Skip to main content

Same Old Song

Half a year after brutalizing his then-girlfriend -- by hitting, choking, biting and threatening to kill her -- Chris Brown is still following the script of domestic abusers everywhere. He loves her, he really does, it was totally unlike him and he promises to never ever do it again. That's the tune the R&B crooner sings in a clip from his pre-taped interview for "Larry King Live," which airs in full this Wednesday at 9 p.m. [. . .] CNN also reports that in as-yet-unseen footage, he announces that he still loves Rihanna. The declaration of love, the shock at being overtaken by such uncharacteristic rage and the promise to never do it again -- it's straight out of a domestic violence PSA. The only difference here is that he's telling this to us, the American public, the fans he's trying to win back, instead of his lover. I can only hope -- for his sake and that of his worshipful young fans -- that the full interview reveals Brown as being ready and willing to confront in uncensored detail what he did and begin to work at truly healing himself. (Tracy Clark-Flory, “Chris Brown: Same old dance and song,” Salon August 31 2009)

It's a bit disingenuous to set this guy up as someone who's coming pretty close to trying to get away with murder and then finish with your hopes that he come to heal himself. You write as if what you most want is for him to wake up one morning with his own dick in his mouth ("try singing that same old tune now, dickhead") and a knife-wielding ex-girlfriend grinning by his side. Only then should therapy be considered -- but, really, who's to be bothered with stitching-up when there's so many other bad boys out there to be spotted for totally awesome comeuppance.

Guys who go beat up their girlfriends are taking revenge upon them for abuse they suffered from their own mothers (who themselves were so unloved they could not help but use their boys as anti-depressants). That's where the anger originates. Feminism want to try taking on that "angle" again, so that we can stop essentializing young men as evil

Link: Salon (Tracy Clark-Flory)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...
3 comments
Read more

The Conjuring

The Conjuring 
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...
2 comments
Read more