Bro, you are the most holy rolling agnostic I have ever met.
Thank you.
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by FourthBase » Wed Feb 19, 2014 11:49 am
Bro, you are the most holy rolling agnostic I have ever met.
by Project Willow » Thu Feb 20, 2014 1:53 pm
BrandonD » 18 Feb 2014 15:17 wrote:
Anyone with an strong opinion on something that has no bearing on his day-to-day life (such as a stranger possibly molesting another stranger) is either emotionally invested in the subject, or indoctrinated. Either way, that person is incapable of assessing that scenario objectively.
by FourthBase » Fri Feb 21, 2014 2:49 am
In nearly every area of contention the most powerful operating bias is that which supports the status quo. Everybody fights to maintain whatever privileges they have, and those with fewer privileges internalize the beliefs of those above them.
There are entire systems of thought and action that maintain this status quo. Victims, bystanders, and perpetrators hold beliefs that both reflect and uphold this reality. To discount this scenario completely, and a number of other cultural forces and factors, is the opposite of objectivity.
Ironically, those of us who have considered the cultural context, as well as the other material that is available, are accused of inherent bias.
From birth to death, from top to bottom, we're all indoctrinated, and affected in our daily lives by the fruits of that indoctrination.
by alwyn » Sat Feb 22, 2014 12:26 am
by smiths » Sat Feb 22, 2014 2:21 am
have you been sexually abused?
have you ever tried to report it and not been believed?
Because if not, you have no objective qualifications for ascertaining the truth in this matter.
by Saurian Tail » Sat Feb 22, 2014 11:09 am
smiths » Sat Feb 22, 2014 2:21 am wrote:and PW, the numbers of abuse you claim without reference are absurd, where did they come from?
by brekin » Sat Feb 22, 2014 4:58 pm
alwyn » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:26 pm wrote:just an innocent bystander here, but fourth base, you seem to have a hard on (not the friendly kind) for Project Willow...that's why i said 'project much?'....
I'm going to ask a different question. have you been sexually abused? have you ever tried to report it and not been believed? Because if not, you have no objective qualifications for ascertaining the truth in this matter. Your arguments seem quite rational and pointed, but i'm afraid you have missed the heart of the matter.
by smiths » Sat Feb 22, 2014 9:13 pm
by Project Willow » Sun Feb 23, 2014 6:51 am
smiths » 21 Feb 2014 22:21 wrote:PW has been the gatekeeper of this thread, FB has been attacked repeatedly for raising legitimate questions and offering alternative lines of inquiry outside the "Woody Allen is definitely a pedophile" narrative
anyone, including myself, who has moved off that central narrative has been lumped into a collective group of scum made up of men who protect or take part in child abuse
i was very upset to discover what a horrible presence i occupied in the 'rape culture'
smiths wrote:googled exactly as instructed, every link has different numbers,
This approximately translates to 1 in 6 women and 1 in 20 men."
brekin wrote:Also, while I believe Dylan Farrow's account more than Allen's from what I've read, there is no experience I can fall back on to legitimize my opinion (and that is all it is) as more correct than anyone elses. I mean even someone with years of experience in investigating such matters can make a mistake. And we are all operating long distance and by remote control on this matter. I think thats why its important to deal with what has been reported instead of falling back on identity politics (individual or group) from whatever side of the debate one is on. My take is, go to the evidence and argue from there. The farther we move from there it stops being analysis and just personality politics.
FourthBase wrote:In nearly every area of contention the most powerful operating bias is that which supports the status quo. Everybody fights to maintain whatever privileges they have, and those with fewer privileges internalize the beliefs of those above them.
The status quo where? RI has its own.
Everybody where? Here, too?
by Spiro C. Thiery » Sun Feb 23, 2014 6:57 am
by FourthBase » Sun Feb 23, 2014 8:28 am
I spoke to a friend of mine today and related to him what's happened in this thread. I asked him how, when I'm delivering what is essentially a cultural critique, people can take it as a personal slight. And he said, of course they do, because they're being jolted into an unpleasant awareness, and an emotional backlash is a understandable response, there's no way of getting around it. Maybe there is no way around it, but I wanted to be clear, as I've already said up thread, I'm not making any character judgements about individual commentators here. FFS, I don't think of you as scum, quite the opposite. As C2W said in the misogyny thread, "It's not about you." Personally, that is. When black people speak about white privilege, I'm not insulted, I take it as a failure of my culture, something that was instilled within me against my will, and from there I can do something about it. That's a more extreme example, but it's along the same lines.
by FourthBase » Sun Feb 23, 2014 8:47 am
Spiro C. Thiery » 23 Feb 2014 05:57 wrote:I feel compelled to weigh in on this numbers issue. Many on this forum will be familiar with the case of Sigmund Freud. Very late in the 19th Century, the father of psychoanalysis postulated, I believe, that a roughly quarter of his patients had been sexually molested by an adult within their familial circle before they had reached puberty. Depending on who you believe, he subsequently came to his senses or, revised his theory to maintain his standing within the scientific community. Either way, it resulted in the idea that the larger number of cases he had encountered involved fantasy on the part of the patient. This point in history would seem to represent an archetype of the justification for disbelieving victims of sexual assault: if they are not outright lying, they must be mistaken. I hasten to note that, the slight variation between German and English for the interpretation of the word "fantasy" notwithstanding, this very suggestion could as well be a classic representation of the more-than-dubious "she wanted it" argument that smears unconscious recollections from the distant past all the way to accusations of a rape that happened yesterday.
In general, I find the concern valid that certain folks will entertain the possibility that a vast conspiracy exists when it comes to the institutionalized sexual assault of young men, but be more reluctant in believing that certain celebrated personalities might have been guilty of such a horrible crime. But the confirmation bias does not begin and end there, and this does not mean that anyone who maintains agnosticism in any one particular case, nor the one in this particular thread, is guilty of this bias.
I, for one, belong to the camp that believe Freud buckled under pressure. The evidence of his potential ostracization exists and has been laid out in a number of books on the subject. Put quite simply, the sheer vastness of the problem is something that no one seems able to comprehend or wants to admit.
Nevertheless, the case of Farrow versus Allen versus Farrow is not so cut and dry. This is a shame because there are elements here that might be quite revealing and instructive, not only for Mia, Woody, Soon-Yi, and Dylan, and for Ronan and Moses, but for all of us.
This is not just a story about the abuse of power and influence. This is not just a story about sexual abuse and our inability to admit how widespread it is. It is a story about the shaming of sexuality and our inability to come to grips with it. People will admit to murder before they will admit to having done something untoward with their genitalia. People will admit to beating the living crap out of their children before they will admit that they have put their tongue on them. We as a society will admit to the violent impulse, as long as the impulse is not sexual. I do not say this to downplay the seriousness of sexual abuse. On the contrary: this reality shows just how serious it is.
by brekin » Sun Feb 23, 2014 1:41 pm
What do you mean by "personality politics"? The evidence we have to work with here is not only what has been reported about the case, and the custody hearing transcript, but evidence in the form of what forces shape individual behavior, what motivates the actors on each side. If by identity politics, you mean to discount or deny that we live in a male dominated society, and all of the repercussions and effects that has on individual behavior, then you are throwing out evidence, evidence as to the motivations of all parties involved. I said I believed Dylan. Again, this is not a knee-jerk reaction, I've weighed several different factors in coming to that position, including a cost/benefit analysis of her having come forward as she has done. You and I agree on that point, but I got there with an analysis that relies on, rather than denies, what you might think of as identity politics, namely that women who make these sorts of claims are often subjected to the most heinous vilification. There was little for her to gain, and much cost, in coming forward, and this argues for her veracity. You seem to recognize this too, but reject that male hegemony has anything to do with it, and that makes no sense to me.
by brekin » Wed May 11, 2016 2:16 pm
"Woody Allen's son, Ronan Farrow, writes about what he views as the culture of acquiescence surrounding his father and allegations of sexual abuse. "
(The Hollywood Reporter)"They're accusations. They're not in the headlines. There's no obligation to mention them."
These were the objections from a producer at my network. It was September 2014 and I was preparing to interview a respected journalist about his new biography of Bill Cosby. The book omitted allegations of rape and sexual abuse against the entertainer, and I intended to focus on that omission. That producer was one of several industry veterans to warn me against it. At the time, there was little more than a stalled lawsuit and several women with stories, all publicly discredited by Cosby's PR team. There was no criminal conviction. It was old news. It wasn't news.
So we compromised: I would raise the allegations, but only in a single question late in the interview. And I called the author, reporter to reporter, to let him know what was coming. He seemed startled when I brought it up. I was the first to ask about it, he said. He paused for a long time, then asked if it was really necessary. On air, he said he'd looked into the allegations and they didn't check out.
Today, the number of accusers has risen to 60. The author has apologized. And reporters covering Cosby have been forced to examine decades of omissions, of questions unasked, stories untold. I am one of those reporters — I'm ashamed of that interview.
Read more: The Woody Allen interview (Which he won't read)
Some reporters have drawn connections between the press' grudging evolution on Cosby and a painful chapter in my own family's history. It was shortly before the Cosby story exploded anew that my sister Dylan Farrow wrote about her own experiences — alleging that our father, Woody Allen, had "groomed" her with inappropriate touching as a young girl and sexually assaulted her when she was 7 years old.
Being in the media as my sister's story made headlines, and Woody Allen's PR engine revved into action, gave me a window into just how potent the pressure can be to take the easy way out. Every day, colleagues at news organizations forwarded me the emails blasted out by Allen's powerful publicist, who had years earlier orchestrated a robust publicity campaign to validate my father's sexual relationship with another one of my siblings. Those emails featured talking points ready-made to be converted into stories, complete with validators on offer — therapists, lawyers, friends, anyone willing to label a young woman confronting a powerful man as crazy, coached, vindictive. At first, they linked to blogs, then to high-profile outlets repeating the talking points — a self-perpetuating spin machine.
The open CC list on those emails revealed reporters at every major outlet with whom that publicist shared relationships — and mutual benefit, given her firm's starry client list, from Will Smith to Meryl Streep. Reporters on the receiving end of this kind of PR blitz have to wonder if deviating from the talking points might jeopardize their access to all the other A-list clients.
In fact, when my sister first decided to speak out, she had gone to multiple newspapers — most wouldn't touch her story. An editor at the Los Angeles Times sought to publish her letter with an accompanying, deeply fact-checked timeline of events, but his bosses killed it before it ran. The editor called me, distraught, since I'd written for them in the past. There were too many relationships at stake. It was too hot for them. He fought hard for it. (Reached by The Hollywood Reporter, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Times said the decision not to publish was made by the Opinion editors.)
When The New York Times ultimately ran my sister's story in 2014, it gave her 936 words online, embedded in an article with careful caveats. Nicholas Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and advocate for victims of sexual abuse, put it on his blog.
Soon afterward, the Times gave her alleged attacker twice the space — and prime position in the print edition, with no caveats or surrounding context. It was a stark reminder of how differently our press treats vulnerable accusers and powerful men who stand accused.
Read more: Full coverage of Cannes Film Festival
Perhaps I succumbed to that pressure myself. I had worked hard to distance myself from my painfully public family history and wanted my work to stand on its own. So I had avoided commenting on my sister's allegations for years and, when cornered, cultivated distance, limiting my response to the occasional line on Twitter. My sister's decision to step forward came shortly after I began work on a book and a television series. It was the last association I wanted. Initially, I begged my sister not to go public again and to avoid speaking to reporters about it. I'm ashamed of that, too. With sexual assault, anything's easier than facing it in full, saying all of it, facing all of the consequences. Even now, I hesitated before agreeing to The Hollywood Reporter's invitation to write this piece, knowing it could trigger another round of character assassination against my sister, my mother or me.
But when Dylan explained her agony in the wake of powerful voices sweeping aside her allegations, the press often willing to be taken along for the ride, and the fears she held for young girls potentially being exposed to a predator — I ultimately knew she was right. I began to speak about her more openly, particularly on social media. And I began to look carefully at my own decisions in covering sexual assault stories.
I believe my sister. This was always true as a brother who trusted her, and, even at 5 years old, was troubled by our father's strange behavior around her: climbing into her bed in the middle of the night, forcing her to suck his thumb — behavior that had prompted him to enter into therapy focused on his inappropriate conduct with children prior to the allegations.
But more importantly, I've approached the case as an attorney and a reporter, and found her allegations to be credible. The facts are persuasive and well documented. I won't list them again here, but most have been meticulously reported by journalist Maureen Orth in Vanity Fair. The only final legal disposition is a custody ruling that found Woody Allen's behavior "grossly inappropriate" and stressed that "measures must be taken to protect [Dylan]."
On May 4, The Hollywood Reporter published a cover interview with Woody Allen, quirky auteur. To me it is a sterling example of how not to talk about sexual assault. Dylan's allegations are never raised in the interview and receive only a parenthetical mention — an inaccurate reference to charges being "dropped." THR later issued a correction: "not pursued."
The correction points to what makes Allen, Cosby and other powerful men so difficult to cover. The allegations were never backed by a criminal conviction. This is important. It should always be noted. But it is not an excuse for the press to silence victims, to never interrogate allegations. Indeed, it makes our role more important when the legal system so often fails the vulnerable as they face off against the powerful.
Here is exactly what charges not being pursued looked like in my sister's case in 1993: The prosecutor met with my mother and sister. Dylan already was deeply traumatized — by the assault and the subsequent legal battle that forced her to repeat the story over and over again. (And she did tell her story repeatedly, without inconsistency, despite the emotional toll it took on her.) The longer that battle, the more grotesque the media circus surrounding my family grew. My mother and the prosecutor decided not to subject my sister to more years of mayhem. In a rare step, the prosecutor announced publicly that he had "probable cause" to prosecute Allen, and attributed the decision not to do so to "the fragility of the child victim."
My mother still feels it was the only choice she could make to protect her daughter. But it is ironic: My mother's decision to place Dylan's well-being above all else became a means for Woody Allen to smear them both.
Very often, women with allegations do not or cannot bring charges. Very often, those who do come forward pay dearly, facing off against a justice system and a culture designed to take them to pieces. A reporter's role isn't to carry water for those women. But it is our obligation to include the facts, and to take them seriously. Sometimes, we're the only ones who can play that role.
Confronting a subject with allegations from women or children, not backed by a simple, dispositive legal ruling is hard. It means having those tough newsroom conversations, making the case for burning bridges with powerful public figures. It means going up against angry fans and angry publicists.
There are more reporters than ever showing that courage, and more outlets supporting them. Many are of a new generation, freed from the years of access journalism that can accrete around older publications. BuzzFeed has done pioneering reporting on recent Hollywood sexual assault stories. It was Gawker that asked why allegations against Bill Cosby weren't taken more seriously. And it is heartening that The Hollywood Reporter asked me to write this response. Things are changing.
But the old-school media's slow evolution has helped to create a culture of impunity and silence. Amazon paid millions to work with Woody Allen, bankrolling a new series and film. Actors, including some I admire greatly, continue to line up to star in his movies. "It's not personal," one once told me. But it hurts my sister every time one of her heroes like Louis C.K., or a star her age, like Miley Cyrus, works with Woody Allen. Personal is exactly what it is — for my sister, and for women everywhere with allegations of sexual assault that have never been vindicated by a conviction.
Tonight, the Cannes Film Festival kicks off with a new Woody Allen film. There will be press conferences and a red-carpet walk by my father and his wife (my sister). He'll have his stars at his side — Kristen Stewart, Blake Lively, Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg. They can trust that the press won't ask them the tough questions. It's not the time, it's not the place, it's just not done.
That kind of silence isn't just wrong. It's dangerous. It sends a message to victims that it's not worth the anguish of coming forward. It sends a message about who we are as a society, what we'll overlook, who we'll ignore, who matters and who doesn't.
We are witnessing a sea change in how we talk about sexual assault and abuse. But there is more work to do to build a culture where women like my sister are no longer treated as if they are invisible. It's time to ask some hard questions.
Farrow's investigative reporting series, "Undercovered With Ronan Farrow," airs on NBC's 'Today.'
The 69th annual Cannes Film Festival got off to an awkward start when Woody Allen, whose new film “Cafe Society” kicked off the fest, was subject of a rape joke during Wednesday night’s opening ceremony.
“It’s very nice that you’ve been shooting so many movies in Europe, even if you are not being convicted for rape in the U.S.,” said master of ceremony Laurent Lafitte.
The joke, which drew gasps from the audience, was perceived as a knock on Allen and director Roman Polanski.
Lafitte co-stars in Paul Verhoeven’s rape drama, “Ellen,” that premieres next week at Cannes.
“Thank you for coming tonight, sir,” he continued to Allen in French.
The 80 year-old filmmaker had received a standing ovation just minutes prior as he entered the Palais theater.
Allen, joined by cast members Kristen Stewart, Jesse Eisenberg and Blake Lively on the red carpet, was making his 12th Cannes appearance with the movie. It was his third time opening the international fest. “Cafe Society,” a fairy tale set in 1930s Hollywood, made for an appropriate launch to a festival that focuses on classic movie-star glamour.
by elfismiles » Thu May 12, 2016 10:29 am
Nordic » 12 May 2016 05:46 wrote:Here's the original thread. It spells Allen as Allan in the headline which is what made it somewhat hard to find
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37699&hilit=Woody
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