Ep. 20 mocks modern sexual identities as performative, dismissing pansexuality and asexuality while deriding CNBC’s 2015 GOP debate as toothpaste-ad chaos, praising Cruz and Rubio but burying Jeb Bush. It pivots to Halloween, framing it as a clash between religious rebellion (like A Perfect World) and modern horror’s demonic themes—from The Exorcist’s puberty-linked possession to Silence of the Lambs’ behaviorist monstrosity. The episode warns against reducing evil to mere identity politics, quoting Ephesians 6:12 while endorsing Lindsay Boring’s Bury My Bones, ending with a Halloween safety plea. [Automatically generated summary]
As we all know, romantic life used to be simpler in the old days.
There were only two genders, male and female, and there were only two forms of attraction, heterosexual and unspeakable.
But today, there are men who identify as women, and women who identify as men, and men who identify other men as women, and women who identify men as other men, and then make love to the first man while secretly fantasizing he's the other man.
At least I've heard that happens.
Rather than simply mock the fabulous colors in this rainbow of diverse orientations, I thought it would be wise if we educated ourselves to the full array of sexual identities and then mock them.
For instance, many of you may have heard that singer Miley Cyrus recently identified herself as pansexual.
Pansexual is a form of sexuality where you desperately seek attention by taking your clothes off because you have no talent.
In the bad old intolerant days, such people were shunned.
But today, I'm happy to report they can lead full, happy lives until they're about 25 when they go into rehab.
Another differently oriented sort of person that's been in the news lately is the asexual.
An asexual is a man who reports that he feels no sexual attraction whatsoever, but baby, you might be just the girl to change all that if you'd only try.
Although there's still some prejudice toward asexual men among women with IQs over 60, being asexual generally works like gangbusters with your intellectually challenged babes, especially after a couple of brewskies.
Then there are those who are demisexual.
This orientation has come to light because it affects such celebrities as Bruce Willis and Astron Kutcher.
Oh, wait, no, that's demisexual, I'm sorry.
Demisexual is when you are only sexually attracted to people with whom you have formed strong emotional bonds of affection.
Another term for demisexual is being a woman.
Yet another form of sexuality is called being lithromantic.
Lithromantic people are attracted to rocks and daffy duck.
Sorry, that was just a little sexuality humor.
A lithromantic is really defined as a person who experiences romantic love but does not want their feelings to be reciprocated.
This is also sometimes called being a pain in the neck.
Then there's scoliosexuals.
Scoliosexuals are people who are attracted to non-binary individuals.
In other words, scoliosexuals are not interested in you if you're a man who acts like a man or a woman who acts like a woman, but only want to be involved with someone who thinks he's something he's not.
The term derives from the Greek word scoliosis, which means asking for trouble.
Finally, there is a zucchini.
Really, there is.
A zucchini, as God is my witness, is a term for a gay friend of a gay man who is closer than a gay friend, but not as close as a gay man when he's being, you know, gay.
Debate Dynamics: American Fiction & Ideas00:12:00
You can use it in the phrase, I'm so drunk right now, I don't even know where I am.
Zucchini.
It may already be too late to say this, but trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Another thing I don't understand about all these different sexualities, what do they want from me?
Like, why is there an article telling me about it?
What am I supposed to do about it?
It's like they want my respect, you know, start a business, you know, like volunteer for a charity.
Do your job.
Well, you know, I was like, I'll respect you.
I couldn't kill it.
Anyway, we're actually going to be talking about sexual identity and evil in a special Halloween edition of the Andrew Clavin Show.
But first, we have to talk about the debate.
Obviously, the Republican debate on CNBC last night.
This actually happened to me.
I'm watching the debate, and I'm multi-screening, as we all do now, and I'm kind of looking up, like, people who are blogging the debate and making comments.
I swear, I come upon a guy who's brilliantly live-blogging this debate.
He is just like taking out the essence of everything, and he's funny, and he's sharp, and he's getting everything, and he's doing little jokes and all this stuff.
I thought, wow, who's this guy?
It's freaking Shapiro.
I'm on the Daily Wire.
I'm reading Arisai.
I thought, man, I got to start being nicer to this guy.
I didn't even know he worked here.
I thought he was just wandering through.
So my take on this debate was this.
Watching the moderators, the CNBC moderators on this debate, Rebecca Sharp or Quick and Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.
It reminded me of those old toothpaste commercials where they would animate tooth decay, you know, and so inside, this is the inside of your mouth.
And there'd be these little evil tooth decay people reading away your teeth, you know.
That's what those guys reminded me of.
It wasn't like these guys were under fire by orcs.
It was just these little kind of evil.
And then every time one of the Republicans would open fire on one of them, like when Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz took the guy apart.
I mean, it was awful.
It was awful.
It was like, and now here's Crest is washing away.
We're so angry.
It's like the entire debate.
It was like a toothpaste commercial.
Anyway, here's my scoring of the debate.
Now, whenever I do this, when people write to me and they get angry if I say someone did well that they disagree with as if I were saying I agree with them.
I just think people do well or badly in a debate.
It's something you do under fire and it's hard.
And if they do it well, they do it well.
And people, you know, they'll say, well, you said he won, but he once shook hands with a Mexican.
I'm just like, I'm sorry.
Anyway, I thought Cruz and Rubio were absolutely fantastic.
They were just great.
And I thought Rubio really showed himself, looked at his best.
Cruz was fantastic.
Cruz is beginning to have a little bit of a sense of humor about himself.
He doesn't come across as such a cartoon villain anymore.
It's really refreshing.
Christie was great.
Christie had the line of the evening when he said to the moderator, even in New Jersey, we consider what you're doing rude.
I thought that was a really good line.
Fiorino was fine.
Fiorina's campaign slogan now seems to be, if we're going to have a cat fight, send a cat.
You know, that's basically it.
It's like she's basically posing that this election is the scene in the Mission Impossible movie where the evil female and the good female have it out, you know, and you can't have a man in there because it wouldn't look realistic so that two women kick each other to death.
And that's the way she's posing this campaign.
Trump is in a bind, I think.
He's caught because he's just, if he goes on being Trump with, I'm so huge and you're a loser and all this stuff, he just begins to look ridiculous.
But when he tries to look substantial, he hasn't got anything.
And Carson, I'm proud.
Ben Carson has the same politics and religion that I do.
I'm proud that he is on my side.
But everybody hates when politicians, but politicians are really good at being politicians.
And what politicians do is they win.
And Hillary Clinton is a politician.
And I just don't think Carson can take her.
I mean, it's that simple.
Jeb Bush, he's the guy in the gangster movie, you know, where the gangster comes up to you and says, you're dead, you just don't know it yet.
Jeb Bush.
I used to work near Paul Newman.
He was literally down the hall from me.
And I went to parties where Newman would be there, you know, the great actor of the 50s and really, really heartthrob, just a very good-looking guy.
He would walk into a party, and as much as I hate celebrity, and as much as I hate to pay any tribute to celebrity, the entire energy of the party would change, and all eyes would just kind of sidle over, and you couldn't help it.
You couldn't help it.
You'd be trying to be polite and talk to the guy you were talking to, and you just couldn't help looking at Paul.
You know, you had to look at him.
Jeb Bush is the opposite of that.
Whatever Newman has, he has the opposite.
Anyway, that was my take on the debates.
I think they looked good.
I think Rince Praebus or Prince Rabus, whatever it is, I can't decide whether he's an idiot or a genius.
I think with that name, I'm guessing idiot.
But I mean, putting them against those little tooth decay guys made our guys look great, I thought so.
Maybe it was his perfect plan.
Let's talk about Halloween.
This is the last show before Halloween.
Has anybody ever seen the movie A Perfect World?
Nobody's seen this movie.
This is a very, very underrated Clint Eastwood movie.
Clint Eastwood directed this movie.
He has a small part in it, but it's really a Kevin Costner film.
And when I was trying to think of what I wanted to say about Halloween, this was the first thing that came to mind.
It was A Perfect World.
Kevin Costner plays a really evil gangster named Butch who is on the run and he kidnaps a little boy.
Take a look at just a couple of seconds of this trailer, just so you get an idea for what it's about.
Eight-year-old Philip Perry has just been taken hostage.
Are you going to shoot me?
Oh, yeah.
By the most dangerous man in West Texas.
Put the gun down, old timer.
You couldn't hit me anyway.
Probably shoot the boy.
Hit in the car, Phillip.
This could be his lucky day.
Get back up!
Complicating law enforcement attempts to apprehend him.
Haynes is believed to have an eight-year-old boy with him as hostage.
This is not a penal escape situation.
This happens to be a man.
You know, Philip, you have an American right.
Eat cotton candy, ride roller coasters.
Okay, so this is a big strain in American fiction is the rebel who, the little boy has an abusive father who is a Jehovah's Witness, I think.
And the bad guy, Kevin Costner, takes him away but teaches him all about the world.
Like he says, you have an American right to eat cotton candy and ride roller coasters.
But the key symbol of this American right is his right to Halloween.
If you saw, he was wearing a Casper the Friendly Ghost costume, which Kevin Costner steals from a clothing store and gives him, tries to give him the right against these Jehovah Witnesses.
He's giving him the right to celebrate Halloween.
And this kind of thing is the rebel against the square white religious person is a big theme in American fiction.
We were talking about yesterday with Straight Out of Compton, where the rappers were up against the blockheaded religious white guys.
It goes all the way back to Huckleberry Finn in one of the seminal scenes in American fiction is where Huckleberry Finn decides that even though he's going to hell, even though the religious people tell him he's going to hell and he believes he's going to hell, he's going to help this slave escape.
And it's a really, really moving scene.
It's the famous line.
He says, all right then, I'll go to hell and he's going to help the slave Jim escape.
And it's really a beautiful scene and it's the seminal scene in all American fiction because all tough guy fiction comes out of that moment and all of the stuff I write comes out of it and it's just a great scene.
But in this, it's Halloween.
And a lot of Christians are really uncomfortable with Halloween and with, you know, very, very cogent reasons.
I mean, they don't like playing with this demonic, kind of ugly supernatural force.
Some of it is they don't like the fictional side of it.
You know, they don't like, some Christians don't like any representation of any kind of supernatural thing that they think doesn't exist or shouldn't exist.
So for instance, the Christian horror filmmaker, Scott Derrickson, he always has demons because he believes in demons, but he doesn't have ghosts and he doesn't have things like that.
I was once writing a ghost story.
I told a friend I was writing a ghost story.
He was a devout Christian.
He said, well, the Bible's very clear, there are no ghosts, because that's a very important process.
It's a very important Protestant idea because it was the way they attacked limbo.
They didn't like the Catholic idea of limbo.
So when the Reformation came, they declared, basically, there are no ghosts.
And he said, there are no ghosts.
And I said, you know, there are no talking lions either, but you read C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
That's why they call it fiction.
And so to me, Halloween is a kind of fiction.
It's dressing up as the devil to sort of, you know, put him in his place, to mock him, to lessen the fear of him, the same way you go to a horror movie to feel the fear in a safe place.
Which is not to say that the Christians don't have a point, because if you watch the way you test an idea, right, how do you test an idea?
You test an idea of its effect on people over time.
You know, the left is always telling us, well, most Muslims are peaceful.
Most Islamists are peaceful.
That's true.
Most racists are peaceful too.
But the idea over time has an effect.
And when you look at the Middle East, you see the effect of Islam.
The other day I was talking about the greatness of European culture.
My proof of the greatness of European culture is Isaac Newton, the culture of science that grew out of it, the American Constitution, the culture of freedom that grew out of European culture.
Ideas have an effect over time.
And over time, Halloween has changed.
Halloween has gotten worse, I think.
When I was a kid, Halloween was just like it is in the old movies.
I mean, we did that stuff.
We went out with a little bag and our little costumes and our little strap-on rubber band plastic masks, and we said trick-or-treat, and they gave us candy, and there were no razor blades.
Not that I know, maybe, you know, being me, I may have just eaten them.
But I think, you know, it really was that world.
When I went to college, I lived in San Francisco for a time, and I walked out on Halloween having no concept of what gay culture is or what was going on.
It was like Mardi Gras for gay people.
It was just all these people in these spangly wings and costumes.
And I remember, you know, as I was standing there, it was a sea of people.
I mean, I've been to Mardi Gras, and it was just like that, this tide of people in these weird costumes.
And I remember a guy ran up to me and threw open, who had wings, sparkling wings, and a blue bathrobe.
He threw open his bathrobe and flashed me, except he was wearing a jockstrap.
And he said, I want you to be the father of my child.
And I laughed uproariously and then quickly snuck home for the rest of the evening because I realized this was not my night to be out in San Francisco.
But when, with the help of our leftist friends, civilization falls apart in places like Detroit, Halloween turns into devil's night and it becomes the most violent night of the year and you get out.
I was just talking to someone who had done Teach for America where they send you into the worst areas in America to teach in the worst schools.
And he said he was grading papers after school on Halloween and the principal came in and said, what are you doing here?
Get out.
You have to get out of this neighborhood.
So Halloween, you know, the demonic in Halloween has come to the front.
The Debate Over Evil00:07:59
So this is part of a larger debate, let's call it.
We'll call it politely a debate in our culture about whether there is such a thing as evil.
When George W. Bush started talking about the evildoers, the evil doer, we got to bomb the evildoers, the left went nuts.
You know, this is a terrible thing to talk about evil.
And recently, Antonin Scalia, the brilliant Supreme Court judge, lawyers, I know lawyers on the left, and they tell me this is a brilliant, brilliant man.
He was doing an interview with, I think it was New York Magazine, and he says, I believe in the devil.
And the woman who was interviewing him was just appalled.
And Scalia turned to him and said, turned to her and said, you're looking at me as though I'm weird.
My God, are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the devil?
I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the devil, he says.
It's in the Gospels.
You travel in circles that are, you, he says to the reporter, you travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the devil.
Most of mankind has believed in the devil for all of history.
Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the devil, and that is exactly right.
And so, if you go online and you look this up, the mockery and the ridicule of Anton and Scalia, he's supposed to be so smart, but he believes in the devil.
It never occurs to them to say he is so smart, he believes in the devil.
Maybe it's me, maybe the problem is with me, you know.
Even that woman, Nadia Bolsweber, that I was talking about, the very, very, very left-wing Lutheran pastor, she said she started out not believing in the devil and ultimately did.
I, when I became a Christian, I did not believe in the devil.
I believed in God, I believed in the incarnation of God and Jesus Christ, but I thought this is getting superstitious.
But over time, I started to realize, you know, little things that you see just kind of when something makes sense of everything else, there's a good chance that it's true.
Okay, so what does the devil do?
Okay, what does the devil do?
The minute the devil enters the Bible, people get messed up about their sexuality.
The first thing everybody does is they, the first thing Adam and Eve do is they cover themselves in their nakedness, and God comes and asks that really, really mysterious question: Who told you that you were naked?
Not why are you ashamed that you're naked, or why are you wearing those fine?
Who told you that you were naked?
You know, and obviously we know it's the devil told them that they were naked.
It's an amazing line which you can interpret a million ways, but we have to say at its base, at its base level, we understand that something has gone terribly wrong with human beings' sex orientation toward their own bodies and their own sexuality.
That's the bottom line that we can say.
And when you look at horror movies, that is what so many horror movies are about.
You know, when you go back to the great horror movies of the 60s when the sexual revolution was taking place, what do you find?
You find Rosemary's Baby, you find The Exorcist.
The Exorcist is a movie about the devil, but it's also a movie about monarchy.
It's a movie about a girl's first period, which is when we know, you know, the poltergeist is supposed to attack the house.
But this is a little innocent girl who suddenly becomes a sexual being, and the devil uses that moment to take her over.
Take a look.
Pull up the Rosemary's Baby clip.
Not the Exorcist clip is too ugly.
You know, I'm the devil, you know, that whole thing.
It's really tough to look at.
But pull up the Rosemary's baby clip just for a minute.
Here's Mia Farrow's Rosemary's Baby.
She's calling a doctor for help.
There's one against me and my baby.
You can kill her.
So her pregnancy surrounds, is the center of this huge demonic satanic plot, and it's everything, every part of our sexual lives becomes a vehicle for horror in horror movies.
Beginning with sex itself, if you go back to all the slasher movies, the slasher movies are comically, you know, two kids, good-looking kids, making love and a guy comes in and stabs them to death.
That's the plot of almost every slasher movie, Friday the 13th.
But now watch Halloween.
Now, Halloween was the one movie in that genre that I think is really, really good.
And here is, what's her name?
I forgot, Jamie Lee Curtis.
Jamie Lee Curtis walking home in a famous scene from Halloween, and she spots the evil slasher up ahead, and then he disappears behind a bush, and her friend goes forward and looks behind the bush to see if he's there, and he's not, and she starts teasing Jamie Lee Curtis, whose name is Laurie.
Watch the scene.
Laurie, dear, wants to talk to you.
He wants to take you out tonight.
Me right there.
Laurie, scared another one away.
It's tragic.
You never go out.
You must have a small fortune stash from babysitting so much.
You guys think I'm too smart.
I don't.
I think you're wacko.
Now you're seeing men behind bushes.
Okay, so Jamie Lee Curtis is what in Hollywood they call the final girl.
And this has become such a common phrase that the New York Times had a story about who the final girl is, a Halloween story about it.
In Scream, which is a takeoff on these movies, the final girl actually knows she's the final girl.
But the quality of the final girl is that she's virginal.
What you see about Jamie Lee Curtis is that she doesn't go out.
She has a fortune in babysitting because one of the things that Halloween is about, it's about feminism.
It's about the fact that this suburban neighborhood that you saw if you're watching this and not just listening to it is empty.
All the women are gone.
The mothers who used to watch people are gone.
And that's why the heroine is a babysitter because nobody's taking care of their kids and they need Jamie Lee Curtis there to fill that gap.
And so the kind of old-fashioned mothering virginal girl is the final girl, the one who survives the slasher.
All these movies obviously grow out of Psycho, which starred, by no coincidence, Jamie Lee Curtis' mom, Janet Lee, who was in the famous shower scene in Psycho.
And Psycho comes from a real murder by a guy named Ed Gein.
And Ed Gein, I think that's it, Guyan Gein, Geen.
Ed Gein, I won't go into his crimes, they're too horrible, but like the murderer in Psycho, they involved women's bodies, which he used to make trophies, and they were all keyed around his mother.
And remember, in Psycho, you have a guy, Norman Bates, who is losing his sexual identity, who has become divided between his identity as himself and his identity as his mother.
And that theme of what it means to lose your sexual identity, to covet the other sexual identity, is the theme of what I think is one of the great novels.
Hannibal's Villainy00:04:08
The movie is considered great.
I think it's the novel that's really great, which is Silence of the Lambs.
And Silence of the Lambs, this is what I wanted to get to, because Silence of the Lambs is an amazing book.
It's a deep, rich book.
His other book, Red Dragon, the one before it, is also a great thriller.
The ones after it just get a little silly.
But Silence of the Lambs to me, he just hit a nail on the head, and he's a very bright guy.
And so it's not just an ordinary thriller.
It stars obviously Hannibal Lecter, this great performance everybody remembers as Anthony Hopkins.
But Hannibal Lecter is called Hannibal Lecter because Hannibal was this African general of genius who almost brought down the Roman Empire.
So he is the guy who is bringing down, who's threatening Western civilization, Hannibal Lecter.
But he's threatening it in a certain way.
He's a lecter, which means a reader.
He's an intellectual.
And he's not just an intellectual, he's a psychiatrist.
And Clarice Starling, the clear star, who is so in tune with the spirit that she can't even get over the fact that lambs and another Christian image, you know, that lambs suffer, she's trying to bring, stop the lambs from screaming.
That's her job.
That's what she's trying to do.
She comes to Hannibal Lecter to help, to get him to help her capture a guy.
And Lecter's not just any kind of intellectual, he's a psychiatrist.
And when Clarice Starling says to him, what happened to you?
He's obviously this brilliant intellectual genius, and he's also evil.
She says, what happened to you?
And Lecter says, nothing happened to me, Officer Starling.
She says, what happened to you to make you what you are?
He says, nothing happened to me, Officer Starling.
I happened.
You can't reduce me to a set of influences.
You've given up good and evil for behaviorism.
Nothing is ever anybody's fault.
Look at me, Officer Starling.
Can you stand to say I'm evil?
But of course, that's what a psychiatrist does.
He reduces people to a set of influences, what happened to make them who they are.
And so essentially, he takes their spirits away and he turns them into meat.
And that is what Hannibal Lecter does.
That's why he is the villain of the piece, is that he turns people into meat.
And who is he looking for?
He's looking for Buffalo Bill.
And what does Buffalo Bill do?
Do we have the clip from Hannibal Lecter talking to Clarice Starling?
This is the moment when she's asking about this.
What does he do, this man you seek?
What he does is he kills women and takes their skin to make a bodysuit.
He wants to turn himself into a woman.
He wants to take their bodies and give himself the body outline of a woman, which he thinks, he thinks will make him into a woman.
And when he talks to his victims, he talks about them in the third person and calls them it, because he, like a good student of Hannibal Lecter, has turned them into meat.
And if you're just meat, then if you put on a woman's bodysuit, then you're a woman.
If you're just meat, if you have no spirit, if there's nothing essential to you.
And this, obviously, we're very familiar with now, is the argument that the left has been making.
One of these guys almost beat our friend Shapiro up on air because he refused to say, not because he said he was doing anything wrong, but he refused to say that he was not a man.
That's how desperate this guy was.
When you ask what these people are looking for, what they want from you, they want you to confirm what is not reality.
And even feminists are having a problem with this now, saying these guys are not women.
Well, of course they're not women.
And don't get me wrong, I am not saying that a person who puts on a mask, whether it's a mask that he buys at the store or a mask that he gets in a surgical procedure, I'm not saying that that person is evil.
Bury My Bones Identity00:02:23
I'm saying that he is fiddling with something, our identities and our essential nature that is very deep.
And the Christians who are worried about Halloween have a point that you are fiddling with something that's very deep.
As the Bible puts it, just to make sure I get this right, I want to make sure, I believe in playing around, but just to make sure I get this quote right, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
So I'm not telling you not to go out and celebrate Halloween.
I'm just telling you to remember, when you're teasing the devil, don't stand too close.
All right, that's what I have to say about Halloween.
Now I want to talk about stuff I like, and I always like to end with music and end the week with music.
And I've been looking and looking for Halloween music.
And of course, you shouldn't look any further than your own backyard.
One of the things I love about coming to work here, and in fact, love about being in LA, because I make fun of LA a lot.
But one of the things I love about LA is when you walk into a Starbucks, everybody has this computer open.
Everybody's writing a screenplay.
Somebody told me I was going to hate that about LA.
It's just what I love about LA is that everybody's here with a dream and with talent and with something they've got.
And the people in this room are no exception.
There are two people in this room.
I talk about lovely Lindsay Boring all the time, who is my excellent makeup artist, but she is married to Will Boring, who is also lovely, but I don't care.
Which I guess is that's my sexual identity.
But they are both extremely talented musicians.
And Will has a holding this up if you can see it, has a great album.
Stocklin, that's the name of the band, right?
Stocklin.
And it's very hard-driving rock, but really good.
I mean, I'm not a hard-driving rock fan, but it's really good.
I've been listening to it in the car.
Got good lyrics, very, very catchy, really good stuff.
So good onion.
You can get this somewhere, right?
Where do you budge?
iTunes.
iTunes.
Okay.
Also on iTunes?
Lindsay, but I have to pick Lindsay for Halloween because she's got a perfect Halloween song.
It's called Bury My Bones.
She's not only incredibly good looking, she's sitting over here.
I won't bring her on because she's wearing this crazy makeup.
She's for Halloween.
She's a big Halloween fan.
Really nice song, Bury My Bones, makes an excellent lead into Halloween.
More importantly than anything else, by the way, watch out when you're driving around, especially in places like LA.
Kids are dressing up in those little black outfits, you know, walking around.
Watch Out For Trick-or-Treaters00:00:58
And then I try not to run them over.
It ruins their evening.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Let's end the week with Lindsay Boring singing Bury My Bones.