Sure, why not. I’m certainly not interested in harshing your mellow.
I’ve got mixed feelings about it. I’m not too keen on watching reruns of The Cosby Show given what I now know about America’s dad, so it would be false to say that I have no care about what the various artist do/believe when it comes to enjoying their work. But on the other hand, I can’t imagine actually looking into it to make sure the artist passed a purity test. That’s usually the kind of behavior I associate with a busybody, or what we’d call a Karen today.
All I can say is that I’m an old woman and I’ve seen some shit in my day and I’m completely capable of divorcing the person from the work, so long as the person is not trying to advance an agenda via that work. And, in fact, the exact opposite of
this has been ongoing for decades. Sensitivity has definitely increased and along with that one absolutely MUST be able to make judgments that factor in social change in attitudes and mores. Same as understanding another culture, one does not need to share its values to recognize the origins of those values and comprehend the pressures and needs that brought them about. If one does NOT make that leap in understanding then one will be akin to missionaries in Polynesia trying to make people wear heavy woolen clothing that’s unsuitable to the climate simply because their religion requires it. Being rigidly dogmatic and unwilling to bring understanding to another age, another culture, another belief system is an awesome way to continue to escalate conflict and ensure that people dig into their respective foxholes even deeper.
Lots of artists and authors I love have gotten crazy/stupid in their golden years. I just try to ignore it and read/listen to the stuff they made before they lost their marbles. Ray Bradbury, for example, was a total wack-job in his last years. Just politics I can easily get past. It’s the sexism/racism/general bigotry that requires some effort.
That’s a stickier one because all the other actors, writers, directors, producers, and crew have had their contributions marginalized by association, through no fault of their own.
I am willing to bet you can think of some things done in the past that society thought was fine that are not fine at all today. I don’t want to sidetrack by putting a list here and debating that but I can give some examples if you want.
I have a collection of Isaac Asimov’s bound science essays that I gathered over the years.
I am not willing to read them nor pass them on. One of these days I’ll get around to putting them in the landfill, where his work belongs.
When I found out about how he treated women, the many rather dated-sounding introductions to his essays suddenly came into clearer focus as the work of an arrogant, pretentious, self-indulgent creep.
Nope. no more for me.
Perhaps my viewpoint is shaped by the fact that I came out of that permissive culture, I see the damage it did and was part of the generation that said, “Not okay.” Not that women weren’t already doing this work long before me, but you might argue I was within a generation that saw a major shift in attitudes toward child sexual abuse and sexual assault. My entire childhood was essentially, “This just happens to us and we deal with it” and I was quite unequivocally and vocally not willing to accept that as the status quo. I think a lot of people my age were in the same boat.
That’s why I can’t look at this and say, “Well it was the times.” I’m familiar with those social mores, they were pushed upon me and I explicitly rejected them.
I do think sometimes the pendulum has swung a bit too far to the right, but we’re talking about someone who understands the severity of their actions by modern standards but refuses to take accountability for it. That’s the ultimate bad in my eyes. I’m sick to damned death of people who won’t take accountability for their actions.
The question isn’t whether bad things were considered okay in the past. It’s obvious that many bad things were considered acceptable in the past. The question is whether people should be held accountable for bad things they did in the past even if those things weren’t considered that bad in their time. My general feeling would be “yes.”
In this case I don’t think raping a thirteen year old was legal in Polanski’s time so you can’t even argue it wasn’t generally considered a bad thing. It was considered bad enough for there to be a law against it.
I had a very close friend while growing up who lived in a poor (financially) household.
One of the things that made us friends was our love of reading.
He would NEVER crack the spine of a book. It was a thing with him. Indeed, he’d only open the book enough so he could read it and was super careful to take great care at preserving the book (no curling the cover for instance). His books were precious to him.
Anecdotal I know but had to share. I miss that kid (we lost touch many years ago).
I used to be very careful with my books until I had a toddler, Og help me. The kid destroys books like it’s his job. And he does it so creatively I can’t be mad at him.
I mean, it’s less about what works for me and more about what works for you, “you” meaning “any given moral person.” It’s “what can you live with?”
Checking the book out from the library and reading it at home and turning it back in doesn’t really impact anyone very much. You could say it increases the checkout count for that book, which is a circulation statistic that I look at for collection development purposes… But that’s a pretty statistically insignificant metric. It’s a metric I’d be comfortable with, and it’s how I’d go about reading an HP book if I felt like revisiting that bit of my childhood. You could even eliminate that small impact by reading it at the library and not checking it out. And if you don’t then go post all over the internet about what a masterpiece it is and how brilliant JKR is, then I’m never even gonna hear about it. Which raises its own set of moral calculus questions - which has greater impact? When you buy the book or the video game and publicly consume it, is it the money going to the creator that’s the bigger problem? Or the social impact, the boost to the author/work’s profile?
I don’t have answers to these questions, I just think they’re interesting variables to play with in our ethical equations. What if you buy the game and never tell anyone about it, you just act like you didn’t buy it? What if you pirate the game and do the same thing? What if you steal the game and then talk about how great it was? What if you neither buy nor steal the game, but then act like you did and talk it up anyway? Which of these is the most moral option? Which is the least?
In my opinion, “the only winning move is not to play.”
One could also argue that it was the escalation of permissiveness (and a lot of the social changes in the '60s turned out to be disastrous for women, film at eleven) that turned the tide and radicalized women to stop turning a blind eye and accepting SA as their lot in life, leading to the current social lack of said permissiveness and causing women to really take a hard look at patriarchal value systems and traditional mores. Leading to a wholesale rejection of quite a lot of it, and now we have a million articles a day bemoaning the fact that radicalized incels aren’t getting enough sex. Which I find pretty awesome because that entrenched entitlement is a big driver of sexual abuse of women of all ages and incels not getting laid means a lot of women not having to put up with their shit. Great injustice tends to lead to great change and it has always been so. I would not want to go back to the social attitudes of the time I grew up but I also will not say it was without value.
n.b. I am not writing this to defend Polanski or say that you are wrong.
I saw a documentary about the case about ten years ago. On the surface it seems pretty clear: Semi celebrity is found guilty in a court of law. Facing jail time he flees the country. And Polanski is always brought up when these discussions occur. And from afar i it’s certainly the case. But after seeing that documentary, I realized that the case wasn’t as clear cut after all. I checked other sources and came to the conclusion that it was complicated. That does not mean I excuse what happened and try to sweep in under the rug, so as to be able to watch a Polanski movie without feeling guilty.
But should you decide to do your own research, I think it’s quite possible that you too will come to the conclusion that “it’s complicated.”
In her latest special Iliza Schlesinger kills it when stating [paraphrased]: It is so easy to get sex, that men who don’t get it shouldn’t. They have shown that they are assholes and so shouldn’t spread their genes.
Sorry, I can’t remember. It was fairly pro Polanski, which is why I decided that I had to check out the claims. The facts did check out, but the conclusions are another matter.
The victim is interviewed and basically says that she forgives him. But then she also says that she’s so tired of this constantly hitting the media. Did she ‘forgive’ him in order to leave it all behind and have people stop asking questions? I don’t know. The documentary slants it as a case of: “Well, the victim says this, so shouldn’t we all just let it go!?”
Again, it’s complicated, but also very interesting in view of the last decade and what powerful men think they can, and do, get away with.
If he didn’t rape her, she would be saying “he didn’t rape me”, not “I forgive him (for not raping me)”. People get forgiven for their mistakes, not for their good acts that were misinterpreted by an overzealous DA.
He got his trial, was convicted, and skipped out.
For smaller things, particularly for things that were considered normal back in the day, I find it hard to boycott artists. So many people did things in the past that we now find inappropriate, I want to worry more about what people are doing now, not what they did in the '90s.