Lolita's Fist

Teenage movies back in the day were about how we felt different to our peers, we were each unusual and didn't fit. The movies were about how we tried. The films were highly inappropriate, but we were so normalized to inappropriate that we didn't notice. Rapey, racist, sexist, were normal. Grease (1978) was chock-a-block full of sex talk - I didn't notice - children ignore what they don't understand and fit what they do into a world that normalized what they did. Girls getting tossed aside if they didn't put out and accepted if they look like sluts. Normal. But to grown men our ignorance of what we were looking at looks like consent, acquiescence, flirting. "Young girls come on to me." Olivia's pants were fashion. Slut pants were fashion. Even now I am deeply uncomfortable with using the term 'slut'. And does my discomfort systemically play right into the patriarchal agendas depicted in Grease. And movies work like history does. When I lo...

Stewart Granger. Mommy curated my (and her) idolisation of Granger. In my head, I know that actors in the 1930s were not like today. Then, the actors belonged to the studios, on contract, in breach of contract if they didn't make the movies assigned by the studios. He would not have been able to say No, and I know what that is like. What a moment to see a fresh-faced young Granger say the N-word. I am shell-shocked. It's a moment where you have to say "I am looking at history with contemporary eyes". A raw case-in-point.

War and Peace (2016) ~ Just as I am about to ask if 'Leo Tolstoy' is a pseudonym of Jane Austen, a hunt and a wolf murder. I was never inspired to read the 'canon' as it's all animal murder, war, and duels. And when they do another version of it in GoT, the man writes women characters in such a way that all that distinguishes them from men is that they are frequently naked and variously raped, wars still in place. Am I unnecessarily suspicious? For whom did Tolstoy and Lawrence write? Women were forbidden educations, and wealthy women who had a version of education had to spend morning noon and night going to fittings and dressing for meals and events. Was Tolstoy interested in love? Have I lost a grasp on my brain?