“There is a girl who went against me. She was going to talk about something I did. I am going to tell you, and this is a promise, if she ever tells anybody..."

"... no matter how much time she thinks went by, I have people who will pull up in a car, kidnap her and throw her in the Hudson river with cement blocks on her feet. You understand what I’m talking about, right?”

Said the movie director James Toback, according to the actress Selma Blair, reported in The Guardian, "Selma Blair: James Toback threatened to kill me after sexual harassment/The Hellboy star claims the disgraced film-maker sexually harassed her and then suggested that he could have her killed if she told her story."

So movie directors talk like characters in bad movies.

There's something so sad about referring to Blair as "The Hellboy star." It's a boy's world.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula wrote:

From the article:

"When he asked her to have sex with him, Blair refused, but Toback insisted she let him pleasure himself in front of her and said: “You cannot leave until I have release.”

“You cannot leave until I have release.”

Say what you want, but that is a great line. Very Ming the Merciless.

"A male feminist writer has been fired by the prestigious GQ Magazine after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her outside a bar."

"The writer, Rubert [sic] Myers, apologized to his accuser after she outed him on Twitter. Journalist Kate Leaver took to Twitter on Thursday to open up about her alleged experience with Myers. 'Ok, here goes. I haven’t told this story because I listened to the voice that told me it ‘wasn’t that bad’ or ‘worth talking about,' Leaver wrote. 'When I moved to London, I wanted to make friends. I met @RupertMyers on Twitter and agreed to go for what I thought was a friendly drink... I was very clear about not being romantically or sexually interested in him, once the subject was raised. I suggested we be mates … He said "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather f--k you" and forced himself on me outside a pub in Fitzrovia.'"

Fox News reports.

"Male feminist" wasn't Myers's label for himself. In fact, no one at GQ ever uses the term "male feminist"...



... if I can trust the search function at the website.

Which I can't....



But I think conservative media came up with that descriptor to revel in the hypocrisy of a liberal.

Daily Caller reporter Ian Miles Cheong had harsh words for Myers, tweeting, “Male feminists who claim the moral high ground, who turn their noses up at the ‘misogynists’ below, are the very demons they claim to fight.”

Yes, of course, that's fun to do — and liberals often deserve it — but Myers seems to have written mainly about British politics, not gender. There is at least one Myers article in the gender category: "Men’s Rights Activists are cave dwelling idiots."

MRAs routinely deny the existence of what many feminists call "rape culture" by suggesting that failures to prosecute sexual violence are the result of endemic false rape allegations, rather than societal attitudes towards consent. When the founder of MRA site "A Voice For Men" Paul Elam wrote a piece entitled "Bill Cosby's victims? Or just a bunch of drug whoring star fuckers?" he was displaying an overt hostility towards women that characterises the movement. Over 50 women have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault. Yet Elam goes to bat for Cosby.

But who will go to bat for Myers? Any Men's Rights cavemen want to step up for this guy? He's all alone now. Sad!

What are the rules for going out for drinks with a co-worker? If they say they just want to be your mate, when is it okay to quip "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather fuck you"?

Yesterday, in the context of discussing allegations against the film director James Toback, I put up this image from what seemed to me to be his most significant film:



That inspired the commenter tim in vermont to write:

Robert Downy doesn't need techniques to pick up women, a simple "wanna fuck" would probably work at least half the time for him. In Wedding Crashers, the PUA was Will Ferrel, that was more believable.

If you look like like Robert Downey Jr. in 1987, go ahead and quip "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather fuck you," and I suspect the worst you'd get is a laugh and a no from a woman who feels flattered and still hopes to be friends. But here's Rupert Myers:



He does not have the looks privilege to say things like "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather fuck you." Now, I think the woman could have briskly gotten the upper hand with the comeback "Rupert, you are not cute enough to work a line like that" and laughed at him. Maybe if she had, they could have been mates. I wish more guys had girl friends who can laugh and keep up with the jokes, including dirty jokes, if they're out having a drink after work.

I'm afraid too many women will recoil at sexual expression and hide too much away and nurture the notion that they are "broken" and "violated" (to use the words of one of Toback's accusers). Let's not fling ourselves headlong into a new era of sexual repression.  There's a big difference between the unsuccessful pick-up line "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather fuck you" and taking a physical action.

I don't know the details that made Kate Leaver write "He... forced himself on me outside a pub in Fitzrovia." This was on a public street, so I'm picturing something like an awkward, resisted hug. Without knowing more, I can't think of what else to say except that conservatives who've been crying out about the lack of due process for men accused of sexual assault should not be gleefully enjoying this man's loss of a job. That would be hypocritical, and your glee is based on the notion that Myers is a hypocrite. That's double hypocrisy!

"The Pick-Up Artist has finally met his match."

I knew the name James Toback, but I couldn't name a single one of his movies, after I read out loud the Daily Mail headline "More than 30 women accuse Hollywood director James Toback of sexual assault in disturbing accounts of him 'coercing them to his hotel rooms, dry-humping their legs, and masturbating in front of them'" and Meade said "Who's he?"

Maybe I'd just always remembered his name because back in the 1970s, I knew somebody else with that unusual last name. I'd thought Toback was kind of important, so I was surprised that he'd only directed 12 films (in a 40-year period). I looked for the most famous one to impress Meade that this was indeed a well-known director. I came up with "The Pick-Up Artist" and showed Meade the image and said, "That was back when Robert Downey Jr. look like this. 1987."

According to a report by the Los Angeles Times, on several occasions Toback would invite women, usually in their 20s, to his hotel room where he would dry-hump them or masturbate in front of them, ejaculating into his pants or onto their bodies and then walk away.

Starr Rinaldi, who was an aspiring actress, told the Times that she was approached by Toback 15 years ago in Central Park. 'He always wanted me to read for him in a hotel or come back to his apartment, like, "How serious are you about your craft?" And the horrible thing is, whichever road you choose, whether you sleep with him or walk away, you're still broken... You have been violated."

Why are you "broken" and "violated" if you walk away from bad pick-up lines like that? This kind of post-Weinstein pile-on is going to dilute the righteous fury and end up boring us. There are so many people with so many stories, so many would-be actresses who never got to live out their dreams that nothing's going to stop the chatter. It's a good time to hurt and embarrass every unattractive guy who got a pretty woman to give him some time by portraying himself as a useful contact.

How could he even think he could have her if he didn't give some major career advancement in exchange!