Casting call

Charles Manson before he was cool

Mark Steyn writes,

Failed singer/songwriter Charles Manson died yesterday, in prison at the age of 83. Showbiz-wise, he couldn't get arrested ...until he got arrested. But slaughtering Sharon Tate et al gave him enormous pop culture influence: Marilyn Manson and Spahn Ranch are among the performers who took their stage names from him and his cult. The BBC calculated a few years back that there are over 70 European bands who play his "songs". Back in the Nineties, I was with Martin Charnin, lyricist of Annie, who'd heard a rumor that Manson was about to release, from his gaol cell, a Christmas album. "Slay Ride?" I suggested.

But, as I remarked glumly on "Fox & Friends" the other morning, the big bucks are when you do the joke for real. The left's glamorization of violence is a cliché because it's real - because all over the western world dweeby, spindly, trustie-fundie varsity youth who couldn't shoot up a liquor store or cut it in MS-13 instead get turned on by political violence. As upper-middle-class suburban cheerleader Bernadine Dohrn crowed to a crowd of 400 "activists" about three months after the Manson murders:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the pig Tate's stomach! Wild!

The crowd then adopted a fork-style hand gesture as a symbol of solidarity.

Oh, but surely Miss Dohrn was only a misguided child ...pushing thirty. Or a decade older than the young men who liberated Europe two years after she was born.

Miss Dohrn retired a couple of years ago as a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Her husband is Bill Ayers, mentor to and patron of the 44th President of the United States.

~Speaking of degrees of separation, "the pig Tate" (in Professor Dohrn's words) was the wife of Roman Polanski. The stomach her killers "shoved a fork into" was the belly of a woman two weeks away from giving birth. If one seeks mitigating factors for the full-throated support Hollywood gave Polanski in his subsequent incarnation as child rapist, the loss he suffered that night in 1969 was profound and grievous. One cannot plead the same for the now daily churn from Hollywood's soiled and sagging "casting couch". Polanski was a supposed "father figure" to one of today's biggest directors, Brett Ratner:

Keri Claussen Khalighi was a 17-year-old fashion model from a farm town in Nebraska when she met Brett Ratner and Russell Simmons at a casting call.

Ratner was an up-and-coming music video director and a protege of Simmons, the Def Jam Recordings mogul. They took Khalighi to dinner one night in 1991 at Mr. Chow in New York, and then back to Simmons' apartment to show her a music video they'd been working on.

Quickly, Simmons began making aggressive sexual advances, yanking off her clothes, Khalighi said.

"I looked over at Brett and said 'help me' and I'll never forget the look on his face," she recalled. "In that moment, the realization fell on me that they were in it together."

Khalighi said that Simmons, who was then about twice her age, tried to force her to have intercourse. "I fought it wildly," she said. He eventually relented and coerced her to perform oral sex, she alleged. "I guess I just acquiesced."

Ratner, meanwhile, "just sat there and watched," she said.

Feeling "disgusting," Khalighi said she went to take a shower. Minutes later, she alleged, Simmons walked up behind her in the shower and briefly penetrated her without her consent. She said she jerked away, then he left. "It hurt so much."

She was just seventeen. But at least Roy Moore never called up her mother to ask if he could meet her at the shopping mall for a chocolate malt.

Read more here.

"I am nobody"

Evolutionary female adaptations

Kevin Williamson writes:

Charles Manson is a penniless prisoner serving a life sentence at the Corcoran State Prison in California, his death sentence having been automatically commuted thanks to the state supreme court’s suspension of the death penalty. The 80-year-old man, who is reasonably fit for a prisoner of his age but does have a swastika carved into his forehead, has just been issued a marriage license to wed Afton Elaine “Star” Burton, 26, an attractive young woman from Illinois who has been corresponding with Manson since she was 17, and who moved to California at 19 to be nearer to him. Manson is not permitted conjugal visits, but, if the couple is so inclined, the state of California will in its benevolence permit a clergyman or magistrate of their choosing to officiate at a prison wedding, which up to ten guests may attend.

Read more of Kevin's thoughts here.

Days of Broken Arrows writes a short history of Manson:

Manson:

Son of a prostitute.
No father.
Awful childhood.
Barely literate.
5’2″ tall.
Spent most of his youth in detention centers.
When he was finally released as an adult, he begged to stay inside, worrying he could not handle life on the outside.
With a few years he had harems of women.
Held orgies.
Orgies were so great that Beach Boy Dennis Wilson invited them to move in.
Dennis Wilson was a major Alpha Male rock star of the ’60s.
Manson then order his women to kill.
They were so devoted that they did.
His women were not ugly losers — some were former cheerleaders.

Say what you will about the guy, but he had an innate Alpha quality. Shame it was put to such bad use. Guys who whine they can’t get women should think about his life and how he managed to not only get women to sleep with him but basically make them servants to his will. He had some serious charisma.

I’m not surprised at the wife who is a fraction of his age. I’d be surprised if he didn’t have groupies.

F. Roger Devlin writes:

The very first thing contemporary dating gurus teach men is not to be a “nice guy.” Nor is this aversion to “niceness” exclusive to feminine psychology: even men understand the pejorative connotations of the word innocuous.

Perhaps more important than piling up more examples to attest the phenomenon is giving a little thought to why female masochism occurs. Like other sex traits, it is an evolutionary adaptation. I am going to go way out on a limb and suggest that early hominid males may not have been quite so delicate as Tom Fleming, who becomes ill at the very thought of a woman being struck. African men are, by all accounts, pretty quick with their fists to this day. Gallantry is an achievement of civilization, not a part of our primitive nature.

Now, females in our “environment of evolutionary adaptation” were dependent on males for mating, protection, and access to resources. These males were bigger and stronger than females and could easily hurt them if angered or displeased. If our female ancestors had been delicate snowflakes unable to endure life with such brutes, we would not be here today. In other words, women adapted to male brutality, including occasional violence, learning how to get through or around it.

Think for a moment, men, how you would learn to behave if you were dependent for survival on an unpredictable and often violent creature larger and stronger than yourself. You would learn not simply to take what you wanted. You would learn to act when his back is turned, to use indirection, deception, manipulation. You would learn to conceal your true thoughts and keep Big Boy confused as to your true intentions. You would, in short, learn to act like a woman.

The battle of the sexes is a contest of force vs. cunning. Yes, civilized men learn to control their aggressive impulses and not beat women up every time they feel irritation with them. In the modern West, men have largely renounced the use of their natural weapon for controlling women, i.e., force. Have women renounced the use of their own weapons against men? Certainly we cannot expect women to shed millennial evolutionary adaptations automatically the instant men learn to behave.

Women’s basic strategy during courtship is still to keep suitors confused. Their primary method of getting what they want is still the indirect route through influencing their men. When they express aggression, it still usually takes the form of passive aggression. And they are still both more frequent and more effective liars than men.

To judge by self-help literature aimed at women, most conceive the task of finding a mate as one of figuring out “how to flatter, tease, dupe, and otherwise manipulate a man into marriage” (Rhoads, p. 120). Does it never occur to women that if they really were loyal, sincere, and feminine, men might not need to be duped into marrying them?

While I am not holding my breath for feminism to demand an end to feminine wiles, I think it possible for women to overcome the uglier side of their nature just as men learn to control their temper and instinct for aggression.

In short, I would be more inclined to sympathize with all the campaigns opposing “violence against women” if they were coupled with their logical counterpart: opposing “fraud against men.”

Read more here.