"So many people think you have to look like a man, play like a man to get respect. I was the opposite."

"I was proud to a be a woman, and it didn’t fit well in that culture," said Candice Wiggins, speaking about the culture within the Women's National Basketball Association. She's abandoning her stellar career 2 years early, because of her "mental state." She says she was bullied for her femininity and heterosexuality.

"I didn’t like the culture inside the WNBA, and without revealing too much, it was toxic for me. … My spirit was being broken.... Me being heterosexual and straight, and being vocal in my identity as a straight woman was huge,” Wiggins said. “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women. It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules they (the other players) could apply..... People were deliberately trying to hurt me all of the time. I had never been called the B-word so many times in my life than I was in my rookie season. I’d never been thrown to the ground so much. The message was: ‘We want you to know we don’t like you.’... It comes to a point where you get compared so much to the men, you come to mirror the men,’ she said. “So many people think you have to look like a man, play like a man to get respect. I was the opposite.... There were horrible things happening to me every day...."

I don't know how much of that to believe. I don't understand the nature of the razzing that goes on behind the scenes in sports, whether Wiggins was unusually sensitive or arrogant, and what sexual orientation had to do with it. The other women are not telling there side of the story, so I feel compelled to imagine it.

If you read the story at the link, you'll see that Wiggins is writing a book, so she has a motive to stir up interest in her story. I'm interested in seeing how well this angle plays — this notion that she had more femininity than those other ladies and that there's something especially brutal about lesbians.

There's also the problem that the WNBA is just not popular, and that's what's really bothering Wiggins, who said: "Nobody cares about the WNBA. Viewership is minimal. Ticket sales are very low. They give away tickets and people don’t come to the game." And she's switching over to beach volleyball —where she sees a "celebration of women and the female body as feminine" — which people do seem to like to watch (perhaps because we only watch it every 4 years when the Summer Olympics come around).

Did Lena Dunham "celebrate" "the extinction of white men"?

The comic writer/actress put up a tweet with this video, which begins with her voice asking her father "How are you feeling about the extinction of white men?"

It's not the end of men, it's the evolution of men into better men. (beautiful animation by Sophie Koko Gate!) pic.twitter.com/Qtf0xyT5Ad

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 2, 2016

The video is presented with the caption "It's not the end of men, it's the evolution of men into better men. (beautiful animation by Sophie Koko Gate!)"

And it really is a very cool animation. The father's answer, heard in voiceover, is:

Well, white men are a problem. Straight white men are a big problem, that’s for sure. But I actually feel pretty good about it. I think straight white guys have been screwing things up for long enough. High time for straight white males to step back and let some other people do it.

At Breitbart, the video was said to be "celebrating the extinction of straight white men." I don't think she's "celebrating" anything but her own father. The implication is: Isn't he cool and funny? (Note that his last word, "it," refers to "screwing things up.")

The caption shows that she has the mild opinion that men are evolving into better men, not going extinct at all. But she got your attention, including getting somebody at Breitbart to raise up the righties in protest, which I'm sure she celebrates.

"New Study Says That Lesbians Hold Hands Better."

A headline at Slate marks the emergence of a new rule in reporting on scientific studies: Where a difference is shown between gay and straight people, portray what is true of gay people to be better.

What's bad about the way heterosexual people hold hands? There's a "dominant" position, and the man takes it. That's funny. I always thought there's a more comfortable position and the man lets me take it. Am I supposed to feel all subordinated retrospectively?

"Blue Is the Warmest Color" — that movie about lesbians that won the grand prize at Cannes — is hated by...

... the lesbian who wrote the graphic novel upon which the movie was based. And by "graphic novel," I don't mean that it has detailed descriptions of the sexual act. (The movie, however, has a 10-minute sex sequence that the author calls pornographic.) What I mean is what the NYT is referring to as a "comic book-novel" to avoid the ambiguity that appears in my first sentence.

Here's the Wikipedia article for "graphic novel":

The term "graphic novel" was first used in 1964; it was popularized within the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God in 1978, and became familiar with the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Spiegelman's Maus, Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen, and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Book Industry Study Group added "graphic novel" as a category in book stores.

Oh, but the author-artist of "Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude," Julie Maroh, will be stuck with the less respectful terminology as the topic under discussion is porn. Her book has sensitive images like this:



And the movie doesn't capture what she meant to convey.

Noting that the director and actresses are “all straight, unless proven otherwise,” she said that with few exceptions, the film struck her as “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.”

Even worse, she said, “everyone was giggling.”

Heterosexual viewers “laugh-ed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous.

“The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous,” she continued. “And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were” the “guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.”

But what do you expect when a commercial movie is made from a book? The story is much less about the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters, and what's on the screen are superficial images, particularly beautiful faces and bodies, and the audience is invited to gaze and feel whatever they feel. The movie director,  Abdellatif Kechiche, said:

“What I was trying to do when we were shooting these scenes was to film what I found beautiful,” he said. “So we shot them like paintings, like sculptures. We spent a lot of time lighting them to ensure they would look beautiful; after, the innate choreography of the loving bodies took care of the rest, very naturally.”

So, like many, many movies — perhaps nearly all movies — this movie is about how beautiful women are. Meanwhile, we learn that the actresses were not as naked as they look. "We were wearing prostheses," one says, mysteriously.

"What's happened to humour? We're becoming American. Everyone gets so angry over everything."

Says Rupert Everett, who is openly gay, which I mention because he's also saying things like:

"Why do queens want to go and get married in churches? Obviously this crusty old pathetic, Anglican church – the most joke-ish church of all jokey churches – of course they don't want to have queens getting married. It's kind of understandable that they don't; they're crusty old calcified freaks. But why do we want to get married in churches? I don't understand that, myself, personally. I loathe heterosexual weddings; I would never go to a wedding in my life. I loathe the flowers, I loathe the fucking wedding dress, the little bridal tiara. It's grotesque. It's just hideous. The wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later. It's just a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster."

And:

"I can't think of anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads... For me, being gay was about wanting to do the opposite of the straight world, so I think that's where my problems in this particular area come from. For me, personally, the last thing I would like in the entire world would be to go through cocktailing my sperm with my boyfriend and finding some grim couple in Ohio who are gluten-free and who you pay $75,000 to have your baby. To me it feels absolutely hideous."

His memoir is called "Vanished Years."

Wouldn't it be cool if Andrew would openly explore what might be complex feelings about heterosexuals — especially women?

I said.

And he said...

IN THE COMMENTS: Lem said:

I'm at work now, so I can't do much.. look up Sully's treatment of Condi Rice and the women of the Bush WH.

There might be something there we can use.

(Damn. I should have taken the day off.)

I love the smell of an intertube fight early in the morning.

Okay, kids. Marshall the evidence. Comb through Sullivan's blog for evidence of misogyny. I'm in a frontpaging mood! I'll even correct your typos (as I did for dear, sweet Lem).

"Of all the debates Sullivan has been embroiled in, his collision with the gay left is the hardest to reconstruct..."

"... because the gay-rights debate has been transformed in the two decades since, not least by his own writing."

From a long article about Andrew Sullivan, a good recounting of this part of his story, which if you don't like Sullivan or understand why I read him, you need to know:

Yet Sullivan wrote the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry—and he was savaged by other gays. His talks were picketed by a group called the Lesbian Avengers, who waved signs with Sullivan’s head in the crosshairs of a gun. In gay bars he was denounced as a “collaborator” and physically attacked. He was anathemised by mainstream gay-rights organisations, who refused to engage with him. Why?

The Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein spoke for this tendency when he claimed that Sullivan was “promoting the bargain of assimilation. But this deal comes with a price. It requires gays to maintain the illusion that we’re just like straights… [But] we were interested in messing with the codes of sexuality.” By advocating marriage, Sullivan was opting into the very system gay people should destroy. He was just “Rush Limbaugh with monster pecs,” a self-hater who “would solve the faggot problem by urging gay men not to act like fags”.

Today, marriage is the Number One demand of the gay-rights movement. So why was Sullivan demonised for being the first to articulate it? He says now, haltingly: “It was the middle of a plague, we were all dying, and here’s this brash British guy who’s a Catholic and right-winger talking about something unfamiliar, that challenges their assumptions… [But] I was too narcissistic to realise that it wasn’t about me.”

If you happened to be gay back then, you were supposed to join the left and contribute to the enterprise of smashing conventions. Now, I think there still is an undercurrent of hating heterosexuals out there, and I often feel it coming from Andrew Sullivan, but I'm not going to elaborate on that now.

ADDED: Sullivan links, quotes my last sentence, and says:

Please do. You can't throw that out there with no back-up. I'm sorry if my perhaps uncharitable snark about her impending marriage offended her. Probably not my best moment. But the notion that I somehow "hate heterosexuals" is so nutty, not to say meaningless, that I don't know how to respond. I hate 97 percent of humanity? I hate my mum and dad and brother and sister? I hate my co-workers? Just because I think Sarah Palin is a whack-job makes me a heterophobe? Please, Ann. You don't campaign for twenty years to enter a heterosexual institution because you hate heterosexuals. You don't argue for social integration of gays and straights because you hate straights. You don't write a book urging that sexual orientation cease to be a defining social divide if you are a gay separatist. And it takes Goldstein-level dishonesty to say as much.

Well, Sullivan obviously knows what is giving me the feeling of heterophobia coming from him. His weird obsession with Sarah Palin's pregnancy and his reaction to my engagement. He never answered my question "what part of my experience deserves 'OMFG.'" He said:

And I'm all in favor of the right of straight bloggers to marry their straight commenters. It's a civil right. And more than I am currently allowed after living with my husband for almost five years.

And my response was:

This isn't about legal rights. This is about how individuals treat each other, and I want to know why you disrespected me. Explain why you linked to Pandagon's scurrilous OMFG, which, as you know, means "Oh, my fucking God." Is that the way you mean to speak to me? Is that the way you talk about God?

I never saw an answer to that. And as I said in this other post, I do not see how his reaction to me fits with his interest in extending marriage to gay couples:

I too think that Sullivan's reaction to me was detrimental to the cause of same-sex marriage (for which he has fought so admirably). Obviously, he had to have thought he was serving his cause by asserting that his 5-year relationship deserved more respect than mine, but he has a tragic blind spot. He was acting as though it's perfectly fine to trash someone else's relationship because it strikes you at a gut level as wrong. But that's how millions of people feel about his relationship! If we start arguing in that emotional mode, your cause is doomed.

I think Sullivan's reaction is probably complicated. He wants gay relationships to be accepted and given equal respect, and he seems angry that it hasn't happened yet. He struck out at me with derision and contempt and I felt the hostility. He couldn't explain it then, and he doesn't explain it now.

One can be outraged at an exclusion and still dislike the people who are included. For example, I would be outraged by a private club that barred women from membership but might simultaneously hate the men who actually were members. I'd want the right to join even if I didn't want to join, because I disapprove of the discrimination.

I know Sullivan takes strong positions and stands his ground, and I don't really expect him to do this, but I think it would be cool if he would openly explore what might be complex feelings about heterosexuals — especially women.

AND: "I'm sorry if my perhaps uncharitable snark about her impending marriage offended her" = a classic nonapology.