So Woody Allen married the stepdaughter of his former partner, Mia Farrow. My wife thinks this was gross behaviour, while I don’t.
Is this a man/woman thing?
Give your opinion here, together with your sex.
(Your opinions of Allen’s movies could form the topic of another thread if you so wish.)
I thought it was kind of icky. Then again, I am kind of grossed out when the man in the relationship is like 3x older than the women. These old farts are stealing all the babes, damn it! :mad:
Yes, gross. Gross because he was cheating on his partner with her adopted child. She (his partner—Mia Farrow) found out about the affair because she found nude photos of her daughter in his possession. :eek: That’s not the most pleasant way to find out, is it?
He betrayed his long-time partner, while simultaneously helping the child betray her mother. Pretty skeevy.
Gross, icky, morally reprehensible. The age difference makes me raise my eyebrows, but I probably wouldn’t care about that so much if it weren’t for the rest.
I am female, by the way.
Weird and unconventional, yes, but not especially gross. Especially since she was just adopted and not her’s biologically. If she had been, that’d make it a bit more questionable but still fair game in my book.
The only thing I’d have even a small problem with is if it had been his and Farrow’s biological daughter and even then, if Allen and the hypothetical daughter really wanted it and she wasn’t being coerced, it’d only be enough for a raised eyebrow. It’s none of my business who someone else fucks.
I agree with yosemite as far as the not-rightness of betrayals going on.
But, frankly, I’m pretty numb to any odd and/or dramatic celebrity relationship stuff. They’re all disgustingly rich and priveleged, and can and do get away with all sorts of stuff that we mere mortals could not. And, they don’t seem to think there’s a problem with it, and there isn’t. They operate in a different moral landscape than we do.
Three cheers for fortune.
huzzah!!
huzzah!!
huzzah!!
A guy speaks. Well, as far as I’m aware she was of age and consenting, so it wasn’t really a case of “getting away with stuff”. Was it wrong? Most definitely: having an affair with your partner’s much younger adopted daughter seems to be morally, if not technically, incest, and a pretty vile way of cheating on someone. God, I’d love to see Woody Allen on the Jerry Springer show, with rednecks throwing chairs and baying for his blood, while he stammers that he’s late for his therapist.
I don’t think that should make any difference. This girl wasn’t just a house guest, she was taken on as a daughter. I have a friend who is adopted, and his adoptive parents are every much his “real” parents as anyone else’s.
She was not his adopted daughter. She is Andre Previn’s and Mia Farrow’s daughter. Still yucky but I just wanted to clarify.
Yosemite said everything I wanted to, but said it better. I’m a woman, btw.
There are lots of times that I don’t need to post if yosemite gets to the thread first. This is another one of those times.
I don’t know, a lot of people go around judging everybody else. They’re gross because they have a girlfriend three times younger, or cause they’re having babies at age 50, or cause they’re in love with their adopted daughter.
Well, you all have been unhappy at some point in your lives, I;m sure of it. It’s human nature. Who am I to say what works for people, what gives the ability to snatch whatever happiness they can get out of this life? I truly believe you only go around once.
But then I am fairly hedonistic. I refuse to judge other people…I don’t know what would happen if I fell in love with my adopted father. (And I am adopted, BTW, and it does seem icky to me). But if I really thought that was my key to happiness…
Why, bless your heart. 
I’d assume that you would not decide that your key to happiness had to be achieved in a way that betrayed your mom (in a pretty cruel way), though, right?
Marriages or partnerships break up. People fall out of love. It happens, and it hurts. But it can hurt a lot less depending on how people handle it. It appears that Allen and this girl handled it in an extremely dishonorable way.
Guy here.
Yes, it’s ethically unpleasant IMO; though I’ll recognize it’s voyeuristically enticing.
Starting an affair with your current lover’s daughter w/o cleanly finishing with the mother first is one of those things you should not do. There are elements of trust in relationships that should be respected. BTW that goes also for SoonYi vis-a-vis Mia. She was of age to make the decision, she could have told Allen to first make a clean break with Mia.
However, that she didn’t is kind of telling. The whole “it’s not so bad if she’s adopted” bit doesn’t do it for me, but SoonYi’s welcoming of the affair does lend credence to a POV that Mia’s adoptees were brought up in an environment that let them see themselves less like a family and more like a child-sponsorship. Clearly there wasn’t enough of a parental/filial type of bond between the women.
Besides, it’s also almost a real-life plagiarism of the plot of one of Woody’s own stories from the early 70s.
I don’t think his behaviour was appropriate as a stepfather. Not just because he cheated on his partner with her daughter, but for similar reasons to why it’s frowned upon for teachers to have affairs with their students. Also, Mia accused Woody of molesting another of her children - if that’s true, and if his affair with Soon-Yi began when she was still a child, then it’s very wrong. Some children think they’re in love with the paedophiles who molest them but that’s not based on a true loving relationship between equals, it’s a lot more to do with being manipulated by adults who should know better.
I also find it hard to comprehend anyone looking at a person who has been in their care since they were a 12 year old child as a desirable, sexual being. I still see my young cousins as kids, despite some of them being adults with children of their own now, and I’m not even their carer!
The interesting thing is that he really doesn’t think that he did anything morally, ethically, or behaviorally wrong. It’s odd that someone with such a finely tuned ear for the neuroses of modern living is absolutely and willfully stone deaf on this topic.
All I can say is that I hope it was worth it for him, because this changed his public image from quirky-beloved-genius to icky-amoral old man-genius.
It seems to me life rarely plays out as neatly as some here suggest, even if the desire is there to do the right thing. Like most human beings, Allen and Soon Yi were probably trying to have it both ways. They probably found they were gravitating together and a relationship formed that they knew would be both hurtfull to Mia and the rest of their family as well as condemned by society at large, so they kept it under wraps and hoped that some day things would work out in a less damaging way.
I have been less skeeved out by it due to the fact that they are still together and seem to be very happy and in love. In other words, he wasn’t simply trying to get some young stuff where he could find it, and she wasn’t hurt by having an older man take advantage of her just for sex and then breaking her heart when he moved on.
And, on another note – and not that it has anything to do with the matter at hand – but I’ve been reading a book about Frank Sinatra written by George Jacobs, his valet of the fifteen years between 1953 and 1968. According to him, Farrow was both manipulative (she had a plan for how many men she was going to marry and how many children she was going to have by them) and a dingbat (always speaking in sign language to her deaf cat, for example). She drove Sinatra nuts.
She has had a reputation for years of being odd, and it could be Allen had long since ceased to love her, but for whatever reason never took the step to leave her until the relationship with Soon Yi developed and was discovered.
I’m not advocating cradle-robbing here, nor am I saying it’s just peachy to have interfamily affairs…but human beings have human fallacies and people rarely create such situations with the intent of causing harm. More often than not, they simply fall prey to their feelings and find themselves in a situation where there is no good solution. IMHO, that was the case here. So again, in this case I’m not all that skeeved out about it; in fact, I’m actually kind of happy for them…Soon Yi, especially…provided that they’re as happy in real life as they seem to be.
And oh, yeah…I’m a guy.
There is definitely an ick factor here. What I find funny is that Mia still expected to work in Woody’s films after all of this happened. Double ick there.
I think she’s a dingbat too, in a variety of ways, but not for this particular reason. How else is she supposed to communicate with a deaf animal? By stomping her foot on the floor? Flashing the lights on and off?
???
I think the grossness is in the way it happened, the betrayal and the huge age difference. But not in the fact that someone slept with his wife’s addopted daughter (or even biological daughter) from another marriage.
missbunny, I don’t really know what you mean by how else she is to “communicate” with a deaf animal. Cats aren’t notoriously obedient to vocal commands anyway, and I would suppose if she wanted it to do something like come to her or eat its food she could just gesture accordingly. Either way she’d have to be in its line of vision.
The impression I got from the book is that she “talked” to the cat via sign language, probably to express affection, etc., like people often do with their pets. But the idea that she thought the cat would get anything out of her use of sign language seemed ridiculous to Sinatra and caused him to view her contemptuously…at least in that regard.