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Back in the day when I was a People Magazine celebrity journalist, Bill Cosby’s penchant for wispy blonde women was well known. You talked about it; you didn’t write about it. John Travolta and Oprah were gay; Michael Jackson was not actually a pedophile; Farrah Fawcett went on the occasional shop-lifting spree (her underlings trotting in her wake at a discreet distance to pay off the store staff); and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice was Bill Cosby’s dating manual.
This didn’t stop me from enjoying Cosby’s comedy or using episodes The Cosby Show as training videos to bolster my own inept parenting skills. I’m one of those people who make a distinction between art and the flawed individuals who create it. If Adolph Hitler had painted Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, I’d have no qualms about hanging it in my living room.
American culture has changed in a big way, of course, and no one can hide anymore from the consequences of his or her bad behavior although if you have enough money, you can probably write a big enough check to get the victims to shut their mouths about it.
I don’t feel sorry for Cosby nor am I inclined to see him as a complex Shakespearian character. We don’t know if he started out as a compassionate and caring man who gradually let the perks of celebrity fuel his regression into moral numbness.
But I suspect he didn’t.
I suspect his behavior is an example of the patriarchy at work. A version of the Madonna/Whore complex with a racial twist.
Cosby’s resume is loaded with good works. He worked as a Navy corpsman doing physical therapy with severely disabled Korean War vets. His comedy routines, which eschewed traditional racial humor, were a deliberate attempt to bridge black/white misunderstandings. He was strongly committed to education as the ladder up out of poverty and frequently railed at other members of the black community for their own lack of awareness and commitment toward improving their lives. He put the blame for drugs, underage pregnancies, violent crime, high school dropout rates and political apathy squarely on the shoulders of apathetic African American parents and Black Entertainment TV programming executives.
Was he right? Well. In part, sure. Though his analysis ignores the larger socioeconomic factors that reinforce poverty and predispose toward crime.
Cosby married an extremely beautiful African American woman in the Michelle Obama mode. But he continued to dawg after sexual trophies – those blonde, blue-eyed whimsy princess types that were the American male’s Ideal of Beauty no matter what his race was until maybe 20 years ago. I’m pretty sure Cosby hated himself for his attraction toward blonde white women – Cleaver certainly did – and so was inclined to punish the objets du desir. Treat them contemptuously. Like human handiwipes for wiping the jiz off his dick.
I blacked out after having dinner and one glass of wine at his New York City brownstone, where he had offered to mentor me and discuss the entertainment industry, writes a woman called Barbara Bowman, the most vocal of Cosby’s current denouncers. When I came to, I was in my panties and a man’s t-shirt, and Cosby was looming over me. I’m certain now that he drugged and raped me.
Is she credible?
I’m not entirely sure. The drugged wine seems like a bit of narrative embellishment, to be perfectly honest.
And the drugged wine, of course, is the detail that turns this incident from a rude seduction into a rape.
But, what the hell do I know? My upbringing in the House of Usher served me well in some ways at least. When I found myself involved in these kinds of scenarios – which I did on countless occasions when I was working as a model – I’d simply announce, That’s it. I’m outa here. I was never that naïve. I always knew how to take care of myself.
If I didn’t like the guy, if I was merely cadging a free meal at an expensive restaurant, I’d demand a ride home and after wheedling me and then cursing me for half an hour or so – Lemme tell you something, sweetheart. You’re not pretty. You’re a fuckin’ monkey. You got fat legs and ugly teeth. And you don’t know a fuckin’ thing about making a guy happy – they’d pony up the taxi fare or the car service and I’d be on my way out the door.
If I did like the guy, I didn’t need to be drugged to strip down to my panties or hurl them over my head.
In any event, Cosby doesn’t recover from a hit like this.
He’ll drop dead some time in the next six months. Maybe sooner. Probably sooner.
Whatever legacy he’d hoped to leave will be quickly dismantled.
###
In other news, one of the women at the ESL training yesterday made a very interesting remark. “I always sniff books before I read them,” she said. “And I always run my hands along the pages, too. I like feeling the pages.”
“Me too!” piped a couple of voices from other parts of the room.
“Fascinating!” I said. “Do you like Kindles?”
“I hate Kindles,” the woman said. “I can’t use them.”
The woman was my age, which probably means her discomfort with electronic reading devices is a generational thang.
But I wondered.
Suppose there are people whose kinesthetic sensibilities are just so strong that they can’t do electronics? Does this become a learning disorder for the New Millennium? At some point does there come to be a tribal divide between the humans prepped for mind fusion with artificial intelligences and those who reject that route entirely? Kind of a Cro Magnon/Neanderthal technology struggle? Might make an interesting fictional premise.
This didn’t stop me from enjoying Cosby’s comedy or using episodes The Cosby Show as training videos to bolster my own inept parenting skills. I’m one of those people who make a distinction between art and the flawed individuals who create it. If Adolph Hitler had painted Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, I’d have no qualms about hanging it in my living room.
American culture has changed in a big way, of course, and no one can hide anymore from the consequences of his or her bad behavior although if you have enough money, you can probably write a big enough check to get the victims to shut their mouths about it.
I don’t feel sorry for Cosby nor am I inclined to see him as a complex Shakespearian character. We don’t know if he started out as a compassionate and caring man who gradually let the perks of celebrity fuel his regression into moral numbness.
But I suspect he didn’t.
I suspect his behavior is an example of the patriarchy at work. A version of the Madonna/Whore complex with a racial twist.
Cosby’s resume is loaded with good works. He worked as a Navy corpsman doing physical therapy with severely disabled Korean War vets. His comedy routines, which eschewed traditional racial humor, were a deliberate attempt to bridge black/white misunderstandings. He was strongly committed to education as the ladder up out of poverty and frequently railed at other members of the black community for their own lack of awareness and commitment toward improving their lives. He put the blame for drugs, underage pregnancies, violent crime, high school dropout rates and political apathy squarely on the shoulders of apathetic African American parents and Black Entertainment TV programming executives.
Was he right? Well. In part, sure. Though his analysis ignores the larger socioeconomic factors that reinforce poverty and predispose toward crime.
Cosby married an extremely beautiful African American woman in the Michelle Obama mode. But he continued to dawg after sexual trophies – those blonde, blue-eyed whimsy princess types that were the American male’s Ideal of Beauty no matter what his race was until maybe 20 years ago. I’m pretty sure Cosby hated himself for his attraction toward blonde white women – Cleaver certainly did – and so was inclined to punish the objets du desir. Treat them contemptuously. Like human handiwipes for wiping the jiz off his dick.
I blacked out after having dinner and one glass of wine at his New York City brownstone, where he had offered to mentor me and discuss the entertainment industry, writes a woman called Barbara Bowman, the most vocal of Cosby’s current denouncers. When I came to, I was in my panties and a man’s t-shirt, and Cosby was looming over me. I’m certain now that he drugged and raped me.
Is she credible?
I’m not entirely sure. The drugged wine seems like a bit of narrative embellishment, to be perfectly honest.
And the drugged wine, of course, is the detail that turns this incident from a rude seduction into a rape.
But, what the hell do I know? My upbringing in the House of Usher served me well in some ways at least. When I found myself involved in these kinds of scenarios – which I did on countless occasions when I was working as a model – I’d simply announce, That’s it. I’m outa here. I was never that naïve. I always knew how to take care of myself.
If I didn’t like the guy, if I was merely cadging a free meal at an expensive restaurant, I’d demand a ride home and after wheedling me and then cursing me for half an hour or so – Lemme tell you something, sweetheart. You’re not pretty. You’re a fuckin’ monkey. You got fat legs and ugly teeth. And you don’t know a fuckin’ thing about making a guy happy – they’d pony up the taxi fare or the car service and I’d be on my way out the door.
If I did like the guy, I didn’t need to be drugged to strip down to my panties or hurl them over my head.
In any event, Cosby doesn’t recover from a hit like this.
He’ll drop dead some time in the next six months. Maybe sooner. Probably sooner.
Whatever legacy he’d hoped to leave will be quickly dismantled.
###
In other news, one of the women at the ESL training yesterday made a very interesting remark. “I always sniff books before I read them,” she said. “And I always run my hands along the pages, too. I like feeling the pages.”
“Me too!” piped a couple of voices from other parts of the room.
“Fascinating!” I said. “Do you like Kindles?”
“I hate Kindles,” the woman said. “I can’t use them.”
The woman was my age, which probably means her discomfort with electronic reading devices is a generational thang.
But I wondered.
Suppose there are people whose kinesthetic sensibilities are just so strong that they can’t do electronics? Does this become a learning disorder for the New Millennium? At some point does there come to be a tribal divide between the humans prepped for mind fusion with artificial intelligences and those who reject that route entirely? Kind of a Cro Magnon/Neanderthal technology struggle? Might make an interesting fictional premise.
