Speaking of “Charlotte” Clymer –
“Before, I used to get a lot of women accusing me of ‘mansplaining’ stuff to them, but if they say that to me now I can get them fired.”
Remind us of how fragile and vulnerable Clymer is, because at the moment I just can’t seem to see it.
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15 responses to “Body language”
Is it just me, or does Victoria have the terrified look of someone being held captive?
So, uh, where’s the pony tail?
Magdalen Berns made a video about this guy.
https://youtu.be/O65OL7k0jXg
Hat tip to the Twitter hashtag #StopClymer. What a history this jerk has. I can’t believe he’s taken seriously by any publication.
Trump would KILL for hands that big!
@Rob:
Not Just You.
The look of someone trying to avoid being punched. The look of someone facing naked aggression in a place that’s supposed to be safe. The look of someone who can’t take the risk of being flippant or disagreeing or walking away. It’s a lot to read from a photograph, I know, but it’s broadcasting those feelings across bandwidth you could drive a tank through.
All my hackles are up. Everything about this photograph tells me that here is a woman who is being threatened.
oy – back off with the backhand gestures . . . .
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs004210050394
Clymer was an asshole as Charles, and he’s still an asshole as “Charlotte”.
James, that’s the pattern. The pattern that everyone has to – for some reason – pretend doesn’t exist. This whole movement is no-true-scotsmaning the whole of society. It’s breathtaking.
Just read a recent a remarkable New York Times piece about the eminent historian and travel writer Jan Morris, who is still writing, going on as strongly as one can at age 92, and still living (in Wales) with her (alas, dementia afflicted) partner of some 70 years).
This partner was Jan Morris’s wife when Morris was the eminent journalist James Morris, transforming herself into Jan via sex reassignment surgery decades ago — a crucial element that seems absent from many trans narratives nowadays. They have remained together since their heterosexual marriage long ago, which produced four children; James Morris’s sexual transition did not interrupt this relationship — another inspiring aspect of what the Times piece recounts.
Well do I recall how Jan Morris’s experience and her description of it in her acclaimed book “Conundrum” was big news in the media of the past and how her presentation of it enlightened so many people, me included, about the very existence of the entire sex change phenomenon.
It is strange that, before this article was published, that her name has so rarely, or so it seems to me, surfaced during the often ugly heat of current-day discourse about the trans experience, for clearly she continues to have so much sorely-missed enlightenment to offer.
I hope those who have not heard of her will Google this piece and discover the balm of her intelligence and insight, into not only into the sexual change experience but also the entirety of life and what it offers. The human richness that she shows us via the article is sorely needed today — and not just in reference to the viciousness that seems to have become endemic to so many who are constantly clashing over trans issues.
I can’t seem to embed a link to the Times piece here (don’t know why), but basic Goggling should connect to it.
Latsot, you’re right about the body language. Look at her hands. She’s wringing them. The creepy fellow in lipstick has a very aggressive posture, hand out in a violent gesture, chin jutting forward, clenched brow. She does indeed look like she’s afraid he’s going to hit her.
Is he just pretending to be a woman so he can bully women and get away with it?
Michael:
It’s great that people can live and love in complicated, changing relationships. I think it’s admirable when people find a new basis for an existing relationship when something fundamental changes.
But I don’t think that’s an expectation we can place on a partner or a relationship. The issue we keep coming up against when it comes to trans stuff is that someone, somewhere is being pressured to accept something they shouldn’t have to. Men in women’s sport and spaces. Men skewing the crime statistics that exist to determine how policing is deployed. Men threatening women with both their male bodies and their claimed and untrue status as especially marginalised women. Lesbians pressured into sex with men. Lesbians pressured out of the LGBT movement. You get the idea.
It really is nice to hear stories of love that transcends obstacles, but we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that kind of story is any sort of ideal. We shouldn’t pretend that we get to decide which decisions are de facto good or bad in other people’s relationships.
Speaking of reading people that pic does say alot but can go both ways :
With her exprssion on her face she could be angry bout something but not taking it out on her shes just demonstrating how she feels.
The other way she thinks that just bc she has females bu the hair she can freelydo whatever she wants bc it makes her feel good when it hurts others.
Thats all i gotta say about that.
Papito@9:
Seems like the best explanation, given his comment about “now I can get them fired”.
Yes, I remember Jan Morris.
I remember Nora Ephron’s funny, deadly review of his book.
I found this quote from Ephron’s piece:
TBF, I never read Conundrum. But Ephron quoted from it. I remember her highlighting Morris’s evident notion of “womanhood” (e.g. tut-tutting over a clumsy workman who tracked dirt into Morris’s parlor. “It would be a man, wouldn’t it,” Morris wrote when recounting this little incident.)
Ephron ended her piece asking, Who thinks this is what it is like to be a woman? And answers herself: “It would be a man, wouldn’t it?”
Ephron’s piece is in the collection Crazy Salad.
* via https://zagria.blogspot.com/2013/11/jan-morris-1926-part-3-travel-writer.html
–which also has this quote from Rebecca West: “She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a woman, and curiously enough, a man not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be.”
Blimey, great finds, Lady M.
Thank you for that link, Lady M . . .
It clearly hi-lights a chain of “thought” that may have been nominally less belligerent, but was certainly no less misogynistic.
It also underlines the typically dire need for recognition.
Some particular callouts . . .
Rebeccca West wrote for The New York Times and said:
“She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a woman, and curiously enough, a man not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be.”
– * – * – * – * – * – *
Jan and Elizabeth did later divorce, but keep on living together as a couple.
[because “The Royalties are shared” ? ]
– * – * – * – * – * – * – * – *
Only in the essay “As to Sex” does [she] discuss how [she] is famous to people who never read her books.
– * – * – * – * – * – * – * – *
[She] was offered a CBE in 1999, and despite being a Welsh republican she accepted it.
– * – * – * – * – * – * – * – * – * – *
Neither does [she] discuss her class entitlements beyond mentioning them as natural.