predators, their prey young fame-hungry starlets. And all our favorite female stars had once been fame-hungry starlets ready and willing to have sex with whomever they needed to have sex with to succeed.<\/p>\n

And my mother\u2019s brother Howard, an entertainment lawyer who represented many big stars, told me stories about his clients that made my mother\u2019s tales of Hollywood sound like Frank Capra movies. Yet when I sold my first novel<\/a> to Paramount Pictures and Bob Evans (he had just made The Godfather<\/i> and Chinatown)<\/i> I forgot all about the casting couch and went to Hollywood under the noble delusion that my excellent novels and scintillating stories and neato screenplays would be all I needed to exchange for riches and fame.<\/p>\n

Now lest you think my mother and her brother exaggerated the pervasiveness of sexual dominance and submission in the entertainment industry, read any thorough history of Theatre and you will learn that in Shakespeare\u2019s time, theatre companies were composed solely of men and boys, and could only exist under the auspices of powerful aristocrats with excellent connections to incumbent royalty. Thus in order to legally form a theatre company, a man had to bend, literally, to the will of someone with greater societal power than he, and once that man had gained the requisite support of a powerful person, other men bent to him if they wished to join his theatre company. From that tradition, entrenched for centuries, was born the theatre and movie world of today.<\/p>\n

So there I was, a neophyte in Hollywood meeting with upper echelon players, and from day one I was made aware that my excellent novels and neato screenplays were of so little consequence to the people with power in Hollywood, you wouldn\u2019t believe how little. And every step of my way in the movie biz, and on several memorable occasions during my odyssey through the publishing world, I was presented with demands and invitations to bend to the sexual wills of men and<\/i> women in order to further my career\u2014demands and invitations I was unwilling to accept.<\/p>\n

Thus, as a sympathetic movie producer said to me when I lamented my fall from grace in Hollywood and New York, \u201cListen, sweetheart, you don\u2019t put out, you get put out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is why news of famous actors and famous writers and famous politicos using their positions of power to coerce sexual favors from those less powerful than they is very old news to me and old news to anyone who has been in the entertainment business for more than a week or two. So my question is: why is such a big deal being made about such behavior now<\/i>, when Power Over Others, sexual and economic, has been an essential component of our culture for centuries?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s my theory. The controllers of our media and our government and our economy are keenly aware that our stock and real estate markets are fantastic bubbles filled with hot air, and Trump or no Trump, those bubbles are soon to burst. But rather than allow the endgame of their Ponzi schemes to be the focus of our collective attention, they have pulled out the oldest arrow in their titillation quiver to distract the masses from the colossal rape of the already supine population\u2014a rape in the form of more tax breaks for the wealthy and more plundering of the national corpus before our casino economy comes tumbling down yet again.<\/p>\n

Or as the Wizard of Oz said to Dorothy and her comrades, \u201cPay no attention to that man behind the curtain.\u201d Keep your eyes on the screen. Pay no attention to the psychopaths ransacking your future. Keep your eyes on your screens and we\u2019ll give you the name of yet another Famous Old Man who did naughty things to people less famous than he. Aren\u2019t you outraged? Doesn\u2019t it make you just want to\u2026buy something?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Swept diptych by Max Greenstreet \u201cAs if layers of lies could replace the green illusion; or the sophistries of failure, the stench of success.\u201d John Fowles As part of my anti-anxiety regimen, I avoid mass media news. Even so, I still hear about the ongoing criminal acts of Congress and the Supreme Court, as well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4518,4519,4523,4520,4521,117,4517,4516,977,4524,4525,512,4515,9,4522,33,1999],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2383,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381\/revisions\/2383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}