'Liz Lochhead recently called Burns "Weinsteinian" and "a sex pest", and prompted a controversy that has raged in the Scottish press for the past fortnight. Ahead of her talk on Burns and Women next week, Lochhead, the poet, playwright and former makar previewed her speech, in which she calls Burns a "sex pest" and drew attention to a 1788 letter to a friend in which he bragged of giving his lover Jean Armour a "thundering scalade [a military attack breaching defences] that electrified the very marrow of her bones", and said he "fucked her until she rejoiced".
For Lochhead, this "disgraceful sexual boast … seemed very like a rape of his heavily pregnant girlfriend. It's very, very Weinsteinian."
After her comments were aired on the BBC, Lochhead received support from Robert Crawford, whose biography of Burns quotes the letter, and who argued in the Herald that "what he presents as ... exclamations of pleasure may well have been cries of pain".
Burns did have "his Weinstein moments", Crawford agreed, and "feminists are right to subject [him] to scrutiny" when he comes across as "an 18th-century buck showing off [to] his male cronies".'
https://www.theguard...einian-sex-pest
On Ansari: is this part of the Babe article accurate? "[Ansari has] probably done more thinking about the nuances of dating and sex in the digital age than practically anyone else. He wrote a book about it, "Modern Romance", and it was a New York Times bestseller. Ansari built his career on being cute and nice and parsing the signals women send to men and the male emotions that result". If his career is in fact built on hypocrisy....
(Though in retrospect he might have been perfect for The Night Of.)
OTOH the allegations against Franco have been misleadingly reported and seem to have been taken out of context. (Example: How could taking his students to a strip club and encouraging them to remove their shirts have possibly been appropriate? They were in his class on Sex Scenes. Sketchy, possibly prurient and exploitative, but nowhere near Weinstein level, and arguably appropriate. My first university-level theater teacher encouraged all students to be naked. And we weren't even doing sex scenes (most of the time...).
It's also been reported that he "forced" a "mentee" to perform oral sex by "pushing her head down". In fact the woman was not a student or work relation, and they were already in a romantic relationship; and this a more accurate description of her account of what happened:
'They had begun a romantic relationship when she said he pressured her into performing oral sex on him — an act she'd never done with him at that point — while sitting in her car.
"I was talking to him, all of a sudden his penis was out," said Paley. "I got really nervous, and I said, 'Can we do this later?' He was kind of nudging my head down, and I just didn't want him to hate me, so I did it." She began to perform the sex act, but was uncomfortable. To extricate herself from the situation, she told Franco she spotted someone near the car. [...] Later, Paley said, she and Franco advanced their consensual sexual relationship. Today, she said she would have handled the encounter in the car differently, especially in the wake of the Weinstein scandal. "I would say, 'No, stop, get out of my car,'" she said. "The power dynamic was really off."'
http://www.latimes.c...-htmlstory.html
While bad in the same general way as Ansari, it seems nowhere near as bad in scale as what Ansari apparently did.
And complaints that he told students about roles for prostitutes doesn't seem so offensive or inappropriate given that he was working on an HBO series about prostitutes over the same time period. At least it doesn't seem hypocritical to quite the same extent as Ansari.)
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 24 January 2018 - 10:23 PM
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worry, on 18 January 2018 - 11:05 PM, said:
