There are a lot of examples from pop culture of some homewrecker woman 'stealing' another woman's man, and it's never sat comfortably with me.
I know it's 'just' a song or 'just' a movie, and I know no songwriter or screenwriter really thinks a man is so easily stolen like a DVD player under the arm of a crack addict as s/he runs out of a house in the dead of night.
But we're prepared to acknowledge how decades (a century in fact) of portraying gay people as the squealing, sissy comic relief in movies has been to the treatment they've received throughout most of modern history. So I think it's only fair we admit how the all-pervasive idea that a woman can 'steal' another woman's man might also be generating or adding to a dangerous culture we're already battling with.
As the last few years have proven to us, stereotypes persist and no matter how harmless the intent, they matter to the way we as a society perceive a certain gender or group.
One of the biggest parts of the cultural conversation today is around women having their own agency and power to make decisions, no different than we've always expected of men.
Why don't we take pains to afford men the same agency, and say so in our gender discourse? There's a (very valid) complaint that female characters have long gone without real depth or dimension in popular entertainment – every female character a variation of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy – and we're starting to see the end of it, or at least a lot more awareness of it in the MeToo era. Maybe we need to acknowledge the same thing for men and their power to not be 'stolen'.
Because there's another potentially damaging side to this, and it's related to the way women are punished for the same sexual behaviour men are rewarded and revered for. If a woman 'steals' some other woman's man we consider her the villain and the homewrecker rather than him for allowing himself to be so easily 'stolen'.
Is it another symptom of rape culture where we automatically consider men to be barely-autonomous fucking machines who have no control over their drives, whether it's the way we blame the other woman if he strays or the rape victim he drugs because of the length of her skirt?
Maybe instead of asking Joelene not to conspire to steal her boyfriend, Dolly Parton should have been singing to him, imploring him to remember what they have together and not to throw it all away because he can't help thinking with his dick for 10 minutes?
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Authors with Longevity
What is it about some authors that have made their careers endure when it seems nowadays that you only get one shot at fame and fortune and then you're passed over for the newer, hotter name no matter how hot and bright you burnt?
Think of Ira Levin, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, PD James, Barbara Cartland and other writers who came of age or came to prominence in the postwar era. For some reason they have careers with longevity, every new book as successful as the last until they've reached near-mythic status.
The generation that influenced them in turn - Poe, Hammett, Christie, Stoker, etc – are beyond mythic, now titans in the field of published fiction.
But look at a lot of the hit authors you know from the last few years like Paula Hawkins, Ernest Cline, Liane Moriarty or Andy Weir. They get a single shot at household name recognition because of (respectively) The Girl on the Train, Ready Player One, Big Little Lies and The Martian, but is anybody who loves fiction still talking about them to the extent we do King or Cartland?
What's different today? Is it simply because there are so many more books being published and – paradoxically – a much more fractured field, making it so much harder to market oneself as a writer with any enduring appeal across a whole oeuvre (whereas writers like William Peter Blatty or Dean Koontz had the benefit of a few decades to seep into the cultural consciousness)?
Is it just because those newer names simply haven't written more than a single good book and therefore don't have long careers to sustain? Whereas Stephen King has published one beloved novel and collection after another since the mid 1970s, I wouldn't have a clue what else Andy Weir has written.
The only authors who've come close to such immortality in the 21st century have been Dan Brown, JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer and to a lesser extent EL James. The reason for Brown's phenomenal success with The Da Vinci Code is still inexplicable because (like Cline's Ready Player One) he did not write a particularly good or memorable book.
The same goes even more so for James. Not only did she do nothing particularly groundbreaking with 50 Shades of Grey to warrant such fame and media legitimacy (ebooks had pioneered and established that kind of erotica years before) many can point to dozens of still-obscure books that have far better prose.
The Harry Potter series was certainly popular but – like Moriarty, Cline and the rest mentioned above – Rowling's popularity got a huge shot in the arm from the film version/s of her story.
But even that seems not to prove anything. The Twilight films had as much cultural impact as the Harry Potter franchise, but do you ever hear Stephanie Meyer's name anymore? Her and Rowling's careers have in fact been mirror images of each other – one huge series of five or six parts, then a couple of standalone novels that have made few waves in literary circles.
Maybe Rowling's just smart, keeping herself in the fray by writing the next few movies in the Potter world, rubber-stamping and/or writing the Potter stage show, etc.
But it still leaves us with a question. How do you become a name author we love and read over generations versus a one hit wonder? Was there something in the media, sociological or technological landscape in ages past which made it possible to solidify an artistic legend, but that day's over?
Think of Ira Levin, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, PD James, Barbara Cartland and other writers who came of age or came to prominence in the postwar era. For some reason they have careers with longevity, every new book as successful as the last until they've reached near-mythic status.
The generation that influenced them in turn - Poe, Hammett, Christie, Stoker, etc – are beyond mythic, now titans in the field of published fiction.
But look at a lot of the hit authors you know from the last few years like Paula Hawkins, Ernest Cline, Liane Moriarty or Andy Weir. They get a single shot at household name recognition because of (respectively) The Girl on the Train, Ready Player One, Big Little Lies and The Martian, but is anybody who loves fiction still talking about them to the extent we do King or Cartland?
What's different today? Is it simply because there are so many more books being published and – paradoxically – a much more fractured field, making it so much harder to market oneself as a writer with any enduring appeal across a whole oeuvre (whereas writers like William Peter Blatty or Dean Koontz had the benefit of a few decades to seep into the cultural consciousness)?
Is it just because those newer names simply haven't written more than a single good book and therefore don't have long careers to sustain? Whereas Stephen King has published one beloved novel and collection after another since the mid 1970s, I wouldn't have a clue what else Andy Weir has written.
The only authors who've come close to such immortality in the 21st century have been Dan Brown, JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer and to a lesser extent EL James. The reason for Brown's phenomenal success with The Da Vinci Code is still inexplicable because (like Cline's Ready Player One) he did not write a particularly good or memorable book.
The same goes even more so for James. Not only did she do nothing particularly groundbreaking with 50 Shades of Grey to warrant such fame and media legitimacy (ebooks had pioneered and established that kind of erotica years before) many can point to dozens of still-obscure books that have far better prose.
The Harry Potter series was certainly popular but – like Moriarty, Cline and the rest mentioned above – Rowling's popularity got a huge shot in the arm from the film version/s of her story.
But even that seems not to prove anything. The Twilight films had as much cultural impact as the Harry Potter franchise, but do you ever hear Stephanie Meyer's name anymore? Her and Rowling's careers have in fact been mirror images of each other – one huge series of five or six parts, then a couple of standalone novels that have made few waves in literary circles.
Maybe Rowling's just smart, keeping herself in the fray by writing the next few movies in the Potter world, rubber-stamping and/or writing the Potter stage show, etc.
But it still leaves us with a question. How do you become a name author we love and read over generations versus a one hit wonder? Was there something in the media, sociological or technological landscape in ages past which made it possible to solidify an artistic legend, but that day's over?
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