The web blew up at the same time as the Reagan/Clinton/Bush financial
bombs were detonating, leading to a huge private equity bubble in which
super-wealthy Americans used debt financing and other forms of financial
engineering to buy out successful companies, then hollowed them out, selling off their real-estate and plant, loading them up with debt, and raiding their reserve funds.
This meant that when the internet came along and started to challenge
their markets, these incumbent firms were offering inferior products and
had no money and no ability to borrow in order to pursue experiments to
adapt to the changing market. These century-old companies had weathered
many transitions in their history – the internet’s insurmountable
challenges were as much the fault of debt-loading as they were anything
inherent to the net.
A new analysis in the Financial Times found that the majority of
companies that were acquired in leveraged hedge-fund buyouts “have
either defaulted, gone bankrupt or are in distress.”
The stories of these firms are bananas: they’re taken private, then put
through IPOs, then taken private again, then thrown at the public
markets again. At each turn, the fund managers and at least
some of their investors take home giant paychecks – and the companies’
fortunes get worse and worse.
The internet was always going to challenge these businesses, but they
went up against the net having been cruelly flensed of their assets,
reserves, and will to live.
A friend asked me to follow the flow, and write this hashtag #metoo.
Cavafi, the Greek poet who lived all his life by the sea and wrote about
everything but the sea, before dying he said: Let me too say something
about the sea.
The sea is too big a topic for literature, just like the oceanic scale of harassment, stalking and rape.
All my life I’ve been thinking about the oppression of women, writing
about it, acting out. I am a feminist activist: sexual harassment was
one reason I became one. Nobody is born a feminist.
But my point of view, even after many years and much female experience,
was never the view of a victim. I still forbid myself to think in that
way. Especially after bearing witness, and writing down the stories of
women raped in war-crimes in former Yugoslavia. It was their brave
testimonies that helped make that common deed of war into a crime,
officially, in 2008.
I appreciate this recent flow of #metoo. As an activist, I can hope that
my work has done well, now that the mainstream is picking it up. Not
from Balkan battlegrounds, but from Hollywood and Silicon Valley, no
less. The fish stinks from the head.
My mother was a doctor, and a resistance fighter in World War Two. She
always considered uniformed soldiers, guerrillas, killers and rapists as
all part of one whirlwind of violent cruelty. I understand that every
woman has the right to feel differently and express herself thus. But to
my mind, in the everyday matter of violence against women, there is no
major difference between war and peace.
My mother survived war, and I was born in peacetime. My mother told me
how she was harassed by the husband of a friend. My father and she
socialized with this man and his wife on daily basis. I grew up with
their daughter, who was my own best friend.
He was a notorious womanizer, a good looking, sweet talking gentleman
with high social position. I was a grown up teenager when my mom told me
about his advances: I went to his office and denounced him to his face.
As a gentleman, he was horrified. He threatened to punish me by
damaging my career, which actually followed.
Many years later, I also learned his daughter, as a child, had been
molested by the family gardener. This gardener was no gentleman, but the
gentlemanly father hushed it all up anyway; he forbade his daughter to
ever speak of what had happened to her.
Once, as a teen, I was assaulted, in the tight closed room of the
elevator, by the big brother of my neighbourhood girlfriend. I told her
and her mother about it, but they stayed silent. Big brother was the
hero of their family: handsome, dashing, bold…. So whatever he did was
right, or else my fault! Some years later, the guy ended up in prison
for fraud.
At the age of 21, I went to the Yugoslav embassy in Rome to renew my
passport, since I enjoyed living alone in Rome. The ambassador, who was a
family friend, received me in his Roman office and assaulted me out of
blue. I told my parents. Next time he came to our home, with his wife
and son, for dinner, nobody mentioned the episode. We all behaved as if
nothing untoward had happened.
I left Italy and went to Belgrade to renew my passport. Then I stayed
in Belgrade, forsaking my Italian life. The ambassador eventually made a
good career. He became the last president of Yugoslavia before it
disintegrated in bloodshed.
At a film festival in Ischia, I presented a movie script, in a
lively Italian scene full of movie celebrities. Along came the
president of Italnoleggio, the Italian governmental film company. He
tried to seduce me by showing me pedophile pictures of small girls
dressed in high heels. I immediately reported this to the celebrities:
they listened, and told me that Rome was a notorious center of all sorts
of weird vices, and that a newcomer like me would get used to it. They
needed the government funds he was managing; they were the talent, but
also the great man’s hangers-on. I later heard that he committed
suicide in a state corruption scandal.
Asia Argento, the Italian actress and director, is paying a hell of
a price for her coming out in Italy’s machiavellian cinema culture,
with its Catholic double standards. I especially appreciate her honesty
of not playing the violated “good girl”, which exactly what puritan
creeps don’t like about Asia Argento.
The worst of the lot was my gynecologist. One of those nightmares
every woman dreads when she must expose herself to a trusted male
professional. I was young, I was a foreigner, and I was in a very
special clinic, alternative politically and economically correct, in a
Catholic country. The doctor was handsome, famous, young and with nice
manners. And yet he did it, unexpectedly, out of sheer male power,
without any shame or fear.
I was so shocked and horrified that I didn’t even know how to
interpret that, and cope with it in future. Go to the police? Refuse
all male doctors on principle? Never have any children? This, in a
country where Catholic nuns secretly performed abortions? Who was in
charge of my body and the abuse of it: the doctors, the state, the
church? It certainly wasn’t me, so #metoo.
I know a young woman, who is not a feminist, who criticized the
#metoo coming out. She said that those women made choices to advance
their careers, that they could have bravely and forthrightly shouted no
at the moment, instead of all lamenting #metoo together, much later.
I asked her if she ever had any similar indecent approaches
herself, being a beautiful girl with a job. She said of course. But
then, she added, those work situations didn’t bother me. What bothered
me was a pedophile who hit on me while I was with my parents on summer
holidays. I never dared to tell them, or tell anybody. Oh, and then
there was that priest in the church, who groped me while I was with my
best friend for her christening ritual.
I was alarmed that things hadn’t turn out much better for this
young brave friend who saw no use for feminism, “God forbid.” There
must be a lesson here for women of all ages, colors, creeds and
financial conditions. Woman may not support, or even believe, the
coming-out women, but they should bear in mind that it can happen to
#themtoo!
I know women who say they adore men in power, that coercive power
feels sexy… I also know women who routinely beg men for money and
favors, because of sex, or just because they are men, and men are
present in the world, and have wealth and power. I know women who
consider all men equally worthless, and cheerfully go to bed with them
anyway. But I never met any woman who liked being assaulted or raped.
No one can protect or console those who suffer, when they live in denial
without empathy.
After the conflict, if it can end at all, can come truth and
reconciliation. The #metoo situation is a viral social-media event,
like others of our time, but the emotional pain of the sexual abuse of
power, and the righteous joy of revenge at last, can’t last long enough
to transform gender relations. We should open a place where the wisdom
of empathy among women is stronger than viral media. Where we can write
about the deep and stormy sea, instead of mutely living on its shores,
until we die.
Honestly, I think people seriously misinterpret Kylo Ren’s role as a villain, and not in a “he’s so misunderstood” Draco in leather pants kind of way.
He’s fascinating because he’s one of the few fictional villains that has some stuff in common with some of the real men who do dangerous and deadly things– he’s posturing, he feels persecuted, he’s explosive and uncontrolled, when he tries to look like a cool villain and give off that glib/‘badass’ vibe, it feels forced and awkward, it’s easy to laugh at him, but then he does something incredibly evil and reminds you that pathetic wannabes can be really scary dudes, too. He reminds me of school shooters, domestic abusers, extremely vitriolic alt-right internet trolls.
He doesn’t represent some grand vision or evil master plan like Voldemort. It’s all about outwardly channeling his inner turmoil and rage into self-aggrandizement, getting control over other people because he can’t control himself. He has thoughts, feelings, weaknesses, and at least a little bit of good in him. That doesn’t make him a misunderstood hero. The fact that he’s human and three dimensional and has people who care about him is part of what makes him more like the real evil that walks among us every day in the world.
People are always saying, “Kylo Ren is such a pathetic villain, he’s a whiny emo trying to dress up like a cool bad guy,” but that is lampshaded IN-universe, that people think that’s lame, too, even Snoke. People keep thinking that Kylo was supposed to be a cool villain like Darth Vader and that the movies failed miserably in portraying him as one, but I don’t see how.
True! If Vader kinda represents the old school vision of what a classically dark evil man is, then I guess Kylo Ren would represent the newer type of evil men that exist out here now.
After watching TFA for the first time, the word that kept coming up in my thoughts about him was “relevant.” And at first I couldn’t quite connect why I felt he was an appropriate villain while also strongly disliking him on a level I don’t usually feel toward villain characters at all. When I saw Nina Simone’s tweet, connecting the dots that spelled out “school shooter”, the level relief I felt was really surprising, I hadn’t realized how it had been weighing on my thoughts.
I value his existence in the movies for this reason and for these conversations on this topic. I watched both TFA and TLJ in my local theater, the Century 16 in Aurora, where people were murdered by a person like him in 2012. Going into TLJ I was hesitant because there became certain lines in the sand where I might not be able to bring myself to watch the next one. The biggest one, and fortunately avoided this round, is that I don’t want this character redeemed. I don’t want to sit there, in that seat, and be told he’s a troubled young man who deserves a second chance.
