Girls!

So I'm a heterosexual male and that strikes the fear of god into a lot of people, women especially.

I don't blame them. Not one bit.

One horribly sad realization is the number of people (ordinary people too, not just the female celebrities) who came out with the #MeToo hashtag. I've always been pretty naive. In the back of my mind I'm sure I realized somewhere that stalking and abuse and much worse can and does happen to women on a regular basis. But because “I would never do that” I guess I kind of minimized the issue. It helps I don't have to deal with it myself. I guess it's a bit like racism, I don't care whether somebody is black or not so I don't see what people of colour actually deal with.

Relationships are already a bit of a thorny matter. To open your heart and navigate that and try not to be overbearing yet also try not to seem completely disinterested... that's hard. And people try too much. I find relationships generally work out when it's a casual, fun thing without too many expectations.

Be yourself is cliche but it's cliche because it's true (as with most things), and the reason it's true (and this also applies to every other domain of life, it's not just relationships), is the fact that you really want to show your own personality so it's an honest transaction with the other person instead of “makeup” that you're overcompensating for. (And in general, like yourself! You're probably more likeable than your critical self realizes)

It's hard for a guy to approach a situation where they'd like to get closer to a girl but they also remember the long history of what women have gone through. It's easy to be awkward. And as a result it's easy for women to get creeped out. It's a situation that just sucks all around.

I think women could be a bit more understanding of that, but it's a tough ask. It's hard to disregard your experiences and think “this time it will be different”. I know. It's OUR job (men) to make women feel safe. But it is also true that sometimes we can be awkward and it's hard to separate the creep from someone who has good intentions.

As an aside this is also why I'm not too much a fan of Facebook (who is?). I asked somebody out and she said yes, and things ended up not working out for a variety of reasons. But one of the things that happened was my sending her a friend request (when I still felt Facebook was still relatively altruistic) and her declining it and it must have made me look like a stalker. I'd told my therapist about this and she said well, maybe it's the other person's fault, “because I have my profile set to private and you can't look me up, so she chose to make it public”. But guess what? I looked up my therapist's profile (trying to confirm my suspicions) and there it was. So yeah. They don't give a single fuck about privacy and yet because they've co-evolved with the internet (we never had a chance, in 2006 everything was new and they were founded then and it was a cleaner alternative to Myspace) we're used to social dynamics being the way Facebook has it.

Life has an interesting selection of characters. We tend to divide it into good people and bad people. Those who are “really together” (nod to Hitchhiker's Guide, of course, as one must) and those who just kind of... fail. Nobody is saying it's a sharp, black and white division, but we do tend to see successful people as successful and those who fall through the cracks as sort of, well, failures, of some description.

An interesting thing happened in 2018. Anthony Bourdain, chef, writer, television presenter, world traveler, took his own life. No, that's not the interesting part – that's horrible, the interesting bit is what transpired from all this.

The reaction to Bourdain's death was unanimous. There were many tears of sorrow. The public collectively said that we lost a great man, which I agree with. Many credited him with being their inspiration.

And they wondered why he would do such a thing. To kill himself when he seemed to have it all.

The immediate guess was of course, a longstanding battle with depression. The brain is simply broken, we say. We say that this is a mental health issue that has to be treated and that sometimes, some people can't fight the demons any longer. It's a brain chemistry thing, you know.

And the thing was, it's a plausible explanation. It does happen with certain people. Some people do have a chemical imbalance and they need to take meds to be normal. That's one reason.

Crucially to the theme of this blog post, however, there's another reason: Anthony Bourdain was – according to society's standards – a fucking bastard for most of his life. Or to be less pointed, a bit destitute. He was a drug addict and possibly an alcoholic. He wasn't too much of a criminal, or anything like that, but he certainly belonged to the margins of society. The reason why many were shocked at his death is that he committed the act when, again, he seemed to have it all, but he went through what he went through before he became famous by writing Kitchen Confidential, so that must mean something, doubly so: you escaped the darkness only to end it all in the light and the glory.

That was why people were surprised. But it's not irrational to claim that the demons of depression never really leave, and his demons finally caught up to him.

Enter Asia Argento.

A few weeks – days? – after his passing, a story surfaced. Anthony Bourdain's girlfriend was cheating on him with another man, some French film star or director, I forget, Hugo Clement. Stories of them on Instagram surfaced, and around about the same time, Bourdain stopped posting to his social media, and took his life shortly thereafter.

Argento was wearing a shirt saying “you know who you are” and giving the middle finger to the camera.

What's interesting about all this is that she was a figure in the #MeToo movement, a Twitter hashtag which women used to indicate that they had been abused by men – molested or raped or something of the sort, I'm unclear on some of the details – and several celebrities did it, and it really raised consciousness of how many horrible stories there are out there. Bourdain was impressed by her, and was smitten by her generally, very much besotten. This was the general war going on at the time with Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, where a few women brought forth stories that he had acted improperly. Bourdain was very attuned to the movement and very much against those kinds of predatory characters, and as mentioned all kinds of women have come out since then posting that hashtag, and it's a conversation starter, and hopefully the abuse doesn't happen in future.

But going back to the case of Bourdain, let's evaluate this. His girlfriend, who he was in love with, part of the #MeToo movement, was cheating on him. She's done this to other guys, as well. And Bourdain – though one can never be sure, but the evidence seems pretty conclusive – presumably killed himself out of a mixture of shame, grief, and humiliation.

And society wept for him. And here was an example of hypocrisy, someone (Argento) who claims liberal ideals while proceeding to just do whatever she wanted. And someone suffered for it.

Yet the person who suffered also had a sordid history of drug abuse and questionable behavior, found a new life at the age of 44, traveled the world, and became a comforting voice and presence to millions.

Is anyone blame-free? Are there any saints? Or are we all just fucked up in different ways?

Of course, I don't want to play any moral relativism games. Certain behaviors are wrong and we should call them out when we see them. Some are more toxic than others.

But it's interesting when we do see screwed up people. How many of them could become the next Bourdain, becoming an inspiration? Or when we look at someone, on the other hand, who appears to be respectable: could they become the next Asia Argento, seeming to be on the right side of history yet only doing things for her self gain?

Over the past few months I read Elton John's autobiography – again, very famous, much loved – and he spends essentially half the book talking about his substance abuse, selfish things he's done, violent mood swings. At any point he possibly could have gotten killed or bankrupt or – as he admits in the book – contracted AIDS, Elton John being a gay man and having unprotected sex throughout the 1980's, like Freddie Mercury did, who actually did get AIDS and die of the disease. Yet Elton is still here and Mercury is not (and Mercury never did the same things and was according to his friends a very nice person, proving that life isn't always fair).

John Lennon was also much loved, and wrote Imagine, and became a figure of the peace movement, and he and Yoko shared a deep love. His assassination in 1980 caused some real grief as well. Lennon is celebrated, and remembered.

And yet Lennon abused his women physically and (reportedly) treated Julian, his son, quite badly, in terms of neglect. Yoko banished him away in the early 1970's for reasons I don't remember. When he came back to Yoko I assume things were better, though there were rumours that around the time he died they were no longer together and were putting up a facade for the general public, or at least Yoko was; the story goes that a few days after his death, she moved in with her boyfriend.

So what do we make of all this? The scar marks on otherwise pristine pages? I don't know, but it's interesting. Counter examples exist as well, seemingly good people who in reality are quite bad (though if you've read up to this point the question will occur to you, “Are they much worse than the ones who are celebrated?”): Henry Kissinger, the war criminal, is quite celebrated, Mother Teresa had a saintly image yet glorified the condition of being poor. Bill Clinton is possibly a rapist and, while I do not like Trump and would have preferred a better president, Hillary has some skeletons in the proverbial closet as well. “Crooked Hillary” and “Lock Her Up” is pretty rich coming from a president who fills the swamp rather than drains it, but given her history? It's not entirely wrong. People voted for Trump because they were tired of the lies and business as usual politics and were disheartened by what they'd come to expect from politics.

And I'll just briefly mention Facebook: you'd expect them to care much more about privacy than they do, considering a) Zuckerberg did not start Facebook to meet women (in contrast to The Social Network movie), he was already dating Priscilla Chan at that time, b) Sheryl Sandberg is a women's rights advocate and you would expect her to take a strong privacy stance given the stalking of women that does occur and c) Peter Thiel sued Gawker because they ran a story about his homosexuality – bad enough, but he was also in Saudi Arabia when they did it. And it's a company that says over and over again that transparency and privacy are important... but they don't exactly carry that out.

And how about that Bell Let's Talk campaign that we have here in Canada when they can't even treat their own employees well? I digress.

This is all just to say that we should examine our own behavior and see if there's any hypocrisies there, but just generally, to be aware of what happens behind the curtain. And be curious, and learn, and never stop learning, and infuse more creativity into life rather than be in the cultural gutter. And try to be a good person.

But I also don't like things that end with a moralistic conclusion of “One must strive to do X.”

So I won't.

I just think it's an interesting situation we find ourselves in.