Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Jamaica without concessions

I was really there to hear Jamaica Kincaid.  Her prose awes me.  So powerful and fluid.  While there are few dialogues, her texts have a cliffhanger quality to them. Yet not a trace of sentimentality.  How does she do it?  From the moment she made her way up the stairs on the side of the stage, her whole person exuded pain.  That grand old dame, bent over by pain.  That interior pain that flows in her texts, is it the price paid to escape sentimentality? To produce such powerful prose?  She takes the microphone and tells of being up a lot of mischief when she was in school and always getting punished.  At the age of 7, she had to copy down books 1 and 2 of Milton's Paridise Lost.  "It ended up not being a punishment at all, I fell in love with its character, Lucy.  And later named a novel after her.  I'm going to read from book 2."


In the exchange of love between the reading performer and the audience, that's all she was prepared to give.  She came fully prepared to disappoint her lover's expectations.  If she had given us a reading of her work, we would have loved her all the more for it.  But she didn't come for our love. Her reading had a deep, beautiful stance to it.  It's a hard text to listen to, and the audience was fretting.  She left, standing straighter in her raw loneliness.
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, May 6, 2026

The age gap in Hollywood movies: not happy ever after

41 year difference between De Niro and his life partner Chen

The average age gap between the male and female leads in Hollywood is 15 years. I don't need to tell you which gender is the older one. And that's average, meaning that in some movies, the male lead is 20 years older or more.

At the end of the movie, it is usually expected that the male and female leads will live for ever happy together. Well, that "forever" is not going to last long. 

Women in the US live on average 5 years longer than men. That means our female protagonist is likely to spend 20 years crying over her love interest's grave. Women's roles peak around age 30, whereas men's roles peak at 46, often with men in their 40s or 50s paired with women in their 20s or early 30s.

It would make much more sense for the woman to be older than the man. By about 5 years. Then they could leave our planet at about the same time!

The gender gap in movies ends up creating a model of normality. People go to the movies and identify with the protagonists. Men will think: oh, I can have a partner that is 10 or 15 or 20 years younger than me. Women will think: oh, I won't get a partner that's my age, I'll have to be in a couple with an older man. 

Marriage fits right in the capitalist market model. De Niro is a celebrity hence his value is top, and he can "afford" a woman 41 year younger. If he were retired in Bayridge, he would be no match for her. Women are supposed to look young and fresh whereas it's ok for a man to look seasoned: he's wise and has made money. Hence at 40 or 50, their market value differs markedly in our society. There are couples were the woman is older, but they tend to be discreet or they get ridiculed or worse, see French President Macron and his older wife who were targeted by US media.>

In the US, 1% of married couples have an age gap of 20 years or more, the man being older. That's 600,000 couples where the woman will be a widow for an average of 25 years. And we're talking married couples. it's likely that it is higher when the man doesn't bother marrying his younger companion after a first marriage. 

And when they remarry, they remarry younger women. When women remarry, they remarry older men. 

And about 8% have an age gap of over 10 years, with the widow being alone for 15 years. 

These gaps are much higher when it comes to celebrities with some men parading with women 30 or 40 years younger. 

It's time Hollywood considers treating women as more than the sum of their looks, as full human beings that can be as attractive than a man when they're 40 years old. 









e

contributed by - - Arabella von Arx
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Mapuche, un fantasme masculin rêvé par Caryl Férey

D'accord, l'utilisation du langage dans Mapuche est originale et la trame du polar est pas mal ficelée.
Mais.
Ce roman est un fantasme masculin. Quand j'étais petite, avant de m'endormir, je m'imaginais galopant sur un cheval, j'allais sauver mes camarades de mon école en feu.
Ce livre "Mapuche" suit la même veine. Le détective tente de sauver un certain nombre de personnes et découvre une sombre histoire d'enlèvements d'enfants dans le monde politique de Buenos Aires. Ces adoptions d'enfants de prisonniers politiques forment une part de l'histoire argentine bien documentée, il y a des documentaires bien étayés qui racontent ce triste épisode de la dictature. Finalement, après quelques épisodes héroïques, il sauve surtout sa jeune amante qui est évidemment beaucoup moins habile que lui et moins raisonnante pour ne pas dire intelligente. Mais les trans dans l'histoire subissent des morts horribles, ce roman incluant des épisodes d'ultra violence (comme ceux de Jo Nesbø, d'ailleurs), avons-nous vraiment besoin d'éprouver ce ton dans notre monde déjà frappé de génocides et de terreur d'état?
Utiliser l'histoire de peuples autres, c'est aussi ce qu'on appelle de l'appropriation culturelle, dans le sens que Caryl Férey n'est pas argentin, il se rend dans divers pays et s'approprie leur histoire pour créer un polar. Pourtant, en France, il y a aussi de sordides histoires dans lesquelles il pourrait puiser matière pour ses livres: le massacre à Paris le 17 octobre 1961 de centaines de Nords Africains par exemple, ou plus récemment l'abus sexuel d'enfants dans les écoles.
Autre exemple de ce fantasme? Le détective a 47 ans, sa jeune amante 28. 19 ans de différence. Pour un homme vieillissant comme Férey, il s'offre à lui-même une justification plaisante d'essayer de séduire des jeunes femmes dans la vraie vie. On nous présente constamment dans les films des couples où l'homme est beaucoup plus âgé que la femme, comme si c'était une situation normale. Or dans la vie, les hommes meurent plus jeunes, il serait donc plus "normal" que les femmes aient des compagnons plus jeunes, plutôt que le contraire. Mais tant que ce seront des hommes qui réaliseront la majorité des films, des hommes qui racontent l'histoire, ce sera ce fantasme qui nous sera imposé et qui devient une norme dans la vraie vie. D'ailleurs, non seulement le livre est sexiste il est aussi âgiste./>
La jeune amante est d'origine Mapuche, un peuple indigène du Chili et de l'Argentine. En parlant d'appropriation culturelle, Férey n'hésite pas à imaginer une femme dont l'expérience du monde est diamétralement différente de la sienne. Le héros appelle sa jeune amante indigène: "Petit lynx". C'est un peu comme les animaux, les indigènes, peut-être? Elle est petite, oui, je suppose, si elle a 19 ans de moins que lui./>
Un homme mapuche dans un cimetière mapuche:
Mapuche, a male fantasy dreamed up by Caryl Férey Granted, the use of language in Mapuche is original, and the plot of the crime novel is pretty well put together. But. This novel is a male fantasy. When I was little, before falling asleep, I’d imagine myself galloping on a horse, to go and save the students from my school on fire. This book, Mapuche, follows the same vein. The detective tries to save a number of people and uncovers a dark story of child abductions in the political world of Buenos Aires. These adoptions of children of political prisoners are a well-documented part of Argentine history; there are well-researched documentaries that recount this sad episode of the dictatorship. In the end, after a few heroic episodes, he mainly saves his young lover, who is obviously much less skilled than he is and less level-headed, not to mention intelligent. But the trans characters in the story suffer horrific deaths; this novel includes episodes of extreme violence (much like those in Jo Nesbø’s works, for that matter). Do we really need to experience this tone in a world already plagued by genocide and state-sponsored terror? Using the history of other peoples is also what is known as cultural appropriation, in the sense that Caryl Férey is not Argentine; he travels to various countries and appropriates their history to create a crime novel. Yet in France, there are also sordid stories from which he could draw material for his books: The massacre in Paris on October 17, 1961, of hundreds of North Africans, for example, or more recently, the sexual abuse of children in schools. Another example of this male fantasy? The detective is 47, his young lover 28. A 19-year age gap. For an aging man like Férey, he offers himself a convenient justification for trying to seduce young women in real life. We are constantly presented with couples in films where the man is much older than the woman, as if this were a normal situation. Yet in real life, men die younger, so it would be more “normal” for women to have younger partners, rather than the other way around. But as long as men continue to make the majority of films—men who tell the story—it is this fantasy that will be imposed on us and that becomes the norm in real life. In fact, not only is the book sexist, it's also agist. The young lover is of Mapuche origin, an indigenous people of Chile and Argentina. Speaking of cultural appropriation, Férey doesn’t hesitate to imagine a woman whose experience of the world is diametrically different from his own. The hero calls his young indigenous lover “Little Lynx.” Are they a bit like animals, the indigenous people, perhaps? And she is indeed “little,” yes, I suppose, if she’s 19 years younger than him.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Newer Posts Older Posts Home
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)