A series of photographs of women’s private parts
Speaking of men and sex and consent and men who send other men photos and videos of women without consent…Joan Acocella wrote about New York City Ballet (of Balanchine fame) in the New Yorker last week. One story she tells jumped off the page at me.
She starts with a rumination on ballet at its best as an emblem of truth, beauty and the good.
The better the dancer’s first arabesque penché—the more exact, the more spirited, the more singing its line—the more he or she will embody the promise of the ancient Greeks, lasting at least up to Keats, that beauty, truth, and virtue are inseparable, that we live in a good world.
Such thoughts, however, are unlikely to have occurred to Alexandra Waterbury, a nineteen-year-old model and a former student of the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s affiliate academy, on the morning of May 15, 2018. She woke up in the apartment of her twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, Chase Finlay, a principal dancer at N.Y.C.B., who was away at the time, and thought to check her e-mail on his computer. What she found on the screen was a series of photographs of women’s private parts, including her own, plus a brief clip of her having sex with Finlay.
According to the complaint in a lawsuit that she later filed, there were text messages, too. Finlay, sending someone a photograph of Waterbury naked, asked, “You have any pictures of girls you’ve fucked? I’ll send you some . . . ballerina girls I’ve made scream and squirt.” The exchanges included several participants, notably two other N.Y.C.B. principals, Amar Ramasar and Zachary Catazaro, and a young donor, Jared Longhitano. “We should get like half a kilo”—of cocaine, one assumes—“and pour it over the . . . girls and just violate them,” Longhitano wrote to Catazaro and Finlay. “I bet we could tie some of them up and abuse them like farm animals.” “Or like the sluts they are,” Finlay rejoined. “Yeah,” Longhitano wrote back. “I want them to watch me destroy one of their friends. And they know they’re next. I bet we could triple team.”
That. What is that? What is that hell-brew of sexual desire plus hatred and disgust? Why do men like that – and we’ve seen this kind of thing before, so we can assume there are a hefty number of them – have such hostility to women who have sex with them? Why do they share it and inflame it with other men they know? Why does anybody do this?
Call me weird, but the way I like to do things is, I like to spend time with people I like and avoid people I don’t like. It seems so much simpler. Avoidance definitely includes sex. This story (and who knows how many others like it) seem to hint that that’s actually not all that weird for women. It seems to be always women who have sex with a man in good faith and then find out that he’s been hate-sharing photos of her crotch with his buddies. It’s more of a guy thing (though far from a universal guy thing, I’m pretty sure), and the question is why?
I suppose one answer would be that hatred of the female is everywhere so boys grow up steeped in it so a too-large proportion of them simply combine it with sexual desire and thus despise the people they want to fuck. It seems like a thin explanation though. It just seems like such a vile, crappy, depressing, Trump-like way to live life…that I don’t get it.
This is guesswork on my part, never having thought this way or having been a part of locker-room culture (which really puts my Manly Masculine Macho Man credentials in real jeopardy. Hell, maybe I’m trans…)
For someone who sees sex as a conquest, a hunt, a chase, a sport, or a zero sum game, this is “winning.” They’ve fooled or conned their marks (women) into letting down their defences, allowing them to score a goal, mark their territory, ….insert whatever distateful metaphor you want here. The photos, I’m guessing, constitute proof (pix or it didn’t happen) and are like shots you see of the Mighty Hunter, one foot on the heroicly dispatched dead animal that lies before them in the dust, beaten by the better, smarter killer. As human body part trophies (like animal heads hung on the wall or skins displayed as rugs underfoot) are not legal, the images must suffice. It’s how they keep score, it’s how they keep up with other players. That’s all I can think of at the moment. How they can conceal their real, inner-scumbag selves and keep up the pretense of actually caring about/liking/loving their targets (which, presumably, would be required in order for them to gain the trust and acceptance needed to acheive their selfish ends) to the degree they even do is beyond me.
Do they switch this sociopathology off once (if?) they find “the One” they want to marry and settle down with? My guess is no. They just become Supreme Court justices.
Oof, yes, good punchline.
I was actually just reading this:
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/10/06/will-take-honest-conversation-root-mens-sadism/
I really don’t know what to think.
Oh yes. I think I read some of that at the time and stopped because it was too depressing. That’s what I did just now, at least. (Don’t get me wrong – it’s excellent. Everyone should read it if they can.)
I sort of know what to think, but what I think is grim.
I guess for me sex is relatively straightforward–I would want to like (possibly love) and trust someone before I was interested in sharing the experience with them. I’ve certainly been known to complain to other people about partners being late or not putting the seat down or whatever, but I can’t imagine speaking about them with contempt, dehumanising them or sharing details and photos about them without their knowledge. I’m struggling to imagine how these men (and this kind of thing seems shockingly common) can put up the kind of facade that women who have sex with them would trust…now I’m looking back at the men I’ve been intimate with and wondering whether I ever really knew them at all.
“Indelible in the hippocampus, is the laughter”
Side effect of our last remaining caste system, aka only hierarchy where plenty of people still believe in privilege based on birth, aka patriarchy.
If you like being upper caste, you have to put down the lower caste to keep your position.
Then you have to hate and despise the lower caste to justify to yourself what you’re doing to them.
The aristocrats did/do that to the peasants, upper caste Hindus to lower caste, whites to blacks, ultrawealthy to peons. But in all these cases nobody really believes anymore that you’re born that way. But male / female? Absolutely. Just look at all those pink lady brains science is too dull to find.
Bronze-Age patriarchy is still running under the surface. And with modern pink-and-blue apartheid, we have generations of boy/men who have never really lived with or among women. They’re raised in bubbles of football-frat house ‘masculinity’ and have no space to function when their hormones kick in.