Jamie Dornan's lucky he's almost pretty.
Almost.
You'd think he'd be steered away from greasy hair -- if only for the ringlets.
Is he trying to be the new Mary?
Yes, she got away with being the "girl with the curls," but Mary Pickford's reign was over with silent films.
Or, as Joan Crawford once explained, "I designed my own hair styles for No More Ladies. I experimented with braids for formal wear, curls for a gay sequence, maybe a severe coiffure for the difficult parts -- wouldn't it be silly to play tragedy in a mass of ringlets?"
Indeed.
Silly would also be exposing stupidity.
Jamie won't flash his cock in the upcoming 50 Shades of Grey; however, he will make a point to pull out his stupidity and wag it at the world.
50 Shades of Grey is watered down Anne Rice (writing as Anne Rampling or A.N. Roquelaure).
It made it into grocery stores across the country because it was watered down and, yes, because it was sexist.
Entertainment Weekly quotes Jamie insisting that Fifty Shades of Grey is not sexist, "I can understand why people say tying a woman up and spanking her is misogynistic. But actually, more men are submissives than women. Very powerful men. It's a far bigger scene than I imagined: in pretty much any city in the world that you could name, people want to get spanked with a paddle with studs on it."
Did you follow it?
Because Jamie didn't.
The pretty mouth was moving but as usual no blood was flowing to the head.
Jamie argues that (a) more men are submissives "actually" so (b) it's not sexist to portray, in his film, a woman enjoying being spanked and forced to submit.
He then (c) insists that's not sexism.
When, in fact, that's the actual definition of sexism.
More men are passive but the film doesn't portray that.
Let's move beyond the sexual tease passing itself off as a film -- which will attract sexually frustrated people to multiplexes come/cum Valentine's Day.
Is it sexist to portray spankings or submission?
No.
There are people who are turned on by it.
Porn today traffics in spanking in both gay and lesbian porn.
The fantasies are fantasies and speak to the desires of those who stream or rent them.
So what about straight porn?
The porn industry has changed in the last decades.
But the historical subjugation of women in straight porn would make us hesitant to give a full pass to every straight porn in which a woman is spanked. We'll give a pass to porn created today in which a woman spanks a man.
Moving from porn to 'mainstream' films . . .
It's a story of non-stop sexism.
We don't know that there are more men who want to be spanked than women -- in straight couplings -- but we'll allow that there's probably an equal amount of men and women into being spanked by the opposite gender.
It just doesn't make it to mainstream films.
Exit to Eden, for example, features Dana Delaney spanking Paul Mercurio in one scene. In one scene. Despite the fact that his character has traveled to a sex resort to be spanked and is spending a great deal of money to be spanked, he gets spanked once. And then overpowers 'cold hearted' Lisa who 'surrenders' to him as she explains she's so tired of spending all her time at the office, "After a heard day of smacking people, it's nice to cuddle."
Wow.
She started and runs a sex resort built around bondage and discipline but, when she meets the right fellow, turns out she really wasn't into it.
More often than not, the person being spanked is a woman. Whether it's Sean Connery smacking a woman's ass in Goldfinger or Spencer Tracey spanking Katharine Hepburn in Adam's Rib or . . .
With women, what sometimes happens -- 1% of the time, maybe -- is that they have power over a man in sex.
The man is restrained in some manner.
The woman is a bitch if not a criminal.
And as the film progresses, the man will 'reassert' himself by violent taking the woman.
Think Basic Instinct where Sharon Stone enjoys tying up men but goes into a sexual frenzy when Michael Douglas gives it to her rough -- something that also turns on the character of Dr. Beth Garner (played by Jeanne Tripplehorn). Or think about the hideous copycat attempt Body of Evidence starring the charisma free Madonna and Willem Dafoe. On the hood of a car, Madonna takes control so you know that shortly after Willem's going to have to resort to violence and rough sex to 'prove' he's really a man.
And that's what it's really about, Jamie.
Sexist notions of what men and women are.
The most famous scene of a woman spanking a man in a film is probably Cloris Leachman spanking Harvey Korman in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety.
Is it unfair to point out that Cloris' character sports a mustache?
Which is supposed to indicate that there's something unnatural and masculine about her character?
So, yeah, Jamie, yet another man subjugating a woman onscreen?
It's sexism.
It's especially sexism when you're insisting that, in real life, it's men who are more often asking to be spanked by women than the other way around.
For Jamie not to grasp that is not just embarrassing; it also feeds into the pretty but stupid stereotype that so many barely there actors have projected over the years.
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We have avoided Myra Breckenridge for this piece. Raquel Welch plays an actress who started out as a man (Rex Reed, in the film). We have neither the space nor time to discuss the phobia on display towards transwomen. We also don't have time to go fully into our thoughts on the "T" in LGBTQ. But briefly, we would sum it up by saying if you feel you are a woman trapped in a man's body, then you're a woman. If you feel you're a man trapped in a woman's body, then you are a man. We're wondering ourselves if the best help for the T community would be to drop the T which acts more as an explanation to others. Why explain? Most people should be able to grasp it and we don't think anyone should have to jump through hoops or prove or explain their gender to anyone.
