Sexual Perversity in Hollywood

Surprised by the title. David Mamet wrote a play called “Sexual Perversity in Chicago.” My first acting teacher in Los Angeles seemed obsessed with it or Mamet or both. Mamet is a known conservative. At the time I did not know that. I just knew him as a playwright who was respected for his work and revered. The irony of our times is that often conservative viewpoints are offset with rather risque views on sex and relationships.

I remember once running into a law student I knew in San Francisco walking out of a strip club smoking a cigar. He saw me and I thought he was going to pass out his face went so white. It was like he had been caught actually putting a dollar in some dancer’s g string.

We live in a world of hypocrisy where sex is concerned. We women suffer for it. I think about the fact that we have had this wave of open honesty about abuse and sexual misuse by people in the walls of Hollywood Studio lots and the hotel rooms of studio executives. It is a wave though that I fear is like a tsunami. It came. It kicked some ass, and then it went back to sleep. But the problems that were there are still there.

I look back on my life though and I wonder who has won in this war of sex. Men are hurting because they know nothing but to grab and take. Women are hurting because we live in fear of being hurt and used. I have been used but then I have also played. In the process of playing though I was also used. It is as if we women can not win. I have even been labelled gay and by women I think to stop me finding love or because they looked at me and did not see a woman worthy of being seen as a woman. I hurt because of it. I lost my breasts and get labelled not a real woman anymore.

Being labelled gay when you are not is just as bad as being converted to being straight when you are gay. It is lonely and makes you feel violated and alone.

Hollywood you disappoint me. You want women to be beautiful but you undermine the very core of beauty. Love has become a weak word and yet for decades couples went to the movies to see films about love. You underestimate the value of women. You reduce us to the vagina between our legs and the babies we produce there. You drive us out at the age of child bearing and if we fail to produce you scorn us just as if feminism were still a dirty word of pre-suffragette years. You allow men to use us for their vanity and scorn our independence and need to be more than walking storks.

I want to set the record straight. I was not a virgin when I came to Hollywood. I was also not tainted either. I had relationships. I am not ashamed of any of them. I had a code. I never picked a guy up in a bar, well with one exception and he was very exceptional. I never cheated, at least not intentional. I was not interested in being tied down or married, at least not yet. My heart got broken more for men lying to me than for leaving. Men actually never left me, they lied and we ended. This is not the 1950s but that is exactly how it feels. We women are still expected to be pure until marriage and if we are not we are not welcomed or lovable. Here is my truth. I still feel pure. I still feel untainted. I still feel like a good person and I still feel I am worthy of respect. Hollywood it is you who need to change and you who need to push culture to understand I am not Eve. None of us women are guilty for being alive or having experiences unless we force those experiences or break the law.

I am weird, so some people say. Some very famous people have said that, so it must be true right? Just like all the Tabloids and our current POTUS and his twitter rants. Did you think that what you think of as weird to me is being a very good person with principals. What ever you think is weird about me may be your projection. Or are you in the lets make the odd girl into being alone and freaky club. I have my perfect house and car and she is alone so there must be something wrong with her. I am Boo Radley who may one day save your ass. For now, let us fantasize things about her so we can label her to cut her off from the world, because we are elitists and want to bully someone else. Does it make you feel powerful? Is that your perversity? Hollywood do you know how you are feeding the cesspool of hate?

I look at how I was treated when I was getting sick as if I were something to discard and destroy. My life has been threatened by someone who claims to be working in the industry and working a great deal. I would never do what this person is doing to anyone. You Hollywood go on and ignore the consequences of your actions to me and countless other women. You only stop to fix what you have done if the woman has a loud enough voice or a big enough pocket book to make you take notice.

Women terrorize women to get attention and to win at some sick game of fame, and the men feed on the remains like sharks. I love acting. I love creating art. I have stories I want to tell and I still want to bring life into this world. Yet you shut down the good ones for the shallow.

I am not pure but I am also not perverse. I was looking for something that mad me feel safe. What I saw were men who played and toyed with people like pets or objects. The industry is being taken over by the same religious zealots who want to, on the one hand, preach the bible, and on the other want their porn. As a woman I know the result of that hypocrisy. I can be molested by a guy and you destroy me as Eve for not bringing a child into this world, because he did make a kid. Just like the religious right. A baby is worth more than a woman with an education. I needed to give up my life for a kid I did not make and for a man who tried to rape. I need to suffer for men who wanted to have me and got me inebriated. The only Cosby in my life story is male.

Do you know I wanted to make a child, but I wanted to be safe and get to a place where I could be free from pain and free from abuse. Your family values have been my prison cell. Family can be too toxic and unsafe. What you did was drive me back into a lonely and abusive and dangerous place.

Hollywood what matters should not be the box office levels, but whether what you make somehow fixes your mistakes. Messages and meanings that end the misogyny and ends the hate.