Even before the nominations were announced on Feb. 2, as she picked up one award after another, including from her peers at the Directors Guild, people who don’t usually talk about women and the movies were talking about this woman and the movies. Uncharacteristically, the issue of female directors working — though all too often not working — was being discussed in print and online, and without the usual accusations of political correctness, a phrase that’s routinely deployed to silence those with legitimate complaints. I don’t think I’ve read the words women and film and feminism in the same sentence as much in the last few months since “Thelma & Louise” rocked the culture nearly two decades ago.
And now for something completely different - Janis Joplin sings a duet with... Tom Jones?!?
Well that wasn't fun, going out into a hurricane Saturday to see a friend perform in G. B. Shaw's MAN AND SUPERMAN only to discover that George Bernard Shaw, whom I had thought was a progressive feminist, was in fact just as big a sexist as anybody.
What a disappointment. MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION was such an accomplishment - the economic reasons for gender roles are so rarely acknowledged at all, even today, much less a hundred years ago in a play - and a pretty entertaining play too.
So it was no fun at all to sit through MAN and have Shaw just keep relentlessly pounding on this evolutionary psychology-esque notion that women - apparently by nature - are obsessed with trapping men into marriage. Women at the time the play was written could not vote, could not control their own property, could rarely get a well-paying job to support themselves.
The idea that marriage is for the benefit of WOMEN is utterly insane - just ask the millions of little girls who - in places all over the world TODAY - are sold into marriage to old men to pay off a family debt.
Why does anybody even bother to put on such dated, tiresome plays as MAN? And the cutesy ending made me want to puke too.
The actors for the most part were not to blame in this production, although the director was - if the guy playing the obnoxious Shaw-mouthpiece character was attractive, had a tiny bit of charisma - and an English accent! - and wasn't obviously older than the female lead, it would have been infinitely more tolerable. Instead a young cute guy plays the character that gets dumped. And the lack of English accent was really noticeable - not only did all the other English characters have English accents, but there is an American character with an American accent in the play - which made the fact that the English guy had an American accent all the more glaring. AND there's a whole bit about Cockney accent - Shaw being so fascinated with spoken language. What was the director thinking?
I gotta stop going to these off-off Broadway things - I invariably end up bored or cranky.
Once again, my response to Jason Zinoman's latest is too long to fit into a comments box.
Jason,
I posted something written by Theresa Rebeck, in which she suggested that Frank Rich ignored the sexual harassment issue in her play, but paid attention to it when David Mamet presented a false charge of sexual harassment.
How you jumped from that to thinking I believe those things you claim I do (not ok to have feminist agenda; no male critic will give good review; Mamet always gets good reviews) is a great mystery to me.
A man who gets angry at work may well be admired for it but a woman who shows anger in the workplace is liable to be seen as "out of control" and incompetent, according to a new study presented on Friday.
So why should the theater world be any different from the world at large? Even among liberals - there are plenty of people who wouldn't deliberately discriminate but who carry around these unexamined, unconscious assumptions about men and women absorbed through the culture.
Of course you know about the "Angry Young Men" playwrights. Well it's probably thanks to that 50+ year old trope that anger is still a badge of honor for male playwrights: Here's how Charlotte Moore promoted Martin McDonagh:
Mr. McDonagh is an angry young man, asserts Ms. Moore... "He's very sullen, he smokes like a funnel, he drinks like a fish. And he has the Irish, Irish, Irish distinction of being suspicious. There's no more suspicious group on the face of the earth, and he writes from that perspective." And, she adds pragmatically, it doesn't hurt box office that he's good-looking, cheeky and arrogant. "And he's so bright. And fearless."
Martin McDonagh: Playboy of the West End world As a dramatist, Martin McDonagh sounds too good to be true: an attractive, angry young man with Irish roots, adored by the gossip columns, who can't stop writing hit plays. Is he for real? Liz Hoggard finds out. Photographs by Antonio Olmos
Notice how being angry is consider a too-good-to-be-true virtue.
Mr. McDonagh responded to this comment with a flash of anger, disregarding a pledge he had made minutes before to give up harshly judging other living writers in the press, firing off one of those hilariously belligerent rants that his characters are known for and that can’t possibly be printed here. Translated from the profane to the mundane, he said he was going to beat up Mr. McPherson next time he saw him.
Here's Marsha Norman describing Adam Rapp - she seems to equate anger with genius - and yes women can certainly buy into the angry man trope as much as men - although it's certainly news to me that Mozart was especially angry:
You'd have to go back to Mozart to find somebody like Adam. And Mozart, actually, would be a good person to compare him to. Both playful, both angry, both geniuses, both capable of great beauty and great fury, neither a man to be messed with." —Marsha Norman
Here we see The Independent also joining anger to genius in the case of Neil LaBute: Article: Watch out angry white male at large Neil LaBute, writer and director of 'In the Company of Men', is bringing his misanthropic vision to the London stage. Profile by John Lahr profiles the misanthropic Mormon genius.
And that makes a side of LaBute happy. "It's part of my makeup," he says, "to ruin a perfectly good day for people."
Now if Joe Schmoe Nobody said such a thing everybody would despise him for being such a douchebag - angry young men playwrights have asshole licenses. Do you know of any female playwrights who go around saying anything close to that level of obnoxiousness? Even Tracy Letts is described as angry: Here's how Patrick Healy's profile of Tracy Letts begins:
TRACY LETTS was angry. It’s not exactly what you might expect from someone who, moments earlier, had won the Tony Award for best new play for “August: Osage County,” a runaway success on Broadway...
So yeah - I think that Theresa Rebeck knows what she's talking about when she talks about male playwrights anger.
Now about my arguing in good faith - let's look at you:
. That you write that i think it's "so very important" to write an anti-abortion play "now" is absurd -- and you know it.
It WOULD be absurd if I wrote that - but I did not. I said:
So very likely there has NOT been anything from the left to match the approach of GIRLS - so why is it so very important to present a polemical anti-abortion play now?
First - it was a question. Second - it was a general question, or if aimed at anybody, would be aimed at The Flea. I did not necessarily think YOU thought it was important to present an anti-abortion play now.
Did you completely miss out on what I have been saying? There haven't been any polemical pro-abortion plays done - neither you nor I can think of one unless you count WASTED from a hundred years ago - so why is it necessary to have a polemical anti-abortion play done now? The Flea and Reynolds, in their commentary about getting the play produced, keep implying that it couldn't get produced because it was an anti-abortion polemic. But in fact the real reason might be because it's an abortion polemic, period. Audiences might not necessarily want to see ANY abortion polemic no matter which side it's coming from.
But the people promoting GIRLS are pushing it as brave - in the face of unsubstantiated assumptions about the tyranny of the pro-choice crowd.
Now about "As for why there can't be plays against sexual harassment" again - I never said that. I merely agreed with Theresa Rebeck that it was mighty fishy that while SHE wrote a play on the subject and Frank Rich ignored that content, Rich did not ignore the content when Mamet presented harassment from the point of view of false charges.
Again, how you made the leap from that to thinking I am claiming that there can't be plays against sexual harassment is bizarre. I choose to think you are just having a reading problem, not that you are deliberately reaching for unfounded conclusions.
So, sorry to say, if anybody has to correct distortions, it's me correcting your distortions. But unlike you, I will give you the benefit of the doubt that it might be a misunderstanding, rather than accusing you of deliberate "bad faith."
Now as far as your suggestion that I write a play about sexual harassment - I don't feel a burning desire right now, but Theresa Rebeck has already written one, and I'm sure others are out there. Why they aren't being promoted or perceived by critics as the last word in brave, provocative and cutting-edge is the real question.
I have written a one-act pro-choice play produced by the now-defunct estrotribe years ago, never to be heard of again. It wasn't polemical except that it looked at the hypocrisy of an anti-abortion activist who gets an abortion - which is based on a true story.
I also have a positive take on abortion in the full-length semi-autobiographical play I'm working on - although it isn't about abortion, just that one of the characters has an abortion, and there is a scene of clinic defense where the pro-choicers are the good guys. And I am not worried about anybody telling me the audience can't handle it - I try to produce my own work whenever possible, to avoid committee-think, tired old assumptions, and litigious directors.
I'm familiar with Caryl Churchill, and I'm not impressed much with her work and I disagree with her take on cloning in A NUMBER. I think she totally stacks the deck.
It so happens that Tony Kushner is the greatest living playwright right now.
Ann is referred to as "the Life Force" and represents Shaw's view that in every culture, it is the women who force the men to marry them rather than the men who take the initiative.
Well loyal reader, I had to go in and re-write parts of Loyal reader, do you think it is so wrong - I just couldn't live with the senamensing line - it was too clunky. I try to use senamensing whenever I can since I invented the word and want to get credit in some future edition of Webster's, but I had to face up to it - it just wasn't working. The changes make the poem flow much better.
Jason Zinoman, the NYTimes theater critic and I have been going back and forth in the comments on my post from March 10ah yes, theatre critics dig up more exciting "controversy"
Rather than fit my latest response into the little comment box, I decided to make it a post instead.
Jason asked: is it not notable that the play makes an argument about abortion that you never see onstage?
But I've never seen any "argument" about abortion on stage - as far as I am aware, any play that has ever dealt with abortion on stage has been about the ambiguities of abortion. Are you aware of a pro-choice play that is the equivalent in stridency of GIRLS IN TROUBLE? I haven't heard of one - please enlighten me.
Nobody has been preventing the Catholic Church or any other anti-abortion organization from producing an anti-abortion play. I will defend to the death anybody's right to say whatever they want in a play. But the right to have your say is not the same as an obligation for others - especially your ideological opponents - to facilitate and pay for you to have your say.
Even if the anti-abortion advocates don't get to grind their ideological axe on stage - so what? It isn't like they aren't getting their point of view out on a regular basis, up to and including getting in the faces of women seeking abortions by standing around screaming in front of health clinics. I used to videotape them. You can see a short sample of what women put up with in the video clip I posted yesterday.
And do you really think that I - or any liberal - are so ignorant of the arguments of the anti-abortion side that we need Jonathan Reynolds to come along and save us from our ignorance? I've heard all the anti-abortion arguments - I was raised Catholic, I was indoctrinated with anti-abortion arguments.
Do you think it's a coincidence that the "hot-button" item chosen to be addressed is one that attack's women's right to self-determination? The theater is empirically resistant to presenting plays by women about women as was demonstrated in the recent well-known study - and the Flea's own web site demonstrates that in the past 5 years it has presented plays by women 11 times while it has presented over twice as many plays by men - 29. (some of the playwrights of both genders are represented by more than one play/production.)
This is the context in which they decide to present an anti-woman play by a man.
When is The Flea going to produce the conservative side of other "hot-button" issues? When will it produce a play that advocates the conversion of gays to heterosexuality? Where is the right-wing response to ANGELS IN AMERICA?
Where does it end - do Nazi sympathizers get their own play? And if not - why not? Where is the REAL "Springtime for Hitler"? What about a pro-Taliban play? I'm sure they're anti-abortion too.
Although really, it isn't like conservative points of view are not being presented on stage. In addition to David Mamet's work, there are all those revivals. Anything written more than 50 years ago will contain points of view congenial to any contemporary conservative.
Now, what does this have to do with GIRLS IN TROUBLE, my play currently in rehearsal at The Flea which consumes about 23 1/2 of my 24-hour day? Just this: we have a vegan in the cast, and I am trying to persuade her of the error of her ways. I've instructed her to stand upside down and then told her she could only have meat and dairy products for a week with the occasional snack of fish just to show her the borderline fascistic rigors of the flip side. She's thinking about it. I didn't have the spirit to bring her the slow-roasted pork, fearing charges of unfair competition: surely she would buckle at the knees and succmb, because there is no denying the pork shoulder. Besides, we need her in the first and third acts, not as a giddy, overfed pig convert too pleasured to make her entrance.
First I presume that as a good conservative he would never try to convert someone who refused to eat pig for religious reasons. Because there is political correctness for conservatives too - it just isn't called that.
Putting aside the hyperbole about standing in the corner, I don't doubt that he is trying to persuade her of the errors of being a vegan, since, according to several reviews of the play he makes it clear that he holds vegans in contempt.
And she told him she's thinking about it. Well what the fuck else would she say? She's one of the very very few actors in this town who has a paying gig of some prestige. And as the playwright of the production she's doing, as well as a grand old man of the arts and a former NYTimes writer from back in the days when that actually meant something, Reynolds pretty much has total power over her career. If he decided to have her removed from the play he could do it - the Dramatists Guild is very clear about the right of playwrights to influence casting decisions. So unless she's a moron zombie, I'm sure what she'd prefer to say was "get the fuck out of my face you disgusting right-wing asshole" but the only thing she COULD say was that she'd think about it.
Now, as to the idiot part. Being a conservative is pretty much a license to be a hypocrite on the basis that conservatives believe that it's proper and right for there to be different sets of rules applied to different sets of people. This is why so many Catholic women end up getting abortions - they tell themselves that unlike those sluts who go around having abortions, if not for fun, than just because they are generally careless and irresponsible, they, the Catholic women, need an abortion due to their own special circumstances.
Knee - jerk conservatives, however, may not find themselves thrilled with Girls in Trouble either - especially in the play's shocking final section. "Jonathan really, in a spirited way, addresses both sides of the issue and comes to his own conclusion about it," says Simpson. "Is it right? Is it left? I don't think anyone is going to find a great deal of comfort with it on either side of the fence." Reynolds feels the same way. "I'm trying to take these issues to their logical extreme," he says. "At the end of the play, I bet you won't be able to tell which side of the issue I'm actually on."
A great big fat waffle with waffle-flavored syrup is what that is. And certainly critics have found there's no dramatic point being proven. As Jason Zinoman, who bends over backwards to give this play a chance, says:
The gruesome conclusion, which takes the discussion about control of one's body to a literal extreme, will polarize. Part of me thinks it's a cop-out, a pox-on-both-your-houses twist that places the value of shock over that of argument.
So it MIGHT BE a pox-on-both-your-houses situation. Or maybe not. In other words - it proves no dramatic point.
Douchebag. Idiot. Case closed.
Of course Reynolds and the Flea's Jim Simpson are in a can't-lose situation here. If the play is a hit and they make money, what's not to like. If the play is not a hit, it's because of the tyranny of the left-wing theatre-goers, especially those women over 40 - as Reynolds takes pains to call out. And even though the play is obnoxious, one-sided and over-the-top, it's considered "brave" and "controversial" because it is anti-abortion.
Speaking of which - can ANYBODY tell me which play, exactly, is it that this play is supposed to be balancing out? If there are any plays which present some kind of unambiguous joy over abortions, I've yet to hear about it. Every dramatic representation of the abortion issue I've EVER heard of has been about the moral ambiguity. And nobody felt the need to throw in a random attack on people who eat meat either, just for the douchebaggy hell of it.
And if Simpson and Reynolds ever find out I've written this, they will be ECSTATIC. Someone actually cares enough about this play to attack it and Reynolds - OOH CONTROVERSY!!! Get out your copy of the First Amendment right now so you can start waving it any minute. Because that's how these men prove what big fucking heroes they are. By facing down Big Sister, the way that brave John fights the Group in OLEANNA.
Yes, it's time for wealthy old white men to band together and fight the oppression of women and their dangerous beliefs in the right to female self-determination. They only have Fox News, most religions, most of the money and a million years of human cultural tradition on their side. Poor pitiful wealthy old white men!
It's funny though, that the one "PC" subject that is selected as the brave conservative piece is anti-abortion. Not anti-gay, or anti-Jew. All these men running theater groups and men writing theater reviews and men interviewing "brave" conservatives seem to agree - the proper subject of anti-PC attack is female self-determination. But I'm sure in the interest of bravery and completeness we'll be seeing a pro-Nazi play or a gays-are-evil play ANY DAY NOW.
And finally, the reason that this play is crap and Reynolds can't make a reasonable anti-abortion argument is because there ARE no anti-abortion arguments that are reasonable - certainly none that assume that women are human beings. I spent years doing clinic defense with video camera in hand, and the standard nuanced approach of the anti-abortion side is demonstrated in this video clip:
THAT'S the people who are the base of the anti-abortion movement.
ah yes, theatre critics dig up more exciting "controversy"
Theater critics lead SUCH exciting lives! They are always discovering something fresh and new and cutting edge!
And even if, say, Ben Brantley gives the latest Martin McDonagh play a luke-warm review, the NYTimes feels obliged to send another critic, Jason Zinoman, out to make it all up to McDonagh by writing a standard fellatio piece.
What really annoys me is theater critics implying that if you don't find pointless violence to be the most wonderous thing ever, it means you're big wimp - or even, the worst thing you can be as far as theater critics are concerned - unmanly. A "pussy" even. Not somebody who has balls. Like a man does.
The idea that right-wingers can't get anything produced is insane - they are lining up to produce anything that Mamet sneezes onto paper and he's a total right-winger.
But uh-oh, the New Yorker's critic has accused McDonagh of racism so his days as critics' darling may be numbered. For while misogyny is encouraged - it shows you haven't been pussy-whipped by the PC patrol and are still manly and in possession of your testicles, racism is a crossing of the line in the US.
But oh those poor poor upper-class right-wing men - always being oppressed! That's why The Flea Theater thinks it's so bold and daring for producing a piece of anti-abortion dreck written by some old upper-class white man. FIGHT THE POWER!
And as much as the critics WANT to love GIRLS IN TROUBLE, to prove how "fair and balanced" they are, it is, by all accounts a huge reeking turd of a play. I could find only one review by a woman so far, Time Out New York's Diane Snyder (no surprise, the ranks of theater critics is totally dominated by males), and she says:
Surely Jonathan Reynolds is having us on. He purports to be politically conservative, but the character who delivers the antiabortion diatribe in his polemical play Girls in Trouble is so ridiculous that one suspects he’s secretly working for NARAL.
Mr. Reynolds, a playwright ("Stonewall Jackson's House"), screenwriter and former food columnist for The New York Times Magazine, has written a raw, flawed work. But he also goes places intellectually and dramatically that no left-wing dramatist would dare. At times that’s thrilling.
Few left-wing dramatists would write something as simplistic and noxious as what Reynolds wrote and still get produced. But thank Our Lord Jesus H. Christ that The Flea is brave enough to stand up for the rights of wealthy old right-wing white men, who have nothing but Fox News, obscenely wealthy think-tanks, the Catholic Church and 24-7 talk radio to turn to in order to get their views across! They MUST have theater too!
I will give Zinoman one thing - he's one of the few critics who gets how crazy right-wing OLEANNA is:
The deck is clearly stacked — it makes “Oleanna” look fair and balanced...
I had a very good time at Amiri Baraka's Master Class at the Cherry Lane tonight. It started off a little slow, but once he got comfortable it was great - he's charming and funny. And right in the middle of the class I got a great idea for a play that I'm working on now.
But as Baraka mentioned several times this evening - we have to fight the Right.
Speaking of which, there's a rightwing nutjob in my apartment building who posted a piece of paper on their apartment door - facing the hallway - with all this crazy anti-Obama ranting all over it. Jesus I hate teabaggers. At least the political kind.
That's where I'm heading one of these days, since countries in the far north tend to have a much better track record on gender equality as Katha Pollitt notes in her latest column. Although after #4 it switches to the bottom of the world - New Zealand - but that's where Jane Campion is from so not too surprising.
Pollitt:
And the winner is... Iceland! According to the 2009 Global Gender Gap report of the World Economic Forum, the land of glaciers and puffins, population 319,000, is the most gender egalitarian country on earth, with women having closed 80 percent of the gap with men. Finland (2), Norway (3), Sweden (4) and Denmark (7) are in the top ten too, as is New Zealand (5). You could try harder, Spain (17) and Germany (12)--in 2007 you were in the top ten. And O, Canada: 25. Very sad.
Athough it's no picnic in the US, the report goes on to note all the incredibly vicious, routine ways that women are crushed by the patriarchy around the world, with things like abortion denied to women even to save her life (Nicaragua), honor killings (Turkey), as well as the crazy Sharia laws in most of the Muslim world, and places throughout the world in which little girls are sold into marriage to old men to pay a family's debt - which is nothing less than sexual slavery - all perfectly legal. And then there's the horrendous illegal stuff like child sex trafficking. When will the routine brutalization of women ever end?
Dubner and Levitt have recently irked the hell out of me and many others by coming out as climate-change deniers - and Paul Krugman, the far superior economist, recently tweaked them by entitling one of his recent blog posts Freakout-nomics.
But before the climate issue, I was becoming extremely annoyed by their absolutely clueless take on prostitution - back in December 2008 when I asked How big a douchebag is Steven D. Levitt. Levitt compared the price of prostitute services to the price of rice in a stunning display of reductionism.
So in October 09 the Freaks were using their same sociological skills to look at why some prostitutes are so successful. I'll let Amanda and Sady take it from here:
SADY: yo lady.
AMANDA: hello! wait ...shouldn’t you be out, earning money for sex?
SADY: i know! i thought about it! but then i realized: i am probably not chipper enough for it. as per superfreakonomics, my disinclination to put your favorite song on the stereo and mix your favorite drink and smile gleefully about how awesome you are for paying someone to help you cheat on your wife would hurt me, probably, in the long run. PROFIT-WISE, that is!
AMANDA: right. which is why us curmudgeons have chosen a life of blogging, instead of the more obvious choice.
SADY: exactly. it's a wonder more women aren't out sexing for cash instead of blogging for dollars! oh, except that there are various disincentives to do that, actually? like, i am pretty sure there are women that choose to do sex work and like it, but what with the social marginalization, lack of protection by the law, health risks, etc. it is actually NOT a wonder that more women do not choose it.
AMANDA: there are so many things wrong with the treatment here, i can't even begin. you did a lot of the work in your piece, but i wanted to start off with this one sentence from the freakonomics excerpt: "There is one labour market women have always dominated: prostitution." hmm. really? i mean, i get that perhaps this is meant to be some sort of play on words, but given the amount of money men have made off of pimping out or trafficking prostitutes, i am not exaaaactly sure this is the case.
SADY: right? i mean, to frame the sex industry - not just prostitution, but other varieties of sex work in general - as "female-dominated" is just absurdly wrong. it's like calling starbucks "cashier-dominated." there are more women on the front lines, but management is by no means primarily or exclusively female. and given the exploitative relationship management has traditionally had with the service employees, that's something to worry about. not that there aren't exploitative female madams, etc. but you get where i am going, i hope. i think the entire article is so infuriating largely because it aims to present an "economic" analysis of prostitution by_ talking to one sex worker, basically? and reading the work of one other dude? this stuff is insanely complex, and people have been fighting about it and studying it forever, and it DRIVES ME INSANE that people are going to read this fluff and confuse it with an actual analysis.
AMANDA: yeah. here's another little pet peeve of mine: pretending that "prostitution" is the same as "sex." I understand that prostitution is a lot different than it was 100 years ago, and a lot of that has to do with changes in attitudes toward sex. but when these researchers say that prostitutes now see competition from "any woman who is willing to have sex with a man for free," they’re implying that tons of women are actually performing the work of a prostitute on a daily basis, which is absolutely not the case. the reality is that many prostitutes are not being paid to "have sex." they are being paid - as the researches note with the high-class prostitute - to have the kinds of sex that men can't get on a daily basis. and in reality, that doesn't mean "interesting sex" or "anal sex" or "enthusiastic sex" that these dudes just can't get out of their wives. it also means degradation. prostitutes are popular, to some men, because they can do whatever they want to them, and the appeal isn't in a particular sex act that they can't get at home, but rather in the experience of paying someone to be their sex partner. when these researches say you "have to like sex" enough to be a prostitute, that's bullshit. plenty of women like sex. you have to like PROSTITUTION enough. or... be poor! and according to them, poor prostitutes are kind of fucking idiots.
SADY: well, this was somewhere i was heading in the piece i wrote for CiF, but there just wasn’t room to talk about it there; even if we don't assume that all men are hiring prostitutes specifically to "degrade" them - and i don't know what goes on in all circumstances, i do assume that a lot of guys want to degrade women because they get off on the power imbalance and others do it for other reasons, from all the first-hand testimony I’ve heard - the nature of the transaction is fundamentally different than the nature of the transaction that is casual sex. at the risk of oversimplifying: in prostitution, a woman does what you want her to do, for money. in sex - even casual sex - a woman does some of what you want her to do, or maybe even all of it, but only in exchange for you doing what she wants as well. in casual sex, there is (unless you are a huge asshole) the expectation that you will be dealing with the desires and needs of the other party. female desire enters the picture. and i think THAT, we can say, is probably a big part of the "sex" vs. "prostitution" thing. even if the guys don't want to HURT the prostitutes, they're paying them to have sex that has nothing to do with their desires and everything to do with the desires of their clients. the only way you can miss that is if you don't acknowledge that women have desire.
AMANDA: right. so these economists are stumped - stumped, i tell you! - as to why more women don't spend their entire lives pleasing men and receiving no pleasure in return. they can't understand why this is, because outside of prostitution, women are lining up in droves to have sex! but instead of working through their obvious miscalculations here, they decide to tell imply that women are probably just kind of dumb. the kicker is when, at the end of the piece, this is how the researchers leave Allie, the "high-class" prostitute who ended up becoming an economist: "Several students said this was the best lecture they had in all their years at the university, which is both a firm testament to Allie's insights and a brutal indictment of Levitt and the other professors." As if it's some kind of joke! when, in reality, these guys actually don't understand wtf they're talking about, and they're actually seemingly amused that a prostitute could not be a dumbass. so: why didn't she write this?
SADY: RIGHT! and that's the thing; i don't want to discount her insights or experiences - or those of LaSheena, the less privileged sex worker they interviewed for five seconds and then apparently forgot about because she wasn't smart enough to be a billionare sextrepreneur - but I think Levitt and Dubner kind of effectively discounted her already, by using her as a subject even though she IS GETTING A DEGREE IN ECONOMICS and simplifying her story, which has GOT to be more complex than the one we're reading, into this wacky quirky Happy Hooker stereotype.
AMANDA: yeah. and thank god she is getting an economics degree, because this is Exhibit A as to why more women need to be represented in the sciences. I’m sure that these guys are brilliant economists, but when you're attempting to form a theory as to why HALF OF HUMANS choose not to be prostitutes for a living, perhaps your own experience will be insufficient.
SADY: right. oh, and the lazy dumb hooker is getting a DEGREE IN ECONOMICS now! wacky twist! did you catch the part where they said she became a prostitute because she "just didn’t like working all that hard?"
AMANDA: oh yeah. i caught that part. the weird thing is that the premise of their investigation is: why don't women prostitute themselves out for cash, when the pay is so good? and they entirely fail to even begin to answer that question. they don't come up with one reason why she wouldn't! oh, they come up with one reason: maybe she's married. but i don’t see another one!
SADY: i can't think of a single one! there's, like, one line where they acknowledge that it's ILLEGAL (being harassed, jailed, and potentially raped by cops: A DISINCENTIVE???) but that's only in the service of pointing out that its illegal status allows Allie to charge high fees.
AMANDA: haha right. now, i don't know if Levitt and Dubner are heterosexual males, but let's assume they are.
SADY: assumed!
AMANDA: the only appropriate response to the ridiculous question posed in the article would be, "I don't know, why don't you suck cock for a living?" Why don’t you suck cock, out of your fancy house, instead of being a famous economist? I'm sure that will be the pertinent question in "SuperDuperFreakonomics: The Freakiestonomics Yet"
SADY: yes, at some point. WHY AREN'T LEVITT AND DUBNER JOINTLY FELLATING YOU RIGHT NOW: A FREAKONOMIC ANALYSIS.
AMANDA: probably because they don't like sex?
SADY: i mean, jesus. sex work is complicated. i'm so sure - and i have to keep reiterating this, because i feel bad for assuming that allie's "i just happened to go on an online dating service and tell people i was an escort because, tee-hee, i just love sex" narrative is a Pile O' Poopy - that there are women who are very fulfilled in their sex work, or at least prefer it to the other jobs they could have. i'm SURE of this. but asking THAT ONE LADY to tell you what prostitution is like - hell, even what the MONEY side of prostitution is like - is massively misguided.
AMANDA: i mean honestly. LaSheena straight-up tells them that she "doesn't like men." And somehow, because Allie says that she LOVES men, this sample size of 2 indicates that women who like men make tons of money doin' what they love, and women who don't like men are poor street hookers. so really, women don't cash in on the obvious benefits of prostitution because they're... bitches?
SADY: that's what irked me so much – they're so invested in this Ayn Rand fantasy of the fulfilled sex-liking happy safe rich sex worker that pretty much everyone else is left out of the picture, or else shamed as inadequate. Allie is like the John Galt of professional sex, in this equation.
Back in college, well before I became interested enough in poetry to write it (two years this April 10, unless you count the elven folks' rhyme-speak in my play TAM LIN written in 2002) one of my favorite poems in the Norton Anthology was LeRoi Jones' "W. W."
The entire poem is available online in Google books. My favorite part:
... The black women in Newark are fine. Even with all that grease in their heads. I mean even the ones where the wigs slide around, and they coming at you 75degrees off course. I could talk to them. Bring them around. To something. Some kind of quick course, on the sidewalk, like Hey baby why don't you take that thing off yo' haid. You look like Miss Muffett in a runaway ugly machine. I mean. Like that.
So cool. After writing that poem Jones had his best-known play, DUTCHMAN, premiere at the Cherry Lane Theatre, in 1964. (Then he changed his name to Amiri Baraka)
So imagine my excitement when Cherry Lane offered NYCPlaywrights a bunch of free passes to Baraka's March 8th Master Class. It's not often you get to meet the author of one of your favorite poems.
Hot Man in Regency Period Clothing of the Week - March 5, 2010
Well this week's edition of Hot Man in Regency... seems to actually be PRE-Regency - the dude's ponytail is a give-away. But I couldn't resist the title, "A Bath Intrique" - I'm imagining some wild bathtub scenario - in short, I WAS intrigued... but alas the intrigue is not in a charming iron claw-footed antique bathing apparatus, but rather in the city of Bath.
Cassie Wyndmoore's brains have always been her distinguishing characteristic. Of course, most gentlemen prefer a pretty wife over a clever one - which is fine with Cassie, who prefers reading to flirting. That is, until a trip to Bath puts her carriage out of service, and Cassie in the path of a helpful "stranger" who doesn't recall that they've met before. Cassie has been smitten with Derek Leighton ever since he courted one of her beautiful sisters. Yet now that he's paying attention to her instead, Cassie can't help wondering about his motives - especially when he seems unduly interested in some strange documents she discovered on a park bench...It is a rare thing to encounter a lady whose intelligence places her above and beyond the fairest of the ton. And for the Earl of Richmond, more surprising still that a woman he found unremarkable upon their first meeting has now engaged his interest so completely. True, Cassie is possessed of important papers that Derek must obtain in order to defeat a French spy - but in attempting to seduce her into turning them over, Derek soon realizes he has given away his heart. Now, his mission is twofold: Prove his loyalty to the Crown...and his love to Cassie.
Well that does it - I am going to have to write a play about Janis Joplin. There's already a musical about Joplin, created in co-operation with her brother and sister, and there WAS going to be a movie called The Gospel According to Janis but apparently that's not happening now.
In any case, I think it's time for a straight play - with some music. Less biographical than the musical, I think.
It's really astounding how popular Janis Joplin is now. She was 27 when she died, 39 years ago, and MY blog gets hits from people Googling her name all the time. Granted I've mentioned her by name several times in the past couple of years, but to give some perspective: I've mentioned Paul Krugman many more times - and Krugman is alive and kicking, writing for the NYTimes, recently won a Nobel Prize, and just had a write-up in the New Yorker. And I don't think anybody has Googled their way to my site via "Paul Krugman" yet. I got 30 visits to my site JUST TODAY from people looking for Joplin.
I began researching the play today, I bought a copy of "Love, Janis" by Laura Joplin, Janis's sister. The book is not valuable for Laura Joplin's prose - she's a lousy writer. It is valuable for all of Janis's letters reprinted in the book. She was a very chatty letter-writer and surprisingly family-oriented for someone with such a hoochee-mamma reputation.
And in spite of her growing success, she was as star-struck as anybody, as in this example from a letter to her mother in April 1967:
Speaking of England, guess who was in town last week - Paul McCartney!!! (He's a Beatle.) And he came to see us!!! SIGH Honest to God! He came to the Matrix & saw us & told some people that he dug us. Isn't that exciting!!!! Gawd, I was so thrilled - I still am! Imagine - Paul!!!! If it could only have been George...
From this quote I learn that Janis Joplin and I have very different tastes in men. Seriously? George over Paul??? In spring 1967 Paul McCartney was not only an incredibly beautiful 25-year-old man, he had just seen the completion of the recording sessions of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - which by all accounts got made due to his pushing for it. In fact, the story is that McCartney pushed to get the Pepper recording finished by April 1967 so that he could fly to the US to be with his girlfriend Jane Asher for her birthday. Which is why he was able to catch Janis Joplin's show in April 1967.
Other Joplin-Beatles trivia - Joplin recorded "Happy Trails" for John Lennon's birthday, but by the time the tape got to him, she was already dead.
Poor old Janis - she got some bad, extra-strength heroin - that's what did her in.
Hot Man in Regency Period Clothing of the Week - February 26, 2010 edition
This isn't so much about the clothing although that's a nice cravat - but whoah, who knew that Gericault was the hotness? I'd rather gaze upon his self-portrait than The Raft of the Medusa!
I see whineypants is still having a hissy fit over being accused of exploitation. But he's trying to pass it off as a joke, both twittering and blogging things to the effect of - hey, look at me - I'm an exploiter - hah hah.
I suspect that he believes that because actors are nice to him they are all perfectly happy with everything and never ever talk shit behind his back. Obliviousness is a kind of paradise, I suppose.
"Well, I think the theory behind it all is that the actors get the glory of having being on stage, which is why they are usually happy to work for free... "
People who have never lived hand-to-mouth seem incapable of conceiving of a world where other people do. And why would off-off Broadway / independent film actors living in New York during the worst economic times since the Great Depression need something as mundane and uncreative as money, anyway?
And yes, I don't mind at all if he links to my blog again and boosts my monetization. At least SOMEBODY is making money from this guy.
Jane Campion - doesn't exploit actors, feminist, makes great movies with good dialog. That's the kind of director I like. Are they only found in New Zealand?
Since Ben Whishaw is in town I think I'll invite him to sit in on an NYCPlaywrights meeting. You never know...
Andrew Bellware is concerned that I didn't mention him by name when I pointed out how he exploited actors - one of his calls for actors even ended up in "Nudity Required, No Pay" a blog I've been following for awhile.
Here's a website/blog I've linked to before (you'll remember, she's the "nest of vipers" blogger). Nancy McClernan has been writing/snarking about me specifically in some of her blog posts and yet she doesn't use my name so I didn't find out 'till just now. Dammit!
So in this post I certainly hope I've remedied the situation to his satisfaction.
I never paid attention to Andrew Bellware until Feb. 2009 when he decided to post a link to my blog, complaining because I said something unflattering about Manhattan Theatre Source there. The irony of this escapes him, utterly - he says something nasty about Manhattan Theatre Source once a month. Apparently only he is allowed to criticize MTS.
It's funny that he didn't discover my parody of his movie "Angry Planet" for over a year after I posted it to my blog (in response to his attacking me in the first place), considering that some of his friends (looking at you NC) monitored my blog through most of 2009. Why didn't they mention it to him?
Bellware posted my parody in its entirety to his own blog, without my permission, because he's as clueless as he is shameless - but when you live in a world where people work for you for free I guess you really develop a hearty disrespect for everybody else's creative work.
I emailed him to point out he did not have my permission - he then published my email address along with my email, and wrote:
Ooh! Legal consequences! Well I'll truncate the boring parts where it repeats itself anyway, that'll reduce the tl;dr part of our lives on the blog.
Repeats itself - yes because I was parodying your film. I guess the concept of "parody" escapes him.
In response to my email he "truncated" the parody - so of course the parody is reduced in effect - which I presume is what he wants. The parody is not very long in the first place - it gets in, makes its point and gets out. But as I said - no respect for other people's work.
It's amusing that he makes a point of saying what a waste of time my commentary/parody is, while he's obsessing over it.
And he can't figure out how to find the individual number of a blogger post and actually whined to me in his response to my email that I didn't provide it to make linking easier.
Like most exploiters, Bellware tries to make the issue about "prurience" - that is a favorite defense of the poor-Roman Polanski brigade. People were out to get Polanski because they HATE TEH SEX! Those puritanical Americans! As if Polanski did not drug and rape a 13-year old and then scamper off.
It's not about nudity, it's about not paying actors for nudity. Only an idiot - or someone being willfully obtuse - could fail to get that.
I do worry that if people see my parody they will want to see his movie, the way people like to see The Room, the famously bad movie.
And "Angry Planet" really is bad. It's not the actors' fault - many of them are very good in spite of the nonsensical script. And Bellware, I already explained just one facet of why your movie sucks - back in May 2009 - your "friends" seem to have let you down again.
I see that the posts on his blog, right after his attack on me, are all defensive about the fact that he doesn't pay actors - they get "points" - the film world's version of stock options instead apparently. But clearly my criticisms are having some effect - so all you actors who've donated your time and talent to his movies: if you ever see a dime, you'll probably have me to thank, at least in part.
UPDATE: Bellware's internet buddies are as clueless as he is. One of them writes in the comments:
legal consequences!?! that is five kinds of special, she reserves the right to mock and snipe at endless length and you are the target of her vitriol.
He either doesn't know, or doesn't care that:
Bellware attacked me, publicly, first in 2009.
A parody is free speech.
A creative work - which includes parodies - is property belonging to the author. There are laws about using people's work without their permission. Bellware is either unaware of this, or doesn't give a damn.
Bellware posted an annoucement offering to "hire" an actress to perform nude for no pay - this ended up on a blog that specializes in highlighting actor exploitation, specifically the exploitation of actresses who are constantly being asked to perform nude for no pay. Only a creep would make such an offer - and he's still a creep even if there are actresses desperate enough to agree to such working conditions.
It is my First Amendment right to express my opinion of Bellware's actions - and Bellware has certainly availed himself of such a right - first.
Bellware is not the only director who expects actors to work for free - the exploitation of actors in NYC is rampant. And these are the same people who throw gigantic hissy fits - as Bellware has done - if ANYBODY suggests that they might have some ethical failings. I suppose they don't get much pushback in their privileged existences, normally, and any they do get is absolutely shocking.
But if Lindsay Stewart really wants a sonnet, I can oblige - although I already have a limerick in mind, ready to go.
****
I do owe Bellware a little - thanks to the increase in web traffic he's sent my way, I'm making money through link clicks.
When you spend your days exploiting unpaid labor, you tend to undervalue other people and their work. This is why a director whose work inspired a short piece of mine decided that it would be perfectly acceptable to reproduce my entire work on his blog without my permission.
But on the left he was revered. "The book tour for 'The Great Unravelling' was like revival meetings, because so few people were speaking out then," Krugman says. "There was a great event—it was in Berkeley, which devalues it a bit - but there was this event with a joint appearance by Al Franken, Kevin Phillips, and me, with three thousand people in the audience, and when we walked onstage we got a standing ovation. That would have been 2004." "I remember one woman saying, 'I thought I was going crazy until I read you,' " Wells says. "He gave a talk for a small bookstore in Marin County, and the town was so small they didn't have a place big enough to hold it, so they held it in a local church, and they had to open the windows, because people were outside listening."
ANY DAY 2 is the name of the movie being produced by one of the characters in my upcoming web cast series. I just have to find enough bob-cut wigs and ho-clothes for the lady actors.
Of course if actors are willing to be exploited - to act in shitty movies for no pay - nothing can stop them - not even the Screen Actors Guild or Actors Equity, apparently.
During yesterday's rehearsal for SODOM & GOMORRAH: THE ONE MAN SHOW one of the actors used the term "showmance" to describe the often short-term, embarrassing sexual relationship that sometimes develops between two actors during the course of theater productions. And the very worst is when one of the actors is married and you have to meet the actor's spouse. Awkward!
I love the term, though and plan to use it.
One of the actors had an hysterical story about a production of "The Nutcracker" that she was in, during which one of the female actors was having sex backstage with the actor playing the Nutcracker - in the magic sleigh that goes to Nutcracker land - while the guy was wearing the giant Nutcracker head. I fell on the floor laughing at the image - I am trying to convince her to write a monologue about it - if she doesn't soon, I will write the damn thing myself.
Hot Man in Regency Period Clothing of the Week - February 19 2010 edition
OK, I don't love this image so much, even though the guy is cute - I guess because he's not wearing a jacket - and he has an open collar, not a darling cravat. And the short sleeve is lame-o.
But I think the name of this novel is really funny, so voila.
My Darlington excerpt now has been read 1001 times, rated by 7 people for a total of 3.86 out of 5. Although I'm confused - it was rated 3.75 before, by 8 people - so I guess one of the hatahs removed their vote?
I can still hardly believe that Albert (pronounced al-BEAR) Capsouto is gone. He died of a brain tumor in January at the age of 53. All the Freres were attentive hosts at their restaurant Capsouto Freres, but he might have been the nicest. I'm going to Capsouto for my birthday and I'm not sure what to say to them. I guess the only thing to say is "sorry for your loss."
This is why I LOVED my cover for A Reputable Rake. I could not have asked for a better cover, by far my favorite. The Rake is just so handsome and his expression perfectly represents the hero of the book.
I concur - he's a hotty. The longer than usual hair makes the difference I think but also, he's slightly more boyish and pretty than the standard rock-hard jaw guys most often used in these things.
