I don't want to put this on FB because that's not my style, but I have to put this out there.
David told me this morning that he owns the movie “El Topo.” I’ve never seen it. We looked it up, and came across the director’s own account of the rape scene with Mara Lorenzio.
I immediately burst into tears, told him to get that movie out of our home, and went to the bathroom to cry.
This man said that the actress was herself “frigid” due to a previous rape, and insinuated that because she orgasmed during the *actual rape* that took place for the film, she was “released,” or whatever bullshit standard disgusting pseudo-auteurs/psychopaths hold women to in order to “get over” their sexual assault.
God, if only some people knew the true prevalence of rape. Crying in the bathroom, I thought of the survivors I know: I thought of my sister, drugged at a party and kept silent about it for a year. I thought of my friends, the stories after stories after stories that were confessed to me through tears. And finally, at last, I thought of myself - because trust me, we bury our own experiences so, so deep - and in that moment, I relived my own assaults, the men who have used and violated and abused and claimed dominance and force over my body and my spirit. The shame, the guilt, the gray areas, the excruciating pain felt in both my body and my mind, the revulsion of my physical self that covered my skin like sweat when I looked in the mirror after it happened each time; and that same revulsion returning, boiling over, reflected back to my tear-streaked, flushed face by the bathroom mirror. Such a sad, familiar image and sensation. I wept.
In the midst of all this Weinstein disgust, I have come across account after account after account of women who are used as tools and props for a male artist’s “genius” and work - Bartolucci being an example, forcing Schneider to experience a real sexual assault because he wanted her reaction as a “girl, not an actress” - and this prevailing sense of women having to constantly demean and devalue themselves for their careers, for their livelihoods, for their art. And one could say, “That’s the job, that’s how it is, they know what they’re getting into.” But why are women the only ones who have to subjugate themselves to such an inhuman, objectified *thing* for their work, for their art? Why do we have to constantly place our self-respect, our bodily autonomy, our fucking voice, at the feet of a brutalizing patriarchy? Why do we have to psychologically kill ourselves to be artists?
Weinstein isn’t the only fucking cretin. And at a certain point, we can only assume that men - in art, in positions of power, in life - are not to be trusted until proven otherwise. If as a man, that offends you - you’re getting off FUCKING easy.
