The pernicious impact of Dr. Robin DiAngelo

UPDATE: My latest post about Robin DiAngelo: No Jamelle Bouie, Robin DiAngelo is not helping

Robin DiAngelo, as I have demonstrated on this blog has no qualms about smearing random white people - or all white people - as racist. Here she is bragging about scapegoating an individual woman in the workplace.

DiAngelo gets away with doing this kind of thing because of course racism is a horrible thing. And since she is against racism, surely she must be a good and wise and fair person. Right?

No, she is not good or wise or fair. She is a snake-oil saleswoman selling tactics that do not make the problem of race in America better. She is telling us that we should judge people on the basis of the color of their skin, and not on the content of their character. She is the anti-Martin Luther King, Jr.

What DiAngelo is selling is revenge. And of course seeking revenge is a very human thing, that's why it's so popular, and that's how DiAngelo can make a living doing it. But it's not ethical. It's immoral to make a living promoting revenge.

Scapegoating, dehumanizing and denying individual human beings their own will, their own conscious ethics, their intentionality is evil. And those are the things Robin DiAngelo does. That's how she earns her living.

More on the pernicious impact of Dr. Robin DiAngelo.

And because the reflex response of all Social Justice Warriors/Identitarians like Robin DiAngelo is to smear their critics as racist, here is a statement:

My Anti-Racist Bona Fides

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in my search results), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.

• I helped prevent racist Razib Khan from getting a gig writing for the NYTime - thanks to documenting his racism for 10 years.
• I stood up to a woman at work who had a pattern of saying racist things.
• I'd like to see Juneteenth become a national holiday.
• I demonstrated that David Mamet's play RACE is most likely based on Mamet's racial hatred of Michelle Obama.
• I believe African Americans built the US.

Fake SJWs

I have speculated in the past that many Social Justice Warriors social media accounts represent views that are so absurd they must be right-wingers posing as SJWs.

Turns out I was not paranoid. Although I somehow missed this story on Buzzfeed from a whole year ago: Activists Are Outing Hundreds Of Twitter Users Believed To Be 4chan Trolls Posing As Feminists.

On Monday, 4chan users came up with a new plan to pose as feminists of different races and begin arguing that certain races were “white enough to benefit from white privilege.” They called the plan “divide and conquer.”

Although SJWs like Mikki Kendall and K Tempest Bradford, who seem to be real, are perfectly capable of dividing feminists by race without any help from 4chan. But it's nice to know my Spidey senses were correct.

Ugh, summer

Have I mentioned that summer is my least favorite season? Oh yes, several time on this blog.

I wrote a poem about how much I was glad when it turned into Autumn.

Summer has never lived up to the hype, not since the summer between 1st and 2nd grade when it seemed to go on forever.

Neo-pagans do the Stonehenge thang.

Richard Dawkins slightly behind schedule

I was wondering when Richard Dawkins was going to get around to embarrassing himself by supporting sexist idiot Tim Hunt. It took a week longer than I expected but it appeared in the Guardian on June 19:

In his letter to the Times, Dawkins said: “Along with many others, I didn’t like Sir Tim Hunt’s joke, but ‘disproportionate’ would be a huge underestimate of the baying witch-hunt that it unleashed among our academic thought police: nothing less than a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness.”

Or as Salon says:
Of course Richard Dawkins comes to Tim Hunt’s defense: Protesting sexism isn’t a “baying witch-hunt,” except in his own mind

And if you want to claim that a man was the victim of “feminist bullies,” as the Daily Mail has, hang on a sec while I laugh and laugh and laugh. You see, ultimately, the main takeaway from Hunt’s remark was a good-spirited outpouring of humorous tweets from women in science actually doing the work. It was Hunt who chose to open his mouth and say something dumb. It was Hunt who chose to double down on it. It was Dawkins who chose to leap into the fray with the phrase “witch hunt.” So sorry, guys, there are no witches here. Just a few sad old dinosaurs.

You're a good man, John Stuart Mill

The press mocked Mill for his crazy
radical ideas about women.

Today's installment of my blog series Hey Sweet Man, dedicated to men who have gone above and beyond to help women, is about the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who lived from 1806 - 1873, and who was about two centuries ahead of his time, as demonstrated by The Subjection of Women - he was not in favor of it, unlike most men of his time:

At the time of writing, Mill recognised that he was going against the common views of society and was aware that he would be forced to back up his claims persistently. Mill argued that the inequality of women was a relic from the past, when "might was right,"[5] but it had no place in the modern world.[6] Mill saw that having effectively half the human race unable to contribute to society outside of the home as a hindrance to human development.

"... [T]he legal subordination of one sex to another – is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a system of perfect equality, admitting no power and privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other."[7]

Mill also worked with, and then married a brilliant woman:

In 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of an intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste during the years before her first husband died. Brilliant in her own right, Taylor was a significant influence on Mill's work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Harriet Taylor reinforced Mill's advocacy of women's rights. He cites her influence in his final revision of On Liberty, which was published shortly after her death...

In one draft of my play JULIA & BUDDY I included a reference to John Stuart Mill. One of Julia's lines in the play is: "if you ruled out all Great Men in History on the basis of misogyny you wouldn't have any left" but I felt bad about it. Not only because it didn't usually get a laugh, but also it was unfair to John Stuart Mill, who was definitely a Great Man of History but was not a misogynist. But in the end I took out the reference to JSM - it just broke up the flow of the dialog. Sorry JSM.

Take Down the Confederate Flag—Now

What Ta-Nehisi Coates said:

That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

This moral truth—“that the negro is not equal to the white man”—is exactly what animated Dylann Roof. More than any individual actor, in recent history, Roof honored his flag in exactly the manner it always demanded—with human sacrifice.

Also what Jon Stewart said:

“The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the roads are named for Confederate generals,” Mr. Stewart continued, “and the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken away from him.”

Meanwhile Clarence Thomas finally gets a clue and joins with the liberal majority:

But it was in a third case, Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc.,that Thomas made his voice heard most clearly—by his silence. In Walker, Thomas defected from the very First Amendment orthodoxy he defended in Reed. Remarkably enough, he joined the Court’s four moderate-liberals—Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—to provide a decisive vote to allow the state of Texas to refuse to print a specialty license plate bearing the much-loved and hated Confederate battle flag. In an opinion by Breyer, the 5-4 majority held that a government can, with few limits, decide to convey any license-plate message it wants, and bar any that it disapproves. This isn’t “content-based” regulation of speech; The plate is speech by the government itself, and the First Amendment does not apply.

Kiss the girl

My daughter-out-law the award-winning chef

From The New Standard:

Northern Westchester Hospital chefs dazzled judges with a Moroccan-inspired entrée at North Shore-LIJ’s fourth annual Ultimate Chef Challenge.  

Their “Pork Tenderloin Casablanca” won first prize in the heated competition, hosted by Glen Cove Hospital. Culinary masters from 14 hospitals across the health system competed in the contest served delicious meals, but without high fat, calories or sodium.

“At any hospital, cooking is a true team effort and a gift that has real creative license,” said Patricia Sobol, executive chef at Northern Westchester Hospital...

If you think this contest is like Iron Chef, it isn't - it's harder. All Iron Chef contestants have to worry about is taste. These hospital chef competitions require the dish to be no more than 500 calories, low in fat and low in salt. And delicious. That just shows you how talented my daughter-out-law is. I'm kvelling. 

Rare personality disorder

The new big boss at work made us all take the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator personality test and it turns out I am INFJ (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judging) which turns out to be the most rare of all the personality types - about 1% or so of all people tested have it.

Well maybe that explains why I always feel out of place.

According to the Wiki on INFJ:

INFJs are conscientious and value-driven. They seek meaning in relationships, ideas, and events, with an eye toward better understanding of themselves and others. Using their intuitive skills, they develop a clear and confident vision, which they then set out to execute, aiming to better the lives of others. Like their INTJ counterparts, INFJs regard problems as opportunities to design and implement creative solutions.

OK. I guess that describes me. On the other hand there are many reasons to doubt the value of these tests, and the Myer-Briggs personality descriptions I've read sound like those provided for astrological signs:

Pisces are the most impressionable of the twelve zodiac signs. Deeply empathetic, they often exhibit a gentle, patient nature, but one that is in want of inspiration. Pisces can be deeply affected by and completely absorbed into their environment. Pisces adapt well to their circumstances, both good and bad. They are generous, amiable, positive natured people with a deep sense of kindness and compassion. Pisces are highly tuned in to everything around them including the feelings of others.

Brilliant heirs of Jon Stewart

The depression associated with the end of Jon Stewart's tenure at The Daily Show is somewhat ameliorated by the continuing excellence of both Larry Wilmore and John Oliver, who both got their TV shows via the Daily Show.

Oliver especially is consistently brilliant - so much so that it's difficult to pick a favorite episode. This one about the report on US torture has to be in the top ten though. And if you didn't already despise Antonin Scalia or Dick Cheney, I guarantee you will after watching their feeble, insane justifications for torture.

Am I a philosopher?

I got into an ongoing debate on the Partially Examined Life (PEL) Facebook Page, like you do. Someone had posted about climate change and why many people are still in denial about it.

Invariably the person chiming in to refute the notion of anthropic climate change and possible steps to address the issue was a Libertarian. Climate change attracts Libertarians like moths to a flame that they claim is not really hot. Although they never mentioned up front they were Libertarians, but a quick look at their Facebook page or Google search results invariably confirmed their political affiliations. But they were often very squirrelly about it, things like claiming they didn't really like Ayn Rand when they had a blog on an Objectivist web site or were a member of an Ayn Rand fan group.

One Libertarian I got into it with, the President of the Murray Rothbard Institute of Belgium, claimed to have no interest in American politics, but a Google search revealed he was a member of a group advocating the impeachment of Obama.

I have never had much use for Libertarians. So I went at their arguments about climate change like the John Galt train zooming down the Rearden Steel-covered Taggart line heading for Colorado after Dagny and her friends had bribed or threatened local officials to ignore zoning laws. The result was always them insulting me, insinuating, or in the case of the Belgian Libertarian, suggesting outright that I was "retarded," and then blocking me. Which, if you don't know how Facebook works, means they no longer exist for you on Facebook - you can't see their profile or anything they've written. Which suited me just fine. And at least the debate prompted me to find this excellent and apparently non-governmental web site about climate change deniers.

Right before he blocked me, the Belgian Libertarian asked me if I was a philosopher. I wasn't sure if he was being sardonic and attempting to argue from authority because he's a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Antwerp or (remotely possible) sincere. But it's a good question. There had been a discussion last week on the PEL Facebook page that led to the question of who, exactly, qualifies as a philosopher. And the answers were all over the map, from "someone who appears in text books about philosophy" to the much lower bar of "anybody who asks questions."

As a result of this lack of consensus Ayn Rand is classified as a philosopher, at least on Wiki, and so is the Marquis de Sade. It seems to me that anybody can claim to be a philosopher if they've written about questions concerning the human condition and the writings were published.

This blog will mark its 10-year anniversary this November. So I guess that makes me a philosopher too.

Hey sweet man - a series

George Henry Lewes

Men are so often horrible to women that it's important to remember that not all men are horrible to women, and sometimes a man will go above and beyond to be good to a woman (besides his own mother.) I will occasionally give those men a shout-out in this new series.

The first up is George Henry Lewes who had a common-law marriage with George Eliot (aka. Mary Ann Evans). Evans was not pretty at a time when prettiness was everything for a woman. The various portraits drawn and painted of her do not at all do justice to the prodigious dimensions of her nose which can be seen in this photo from 1865.

  As Wiki notes:

The young Evans was obviously intelligent and a voracious reader. Because she was not considered physically beautiful, and thus not thought to have much chance of marriage, and because of her intelligence, her father invested in an education not often afforded women.

If they were Catholic they would have stuck her in a convent. However, she must have had one hell of a personality for Henry James observed of her:

She had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone 'qui n'en finissent pas' (translation: that never ends).. Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes, behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.

There can be no doubt that thanks to the stability of her over 20 year relationship with Lewes, Eliot was free to concentrate on her art. She didn't begin writing novels until after they began living together. English literature owes him.

And Lewes was no intellectual slouch himself, also a novelist as well as biographer of Goethe and a philosopher. I wonder what he thought of Schopenhauer, who knew Goethe via his mother's salon.

Unfortunately I have yet to read any of Eliot's novels, but I know that Lewes is a man of good taste because he gave "Jane Eyre" a rave review. He also corresponded with Bronte - before he met Eliot.
The  correspondence with Bronte is especially interesting because he urged her to use Jane Austen as a model which resulted in Bronte pretty thoroughly trashing Austen.

He liked his lady writers, and you have to wonder what would have happened if they'd met, although I'm certain that Charlotte Bronte would never have been compelled to live in sin with Lewes (a major plot point in Jane Eyre is when the unfortunately already-married Rochester tries to talk Jane into living with him in France as his mistress and she responds by running away.) Bronte was always harping on her own unpretty appearance, although it must be said she was much more attractive than Eliot. But no matter how much she despaired of ever getting laid, you know she would have insisted on marriage - which the already-married, although it was an open marriage, Lewes could not do.

Just as well for Eliot, although as a result Lewes is best known as her boyfriend - or soulmate, as Wiki has it.

Here is Lewes' Principles of Success in Literature - I doubt he thought to include "provide emotional support to the author" though.

The Dame Marjorie Chardin Plan

Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon

Dame Marjorie Chardin, (Maude in Harold and Maude) decided to do herself in at 80, and as I get older that seems more and more like a good idea.

Except that I don't know how I will make it to 80.

I keep thinking of Martin Manley a sportswriter who killed himself at 60. Of course I plan to stay in good shape but there's only so much you can do. Life is so hard even when you're young - but at least all throughout my 20s and 30s - even 40s - I kept thinking if I keep going, and keep making self-improvements, keep trying, things will get better. But then you realize that in spite of all that effort, things haven't gotten better and in fact they're only going to get worse - much worse - and what's the point of sticking around to be an increasingly more feeble gargoyle?

Ruth Gordon, who played Maude, died in 1985 at the age of 88.

Fly Me to the Moon

St. James Infirmary Blues

I decided to include a bit from St. James' Infirmary Blues in my Marilyn Monroe play, because it's about a hospital and the opening lyrics are ominous and I always liked the tune. I was very pleased to discover it's in the public domain, and surprised to discover that it always has been - it's apparently a folksong written by Anonymous.

My first introduction to the song was a bit from an early season of Saturday Night Live, performed by Lily Tomlin singing along with "Howard Shore's All-Nurse Orchestra."


The nice thing about this song is that you can change the lyrics any which way you want, pretty much, as long as you get the phrase "St. James Infirmary" in there. Which is a good thing because some lyrics make no sense.

Originally I had the Marilyn Monroe character in my play singing "All By Myself" but then decided to have her sing "St. James" and have an actor playing Ella Fitzgerald perform "All By Myself." This cast has now doubled in size - originally it was supposed to be just two actors playing two versions of Marilyn Monroe, then I added a doctor and now Ella Fitzgerald. At least the Ella actor can also double as a nurse.

Speaking of Ella, she made an album with Louis Armstrong which includes a cover of SJIB but only Louis sings on it.

I've recently come to appreciate Armstrong's trumpet playing but you can hear in this recording that it's also his personality that makes him a great entertainer. When he gets to the lines:

She can look the whole world over
But she'll never find a sweet man like me

He chuckles and says "bragging."

He smoked a lot of marijuana.

So back to the lyrics which make no sense:

I went down to St. James Infirmary,
Saw my baby there,
Stretched out on a long white table,
So cold, so sweet, so fair. 

Let her go, let her go, God bless her,
Wherever she may be,
She can look this wide world over,
But she'll never find a sweet man like me.

Surely his baby is supposed to be dead. So why would she "look the wide world over"? To haunt?

I'll probably just use the first four lines.

Faye Miller dammit

While reading the TV Tropes entry on Mad Men recently, I realized that the character who was a psychologist and then girlfriend of Don Draper is named Faye Miller.

This was the name that Marilyn Monroe gave when she signed into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. So of course I'm using it in my play.

Hopefully by the time my play is on its feet, nobody will remember this character from Mad Men. Hopefully. Not that it should make much difference but it might take them out of the play for a minute. Oh well, you can only control so much.

New Atheists everywhere

The freaking New Atheists are so revered and influential, there's always someone quoting one of them.

So when someone at The Partially Examined life made a big to-do about what Steven Pinker said about aesthetics I plotzed - and then I shared what I think about Steven Pinker. Multiple times.

Although if you've read this blog much you pretty much know what I think about him.

The Partially Examined Life Players: ANTIGONE

An unrehearsed, dramatic read-through of the text we'll be discussing on ep. 117, a Greek tragedy written around 441 BCE, telling the myth of the cursed line of Oedipus, mother-f*#king king of Thebes. 

Featuring Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan, plus special guest starts Lucy Lawless as Antigone, Paul Provenza as Creon, Alice Sinclair as Ismene, and John Castro as Haimon.

More sexist bullshit from Evan Marc Katz

"Men and women are different" is one of the favorite statements of people who want to bolster the patriarchy. Because the difference is always used as an excuse for why men get privileges denied to women.

Here Evan Marc Katz is arguing that women are not as interested in looking at men, as men are in looking at women, and that women are more naturally monogamous than men, based on all the usual evolutionary psychology pseudo-science:

Men, since the beginning of time, were designed to spread their seed.
Because monogamy lowers the chances that our genes will survive, men are not, by nature, monogamous creatures. We choose monogamy because we deem that it’s more beneficial to have love, stability, and a nuclear family than to have lots of children running around with our eyes. But make no mistake, monogamy is a choice, not a natural state.

Evolutionary psychology is used to promote lies about the essential natures of men and women, or as Katz demonstrates:

This is just a long, roundabout way of saying that, in general, men want variety.
I recall a study that said the exact same thing.
Men would be perfectly content having missionary sex with a new woman every night.
Women would be perfectly content with the same man forever, as long as he mixed it up in the bedroom a bit.

Katz is so personally invested in this narrative that when a more recent study comes along indicating that in fact WOMEN are bored more quickly than men by monogamy Katz attacks Amanda Marcotte for mentioning it.

Marcotte harps on studies that show that women respond to novelty in porn (duh) and fantasize about sex with strangers (double duh). All that proves is that, yes, women can get bored with routine sex as well. I don’t think there’s any right-minded person who ever thought otherwise. What this doesn’t prove, however, is that women are MORE driven by sex than men. While it’s useful to recognize that women and men are similar in many ways, I think it’s shortsighted to suggest that we are the SAME, as if gender was simply a societal construct and not somewhat tied to biology. 

Are there some women who want to sleep with hundreds of men? Sure. But there are more men who want to sleep around. 

Are there some women who can separate love and sex and have no emotional attachment after physical contact? You bet. But there are more men who do.
Are there more women who give up on sex within a marriage? Apparently. But that might just mean that she’s married to a jerk for 20 years and can’t summon any more amorous feelings for him. It doesn’t mean that she’s more likely to cheat or that she values sexual variety as much as he does. 

So, to me (and my confirmation bias), this study is much ado about nothing, in that it’s verifying something we already know. The reason that Marcotte is jumping on it is because it confirms what she wants to believe (women and men have the same take on sex), not because it represents a true shift.

Katz can't be bothered to analyze the competing studies and explain why his favorite study is true and this more recent study is wrong - mainly because he lacks the intellectual ability, he's titanically lazy, and he prefers to pull things directly out of his ass. So his response is basically: oh yeah, well this other study says MEN like variety more than women so nyah nyah nyah!

Now I've had my issues with Marcotte in the past, but I have to laugh at Katz, who claims to be a liberal, attacking Marcotte. As Roy Adroso in his Alicublog noted recently:

Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll)...

Marcotte is actually referencing an article in the NYTimes but Katz would rather attack her than Daniel Bergner, the author of the Times article.

Katz promotes the idea that marriage and monogamy were invented by women, and forced on men by women. This in spite of the fact that all societies up to the present time are completely dominated by men. The outright illogic - and self-serving - of such a belief system is absolutely breath-taking. Women are so not naturally monogamous that monogamy is enforced on women often on pain of death. And in a way that is not forced on men.

If women were so congenitally monogamous we'd hardly need to be threatened into it.

In his recent blog post Katz says:

Yes, this is a blog about dating and relationships, but I always find it interesting to share pieces about gender dynamics as well.

Good - then people will know exactly how sexist his attitudes are about gender dynamics.

I think my next entry in this Katz series might be "Evan Marc Katz thinks men are insensitive, shallow, entitled, cheating jerks - and he wants to help you find one for your very own."

More of my thoughts on Evan Marc Katz.

The World at War

Hitler dances for Hermann Goering at Berchtesgaden

I first saw the BBC TV series "The World at War" many years ago, when you could only see it on TV and if you missed an episode you were out of luck.

Now all 26 episodes are available on Youtube.

I did catch the episode called Genocide back then and it is horrible as you might expect. I knew about the concentration camps of course, but not all the awful details.

You know what you're in for with the series though because episode 1 begins with an atrocity - in 1944 the Germans wiped out an entire village in France, Oradour-sur-Glane, which was left empty as a memorial. In January of last year they hauled one of the last surviving German soldiers from the massacre into court.

The rest of the first episode follows Germany from the periods of social unrest and unemployment following WWI up to Hitler's assumption and consolidation of power, to the invasion of Poland. Also included, a little bit about Hitler's personal life at Berchtesgaden, with Eva Braun's home videos - a snippet of which I edited to create the animated gif above. I didn't colorize it, btw, it was filmed in color.

Watching the series now, I hadn't remembered that a big reason why it was so easy to defeat France was all the Communist-hating Nazi sympathizers in the French government. They couldn't wait to join up with Germany.

Since this series was made in 1973, there were lots of survivors of WWII still alive, and not only common people but German, British, American and Japanese officers are interviewed. It was good that the BBC did the series then and didn't wait.

I'm about half-way through the series. I might skip over the genocide episode though.

Call me at the station the lines are open

Gone Daddy Gone

The Violent Femmes self-titled first album holds up pretty well after 33 years.

Wow. 33 years.

My ex-boyfriend John, who was very in-tune with all the newest coolest rock music, well before it turned up on the radio, even the college radio stations, turned me onto these guys - via cassette tape of course.

At the time, nobody else knew about them. Then a few summers later I was at the beach (without John - in our 10+ years together he only accompanied me to the Jersey shore on three occasions and he never went into the water - he couldn't swim) and I heard somebody playing the album on their boom box - they looked like a bunch of preppie boys and girls. And I knew something had changed about music and maybe even The Zeitgeist.

Now everybody knows this album and it is probably responsible for the whole emo music movement although Wikipedia doesn't give them any credit.

I talk about how the VFs were discovered here.

This live version of Gone Daddy Gone is fun, but you can't hear the xylophone, which really makes the song in my opinion.

Studio version

The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe - primary sources

UPDATE: my play about Marilyn Monroe will be performed in Manhattan February 20 - 26, 2017.
GET TICKETS HERE!

I was concerned the just-released Lifetime Channel's The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe would beat me to the punch by using Monroe's own letters as source material for the scenes associated with her stay at the Payne Whitney, but to my relief they did not. Which shouldn't have surprised me, the various portrayals of Monroe seem to be typically poorly-sourced, just as the majority of her biographies are.

At least Secret Life doesn't suggest Monroe was murdered or deliberately committed suicide. She's portrayed as accidentally taking an overdose of sleeping pills on top of alcohol.

The most conscientious of Monroe's biographers, Donald Spoto, suggests her death was due to malpractice - thanks to miscommunication she was given a double dose of barbiturates delivered orally and via enema.

But the entire miniseries is built on a falsehood - it portrays Monroe as having an ongoing relationship with her institutionalized mother, when in fact she appears to never have seen her mother after 1952. According to Spoto:

 (Monroe) refused to visit her... nor it seems (as of 1952) would she ever contact her mother in any way... She helped her but from a distance - by writing checks, making arrangements for her care and, eventually, by providing for her a trust fund... "I knew there was really nothing between us," she said of her mother defensively a few years later. "And I knew there was so little I could do for her. We were strangers. Our time in Los Angeles was very difficult, and even she realized that we didn't know each other." And she concluded  - one of her rare discussions of her mother - with the telling words: "I just want to forget about all the unhappiness, all the misery she had in her life and I had in mine. I can't forget but I'd like to try. When I am Marilyn Monroe and don't think about Norma Jeane, then sometimes it works."

But worse than the misrepresentation of the relationship between Monroe and her mother was the way Monroe was portrayed during the Payne Whitney incident. To my knowledge there are two documents written by Monroe herself that discuss the incident:

• A letter to her acting coaches Lee and Paula Strasberg, written apparently while she was at the Payne Whitney. She begs them to get her out.
• A letter to her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson in which she recounts some of her experiences at the Payne Whitney.

(Other letters by and to and about Monroe, some more significant than others can be read here. )

This is how the incident is portrayed in The Secret Life:

We see Monroe telling a psychiatrist she's just met that Dr. Kris put her in the Clinic.

Then we see a shot of Monroe struggling with two hospital orderlies dragging her down a hallway, screaming "I don't belong here."

Next shot we see Monroe looking through the porthole-like window of her cell while a radio voice-over:

Film star Marilyn Monroe was taken by ambulance from her New York City hotel and was admitted to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. The actress who has a history of drug and alcohol use, is being confined to the maximum security wing of the clinic for her own protection. Neither Fox Studios nor Miss Monroe's representatives could be reached for comment.

Then there's a scene of Monroe's mother cutting her wrists with a razor blade.

Then we see the inside of Monroes' empty padded cell and Monroe is barefoot, wearing black pants and in a straightjacket. We hear distant yelling voices.

An orderly enters.

   ORDERLY  

It's alright. 

   MONROE 

Do you know who I am? 

   ORDERLY 

Take it easy. 

   MONROE 

I have to get out. 

   ORDERLY 

The doctor will be here in a minute.

   MONROE 

I need you to make a phone call. 

   ORDERLY 

I can't. 

   (Monroe approaches the orderly, he holds her off with one hand.) 

   MONROE  

I don't belong here. I'll do whatever you want.   

   ORDERLY 

It's against regulations.

   (Holds a Dixie cup out to her.) 

It's time to take your medication Miss Monroe. 

   (He holds it for her to drink, which she does.) 

Good. 

(She moves towards him walking on her knees. Whispers.) 

   MONROE 

Hey - come here come here come here. I still need you to make a phone call. Please.

(He looks at her and then backs away. He exits and locks the door behind him. Monroe spits out her medication onto the floor of the cell. Ominous music swells.)  

Joe DiMaggio shows up, tells the nurse at the desk he wants her released.

Marilyn and DiMaggio are shown leaving the clinic together to a throng of fans and photographers.

And that's it. I'm not sure if we're supposed to assume the guy made the phone call for her or what.

The reality was much more interesting then that - Monroe took the initiative. She didn't ask anyone to make a phone call for her - she wanted to make the phone call herself, and they refused to let her. Here's how it went down:

The first day I did "mingle" with a patient. She asked me why I looked so sad and suggested I could call a friend and perhaps not be so lonely. I told her that they had told me that there wasn't a phone on that floor. Speaking of floors, they are all locked -- no one could go in and no one could go out. She looked shocked and shaken and said "I'll take you to the phone" -- while I waited in line for my turn for the use of the phone I observed a guard (since he had on a grey knit uniform) as I approached the phone he straight-armed the phone and said very sternly: "You can't use the phone"... 

...After the girl spoke with me and told me about what she had done to herself I went back into my room knowing they had lied to me about the telephone and I sat on the bed trying to figure if I was given this situation in an acting improvisation what would I do. So I figured, it's a squeaky wheel that gets the grease. I admit it was a loud squeak but I got the idea from a movie I made once called "Don't Bother to Knock". I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it, and it was hard to do because I had never broken anything in my life -- against the glass intentionally. It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass - so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. They did, and I said to them "If you are going to treat me like a nut I'll act like a nut". I admit the next thing is corny but I really did it in the movie except it was with a razor blade. I indicated if they didn't let me out I would harm myself -- the furthest thing from my mind at that moment since you know Dr. Greenson I'm an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself.

So Monroe found herself in a very bad situation and then came up with a plan to help herself. The Secret Life depicts her as completely helpless, except with the bit about the pill, but it isn't clear at all how spitting out the pill helped her in any way. And please note she wasn't planning to actually cut herself - she was bluffing. And it worked.

Also it's clear that the room Monroe was in wasn't quite so barren, she at least had a chair. And it's doubtful she was ever in a straightjacket. And she wasn't taken from her hotel to the clinic - she signed herself in to what she thought was a standard hospital. It came as a shock to her that she was committed to a mental hospital. And certainly the media didn't know about the incident until she was out of there - there were no radio announcements.

And the screenwriters have no excuse for making shit up - Monroe's letters are available online.

Oh well, better for me and my play. The letter to Greenson jumps all over the place and the timeline of events is not clear so I will definitely have to use my artistic judgement, but I try not to differ from real life if I can help it.

Here's Monroe after her appendectomy.

Don't Bother to Knock

At no point does Monroe's character
in this move wear this outfit.

Of all the movies that Marilyn Monroe made, "Don't Bother to Knock" is the most important for my play about Monroe because she actually uses something from that movie to help get herself released from the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic - she talks about it in a letter to one of her shrinks:

...I was waiting at the elevator door which looks like all other doors with a door-knob except it doesn't have any numbers (you see they left them out). After the girl spoke with me and told me about what she had done to herself I went back into my room knowing they had lied to me about the telephone and I sat on the bed trying to figure if I was given this situation in an acting improvisation what would I do. So I figured, it's a squeaky wheel that gets the grease. I admit it was a loud squeak but I got the idea from a movie I made once called "Don't Bother to Knock". I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it, and it was hard to do because I had never broken anything in my life -- against the glass intentionally. It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass - so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. They did, and I said to them "If you are going to treat me like a nut I'll act like a nut". I admit the next thing is corny but I really did it in the movie except it was with a razor blade. I indicated if they didn't let me out I would harm myself...

Of course I am using this in the play. I'm not sure which glass she is talking about though - if there was a window in the room she was staying in, or if it was the observation window in the locked door to her room, or what. I guess I'll have to decide pretty soon.

Anyway, so I watched "Don't Bother to Knock" and it's not a bad movie. The plot revolves around Richard Widmark's character, a commercial pilot and his failing relationship with his girlfriend played by pre-Mrs. Robinson Anne Bancroft. She's dumping him because she feels he's too cold-hearted. So within an hour of being dumped, Widmark sees Monroe's character Nell in a window across the courtyard of the hotel they're at - Nell is babysitting for a couple at an awards ceremony at the hotel - and he goes for it - he invites himself over. It turns out that Nell is losing her marbles over her fiancee who died flying in the Pacific Theater of WWII. She thinks Widmark's pilot is her pilot. Anyway by the end Widmark prevents Nell from killing herself (with a razorblade rather than a piece of glass) and his girlfriend sees he's really a good guy and they get back together again.

Could be worse. Monroe is quite touching when she really starts to lose it. She really could act.

And today is Monroe's birthday, born in 1926.

The latest in taking back the rom-com - this one doesn't do it

By way of my actor buddy Matt comes this article about a new romantic comedy called Man Up.

The co-author Tess Morris has interesting things to say about romantic comedy:

The curious thing about the romantic comedy is that it has become more maligned than arguably any other genre of cinema. “The number of times I get into conversations with people where they’re dismissive of romantic comedy, which makes me so furious because you don’t dismiss all thrillers, you don’t dismiss all horrors,” says Morris with visible exasperation.

But this is how bad it's got with romantic comedies:

The art of romantic comedy is something of a passion for Morris and Pegg. “I did an essay at university that was a structuralist comparison of Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally,” Pegg recalls. “I got a first for it. I read it the other day and I didn’t understand it – it’s completely indecipherable to me. It’s like stereo instructions. But, basically, I tried to say that When Harry Met Sally is like a piece of prose, and Annie Hall is a poem because it uses cinematic devices figuratively, like poems, and it rhymes scenes, whereas When Harry Met Sally is a continuous narrative. It wasn’t saying either one is better. Though Annie Hall is better.”

These are examples of romantic comedies - Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally. Ugh.

I used to like Annie Hall, but Woody Allen's advancing old man creepiness has completely ruined all his old movies for me. And "When Harry Met Sally" is one of the earliest rom-coms to suffer from insufficiently hot male syndrome. I still haven't seen "When Harry Met Sally" because I just do not want to see Billy Crystal in any kind of sexual situation.

And that's why I don't feel compelled to see Man Up - the leading man, Simon Pegg, is not very attractive. And the woman playing against him is younger and more attractive.

One of the reasons old tyme rom-coms were successful is because half of them starred Cary Grant. You have to have an attractive man to have a proper rom-com, otherwise you're just catering to male fantasies of unattractive men being entitled to hotter younger woman - the way things are in ALL OTHER HOLLYWOOD MOVIES.

And that's the problem with men having too much control over rom-coms - because then it's all about meeting the desires of men at the expense of women.

My actor buddy Matt is much better looking than Pegg - he should be in this movie.

One of the comments attached to the article makes a really great point about When Harry Met Sally:

ZachBraffFan42069 

The idea that the central axiom of When Harry Met Sally is, "Can men and women ever be friends?" is what makes me dislike the film so much. First of all, that's a fucking nonsense question, but secondly, it's not even the actual plot. Harry and Sally are never friends, they're two people who are sexually attracted to each other when they first meet but are unable to act on it. When they are later able to act on it, they do. The actual question driving the film is, "will these two people who want to have sex with each other end up having sex with each other?" If the film and its fans were more honest about this instead of making it about really shitty gender politics which never even come into play, I might be better persuaded of its greatness.

Good for you ZachBraffFan42069 - quite astute!

Completely off-topic: why do Brits call their dresses "jumpers"? Why not just dresses? When I read this:

Tess Morris is reminding Simon Pegg about the day she met him. “Do you remember, I was really sweaty? I’d bought a new jumper – it was my Simon Pegg Meeting Jumper – but it was a very warm day, and then I walked really fast, and I was late and I was incredibly nervous. And I thought that as you hugged me, all you could probably feel was the warmth of my sweaty jumper.”

What I imagine she's wearing is this:

Manhattanhenge

Manhattanhenge must have been a phenomenon for as long as Manhattan has had lots of tall buildings - so presumably for at least a hundred years by now. And yet it was not called "Manhattanhenge" until about 8 years ago, if Google Trends are to be believed.

Today and July 12 are "full sun on the grid" days of Manhattanhenge.

Apparently Stonehenge itself was not paid much attention to until about 90 years ago.

In this video, Neil DeGrasse Tyson seems to be taking credit for coining the term.

Creature of the night

George Clooney flaunts his male privilege

I had this idea that George Clooney was one of the good guys, but his self-satisfied obliviousness concerning male privilege and aging was on ghastly display today as a "trending" item on Facebook;

This Is Why George Clooney Says He'll Never Dye His Hair

"You have to come to terms with getting older and not trying to fight it," Clooney said in an interview with the BBC, adding that there's "nothing fun" about the process. "I'm a big believer in the idea that you can't try to look younger. You just have to try to look the best you can at the age you are."

How nice for him.

To get a sense of how extreme male privilege and aging is consider this - nobody made a big deal about the age difference between him and his wife - he's 17 years older.

But when Demi Moore was with Ashton Kutcher, their age difference was all anybody talked about and she's only 15 years older than Kutcher.

Not too long ago NYMag ran a piece about the growing age difference between male movie stars and their love interests as the males aged. Clooney was right up there with the worst of them.


FLAUNT THAT MALE PRIVILEGE BABY!

Libertarians attempt to dominate a college

The New Yorker has a story (Ayn Rand comes to UNC) on the chilling effects right-wing politics are having on the University of North Carolina. And as always, Libertarians are looking for a chance to shove the incoherent, poorly-sourced "philosophy" of a crackpot hack novelist down the throats of young Americans:

The other reformist front is a call to revive the Great Books model of humanities education: literature and philosophy as a source of eternal truths, dating back to Plato, passing through John Locke, and perfected by Ayn Rand and the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek. A Pope Center research paper published this year describes a “renewal in the university” through privately funded programs dedicated to teaching the great books untainted by relativism. The report devotes a great deal of attention to programs dedicated to “the morality of capitalism,” which have been founded at sixty-two public and private colleges and universities. Many of these programs, which are often housed within business schools or economics or political science departments, were funded over the past fifteen years by North Carolina-based BB&T Bank, under its former president John Allison, who is now the C.E.O. of the Cato Institute. In a 2012 statement, Allison explained that he funded the programs to “retake the universities” from “statist/collectivist ideas.” He also noted that training students in the morality of capitalism is “clearly in our shareholders’ long-term best interest.”

The Cato Institute founded by the Charles Koch foundation, is where the most extreme aspects of Ayn Rand's economic beliefs are retained (best summed up as "the poor are moochers") but her atheism and progressive social views on abortion (this May they published a piece by Nat Hentoff, staunch abortion opponent, entitled bizarrely Certain U.S. Abortions Tear The Fetus Apart, ISIS-Style - I confess I didn't realize Hentoff was still alive)  and personal habits are thrown away, so you get the worst of the worst.

I've mentioned the John Allison indoctrination program before.

He gets very cross if you criticize him

Great Partially Examined Life podcast from July 2011, a discussion with Patricia Churchland about her book on neuroscience. In the later half of the podcast they discuss a book by Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape.  Churchland criticizes the book for several reasons and says this (at about 1:21:15):

...the idea that neuroscience is going to tell us where well-being lies and what should make us happy and what we ought to choose is kind of what we deal with in Ethics 101, so I was midly surprised to find it in Sam's book... his book has been really criticized in a lot of places... I feel a little bit bad about criticizing him  because and I'm a friend of his and he of course gets very cross if you criticize him. I wish he'd take another couple of years to write that book.

Why am I not surprised that on top of being a torture-supporting Islamaphobe, Harris is also thin-skinned?

I don't know how Churchland could be a friend of somebody so morally repugnant, but then I knew that Churchland is a very different person from me because she claims she never stopped being fond of a high school teacher who offered tutoring on calculus to boys, but not to girls, since girls just can't understand calculus.

I imagine Harris probably believes calculus is harder for girls since he's a devout supporter of evolutionary psychology as are all the New Atheist celebrities, and in the past year said this:

“I think it may have to do with my person slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people. People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this – it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”

Notice how he points out other people's displeasure at being criticized. Not only thin-skinned but a raging sexist and a shameless hypocrite. What a guy.

Hard times for Objectivists

It was a golden age for Objectivists back when nobody but Objectivists were paying attention to Ayn Rand. But thanks to a combination of the two Rand biographies that were published in 2012, as well as the Tea Party and Libertarian-esque politicians like Rand Paul and Paul Ryan Ayn Rand has gotten much more attention in recent years than since her glory days in the 1950s.

And therefore hilarity has ensued.

I've done plenty of research on Rand for my DARK MARKET in the past couple of years (the re-write is currently on hold) and found much Rand-spoof humor. This weekend I found even more from 2013 - John Hodgman appeared as Ayn Rand for something called The Dead Authors Podcast. Possibly the highlight is when Hodgman as Ayn Rand ranks the heroism/tragedy of the members of the Village People.

I was pretty surprised to find her listed in The Partially Examined Life (PEL) philosophy podcast and blog. But actually soon into the 2-hour long podcast it's clear the discussants don't take Rand or her "philosophy" seriously.

As the blog notes:

First Rand grounds everyday human knowledge, largely by dismissing the concerns of other philosophers (even those whom she unknowingly parrots) as absurd. Then she uses this certainty to argue for her semi-Nietzschean vision of Great Men who master their emotions and rely only on themselves. Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth are satisfied with neither effort. 

Warning: This attempt to make sense of Rand's texts will likely offend any Randians out there, and our reading numerous passages from her alleged "texts" may offend the rest of you. When in doubt, curl up in the fetal position and moan "A=A!" over and over again until the bad sounds stop.

As so often happens when intelligent people are confronted with the philosophy of Ayn Rand, these discussants express infuriation. Beginning at 01:05:45 in the podcast on Rand's epistemology:

SETH: The whole thing about how she can go 50 pages before addressing Wittgenstein's argument about use and then to just dismiss it in one sentence infuriated me... 

WES: ...She doesn't really know what linguistic analysis is, or positivism is, she says things about positivism which are just absurd. She associates it variously with relativism, everything seems to get associated with relativism and so she doesn't really have a solid idea of what Kant is about or positivism, linguistic analysis, things she's railing against so it's sort of a weird contemptuousness of something, and she's talking about definitions, she just doesn't even know the definition of them. She just doesn't even have the vaguest idea of what these things stand for philosophically.

DYLAN:  ...it's just so clearly what I would call nostalgic - it's this attempt to "I am very hostile to the idea that there can be ambiguity or disputes, we need to have an absolute authority upon which we can found our conceptual system"... the fact that she criticized Kant doesn't make sense to me because it sounds like she's an uber-Kantian in a weird way, although a misguided one.

WES: ...she characterizes academic philosophy as all one big cesspool of relativism and here she is riding in to save the day, and bring back the concept of objectivity - no all these people were worried about saving the concept of objectivity... that's the big straw man of this essay,that all these things are relativism... 

On Rand's ethics beginning at around 01:18:00

SETH: This is a perfect example of a straw man she makes. Nobody advocates the kind of altruism she's talking about. 

WES: Right. Sacrifice ourselves totally. 

DYLAN: It just doesn't exist. It's like she's thirteen years old or something. And running around "you want me to give up everything in my whole life! I can't"...it's just so pre-juvenile... (she builds) extreme versions of every case and takes one straw man after another, it's absolutely infuriating in this respect.

WES: her philosophy can be called "sentimentalism" ...it's this need for simplicity and certainty... 

By the second hour, Dylan gets to the heart of Ayn Rand and her "philosophy":

...she's like a celebrity of some sort, who somehow managed to get a grip in popular culture and called herself a philosopher and had philosophical aspirations... but you spend more time figuring out what she should have meant if it was actually consistent or thoughtful... 

I will definitely be checking out this PEL series further - not only do they have several podcasts devoted to Schopenhauer, but they have a good healthy contempt for the New Atheists, especially Sam Harris. For example:

Scientism is what makes it possible for someone like Sam Harris to be taken seriously on morality, despite the fact that his arguments flunk philosophy 101. That intellectually curious people are influenced by that kind of stuff (and freebase it regularly via TED lectures) is a crime. They're better off with "The Secret."

Love it.

Hopefully the last thing I'm going to write about Compulsive Love

I had blissfully forgotten about Compulsive Love until a notice for a free reading by the series author Adam Szymkowicz was sent to me last week. I almost didn't post the notice because Compulsive Love is so mind-bogglingly obnoxious.

I thought yesterday's post would be the last time I ever wrote about it, but then out of curiosity to see if the other episodes were as grotesque as episodes 1-4 and 8 I took a look at the Youtube site devoted to the series. They were pretty bad, although episode seven seems to be the most realistic - instead of wanting to have sex with the unattractive hero, the Girl of the Week just steals his crappy stuff. But nothing else was especially extra-horrific - until... wow, just when I thought this series couldn't be more repulsive.

There appears to be three videos called "The Melissa Files." Melissa is the office boss lady who represents the "bitch" in the bitch/slut/because...um girl triumvirate of female characters in a dude-bro media production. She's basically like Frank Burns on MASH, except in MASH Burns had Hoolihan as a partner and got to have sex. Melissa is crazy, lonely and sexless - a loser in every possible way, and the three Melissa Files videos seem to exist to mine all the humor inherent in humiliating the character even more. I suspect that Szymkowicz has seen 30 Rock and based the Melissa character on Liz Lemon - except Szymkowicz doesn't get that we are supposed to be sympathetic towards Lemon.

And this is how deep the misogyny goes - while the unattractive, weaselly man-baby hero gets to have sex with many women in the series, the Melissa character doesn't even get to lust unrequitedly after an attractive man. In the episode The Fake Limp she is seen eyeing the average ass of some pudgy balding guy. His character is billed as "the sexy co-worker" which I would normally think was meant as a joke, but you can't tell in dude-bro Bizarro World. There really are no attractive male actors used in this series.

I feel especially bad for the way a good actor, Amy Staats is misused here. She's probably the best actor in the series and far more attractive than Alex Anfanger, who plays the hero who gets all the sex. But that's pretty much the fate of female actors in a world dominated by dude-bro assholes. I will have to reach out to Staats for an audition the next time I'm working on a decent project to give her a chance to play a character worth playing. 

One day when the entertainment industry is less thoroughly dominated by men we can all look back on series like Compulsive Love and laugh. Until then...

Compulsive Inclusion

I've been running the NYCPlaywrights web site/email blast as a money-making (although not notably
profit-making) proposition since January 2011, and about six months ago or so I started including free theater notices in the email blast, as a service to the readers. There is always some free theater - usually readings but sometimes full productions - going on in New York City, and especially between May and October because of all the Shakespeare in the park productions.

Sometimes I have to go looking for free theater, but often I'm emailed notices and I've never turned anything down for inclusion in the email blast. But I did briefly consider not running a notice for a Project Y Theatre reading last Sunday for a play by Adam Szymkowicz. But in the end I did run it for the sake of NYCPlaywrights inclusivity.

I found it odd that Project Y Theatre was promoting his play as part of a reading series called "Parity Plays."  What they consider "parity" is 50% women in casting - not playwriting.

The four or five regular readers of this blog may remember my excoriation of a web series written by Szymkowicz and produced a couple of years ago, called Compulsive Love, a case study in un-self-aware male entitlement in which the hero of this anti-romantic, unfunny romantic comedy is such a creep that when he loses a bet playing pool with a woman he refuses to pay up and instead pimps himself out (because there's such a huge market for unattractive hetero male prostitutes in the world of Compulsive Love)  performing oral sex on first his creditor and then on some kind of organized crime lady - there might be more to the plot but I can't report on it because of the vomit that inevitably lands all over my laptop screen whenever I try to watch more than a few minutes at a time of this show. Anyway, since his cunnilingus skills were honed through prostituting himself he is able to walk into a lesbian bar, buy a lesbian a drink and then have sex with her.

But since the hero has sex with at least one new woman per episode I guess that demonstrates Szymkowicz's track record writing work with lots of roles for women. Take that, patriarchy.

While researching this blog post I found somebody else complaining about the series, on the Youtube posting of the lesbian episode:

Neisza 

You do understand that "Where no man has gone before" is actually a name of a trope that you present here - a man having sex with lesbian? It appears in about 90% of movies and shows with lesbian characters (that are not aimed at lesbian audience) - that the lesbian has to be de-gayed and be sexually accessible for a man. I think I don't have to mention it's incredibly homophobic and misogynistic, and actually this way of thinking stands behind "corrective rapes" on lesbians too.

And no, that isn't me writing under a pseudonym.

The trope that the lesbian episode best embodies is If It's You It's OK. See illustration on the right. Although Compulsive Love goes this trope one better - you don't even have to be "The Batman" to turn lesbians into bisexuals, just some goofy-looking ethical failure. That's amore.

Nicest Thing

Mango Sorbetto

Good for everything. Highly recommended.