Freakonomics beatdown

I am sorry I missed this Freakonomics dudes beatdown at "The Sexist" column and at Tiger Beatdown back in October.

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.

Blocked by Sady Doyle - again

I was once blocked by Sady Doyle on Twitter because I refused to back down from pointing out what a sexist Mohammad Ali was. Although I had written admiringly of Ali too. 

I've written much in praise of, and in defense of Sady Doyle too. And she unblocked me, eventually.

But apparently to disagree with Sady Doyle on some matter concerning race is to be blocked by Sady Doyle.

That is how the New Philistines are. It doesn't matter if you are a solid anti-racist, as my blog testifies I have been for at least the last twelve years - if you disagree with a New Philistine on anything, including tactics, they will treat you like you are the Grand Wizard of the KKK.

 I will be writing more about the New Philistines, focusing on Roxane Gay and her "stay in your lane" philosophy soon.

So Sady Doyle blocked me again. This time because I criticized her piece on the contemptible hereditarian Robin DiAngelo. 

Doug Henwood vs. Sady Doyle

Sady Doyle posted an excellent piece on Tumblr three weeks ago - Progressive - I assume she hasn't seen my blog posts about Doug Henwood and his feminist-hating Ladies Auxiliary, so her using the term "Women's Auxiliary" in her piece is no doubt an example of great minds thinking alike:

You can use sexism to rally people for a “progressive” cause, but you can’t then claim that the sexism is invisible, that it doesn’t exist, or that it doesn’t matter, or doesn’t compromise you. You can frame women and feminists as your Women’s Auxiliary, people to be tapped when you need their time and effort and platforms and organizing skill, and discarded or flat-out trashed in favor of better, more male politics whenever we step out of line or whenever it’s convenient. But you can’t do it and tell me that your gender politics are “progressive.” You can’t be a feminist on some days and a person screaming about Hillary Clinton’s vagina on the internet other days, as a wise man might say. So go ahead. Type about how Hillary Clinton is “pandering for votes with her vagina.” But don’t do it and then tell me your opposition to Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with her gender. There is a limit to precisely how many times you can feed me horseshit and call it chocolate frosting, and right now, the taste in my mouth says your time is up.

I also used the chocolate/shit metaphor for sexism ten years ago.

I was blocked on Twitter by Doug Henwood over a year ago, when I got a little too contrary for him - he's used to his Ladies Auxiliary who are compliant and deferential to him as a Great Man of the Left - but Doyle has had an ongoing and increasingly bitter war with Henwood for months now. Perhaps because they were once friendly Twitter colleagues it has become so bitter - I was never friendly with Henwood - my first introduction to him was him attacking the Fawcett Society as "bourgeois feminists" and me giving him shit about it.

I could tell Henwood was a misogynist Radical Chic type from the moment I encountered him. And his online interactions with Sady Doyle have only proven I actually underestimated his shitheadedness. From another article by Doyle: Beware of the angry white male public intellectual which justifiably links other infamous shitheads like Richard Dawkins to Bernie Bros like Henwood:

In many cases, online attacks are set in motion when well-bylined men publicly point their followers to the offenders in question. It’s hard to document every incidence of this, because it’s a bit like a fish documenting water. I called Doug Henwood’s anti-Hillary book cover sexist and blocked him. He began tweeting about how I’d blocked him and suggesting that I was lucky he wasn’t planning to sue. Soon enough, I was getting hundreds of angry tweets. 

Greenwald and similarly left-leaning writer Matt Taibbi, meanwhile, linked to an old article about left-wing sexism against Hillary Clinton by Rebecca Traister. “We got more or less the same argument about ‘Obama Boys’ years ago,’ Taibbi complained. Traister reported that a few hours later, her mentions now include “many suggestions that I am a paid shill hack who should suck a vinyl dick.”

Brad DeLong, colleague of the Mighty Krugman and who Henwood insinuated was saying good things about Clinton out of careerism has Sady's back.

Amber A'Lee Frost and Liza Featherstone: Radical Chic Ladies Auxiliary attacks feminists

Welcome Tweeters. More of my thoughts on Doug Henwood, Liza Featherstone, Amber A'Lee Frost and the Radical Chic. 

New for July 2017 - THE DIRTBAG LEFT!

---

I've mentioned Amber A'Lee Frost and Liza Featherstone before - both of them are members of what I like to think of as the Radical Chic Ladies Auxiliary. Their mission is to constantly suck up to radical chic lefty men by attacking actual feminists every chance they get.

Or as Doug Henwood (Featherstone's much-older husband and number one leftwing Hillary Clinton hater) likes to call it "bourgeois feminism." But that Marxist lingo is just a thin veneer to cover the fundamental misogyny of Henwood's position, which he shares with old lefty men generally.

You can see an example of Frost and Featherstone's hatred of actual feminists in this screen cap from Facebook, sucking up to their lefty men in this needless attack on a Ms. Magazine article.

How dare Ms. Magazine suggest, as this article does that rape is not just an ISIS problem. Bourgeois bitches!

They also hate Rebecca Solnit for daring to write an article about mansplaining.

I don't think I've seen as many attacks on feminists coming from Katie Roiphe as I do from the Ladies Auxiliary.

In other news The Nation has decided to support Sanders. I was trying to decide whether or not to re-up my Nation subscription, so now I know the answer to that.

Sady Doyle continues to fight the good fight on Twitter.

And she shares this excellent piece: Losing Bernie: My Journey from #FeelTheBern to #HillYes

The Ladies Auxiliary hates Doyle as much as they hate any other "bourgeois feminists" which is always a high recommendation in my book.

I had to laugh at Featherstone expressing disgust at Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch's engagement though.

Yeah Featherstone, what a concept! A woman marries a much older balding unattractive man who is full of himself! Shocking!*

Talk about lack of self-awareness. I guess that's what it takes to be a member of the Radical Chic Ladies Auxiliary.

I will be monitoring their activities and attacks on Hillary Clinton and feminists generally leading up to the 2016 election. So far the feminists that Henwood and his Ladies Auxiliary have attacked include: me,  Sady Doyle, Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, Rebecca Solnit, Michelle Goldberg, Gloria Steinem, The Fawcett Society, Ms. Magazine. I'm sure there are many more, these are just the ones I found on a quick run-through of recent commentary. For Amber A'Lee Frost, especially, there doesn't seem to be any feminist she won't find an excuse to attack. So of course she loves the smear-mongering feminist-hating bully Mikki Kendall. Because that's just who the fuck Amber A'lee Frost is.

*Although Henwood probably hates feminists more than Rupert Murdoch does.

Open letter to Sady Doyle

Really? You're going to block me on Twitter because I said Mohammed Ali wasn't perfect, and deliberately adopted an arrogant persona as a statement against the bigotry of the time? And because I took exception to the standard identitarian practice of scapegoating white women - most often white women who are feminists?

BTW - I said very complimentary things about Mohammed Ali a year ago.

http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2015/01/meet-mohammed-ali.html

But of course identitarians aren't interested in getting to know anything about the people they smear.

I was smeared five years ago as a "racist" by that bully Mikki Kendall (see Michelle Goldberg's piece in The Nation on what an ass she is) because I argued with friends of hers on Facebook who claimed John Lennon and Yoko Ono were racists. In spite of the fact that anybody who reads my blog can see I'm on record as being an ANTI-racist for the past 10 years - and Jamelle Bouie even cited my blog as evidence against Razib Khan during the NYTimes controversy.

http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-triumph-of-racist-razib-khan.html

As far as I can tell, Kendall thinks I deserve to be falsely smeared as a racist because I was impolite when I was arguing with her and her friends. That was my first taste of the absolute conscience-free approach to public discourse of identitarians.

It's only a matter of time until identitarians turn on you because attacking people on the basis of their gender/ethnicity is what they do. Because identitarians are fundamentally bigots, who don't give a shit about the content of a person's character, ONLY the color of their skin.

And Jesus after all the nice things I said about you and defended you against that asshole Doug Henwood?

http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search?q=sady

Don't you think the groupthink and absurd smearing that the brocialists engage in is exactly what identitarians do? How could you fail to see the similarities in the mob rule mindset?

Fun fact: my first awareness of Doug Henwood was on Facebook arguing with him calling a feminist organization "bourgeois" - his response was to attempt to smear me with the Mikki Kendall lie - proving that brocialists and identitarians are EXACTLY alike when it comes to smearing people, without the slightest ethical qualm.

You're a brilliant writer. As a judge of character, not so much.

Misogyny and the Hillary-hating Left

NEW FOR 2017: THE DIRTBAG LEFT

I was onto Doug Henwood's misogyny over a year ago when I tangled with him via a friend of a Facebook friend, but it's very gratifying to see others making public statements about his utter derangement on the subject of Hillary Clinton.

Henwood is the leading leftist Hillary hater - he hates Clinton so much he's willing to dig up the debunked Whitewater charges to do it, while insulting any of his critics who call him out for being an unethical crank as Gene Lyons found out:

Because he finds her too close to Wall Street and too hawkish on foreign policy, Henwood evidently feels it his moral duty to blacken Hillary Clinton's character. It's not enough to say she voted for the Iraq War and favored bombing Syria. Henwood had to dig up "Whitewater" to prove her a liar and a cheat. 

Then, after I wrote a column pointing out that almost everything he'd written about that phony scandal was nonsense, Henwood began calling me bad names on social media. "Clinton towel boy" was one. 

So I posted the following on his Facebook page:
"I find it interesting that when confronted with several quite basic factual errors in his description of the great Whitewater scandal of legend and song, Doug Henwood's response is name-calling. That tells me pretty much all I need to know about him. 

"However, it's false to say that the late Jim McDougal's savings and loan financed the Clintons' Whitewater investment. He didn't buy it until five years later. Another bank made the loan, for which both Clintons were jointly and severally responsible — meaning they'd have to pay it off regardless of what happened to McDougal or his other investments. Which they did. Whitewater cost the S&L nothing.

Henwood, like many men on the far Left - and their enablers like Henwood's wife Liza Featherstone and their good buddy Amber A'Lee Frost - just don't like feminists generally, unless they are, I guess, members of the proletariat and/or Marxists.

I first heard of Doug Henwood when he attacked the Fawcett Society as "bourgeois feminists"  on Facebook.

Doug HenwoodYesterday at 8:47am ·
Man, isn't this bourgeois feminism for you? T-shirts cost a nickel apiece (presumably that's printing cost, not the entire t-shirt), sell for $70.
http://gawker.com/women-making-70-feminist-shirts-in-factory-paid-under-1653799400

The Society has been around since 1866 fighting for women's rights. And apparently the story was wrong anyway:

UPDATE: Much to our relief, The Fawcett Society has confirmed that the “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” tee was not produced in a factory with unethical work conditions, as reported by Dazed Digital. “We have been particularly pleased to receive evidence that 100% of workers are paid above the government-mandated minimum wage and all workers are paid according to their skills and years of service,” said Fawcett’s Eva Neitzert to Dazed of the factory in which the garments were made. “The standard working week is 45 hours, and workers are compensated (at a higher rate of pay) for any overtime worked."

If Henwood has apologized for smearing this venerable organization I have yet to discover any evidence. 

Henwood's attitude is described pretty well by this passage in Michelle Goldberg's piece in Slate, Men Explain Hillary to Me:

Of course, people of good faith are going to disagree about individual examples of sexism. What’s immensely frustrating, however, is to realize how many ostensibly enlightened men think that gender can ever be totally disaggregated from Clinton’s efforts to become the first female president. They seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously. They certainly don’t care about female leadership.

I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise; as long as feminism has existed, left-wing men have dismissed it as a bourgeois triviality. Now we know how little things have changed. For that, at least, we can thank these men for educating us.

Goldberg  doesn't mention Henwood by name, but Sady Doyle (whom I've admired for a long time) does in her piece in  Global Comment Hating Hillary: The One Thing Left and Right Men Can Agree On:

You know Hillary-hate. You’ve seen it before: It’s Tucker Carlson proclaiming that “when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” It’s Chris Matthews scolding Clinton, when she criticized Bush’s homeland security spending in 2005, by saying that “you look more witchy when you’re doing it like this.” It is sainted progressive icon Jon Stewart getting huge laughs, off a shot of Clinton smiling politely, with the line “that look is where boners go to die.”
And it goes on, and gets worse, until Hillary is not just portrayed as an ugly, mean old lady these dudes don’t want to fuck, but as an actual monster. Hillary-hate is the fact that, while Clinton was grieving the suicide of her friend Vince Foster, Republicans spread rumors that she had seduced and murdered him. Hillary-hate is Maureen Dowd calling Clinton “Godzilla” and “Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.” Hillary-hate is the not-remotely-subtle implication that Clinton abuses her husband, spread by the New York Post; next to a photo of Clinton with her mouth wide open at a Benghazi hearing, they ran the headline “NO WONDER BILL’S AFRAID.” Hillary-hate is the persistent, bizarre need for major media outlets to go along with Dowd’s calling Clinton the “50-Foot Woman” and to make Clinton look scary by portraying her as superhumanly huge: On the cover of TIME as a rampaging, pantsuited giantess the size of a skyscraper (photographed in the act of stepping on a powerless man, of course) or on the cover of the New York Times Magazine as some sort of Lovecraftian elder God the size of a planet.
Hillary-hate is Nation contributing editor Doug Henwood, greeting Clinton’s candidacy, this time around, with a book cover in which she is portrayed as a murderer aiming a gunat either (a) you, the reader, (b) the Democratic party, or quite possibly (c) Democracy itself.
Henwood turned out to be my breaking point, for this particular hate-wave. He provided the moment when I found out what happens on the other side of dread; when the anxiety of my internal monologue (they’re going to do it to her again; they’re going to do it to her again; they’re doing it to her again) broke, and clarified.
I don’t care if I have to end my career, end my friendships, or end my life with a Twitter-fight-induced heart attack, is what I thought, on the other side of fear. If there is anything I can do about this, they will not get away with doing it again.

Doug Henwood, as thin-skinned as they come, of course  has to jump on to attack Doyle:

She has no idea what Henwood thinks of Clinton if she's incapable of Googling "Henwood" and "Hillary" and finding the article in Harpers, mentioned by Lyons, entitled: Stop Hillary!

Amber A'Lee Frost also attacked Doyle in the Baffler in a piece meant primarily to hype the forthcoming hate-Hillary books of her good friends Henwood and Featherstone:

That so many established feminists appear to favor one exceptionally rich and powerful woman over the millions of women in dire need—many struggling as a direct result of horrifying policies of Bill’s that Hillary still supports to this day—is alarming to me. Sady Doyle, a self­-identified socialist who supports Clinton nonetheless, says that “the gendered nastiness coming unilaterally from Sanders’s camp doesn’t make me feel I can vote for him in any scenario.”

Established feminists are favoring Clinton as a presidential candidate. And I'm sure you could easily dig up objectionable actions on any other candidate, even Saint Bernie Sanders. 

Doyle's TRAINWRECK

I've been reading Sady Doyle's "Trainwreck" and think it's quite a good, if rather a short read, book.

I've been a fan of Doyle's for a long time and have blogged about her here many times. My admiration for her has even survived her blocking me on Twitter because I failed to STFU about Mohammed Ali's sexist attitudes towards women the day he died. This is helped by the fact that she eventually did unblock me - I don't know if my open letter to her had any bearing on that or not.

I wasn't surprised her book is good, she's a brilliant writer. And I was especially pleased to see she mentioned what a creep Doug Henwood is, in two places in the book. 

Hopefully she'll write a follow-up and include mentions of people she left out of "Trainwreck" like Matt Taibbi or members of the Dirtback Left besides Henwood. I also hope she'll touch on the unhinged hatred of Sheryl Sandburg on the part of the alt-Left. I suspect it's due to their hatred of women in power generally (Henwood has made clear his idea of feminism doesn't have anything to do specifically with women's rights but rather with "peace and egalitarianism" - which does not, Henwood clarifies, have anything to do with putting women in positions of power.)

I had admired Doyle much longer than I loathed Henwood, but I was very gratified to discover that she clashed with him during the 2016 presidential campaign, which is what any real feminist would naturally do. 

And at the same time Henwood made common cause with Jason Grote, another brocialist utterly beside himself with hatred for Hillary Clinton. I clashed with Grote nine years ago, once, and then I clashed with him a couple of times on Twitter over the 2016 election. And for that, Grote literally claimed I had "stalked" him. Now stalking is illegal and Grote publicly lying that I did this illegal thing is a form of libel and I really should sue him for it, but it wouldn't be worth the lawyer's fees. 

So if a woman expressing a few opinions on three or four occasions on her personal blog and Twitter is experienced by a brocialist like Grote as this scary illegal thing, you can imagine how terrifying the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency was for him. 

The NYTimes review of "Trainwreck" is justifiably positive although the review had a quibble with Doyle's views of Harriet Jacobs' career. I also have a couple of quibbles with the book - a very minor one in that Doyle claims that only after their deaths did anybody find out that Anne and Emily Bronte were also authors like Charlotte - both Charlotte and Anne traveled to their London publisher to present themselves in their true identities. Only us Bronte-heads know this but still...

A much bigger quibble I have with her is about Mary Wollstonecraft. She suggests that thanks to her husband publishing her posthumous biographical details, Wollstonecraft was perceived as a "train wreck" and that this set back the fight for women's rights. I don't subscribe to the Great Man theory of history and I don't subscribe to the Naughty Woman theory of history either. There were actual socio-economic conditions holding women back that were little influenced by one writer's life, no matter how bad her reputation.

But overall a very good book and I recommend it.

The Menaissance Festival!

Sady at Tiger Beatdown has outdone herself this time:

The chicks today, they get to do so many things! Why, they can vote, and attend colleges, and even drink and smoke in public! These chicks: An alarming number of them have jobs! And, like, financial autonomy, from the jobs, and hence a socially assured position of power from which to negotiate the terms of their relationships and lives, thereby making them not entirely dependent on the funding and/or goodwill of men for their continued survival and status, and so they're all able to make decisions and expect fair treatment and… dude, it's a mess, I tell you. Because it turns out, after like fifty-some years of this business, none of these chicks is impressed enough by your penis!

"Excuse me, madam, I happen to have a penis," you say. (Because you do. A trans variety of gentleman has no place within the Menaissance!) "Would you, perchance, like to hear about all of my thoughts and feelings as they relate to this penis, and also how important it makes me, and furthermore how it qualifies me to boss you around?" And the chicks today, they don't particularly care to listen! They used to listen. They used to have to. It was, like, their job.

Hence, the Menaissance: From "Men," meaning dudes, and "aissance," meaning "making asses out of themselves." What happens, apparently, is that a dude watches a few too many episodes of Mad Men and reads one too many Raymond Carver stories and takes at least one beer commercial just a bit too seriously, and then he decides to engage in some HISTORICAL RE-ENACTMENTING, buying books with titles like The Retrosexual Manual: How to Be A Real Man, and playing dress-up in his special Don Draper costume that he got at Banana Republic, and getting his hair did at special man-focused man-salons which ensure their manliness by putting Elvis memorabilia all over the place (because women HATED Elvis, duh), and also probably pretending that he likes how scotch tastes and that cigars don’t make him want to barf his rare steaks back up onto his pseudo-vintage-trouser-encased lap, and in all other ways attempting to embody some wacky vision of pre-feminist manhood that, unless he is actually ninety-seven years old, he has only ever seen on TV.

Compulsive Love - two actual episodes

So apparently you can watch the straight male fantasy series Compulsive Love for free, although only one episode per week.

I felt maybe it was unfair that I based my assessment of the series on the trailer so I watched two episodes. And no, I was not unfair. Not only is the protagonist ("Ratface") physically unappealing yet irresistible to women, he's also a gigantic man-baby.

It did occur to me that perhaps the series is based on the same premise as Mr. Bean - which, if you are unfamiliar with that show:

...follows the exploits of Mr. Bean, described by Atkinson as "a child in a grown man's body", in solving various problems presented by everyday tasks and often causing disruption in the process. Bean rarely speaks, and the largely physical humour of the series is derived from his interactions with other people and his unusual solutions to situations. 

So it could be a Mr. Bean scenario, but in spite of the evidence I think not. I think we're actually supposed to feel sympathy for Ratface, especially since there was the series tag line that seemed crafted to garner sympathy for him: "PUNCHED IN THE FACE BY LOVE AND THE WOMEN WEARING THE BRASS KNUCKLES" although that tag line seems to have disappeared from the web site.

In the first episode we meet our hero, a grown-ass (albeit tiny) adult male, out on the street beating a trash can with a baseball bat because his girlfriend broke up with him and he's too manly to quietly cry in the privacy of his bedroom. Then we see a woman who is apparently not only his co-worker but his constant companion (when he isn't banging a chick) who has a Janeane Garafalo/Zoe Deschanel/Daria vibe. Her arm is in a sling. Daria asks Ratface if he wants to know what happened to her arm. This is a set-up to demonstrate what a priapic man-baby Ratface is, because a random woman rides by on a bike and Ratface turns mid-conversation with Daria to go chase her down.

Now here's where I almost believed there might be hope for this series. Because at some point in the montagey courtship of Ratface and Maria The Bike Woman, Maria stops to stare at a church wedding, and strangely she focuses on a freakishly enthusiastic nun who is part of the throng of well wishers. Thanks to the weirdness of the nun and the lighting effects and the slo-mo, for a second I thought this was going into some Un Chien d'Andalou surrealism territory. But alas, instead it turns into Maria having sex with Ratface, which I skipped over because ew.

The next scene Ratface is telling Daria about how great the sex was and their supervisor Melissa comes by to chide them for drinking the company coffee. This was the second time I thought maybe something interesting was going to happen - some wackiness with social-commentary-edge office humor. But no, we are whisked to a scene between Maria and Ratface in which Maria tells Ratface she's going to become a nun. Once again I perked up (but with less false hope than previously) because I thought maybe she was going to say something like having sex with Ratface convinced her that she would rather live a life of celibacy - very derivative Woody Allen style but at least it would have been something. But no, not even that. We next see Daria comforting Ratface and then watch him beat a trash can some more. And actually Daria tells him to hit the can.

The second episode was even worse - the girl of the week was an Asian woman who spends all her time with her mother, talking in their strange foreign tongue that Ratface doesn't understand, and finally la femme de la semaine breaks up with Ratface because she'd rather spend more time with her mother.

And it turns out that Daria has an obsessive stalker - a balding barista. Apparently no attractive men exist on Straight Male Fantasy Planet.

Well it looks like this is shaping up to be a series with the classic female triumvirate of straight-male-dominated storytelling - the bitch, the crazy slut, and the Because...Um? girl.

I'll let Sady Doyle break it down...

In Apatow-Brand comedies... girls are either bitches (wives; sexually unavailable women; professional women; ex-girlfriends) or sluts, typically of the crazy drunk variety. (Woody Allen, another prominent "Because, Um...?" writer, uses Manhattan to compress all of the above-listed "bitch" characteristics into a successful lesbian ex-wife, whom he hilariously confesses to having tried to run over with his car. HA! A man trying to murder a woman because she ended their relationship and/or is not heterosexual! It's funny, 'cause that's how a lot of women actually die!) Eastbound & Down takes this tack by having literally only two other female characters, a wife whom we're encouraged to think of as an uptight bitch and a "fuckbuddy" whose only defining characteristic is that she is such a crazy drunk slut all the time. The "Because, Um...?" girl can only exist in the negative space created by this double bind. If women have standards, they're bitches; if they don't have standards, they're sluts: try to write yourself out of this, and you find that the only feasible way to create a non-threatening female character is to give her no motivations or personality whatsoever, to turn her into a cipher who provides love or sex simply because the plot demands it.

So in Compulsive Love we have the crazy sluts: obviously all the women who have sex with Ratface; the bitch: the office manager, the Asian woman's mom; and Daria, the Because, Um... Girl. Now she's not having sex with Ratface yet, but I expect eventually Ratface will realize that she is the one for him. But she's still a Because, Um... Girl because she actually spends her free time with him. Because, Um... who the hell would do that??? Although if you are forced to live in the land of no attractive men, it does become more understandable.

Well maybe it's just silly for me to look for any rhyme or reason here because the series' author basically says that everybody is crazy:

Compulsive Love follows Aaron who is completely obsessed with women. Is his character a broader statement on the dangers of conflating happiness with having a relationship? Or is it poking fun at the tragic failures of dating?
I think a little of both. Aaron rushes into relationships. He thinks being in love will save him and solve all problems. He thinks every girl he meets is the girl that will change his life. 

In the series Aaron tries to cut through the “batshit craziness” of dating. But he’s nutty himself. Who’s crazier him or the women he dates?
He is equally crazy as they are if not more so. I think that’s part of the fun. 

The series is full of big laughs. It’s also very sexy.
Sex is always a good idea.  My plays tend to be pretty sexy.  It’s part of my aesthetic and one I think Kevan (our genius director) shares.

Straight men think it's off-the-charts sexy to see an unattractive man have sex with lots of attractive women. Although normally we call this "straight porn."

And the interviewer and the author apparently haven't seen the series. Aaron thinks being in love will solve all his problems? What problems? The only problem we see him having is getting laid and maintaining his fuck-buddy status. There is zero context here. And the tragic failures of dating? Ratface finds an attractive woman, has sex with her, and then some bizarre unlikely plot point intervenes - the woman wants to become a nun, the woman is with her mother at all times. Yes this is truly an incisive commentary on Our Times.

The fact that Straight Male Fantasy Planet is populated exclusively by the batshit crazy is the biggest problem of this series. Because batshit crazy people are in fact not actually interesting. If Ratface was normally sane and then we see him beating on a trashcan in the middle of the street, well that would be amusing. Because it's extreme and out-of-character and thus would effectively convey his extreme disappointment in love. But if he's batshit crazy then so what? That's the kind of thing that batshit crazy people do!

And Ratface isn't so crazy that he is unable to express his cool subversiveness by coming back at the crazy bitch office manager's insults with a bon mot about monkeys shitting on the wall. So his craziness doesn't render him completely incoherent - just crazy enough to find a new crazy but attractive woman to have sex with every week.

Then again if everybody is batshit crazy, you have an automatic out:

If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended: 

we're all batshit crazy here!

Well that's it for me and this series. It's just too damn depressing.

If you want to see a web series done right - including a romantic angle with an attractive male object of desire, check out The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl.

Theatre Essay: Bitches is Crazy: or why I despise TALLEY'S FOLLY

BITCHES IS CRAZY

~ OR ~

Why I despise and loathe the Pulitzer Prize-winning play TALLEY'S FOLLY

 

In which I explain why I have a problem with a play that presents a stalker, who forces a woman to remain in a boathouse until she submits, as a romantic hero.

When I first saw Lanford Wilson’s TALLEY’S FOLLY, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, I didn’t even pick up on the horrific stalking and bullying aspect. This was in the early 1990s, when I first became interested in writing plays, and I considered it homework to go and see a community theatre production of the play in Haddonfield New Jersey. I picked the play exactly because it had won the Pulitzer Prize: I figured it had to be good. Like Shakespeare good.

But instead I was bored. It’s a ninety minute play that felt like two hours, but I gritted my teeth and stayed until the end. As I was walking out of the theatre I remember wondering whether I should abandon playwriting and go back to painting. If that was theatre, then I hated theatre.

My impression of the play, based on that long-ago production, was a long boring conversation, with lots of exposition, and the man doing most of the talking. I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on the truly repulsive underlying message of the play - perhaps it was the way it was directed - I don't remember any physical force used, as specified in the stage directions of the published script. 

Cultural gatekeepers have always been men (or men's female enablers.) To this day the vast majority of movie and theatre critics in the traditional media are men. But thanks to the new technologies all kinds of excellent feminist commentary is available to the public. One of the best purveyors of feminist culture theory is a web site called Tiger Beatdown. And one of its best essays is called TIGER BEATDOWN FOR DUDES Presents: That’s Not Funny. No, Seriously Dude, It’s Not.

In this essay, the author identifies a cultural trope called the Because...? Um Girl. I’ll let author Sady Doyle explain:

So then, of course, you have (television series) Eastbound & Down, where a man calls a woman a “bitch” and promises to “fuck her up (with some truth),” because she doesn’t want to immediately jump into a relationship with him, and her reaction to this is to dump her fiance and move to a new city with him about five seconds later, so he basically verbally abuses her into being his girlfriend, which, if we were encouraged to look into her motivations to the same extent that we’re allowed to examine the motivations of the other (male) characters on the show, would be some spooky tragic cycle-of-abuse bullshit – the show emphasizes that the only other characters who are drawn to him are deeply fucked up, I would take “deeply fucked up” as an answer here – but in the context of the show, it’s all cool. Because she’s not a person; she’s a plot point. Because she’s a woman.

Fear and contempt of women are the only motivating factors to write a character this way. In Apatow-Brand comedies, the girls who are not “Because, Um…?” girls are either bitches (wives; sexually unavailable women; professional women; ex-girlfriends) or sluts, typically of the crazy drunk variety. (Woody Allen, another prominent “Because, Um…?” writer, uses Manhattan to compress all of the above-listed “bitch” characteristics into a successful lesbian ex-wife, whom he hilariously confesses to having tried to run over with his car. HA! A man trying to murder a woman because she ended their relationship and/or is not heterosexual! It’s funny, ’cause that’s how a lot of women actually die!) Eastbound & Down takes this tack by having literally only two other female characters, a wife whom we’re encouraged to think of as an uptight bitch and a “fuckbuddy” whose only defining characteristic is that she is such a crazy drunk slut all the time. The “Because, Um…?” girl can only exist in the negative space created by this double bind. If women have standards, they’re bitches; if they don’t have standards, they’re sluts: try to write yourself out of this, and you find that the only feasible way to create a non-threatening female character is to give her no motivations or personality whatsoever, to turn her into a cipher who provides love or sex simply because the plot demands it.

This is an exact description of Sally in TALLEY’S FOLLY. 

Let us review the evidence. Wikipedia mentions some salient plot points:

While on vacation in Lebanon, Missouri the previous summer, Matt met Sally and has sent her a letter every day since. Though the single reply from Sally gave him no hope for romantic encouragement, he has bravely returned to ask her to marry him.

*** 

Sally arrives at the boathouse and is in disbelief that Matt has shown up uninvited, even though he had written her that he planned to come for the holiday.

*** 

Matt's interest in Sally had never waned; once, he drove from his home in St. Louis to the hospital where she worked and waited hours for her, even after being informed that she was not available.

Notice how the Wikipedia entry - which sounds like it was taken right from marketing copy - refers to the stalker coming to confront the stalkee after a year of rejection as "brave." 

But Matt didn’t just wait for her at the hospital, he did a little snooping around while he was there:

                   MATT
Also, I talk to the patients at the hospital, remember? Some are not so young. And they all say "Are you Sally's beau? Every time we say something sweet to Sally, try to get fresh, she says 'Come on now, I got a beau."

Now please note - we are supposed to take this to mean that Sally is “really” in love with Matt because she’s telling men who are hitting on her that she has a boyfriend. She is supposed to be playing extreme “hard to get." 

In addition to spying on her at work, Matt spies on Sally through her aunt:

                    MATT

Oh my goodness. She does have a vanity as well as a temper. You are thirty-one because you were fired from teaching Sunday school on your twenty-eight birthday and that was three years ago.

                   SALLY

What?

                   MATT

I've become great friends with your Aunt Charlotte. There's a counterspy in your home. You're infiltrated. I didn't tell you. You're ambushed. I've come up on you from behind.

                   SALLY

When did you talk to Aunt Charlotte?

                   MATT

Last year. For a second today. And every few weeks during the winter. On the telephone. (He laughs.) I never heard of anyone being fired from Sunday school before.

                   SALLY

I quit. We didn't get along.

This is an astounding, grotesque exchange for many reasons. First, because Sally’s aunt has betrayed her to a stranger. Either the aunt has all her faculties and still gave out embarrassing personal information about her niece because she's an awful person with no respect for her own niece's privacy, or she has mental problems and Matt is taking advantage of this to get the dirt on his obsession. 



And Matt is not the least bit bashful about the fact that he has been obsessively spying on this woman - he brags about it with undisguised triumph:



You're infiltrated. I didn't tell you. You're ambushed. I've come up on you from behind.


I won’t even go into the apparent sexual assault metaphor there. And don’t tell me that Wilson was unaware of that possible interpretation.

The third reason that the “talking to Aunt Charlotte” passage is so objectionable is because of the way that Sally reacts right after Matt has humiliated her. Remember now, Matt has just said a few lines earlier that Sally has a temper. Here’s how she responds to all this information:

                   SALLY

I quit. We didn't get along.

Now most human beings would have some kind of objection to this gross violation of privacy let alone someone who is supposed to have a temper. But Sally is a “because...um girl?” defined as

"a non-threatening female character (with) no motivations or personality whatsoever...  a cipher who provides love or sex simply because the plot demands it."

To have Sally respond in a way that a person with a temper would respond would work against the narrative that says that Matt will win her in the end. And the plot demands that he win her in the end. And that's not hyperbole - the Matt character confides in the audience at the top of the play:

They tell me that we have ninety-seven minutes here tonight without intermission... if everything goes well for me tonight this should be a waltz one-two-three, one-two-three a no-holds barred romantic story..."

He virtually declares the outcome and how long it will take. There's certainly no time for Sally to have an actual personality, or for there to be any realistic consequences to Matt's actions. The plot demands that she provide love. She delivers, like a compliant plot device.

Matt's charm offensive doesn't end with the stalking, however. He's not afraid to use physical force - several times throughout the play Sally tries to leave the boathouse and Matt stops her by holding her back or blocking the door:


                      SALLY

-Get gone now. Leave before I hit you with something. You can walk to the Barnettes', they'll give you some gas for a couple of coupons.

                      MATT

Now who is making the disturbance?

                     SALLY

               (Angry, quite loud.)

Get off this property or get out of my way so I can go back to the house, or I'll disturb you for real.

                     MATT

We are going to settle this before anyone goes anywhere.

                     SALLY

I won't be made a fool just because I fell in love again, Matt, and I won't be pushed around again.

                     MATT

You're not getting away from me.

                     SALLY

Get out of here!

                     MATT

Do you realize what you said? Did you hear yourself?

                    SALLY

             (Yelling toward the door.)

Buddy! Cliffy! Here he is. Matt Friedman is down here!

(Her last words are muffled by Matt's hand as he grabs her and holds her fast. She tries to speak over his lines.)

                     MATT

              (Grabbing her.)

Vilde chaya! you are a crazy woman! We could both be shot with that gun. People do not scream and yell and kick.

              (She stops struggling.)

People are blessed with the beautiful gift of reason and communication.

              (He starts to release her.)

                    SALLY
Cliffy!

                    MATT

               (Grabbing her again.)

How can such a thing happen? When they passed out logic everybody in the Ozarks went on a marshmallow roast. You are rational now?

(He releases her. She moves away. Matt stands where he can block her exit.)

Life is going to be interesting with you. Are you hurt?

Is there anything more repulsive than a thug using physical force against someone he is supposed to love, and then lecturing her on the proper way for people to behave? 

But remember how Sally is playing hard-to-get? Stalker/bully Matt can see the clues that tells him what she really wants, in spite of her many protestations.

This passage contains one of those clues:



                   SALLY

I won't be made a fool just because I fell in love again, Matt, and I won't be pushed around again.

Did “because I fell in love again” leap out at you too? Who ever says that, right in the middle of screaming at somebody to go away? Women, of course, in "romantic comedies" and that’s why you have to respond to their craziness by replying:



                  MATT

You're not getting away from me.

Women don’t know what they want. Or maybe they secretly do know what they want, but they’ll jerk you around for a whole year. And that's why, as a man, you can’t take no for an answer. You have to keep her in that boathouse until she gives you the right answer.

But maybe Sally is just crazy and so Matt is forced to act crazy too. But here’s the thing - nowhere in the play are we led to believe that Sally is crazy. She’s normal, albeit sad yet beautiful. No, Sally isn't crazy, Sally is a woman and bitches is crazy. 

But even more important than Sally blurting out that she fell in love is Matt blurting out in Yiddish during the struggle.

But first let's look at more of Matt’s charms:

                      MATT

I am foolish to insinuate myself down here and try to feel like one of the hillbillies. Who ever heard of this Friedman? I don't blame you. I won't be Matt Friedman any more. I'll join the throng. Call myself... August Hedgepeth. Sip moonshine over the back of my elbow. Wheat straw in the gap in my teeth. I'm not cleaning my glasses, I'm fishing for crappies. Bass.

                     SALLY

Sun perch.

                     MATT

Oh heck, yes. Only I'm not. I can't even take off my shoes without feeling absurd.

                     SALLY

People don't walk around with their shoes off here, sipping moonshine. It isn't really the Hatfields and the McCoys. The ones who go barefoot only do it because they can't afford shoes.

So we’ve seen that Matt is a stalker, a bully, and he mocks Sally’s community. How could such a character possibly be acceptable as a romantic lead?

Here’s how:  

                      MATT

...and Buddy came - does your entire family have such absurd names?

                      SALLY

His real name is Kenny. We call him Buddy.

                      MATT

Kenny? Is his real name? This is better, for a grown man? Kenny? Kenny Talley, Lottie Talley, Timmy Talley, Sally Talley? Your brother also does not know how to converse. Your brother talks in rhetorical questions. "You're Sally's Jewish friend, ain't ya? What do you think you want here? Did you ever hear that trespassing was against the law?"

Kenny has a good reason for telling Matt he's trespassing - he told him to leave because Sally wasn't there. Matt believed she was hiding from him and that's why he refuses to leave. 

So why is Buddy the bad guy and Matt the hero of this passage? 

Anti-Semitism. 

Matt's from an oppressed minority so he's allowed to be completely obnoxious and still get the girl. 

Still not convinced? Imagine how obnoxious Sally would sound if she said this to Matt: "What kind of names are those? Schlomo, Golda, Moishe, Uri?" She even says at one point that he shouldn't make fun of her accent because she wouldn't make fun of his. But the normal rules of polite behavior do not apply to Matt: we are expected to excuse him because he is a victim of anti-Semitism. 

And this should not be surprising - if people can excuse Roman Polanski for drugging and raping a 13-year-old due to the Holocaust, surely we can forgive Matt a little stalking and bullying and bigotry.

As much as I loathe TALLEY’S FOLLY, Wilson, in his introduction to the published version, reveals it could have been much worse. Wilson writes:

Everyone loved it, that is, except Marshall W. Mason, who was to direct. After many glowing comments and applause, Marshall and I retired to his office. He had (ominously) said nothing during the discussion period. I thought the play was perfect, so I had quite a chip on my shoulder. He said something like, "So the story is, essentially, Matt comes down to Lebanon and browbeats this girl into hysterical admission that she's barren." I said yes and he said "What's fun about that?" He pointed out that with Matt knowing she couldn't bear children he didn't even have to tell her he refused to bring children into the world. Except for being turned down, he had nothing more at stake. He didn't even have to browbeat her, he could just say Lottie told me. It wasn't even dramatic. His actions were brutal with little cost to himself.

All true enough, but please note that in spite of the glaring flaws that Wilson admits were in the script, "everyone" - that would be the Circle Rep play reading group - loved it prior to the re-write, and Wilson himself thought it was "perfect." Wilson continues:

However, if he did not know her situation, then he would first have to tell Sally that he refused to have children and ask if she would have him in that condition. He had to risk something. Marshall must have been very convincing because the chip fell off my shoulder and very soon I was taking notes. I rewrote the middle third of the play. It was much more dramatic... Marshall said, "Let's read it. I'll read Matt, you read Sally.

OK, so Wilson rewrote some of this "perfect" play, but there was still a huge problem, he continues:

I had sat there as Sally, watching Matt jump through hoops, and all I said was "Oh Matt" and "Come on now, Matt." I didn't like my part. And I especially didn't like it when Matt finally told me he wanted to marry me but he didn't want kids. The writer had not provided me with the obvious response: "Who told you I couldn't have children?" I sat there livid because he had made me feel terrible about his lousy childhood and I thought it had all been a ploy. And all I did in the script was cave in. Back to the typewriter. Sally's part grew by a third. It is still not as flamboyant as Matt's but I think she now holds her own. She is much stronger and much more her own woman. We finally had a play.

I would argue Wilson is giving himself too much credit here - as I've demonstrated, Sally is a sap when it's narratively convenient. But then Wilson admits there are still problems with the final version of the play - the version that won the 1980 Pulitzer for drama:

If Matt knows she can't have children and it takes the whole play for him to convince Sally it's OK that she can't have children - it's a story. If he doesn't know and he presents his resolution, and then finds out she can't have children anyway - it's a plot. What happens is a very strange phenomenon. When Sally finally screams out in desperation, "I can't have children, I can't bear children!" there is an almost audible click as the last piece of the plot locks into place. It is an enormously satisfying moment. We feel the perfection of it. But it is also terribly disappointing. We feel like we have been manipulated. This has all been a carefully worked out artifice... that's what a plot this starkly presented does. It underlines the artifice... we decided to live with it.

And bingo - Pulitzer. 

Now the repulsiveness of Matt's character is not an issue for Wilson because, as I said, Matt gets an asshole license due to anti-Semitism. But the problem with the plot as-is goes beyond the "perfection" of its artifice. Wilson has set up a situation where a woman is interested in a man, but tells him to go away many many times, presumably because she can't have children. But if that's the issue, why didn't she just tell him she can't have children?

But if that is really why she rejects him, why wouldn't she immediately respond, when he tells her he doesn't want children, that she can't have children? Instead he has to drag it out of her - still.

No matter how many times Wilson has someone tell us that Sally is strong, what he shows us instead is that Sally is a dithering, childish cipher who has to be browbeaten and physically restrained by Matt in order to achieve a happy ending. 

And are we to believe that because she can't have children, Sally has sworn off men forever? And that only a browbeating stalker who doesn't want children and is eleven years older could possibly make her interested in sex, love and marriage again? Are we supposed to believe that Sally is going to end up an old maid unless Matt comes along, like Mary in the George Bailey-free alternate universe in "It's a Wonderful Life?" That movie has the excuse of being made in the 1940s. TALLEY'S FOLLY was written in 1979. 

Finally, the device of having Matt speak to the audience at the beginning of the play, telling us up front that he's going to try to get the girl, adds nothing to the story. In fact, it puts Matt and Sally on an even more unequal footing by making Matt the omniscient narrator and Sally just a character behind the fourth wall, and it puts the audience in the position of being confederates of Matt in his campaign to win Sally.

And his little winking aside to the audience at the end of the play: 

(takes out his watch, shows time to Sally and then the audience) 

...right on the button. Good-night

- is creepy, precious and smug, all at the same time. 

I've been involved in play readings since November 2000 in New York City, and I've seen actors make really crappy plays sound good. Skilled and appealing actors can work wonders on bad scripts. And Wilson had access to a very high caliber of actor for his work by the time he wrote TALLEY'S FOLLY. But what those not-so-great actors in Haddonfield New Jersey made plain to me, and what the text itself and Wilson's own comments make even plainer is that this is actually a poorly thought-out play with a repulsive character as a romantic lead.

During the course of writing this essay, I had an argument on Facebook with an actor who defended TALLEY'S FOLLY by saying that obviously I am wrong about the play, since it's so popular and nobody else has noticed the whole stalking/bully aspect.

But in the past few years, critics are finally beginning to take note. 

This is from Theatre Mirror Reviews in 2006:

Adam Zahler’s canny direction makes Matt’s determination -- and aggression (He’s not taking ‘NO’ for an answer) -- seems ever so romantic. Remember, the play is set in 1944, way before “stalking” entered our vocabulary. Stephen Russell makes Matt an earnest, if gangly, hero to rescue Marianna Bassham’s fragile maiden-in-distress. The two seem so mismatched that we, just like Sally, need convincing---and we get it in Zahler’s heartfelt production.

This is from a 2009 theatre review in Pegasus News:

Matt Friedman is persistent (as many smitten men can be) but he doesn't seem delusional. The idea of stalking in the sense we have today didn't exist in 1979, when Folly won the Pulitzer, or 1944 when the play is set. Sally doesn't make Matt feel welcome, but she doesn't exactly chase him off.

And this is from a 2012 review in a blog associated with the Journal News:

She finds moments — flashes of moments, really — where Sally drops her resolve to reveal emotion in a shy smile, a glint in her eye, a color change on her expressive face.It’s not much for Matt to work with, but Stone uses those moments as fuel, to push, prod and needle his way into Sally’s heart.

In our modern age, Sally’s family would have a restraining order, power being power and no meaning no. Matt’s considerable charms — despite the best of intentions — would be kept at bay.

Of course the stalking is excused based on the "that's just how it was in the good old days" argument - but at least there is acknowledgement of the behavior. 

But why keep producing a play that excuses stalking and bullying? Not only excuses it, but posits those behaviors as absolutely necessary for a romantic comedy - the only actual dramatic struggle on stage in the whole play is Matt restraining Sally from leaving the boathouse, after refusing to leave it himself. 

My theory is that in addition to being relatively inexpensive to produce, most of the people who've seen this play in the past twenty years are old - theatre audiences are famously old. When the audience for TALLEY'S FOLLY was coming of age, male dominance was the absolute law of the land. Nobody even questioned it. So of course these attitudes and behaviors are perfectly acceptable to them, even "romantic." 

As the post-baby boomers become old and become the theatre audience, they might not be so comfortable with the extreme patriarchy of this play - and TALLEY'S FOLLY will one day go the way of WHY MARRY, the 1918 Pulitzer Prize winner that nobody ever produces anymore. Because it's crap.

So sure, few people notice the egregiousness of TALLEY'S FOLLY now, but that's just because I'm ahead of the curve.

c. 2012 by Nancy McClernan

And if that isn't enough for you here are even more reasons why I hate TALLEY'S FOLLY.

UPDATE: years after the #metoo movement, misogynist idiots are still producing this play.