But your prostitute murdering analogy fails in this case. Cosby isn’t making a joke about raping women or sexually harassing them, he’s making a joke about the way men around the world are united in their desperation for some magical solution to their own inadequacy. Knowing what we know now, you can almost hear the self-loathing in the joke. Cosby the Comedian mocking the patheticness of Cosby the man.
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To this and most of the rest of your objections here, are you familiar with this concept http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis) ?
Yes, it was. I was a young women back then, and we always thought it was funny from the late 50s on. Spanish fly was thought to be an aphrodisiac – something that would make us love and desire. We weren’t technical back then, it was just a joke about a magic-wand lamenting the neverending desire to get the people we thought were hot to think we were hot too.
If everyone on the “casting-couch” (male, female, gay, straight) were arrested, there’d be almost no one in Hollywood.
Yes, it’s distasteful that men convince women to sleep with them even when the women don’t want it. Today, it’s sexual harassment in regular jobs, but not in Hollywood.
And this song!
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This.
If you read this post you’ll see a rationalization or normalization of rape culture from a supposed observer at that time, written as if they were the only person over 40 around.
Observe that “we always thought it was funny from the late 50’s on”. In fact it dates much farther back and in different forms, it was normalized long before this person came of age such that they noticed it. But like many “if it’s new to me” often makes it entirely new to many where few things are. This is why history. But to be fair, few recognized this for what it actually was at that time, it was ingrained in the history this person was taught and/or witnessed such that it had no name despite being everywhere.
This person also seems to ignore that the mindset entailed in the Spanish fly myth is of rape not because an aphrodisiac was used, but because it was used without consent. But they weren’t technical back then, about consent. Which is one of many reasons rapes were/are common and commonly unreported.
This person if real is so normalized to rape that the descriptive “distasteful” is sufficient, like when you have some small hygiene failure or leave your hat on indoors. They also seem to think that coercion + tit for tat is the sort of sexual harassment being discussed, but it isn’t, the distinction between parties knowingly & unknowingly being drugged has been made a few times.
Young people quite often think of such things as funny & in some comedic ways jokes can & have been made showing they aren’t alone. One of the differences btwn now & then is that nowadays at a certain age it will be made clear to young people at least a few times. Back then, you could sail into adulthood & beyond raping & being raped while thinking it was okay or justified or the victims fault & this includes victims.
This person illustrates very well the problem.
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Yes, there’s a difference. Altering someone’s inclinations without their knowledge is the absolute creepiest possible violation of autonomy I can imagine. Knocking someone out is orders of magnitude less disturbing.
I 100% agree with you. But I am more likely to believe that there was consent for the casting couch.
I’m pretty dark on that sort of thing myself, but I’m a lot more worked up about the far more mundane and everday varieties of the phenomenon, due to the pervasive dehumanisation it’s designed to engender… see Bill Hicks on marketing, if you don’t catch my drift.
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Why do you keep going on about casting couches?
Are you suggesting that Cosby’s handlers advised all these women that Cosby would be able to slip them drugs and rape them as a condition of employment? Because that’s a little extreme even for your antiquated & somewhat nauseating views.
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Sure, yeah, I get that, thanks for the link. But I think it is possible to make fairly atemporal and appropriate criticisms of such things as rape, torture, slavery, etc., the list goes on. Afterall, there were people in the not so distant past who were opposed to the above, regardless of how indifferent (or supportive!) the majority might have been at the time.
But this is really not the point, it’s a bit of a red herring, these statements that “times were different”.
What is happening here is some people, myself included, are interested in these things Mr. Cosby was saying, or joking about, at about the time when these alleged events were taking place. The audience may not be offended, they may find it hilarious, but the sad irony is that Mr. Cosby’s joking has a new and disturbing suggestiveness now that a long line of victims is queuing up outside.
Things seem to be moving rapidly in the direction of crisis for Mr. Cosby. Whatever relevance his past joking has for his current predicament, there may be none, but it is slightly more than merely academic for those of us who find it disturbing when, say, for example, a torturer makes jokes about torture while documenting the hilarity for all posterity.
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Look, I’ve expressed my opinion and I frankly don’t care about your ad hominem remarks or what you think about my views. I disagree with you. Get over it.
Is sexual attraction always a matter of free will? I’m not discounting the importance of consent, by any means, but think of it-- Oscar Wilde did hard labor in jail because the victorian establishment chose to disincentivize the love that dare not speak its name. The logical solution would be to stop finding cute boys like Lord Alfred Douglass so damnably attractive.
There’s a magic element to it; why not have a literary tradition of magic potions?
On the other hand, this sort of thing shouldn’t be used to justify conduct which one or both parties is likely to seriously regret once this “magic” wears off.
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If you’re going to shove an elephant into the room, the least you could do is buy me a drink, first.
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Edited to express my view.
Right so pretty much out of the blue you think consent because casting couch, despite that not being the circumstances in the alleged events being discussed. Okay, that is an opinion of sorts.
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But neurolinguistic programming is the hot ticket! The major political operations love it!
And nearly everybody seems to be OK with getting others to believe right and true things by whatever means necessary. You know, the things you believe are right and true.
So the problem seems to be when “whatever means necessary” is applied to things only one person believes, like “that woman ought to want to have sex with me right now”.
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FOURTEEN women have come out saying Cosby raped them and you think this is just a “wave of media hype”??!!
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Could you be any creepier with you casting couch nonsense? Jesus fuck.
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I wonder how The History will judge our own utterances and jokes we are making today. What will be found bad, offensive, distasteful, or Victorian-grade uptight.
We should have some sort of statue of limitations for judgments based on decades old speech.
Especially as much more of what we do is recorded for posterity, for much wider range of people, than 45 years ago.
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Cosby isn’t dead ya know
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