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May 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:34
229 Marilyn Monroe and Sexual Abuse
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Good afternoon.
Actually, my goodness, good evening.
It's quarter to eight. It's deaf.
I'm heading home from work after my 6.30am New York morning.
I just finished my last demo of the day, so an unusually long day for me.
You will be happy to know that my last demo was to a private sector company whose money I will be more than happy to take, although I am not entirely convinced or sure We just can't tell.
But anyway... There is no purity in this fog of evil.
Now, I am going to talk about a disturbing topic.
And I sort of caution you in advance that it is going to be disturbing that I'm going to talk about child sexual abuse.
And so, just, you know, forewarned is forearmed.
I know that it can be a traumatic topic for some.
And it's a topic I've been meaning to wrestle with for quite some time because I think it is highly...
I think it's a lot more prevalent than some people think, and I would like to talk about it because, surely by coincidence, this was pushed sort of to the forefront of the topics at hand by, oddly enough, watching about half of the movie called Seven Year Itch or The Seven Year Itch with some nondescript guy and Marilyn Monroe.
And I watched some of this on Saturday night with Christina, and we only stopped watching it because we just had to get to bed.
Oh, it was Sunday night, and we had to get to bed, so we stopped watching it.
But I taped it, I just haven't got around to watching the last half, so much like the King Kong review, this is about the first half of the movie.
And in my experience, the first half of movies is always better.
Than the second half.
So this, I think, is an interesting topic.
It is an awful topic, obviously, in a lot of ways.
But I think it's impossible to understand the corruption capable of being inflicted upon children by authority.
I mean, we've talked about it in terms of the state, in terms of mothers, in terms of fathers, in terms of violence, in terms of moral and emotional corruption.
And I've touched upon sexual corruption or sexual attacks upon children.
Because there are always attacks, right?
No matter how seductive it is, it is always an attack.
So, I would like to talk about it simply because if we do need to understand power structures of which the state is the primary as adults and the parents and the schools are primary as children, the relationship between sexual abuse and parental power is obviously quite considerable.
And of course, in no way, shape or form am I implying or wish to imply or wish to be understood That there is anything innately sexual about or sexually exploitive about the parental relationship.
But I think that in conversations that I've had with women over the years, I mean, obviously this is self-selecting, so with all the caveats in the world, I have actually found that about a third to a half of the women that I know experienced some form of premature sexual experience.
And by that, I mean sort of mid-teens, like premature to mid-teens.
I don't go with this sort of 18 or 21 thing because we're sexually mature.
Usually at 13 or 14, so I'm talking like 15 or 16, and of course a family member or friends and age disparity and all those kinds of things that go towards the enactment of pedophilia.
I noticed that in conversations with women, and it's not like Hi, have you been abused sexually?
It's not sort of an opening gambit of mine, but it is something that has come up in conversations with women I've gone out with or women I've known.
And of course, not only is it self-selecting, but it's self-reporting, which is always kind of tricky.
But in terms of the reports of child abuse, sort of my general philosophy is that if you were abused physically or emotionally or sexually, and you say, I was abused physically, emotionally or sexually, then obviously it's fairly okay to say that you were. then obviously it's fairly okay to say that you were.
And the reason being, I mean, to some degree or another, the reason being that either you are telling the truth or you're lying and claiming to have been abused.
Now, no one but an abuse victim would have such a twisted sense of value or a desire for attention or personal interest as to claim abuse when it didn't exist.
Obviously, this is somebody who was abused in some form.
Now, it may not be the specific form that they talked about, but it is some form of abuse for sure.
Now, the reason that this came up when watching a Marilyn Monroe film, I'm going to give you a brief synopsis of the first half of the film, which is really, I think, the only significant part, and I'll sort of maybe watch it to the end some point this week if I get the time and report on it if it sort of changes.
But basically the theme of the story is that this guy who's in a publishing house, he sends his wife and children, his wife and child, his wife and son, out of New York for the summer.
And he does this because it's so hot in New York in the summer that you've got to get the women and the children out.
This is before, I guess, they have air conditioning, it's mentioned, but...
It seems to be quite a common phenomenon and is required for what occurs in the film.
So he sends his wife away and his kid away and they're going to be gone for a couple of months in the summer.
Now there are two, for me, two general themes to the movie.
And it does explain something that they talk about in this sort of show that I watch with these old movies from time to time.
They have interviews at the beginning where they say everything about the film and they interview people to do with it.
And one of the things that they talk about is, well, you know, it's so impossible to understand this Marilyn Monroe mystique, and it's so impossible to figure out what made her so popular and such an object of sexual desire and blah, blah, blah.
And I got to tell you, I think I saw Bus Stop many years ago, but I don't really remember it.
But this is the first Marilyn Monroe film that I've seen.
And she does remind me in this movie of Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's where they have the similar sort of dysfunctional hottie.
But to me, it's not hard to figure out at all in that she's a target for pedophilia.
I mean, she is absolutely a childlike woman in a grown woman's body, which is part of the sexual predation and sort of basic confusion and horror that pedophiles have with regards to children.
And so I don't really see any sort of mystery as to why she was considered to be such a paradigm or paragon of sexual attraction.
Now, she herself was a victim of sexual abuse.
Terry Hatcher came out with it recently.
There's been a whole host of other people who have talked about it.
And so I don't think it's something that's sort of slowly coming back out of the closet.
And it is something I think that sort of needs to be discussed because in sort of the analysis of power, it is very important to talk about sexual violation because it is one of the most egregious, if not the most egregious abuse of power that is possible for any human being to commit against another human being.
And of course, in religion, it's not unknown.
So in this movie, sorry, in this movie, the guy sends his wife and away.
And there's sort of two major themes in the movie.
The one is temptation, and the other is the sexualization of children.
And... The first sort of thing, he's in the publishing house and he goes to his work and he sort of publishes racy novels, like he sort of trashes down these sort of racy novels and has them come out as sort of bodice rippers and so on, sort of classics.
So in one of them, he's sort of the opening joke, is he's turned Little Women by Marie Louise Alcott into some sort of like girl's dormitory nudist thing or something like that.
And there's a cover picture and he draws on the cover picture sort of like a smarmy kid with a black marker and he is basically making notation that the girls' tops on the cover of the book should be lower to show more of their cleavage and so on.
And again, there's something sort of infantile about this whole thing.
And he's taking, of course, little women, right?
Little women is about girls.
And he's sexualizing girls through this, right?
He's saying more cleavage, more sort of sexual content to the girls on the cover of this book.
And so there's sort of one sort of clue.
And again, I'm not saying any of this is conscious, but this is what I think seems to be going on.
Now, this guy, his doctors told him to quit smoking and quit drinking.
So, of course, he has the normal tussles with himself.
Should I smoke? Should I drink? And so on.
Which sets up the theme of temptation, right?
Now, what happens is he goes home and he pictures his wife sitting there and she's away.
And she mothers him, or at least he perceives it as being mothered by him.
She's sort of indifferent. She turns her cheek when he goes to kiss her.
She's rather sort of smarmy and supercilious and condescending towards him.
So she doesn't really treat him as a man.
She doesn't treat him with any respect.
And so it's sort of like a bad mother, right?
It's like a bad, indifferent, cold, callous, superior kind of mothering that's going on between himself and his wife.
And his son also has no respect for him and doesn't interact with him at all, just continues to play some silly game with a space helmet on when his father tries to kiss him.
So this is a guy, obviously, he's getting no respect from the adults or even his own son in his life.
And so he's sitting on his balcony, and he's trying to read this book that someone's psychiatrist has given to him to review, wildly out of context with the other stuff that he's publishing.
And I don't really understand what it's doing in the movie, other than to sort of score that this is about the unconscious rather than about the events.
It's about the middle-aged crisis of the American male or something like that.
And anyway, so what happens is his wife appears in his imagination sitting in his chair opposite him on the balcony, and he's saying, you know, oh, you know, I'm really attractive to women.
And she's sort of laughing and says, oh, what an imagination you have.
Don't be silly. I mean, I find you okay, but then I'm used to you, right?
So it's all this smarmy put down from his wife about his sexual attractiveness.
And so he goes off into these fantasies about how his secretary wants to rip his clothes off, but he resists.
And then a nurse, when he got his appendix removed the previous year, the nurse kept breaking into his room at night and trying to ravish him.
You have a certain animal something about you.
And then, you know, it's all over the place, right?
Like everywhere he goes in his imagination.
It's sort of like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, if you've ever read that short story.
Everywhere he goes, women are trying to rip his clothes off and he's got this fantasy about being incredibly attractive.
And of course his wife just laughs at him in a sort of cold way.
Oh, what an imagination.
Oh, you're just making all this stuff up and so on.
And so, to me, this sort of clearly sets up the personality of a man who is sexually humiliated or castrated by his wife, and so we can assume sort of also by his mother, and possibly by his father, though it does seem to be pretty feminine the way that this works.
And so, like Naughty Boys, right?
This is sort of the movie setup, and it's pretty common for stuff in the 50s, or the 60s, I guess this was.
So, like Naughty Boys, these guys, when their sort of mommies are away, when they send their wives away for the summer...
You know, they smoke, they drink, they go out, they pick up hookers, they pick up girls, they go and do all this stuff, they go chasing women and so on.
And so this is the typical sort of naughty boy and cold mother situation where the boy is attached to the mother but has no respect for her rules because she's cold.
And so he wants to do bad things or disapprove of things when the mother goes away.
And then when the mother comes back, he's sort of guilty and gets punished, which he secretly loves because it shows...
It's all very sort of complicated and to some degree Freudian, but when you see that in this man's imagination his wife is constantly sexually humiliating him and belittling his attraction and so on, then I think what we start to see is the pathology of a personality of a man who's pathologically insecure sexually and is constantly being humiliated by adult women, right? Adult women in his life who don't even raise the energy to We don't even listen to him.
His wife just brushes him off.
Oh, what an imagination you have, and so on.
Now, the way that it works in the movie, then, is that Marilyn Monroe moves into the apartment upstairs.
And she knocks a plant over that almost hits him, and then she comes down to apologize.
And he says, do you want to come down for a drink?
She's like, oh yes, it's so hot up here.
I keep my paddies in the icebox, right?
And so you get this character, Marilyn Monroe, who is immediately sexually inappropriate, right?
You don't say to strange men who live on the floor underneath you that you keep your underwear in the icebox.
I mean, this is obviously somebody who doesn't have any sexual boundaries.
So she comes down and she's dressed to the nines and they have champagne and she's giggling and she talks about a photo shoot where she was semi-nude and then she talks about how attractive it was and how guys loved it and so on and she's a model and she shows off for him and she's very flirtatious and very sexy and of course it's Marilyn Monroe so she's pretty, she's got a nice figure, she's got great skin.
And so you have this woman who is invited down late at night to a man.
She doesn't have any clue who he is, right?
She's invited down to his apartment.
She shows up dressed to the nines.
She hangs around. They drink quite a bit.
And she talks about being nude in a photograph.
She lifts her top to stand in front of his air conditioner.
She's incredibly flirtatious.
While absolutely unconscious, it would appear, of her own sexuality.
And this is a very complicated thing, which we won't really get much of a chance to talk about at length today, but this unconscious sexuality, this projection of intensely desirated seductive action, while at the same time being completely innocently bewildered by any sort of response to that, is typical of sexual abuse victims.
And it doesn't mean that all sexual abuse victims display this kind of unmanaged and hypersexuality.
Seductiveness followed by, what do you mean?
So there's this woman who's dressed to the nines, Her boobs are half hanging out of her top, and she's flirty, and she's sexy, and she's, you know, sucking on a popsicle and looking up coyly and batting her eyelids, and then when you ask her out, she's like, well, where would you get that idea?
I mean, this is part of the sexual humiliation that he's experiencing at the hands of this woman, and so on.
And so he does all the slimy things.
He says, oh, I'm not really married, and then I am kind of married, and I have a kid, but he's just a little one, and he doesn't really count.
And so he's basically throwing himself at Marilyn Monroe.
And there's a constant undertow of the child woman, right?
She's like half-retarded in this movie.
The woman with the body of an adult, but she's got the mind of a child.
And to me, that is simply an acceptable way of talking about pedophilia, right?
Whenever you see these kinds of women who are sexy and seductive, but, you know, kind of clueless, right?
These sort of Alicia Silverstone kind of character, then to me, you're simply talking in a socially acceptable manner or portraying in a socially acceptable manner pedophilia, right?
Because when you have these adult women with these retarded childlike brains, to me, it's just pretty obvious what's being talked about.
But, you know, let me know if you think otherwise, of course.
And so what happens then, sort of when I sort of had my suspicions at this point, but the clincher for me came when she says, oh, let's have a party, let's do this, let's do that.
She's dancing around the room very seductively and so on.
Again, absolutely a constant invitation to a sexual advance and a constant provocation of a man that she knows is not loyal to his wife, that she knows has invited him down, that is nervous and obviously attracted to her and so on.
And she says, oh, you know, guys keep asking me to get married.
They keep asking to marry me all the time.
Oh, whatever, right? And so what happens is, he says, I know some piano.
She says, oh, play something for me.
So then he sits down. He says, oh, well, I haven't played this in a while, but let me give it a shot.
He cracks his fingers, and then he launches into chopsticks.
And Chopsticks is a child's song.
So she's like, oh, I know that one.
And she sits down next to him, and she's crying out, you know, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, you know, this kind of thing, and playing Chopsticks and throwing her head back and laughing.
And it's a very childlike situation, right?
This is what a little girl of about eight or so would do, is sort of throw herself into Chopsticks, which is what a child would learn when she's playing the piano, throw her head back and sing in this giddy sort of whatever manner.
And what he does then is he grabs her and tries to kiss her and pushes her back off the bench, and they fall over in a sort of violent manner.
And I guess it's supposed to be funny, but it doesn't seem that funny, because, of course, by this point, this thing's got pedophilia written all over it.
But what happens then is that he jumps up, and she sort of slowly gets to her feet and says, Oh, I sort of lost track of what happened for a moment there.
Now that to me was the real clue.
That's the final clue about sexual abuse on a child.
Because this level of dissociation is absolutely typical of people who experience trauma, but people who experience sexual trauma and particularly when they're children.
This dissociation is completely...
Like she got kissed in a violent manner.
She got thrown off a bench and they fell down in a heap together, which is a definite attack, right?
And he experiences it as an attack and feels guilty about it as an attack.
And her comment is not slap him in the face and say, what the hell do you think you're doing?
You're a married man and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
But what she does is she sort of gets off half daze and says, oh, I sort of lost track of what happened there, which is really not that hard to do, right?
I mean, because he just attacked her, right?
I mean, he just sort of threw her off the bench and tried to kiss her and so on.
And so the fact that she simply is unable to process a sexual attack or an attack upon her in a very aggressive manner and continues to stay in the apartment and continues to smile at him and joke with him and then says, you're a very nice man, as she leaves and so on.
That, to me, is indicative of a child who has been assaulted sexually, is unable to process it, has no other option but to comply.
And I'm not saying that it's possible that a woman who's been assaulted sexually as a child, she will grow to adulthood, and it's certainly possible that she is going to have sort of the physical body of a mature woman, but be sort of stunted intellectually and emotionally in this sort of childlike Marilyn Monroe fashion.
So it could be that this is not a direct analogy to pedophilia, but what I think occurs in the film that's very clear and very strong and maybe a clue into this kind of ghastly mindset is that this man who is experiencing sexual humiliation from adult women,
From adult women, let's just say, from women who have a sense of self, from women who have some sort of judgment, with women who can look at him sort of objectively, like he's a really plain-looking, skinny, short fellow, without any particular sexual charisma, without... I mean, he's a boy, right?
He's a boy trapped in a man's body in the way that sort of Marilyn Monroe is a girl trapped in a woman's body, and so on.
Well... A clue to me about the motivation for him to attach himself to Marilyn Monroe, and of course she's pretty and so on, but the fact that she doesn't seem to have any clue about whether he's attractive or whether he's not or whatever,
the fact that she is completely clueless about any sort of adult matters as a whole, Is to me an indication of why somebody who's sexually humiliated by adult women might turn towards children, might turn towards girls, right?
More impressionable, less ability to defend themselves, less ability to judge him as an adult.
Like to look at his life from a sort of adult standpoint and say, okay, so this is who you are.
I got it. You're really not that attractive.
I've seen better. I know better.
I've, you know, been with men who are different and so on.
So whereas he's experiencing sexual humiliation of a pretty extreme form from his wife, he then is tempted to turn towards a woman who is sort of this childlike woman.
So she doesn't have the intelligence or experience or emotional maturity to judge him objectively as a not-that-attractive kind of wilted, kind of pathetic, kind of faded man.
So, in her eyes, because she just pours her effusiveness into anyone, and you really do get the sense that it could be anyone in the room.
It could be a mannequin in the room that she's interacting with.
She's still going to be bubbly and effervescent and sexy and twirling and dancing and lifting up her top and taking drinks and eyeing him seductively and giggling and sitting next to him and so on.
It could be anyone in the room.
And so that is sort of important that he is drawn towards this woman's complete lack of experience, lack of judgment, lack of defenses, lack of discrimination, which combined with her giddy, idiot, eight-year-old brain is, I think, as Christina put it, less than sort of like a male fantasy.
And I don't think it really is a male fantasy, to be honest with you.
I mean, obviously, Mallory Monroe was a pretty girl.
But is it a male fantasy to have this half-retarded child woman jumping around you and so on, and to know that she's really not going to be able to appreciate your identity as a human being, to be basically just some sort of interchangeable penis with all the other penises hanging and flopping around in the world?
I don't think that's a male fantasy.
I mean, it may be some men's fantasy.
But I wouldn't say that those men's sexuality is particularly well-developed or healthy because a man's sexuality should, I think, in the best of all worlds, respond to sort of an intelligent and courageous and virtuous woman and so on.
I mean, that would be the ideal, right?
I mean, sexuality responds to virtue and strength and maturity and confidence and all that kind of stuff.
Rather than being drawn towards silly, giggly, idiotic, flirty, but sexless kind of women.
And so what I see in this particular kind of fantasy is that you have a man rejected and humiliated by his wife from a sexual standpoint.
Which, of course, means that the wife has her own problems with sexuality, right?
That she's with this kind of guy.
So you have this guy, rejected by his own wife, who then turns towards an undiscriminating and idiotic, half-retarded girl.
This girl is then incredibly flirty, puts herself in incredibly compromising situations.
Where just about anything can happen, and she's completely unconscious of the danger, incredibly flirty.
This is part of the pathology that comes out of being sexually abused as a child, that you put yourself continually into horrifying and dangerous situations.
That which we don't acknowledge, we repeat.
Until we acknowledge it, right?
I mean, this is sort of the kind of behavior that occurs when we simply don't acknowledge the horror of our own past, right?
So if you're sexually abused, and you come up with even the slightest shred of an excuse for it, in any way, shape, or form, or you have any, you don't press charge.
I mean, I'm talking about if there was some ideal system, but let's just talk about it, right?
I mean, as far as pressing charges in the current system, don't worry about it.
If you don't press charges against whoever sexually abused you, if you don't go straight to The DRO authority or whatever, and get this person taken out of circulation.
If you lie about it, if you reject it, if you say, well, it wasn't that bad, you are inevitably going to be drawn back into these kinds of situations.
The truth will out. The truth is that this is one of the most horrifying things that can happen to a human being, to a child.
And, you know, it has to be acknowledged, it has to be worked through, it has to be dealt with, and so that you can have a healthy relationship with your own sexuality and with, you know, authorities and so on, and you not be so defenseless and so on.
But it's certainly been my experience that the women who, and of course it's mostly women I've talked about with this, so it's the odd man, but mostly it's women, that the women who have gone through this kind of stuff do end up in exploitive relationships over and over and over again.
Until they actually sort of do some sort of serious therapy and go to sort of, you know, particular sort of sessions where the group or individual, where they sort of really work through this stuff, where they no longer do anything but, you know, hate the perpetrators, hate the abusers, and so on.
But a lot of the women are sort of baffled by it.
They return to it like your tongue goes back to a sort of missing tooth area.
They can't let it go.
They can't process it.
And they end up in these same kind of exploitive and dangerous situations over and over again.
Well, this is exactly what's occurring to this Marilyn Monroe character.
So she's basically pushing this guy's sexual buttons, knowing...
I mean, obviously she's a model in the movie, so she's perfectly aware of how attractive she is.
But she continues to sort of shove her bubbies in this guy's face and so on, shake her butt all over his living room, you know, in the middle of the night when no one else is around and so on.
And this is an indication that she's perfectly aware of how attractive she is.
And she says, oh yeah, men keep asking me to marry them all the time and so on.
And then later in the movie, you probably know this famous scene where she's standing over the subway grate and sort of blows her skirts up and so on.
And just to give you a sense of how not so much with the healthy sexuality Marilyn Monroe was, when the scene was originally, the original take of the scene, she actually wasn't wearing any underwear, so everyone got to see her hoo-hoo.
And that's really, I mean, you know you're going to be stepping over this great, this not a woman who's got a very good sense of or control of her own sexuality.
And of course, in her life, right, she married to these powerful sort of abusive men and she ended up being a sexual plaything for, I think, Jack Kennedy or something like that.
Died in sort of mysterious, maybe killed, maybe killed herself kind of circumstances, but, you know, not a woman who was very happy and very well.
And not an unintelligent woman in some of the stuff that you sort of quotes that you read about her.
She wasn't an idiot, but this childlike woman with the hyper-developed sexuality puts herself in dangerous situations, and then when she is attacked, immediately forgets it.
I mean, this is an indication of a pretty significant deficit in reality processing in this kind of personality.
And so the prevalence of this woman as an icon, right?
I mean, I think there are sort of three most famous icons in the world.
There's Jesus, and I can't remember the other one.
And then there's Marilyn Monroe, right?
She's a complete icon because she is so hypersexual and yet so brain-dead at the same time.
And I think that that is a kind of...
A metaphor for pedophilia where the sexually rejected male, and of course this can happen with women as well, but let's just talk about the men for the moment, that the sexually rejected male who cannot achieve or win any kind of respect from a discriminating adult female...
Then must turn to sort of exact his sexual vengeance on children, right?
The sort of I'll show you and somebody who looks up to him and sort of wide-eyed wonder and trusts him and so on that he can't help but...
Be drawn to that sort of from a sexual standpoint, although pedophilia is not so much about sexual gratification as it is just, you know, in a form of the most horrifying form of rape, which is really the exercise of power and aggression, right?
I mean, if he feels that he's been humiliated by his mother, by his wife, I mean, these kinds of men grow up with a lot of hostility towards women as a whole because they themselves have not processed that it wasn't women as a whole that abused me, it was my mother in particular, right?
That's sort of the That's the big thing that you need to do with your own past is to say you don't want to sort of blunt your own pain by generalizing, right?
So it's not, you know, my mother was a bitch.
It doesn't mean that women are bitches because, you know, it's just my mother, right?
I mean, it's not all of them.
I mean, good heavens. How unjust and unfair would that be?
And so because these men have not differentiated that kind of pain and humiliation, They then sort of extrapolate, they blunt their own pain, as most people tend to do when experiencing early trauma.
They say, You know, my mother had to do it because that's what women are, right?
Women are ball-breaking, busting, kind of whatever, right?
And so they have to say, well, it wasn't my mother.
It wasn't my mother's fault because all women do this.
And my mother is a woman and therefore she had to do this and so on.
It's a way of just blunting your own pain and getting rid of the moral responsibility of the people who abuse you to generalize it into universal abstracts or sort of...
This is what women do, and all that happens is you get to blunt your own pain and not have to blame your own mother at the cost of living in a paranoid world view of evil matriarchy and so on.
So I don't think it's a very good solution, but this is pretty common.
So these men then, in order to avoid the pain and rage of humiliation, particularly sexual humiliation, which they probably went through when they went through puberty, With their own mothers who, you know, God knows what happened to their own mothers.
It's all quite a chain, right?
They then end up with this incredible hostility towards women and this great deficit in their sexual confidence and so on, which they then take out on children and so on.
Sadly, it's not that uncommon, this sort of problem.
I'm not saying this is the be-all and end-all of the pathology of pedophilia because there's lots of complicated stuff that's going on.
It is, of course, the most evil crime, I think, that's capable of a human, other than murder, maybe.
Human beings are capable of committing, so it is a completely heinous and evil situation that these people end up putting the children in and committing upon the children.
But I just thought it was interesting to look at how this kind of stuff is portrayed In movies, and somebody keeps bugging me on the board about doing a Fight Club review, and I'd like to do one.
I'd have to sort of read the synopsis again, but you can see this as well in Fight Club, right?
that there's this Helena Bonham Carter character, I can't remember her name in the movie, but she sort of lies back after being done like a Viking by Brad Pitt, and she says, my God, I haven't been bleeped like that since grade school.
And, you know, she's been quite a long way from Room of the View, which was one of her earlier films, where she was in this sort of Merchant and Ivory postcard production based on an E.M. Foster novel that's actually very good.
I would recommend it.
I have not enjoyed any other E.M. Foster novel that I've ever read, and I've only read Howard Zender and Maurice, but if you get a chance to read Room of the View or see the movie, It's a great film. So, sorry to talk about a topic like this.
I think it's interesting, and I think it's interesting to start looking at this.
I mean, there are some more contemporary actresses that play this kind of character, sort of Juliette Lewis and so on.
But I think that it's important to look at, again, sort of deeper and secondary layers in films to sort of figure out why they have the kind of appeal that they do.
And I think this film in particular, especially the comment...
Where she says, oh, I sort of lost track of what happened there when she's attacked.
It's a clear indication that this is a woman who has experienced significant sexual abuse as a child, is absolutely defenseless, and is completely prey to additional sexual exploitation as an adult, which sadly was not just the life of Marilyn Monroe's character, but the story of her own life as well.
Thank you so much for listening.
I will talk to you soon. Please come by and donate, and maybe I'll talk less about pedophilia in the future.
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