hudebnik

It's the beginning of Volume 2 of a fantasy series. Volume 1 ended with the male protagonist and the beautiful princess getting married, to fulfill the expectations of the people and the genre. Problem is, the protagonist is actually in love with the beautiful princess, and also wants to have sex with her, and they've never discussed either of those issues. He's terrified that she doesn't return either of these sentiments, and that raising them will damage their marriage and the kingdom. And then I woke up.

Woody Allen
Bill Cosby
Al Franken
Jian Ghomeshi
Garrison Keillor
Philip Pickett
Harvey Weinstein

The degrees of "good art" and "bad behavior" differ, but these are all men who made life richer and more fun for thousands or millions of people they had never met, while (we know now) making life hell for the women closest to them. (Remind me of other obvious names that I'm forgetting.)

I don't have any terribly penetrating thoughts about this subject that haven't been voiced better by others. Obviously, we need to do a better job of bringing up boys: society should be able to get the art without the despicable personal behavior. And we each have to deal, in our own way, with the anguish and cognitive dissonance of the entertainment we grew up with, that shaped our souls, being tainted retroactively by knowing what its authors were doing to the women around them. I'm usually pretty good at compartmentalization: good art is good art, no matter who creates it, just as a sound mathematical proof is a sound mathematical proof, no matter who came up with it. But art appeals to so many emotional levels as well as intellectual ones; these artists, particularly Cosby, told us something about how to be a human, and that advice tastes distinctly sour when you realize what a lousy job they were doing at being a human.

[Digression: drop the "good art" part.]

At the same time, a guy in Toronto goes berserk with a van, killing as many women as possible in revenge on them for women-as-a-group not wanting to have sex with him. As though it hadn't occurred to him that sex takes place between two individuals, or that women even are individuals: he and "incels" like him are so monumentally self-absorbed that (like our beloved President) they see half of humanity as interchangeable objects, interesting and valuable only to the extent that they entertain and flatter the player-character.

I was a 26-year-old virgin too -- I'd had a few dozen kisses, but never a "girlfriend", much less a lover -- and I felt a good deal of self-pity about it, but it never would have occurred to me to blame women-as-a-group. I might be upset that this or that particular woman wasn't as interested in me as I was in her, but mostly I figured I was doing something wrong, and that I would eventually solve this problem and find the right one with whom to build a physically and emotionally intimate adult relationship. I also figured, rationally, that self-pity wasn't a particularly attractive quality to most potential partners, and therefore not a good strategy for finding that relationship. Treating women as interchangeable objects is an even less attractive quality, and an even less effective strategy. Come to think of it, many of the personal qualities that might plausibly attract a mate are also the qualities of the "good person" I was trying to become anyway for other reasons; even if I never found a person with whom to share sex and other life experiences, I would still have grown into the sort of person I respected, so that's a win.