MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.
Comments
The Cut actually has two links to the Carroll accusation and you have linked to the far better one, mho, the full excerpt from her new "Hideous Men" book, not just the excerpt about Trump. I highly recommend it for those millennial women who don't "get" the apparent lack of what they think is the appropriate amount of "outrage" about #MeToo issues from boomer women.
What and how she writes, she really gets across how I and many of my friends have always thought about these issues. One excellent point of many she makes: she and others like her, we do not accept thinking like victims. After all, after the suffragettes, we were the next wave of feminists. Just not ever into accepting the victim role against some institution that can't be changed (i.e., "partiarchy"), sorry kids. Don't see it as fruitful and never will. Just like there's good people and bad people, there's hideous men and not hideous men. Believe in individual agency and being able to change things by the choices you make.
What is the real mystery: why boomer mothers ended up raising a bunch of kids that want to blame institutionalized "whatever" for lack of ability to change one's own situation and that of others in the process.
Tired of reading millennial cant on this and find it real refreshing and hopeful to read someone like this on it instead. I am so very tired of reading victimhood crap flooding into arts writing right now. There is not this huge bogeyman conspiracy, whatever it is, holding us down whoever the "we" are. It's just gotten to be enormously needlessly depressing to continually read the institutionalized conspiracy and victimhood approach to things. Rather, there is only us, just people, good and bad. (Heck, even if the latter is not true, it's much healthier mentally to believe it.)
Taking Trump out of the full context of her list of "hideous men" does a disservice to the whole idea she gets across: he's just another one of the assholes,not a bogeyman against which we are powerless and from which we can never recover. An attempted rapist doesn't own your brain for the rest of your life, not it you don't let him.
by artappraiser on Sat, 06/22/2019 - 12:41am
The last line of the piece shut me up, somehow quite unexpected.
by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 06/22/2019 - 10:04am
Before this rolls off the blogroll, yes, I admire Jean's spirit of living - I don't want to demean it with "survival" or other quasi-pejorative. Sex in her world is just sex, not the end of the world whatever the asshole - she's had good days, she's had bad, had a full life that's not stopping (except... except...) That was my larger takeaway. Nowadays it seems we've reverted to where any encounter has to define us forever, which of course creates more fear and creepiness and unnatural distrust - Fear of Flying?
by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 06/24/2019 - 2:27am