Basically, it is all about "the evil of Old Europe’s degeneracy" and while the author doubtlessly managed to show how well read he is (whatever that is worth), he failed to prove what, about Polanski's crime as well as about those who defend him, is particularly European. At the end of the day, we have just another pretentious bit of pseudo-intellectual hogwash that serves as an excuse to vent some pretty unpalatable resentments insupportable by reason. Frankly, anybody who talks so much about "degenerates" and what they are doing, gives some reasonable cause for the suspicion that he is somewhat obsessed with it and that gives me the creeps.
Not too surprisingly, this valiant degenerate-buster isn't all that accurate when it comes to facts and I think facts do count, even or maybe particularly if somebody is in the middle a full-blown self-righteous moral outrage. Polanski did NOT "rape that girl violently". If Taylor had bothered to read the notes of the victim's evidence at The Smoking Gun (but then, maybe he has and just doesn't care because it stands in the way of his own verbosity) it would have become obvious even to him that if Polanski would have raped the girl, as opposed to "statutorily raped", the court would have had him by the balls for rape and not for "statutory rape". But then, maybe the court was staffed with evil degenerates from Old Europe. As it really was, the girl maybe complied. She admitted that she had sex before, and at a previous "photo op" Polanski had made her pose topless as well, so she, sexually experienced as she was, must have had at least a whiff of what he was up to. Yet she STILL went with him again to a second "photo session". Obviously the court didn't believe her half-hearted claims of having resisted or -- again -- they would have gotten him for rape and not for statutory rape.
What to make of a mother who lets her 13-year-old daughter go on a hop with such a DOM I better don't say here and no, I am NOT defending Polanski. The fact that his victim was maybe complying (and her mother plain and simply gutter trash) does NOT make him ONE LITTLE BIT better. To make that clear once and for all: A man who has, IRRESPECTIVE OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES, sex with a girl of 13 and knows, as Polanski did, about her age, ought never to leave his prison cell again or at least not entire.
My point is, rather, to speak up for "Old Europe", not to relativize what Polanski did and I think I have a strong case. In evilly degenerate Old Europe, be it back in the Seventies or now, you'd have trouble to find a mother who would be so readily prepared to pimp her underage daughter, whereas in morally upright, clean and family-values-orientated America they just have -- I have covered the topic before -- a cult of "beauty pageants" and "children's beauty pageants" that has elevated the pimping of little girls to an art form and an industry. I don't think it's easy to make a seven-year old girl look like a 30-year old cheap hooker, but they manage.
All this, mind you, is NOT evil and degenerate and, above all, does NOT cater for pedophiles, it is just an expression of healthy, jolly-hockeysticks American family life.
You'll have, too, to go a long way, to find in evil Old Europe, chock-full of degenerates, a Photoshop-service like that, if at all:
Different from the evil, sick and degenerate Old Europeans, Americans are also refreshingly up-front when it comes to the question of what all this is about:
Sadly, it is not a bit funny and if I see Polanski's victim plus Mommy Dearest now posing together, I catch myself first rummaging for my pukebag and then asking myself whether all this is maybe very much in line with the American culture of female attention whoring:
Samantha Geimer (the victim), right, and her mother Susan Gailey arrive at the premiere of the HBO Documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" in New York, on Tuesday, May 6, 2008.Fancy that: There are two women, one the victim of pedophilia, the other one the
All this, again, does not make Polanski even a bit better and I fail to see what Polanski's work has to do with it anyway. A pedophile is a pedophile is a pedophile. I find the argument of the "great artist" sickeningly amoral. Let's say, for argument's sake, that Polanski would have spent all the years since 1977 in prison or at least in a situation where he couldn't approach and ensnare barely pubescent girls. What would we have missed? Yeah, right. A couple of good movies. Not more. Get your values in perspective!
Is this a feminist point of view? Good joke! Predictably, those loud-mouthed jerkettes, the most vicious enemies of other women, were the first ones to speak up for Polanski, see... [The links to the cases of feminists defending Polanski I'd provided are dead now. As I've learned about a petition from 2009 demanding a pardon for him in the meantime, I'd like to mention a couple of names from the signee roster and the names of others who defended Polanski publicly: Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein, Whoopi Goldberg, Kate Winslet, Natalie Portman, Meryl Streep, Catherine Deneuve. So what do we have here? A pedophile, a DOM, several women who stridently supported the unspeakable and unspeakably false-faced #metoo campaign, and a woman whose denouncement of same campaign doesn't seem quite so stellar anymore, now we know that. - The Editrix January 2018.]
Talking about feminism and back to the children's beauty pageants: I wonder what those
I realize quite well that a penchant for very young females is a biological male trait. I am not naive. Maybe you won't believe this, but I know from the time I used to work with horses that even stallions recognize the younger ones and prefer them. I just think that childhood is, if not a biological, but a civilisatory achievement and to end it for the sake of sexual gratification is uncivilised, barbaric and a civilisatory advanced society needs to taboo and severely penalise it.
Another aspect is that I doubt Samantha Geimer, the victim, has done pre-and barely pubescent girls in other cultures a favour with her tawdry exhibition of "forgiveness" towards and exculpation of Polanski, but what the heck. Any- (But ANY-!)thing for some minutes in the limelight. Can you imagine a boy who'd been sexually abused as a child and who'd then pose in "sexy" clothes in front of an audience, an audience, mind you, that is fully aware of his history? I can't.
One last thing and I wasn't sure whether I'd go too far here, specifically as this will exceed the topic of feminism for which this blog stands. However, this "evil degenerate Old Europe" bit made me increasingly angry in the process of writing this entry. So here it is:
Dear Rob Taylor, Old Europe may not always have behaved as well as human decency would have required it towards people of your skin colour (or towards people of their own skin colour) over the course of its history, but, believe me, different from your country, blacks, few as they were here, have never been enslaved at this side of the Atlantic, and even with the feudal system in place, NOBODY has ever been enslaved here. And with which the Kennedy family got away in -- notabene -- 20th century America... that would make any European Renaissance prince, including those of Borgia ancestry, faint.
In the process of the modest research for this entry I was appalled to find that "child beauty pageants" are held, albeit not very profusely, in Britain as well. But Britain, this staunch ally of bright and beautiful America, doesn't fall under the definition of "Old Europe" in the Rumsfeldian sense anyway.
