Charles Bukowski: I’ll let Charles speak for himself “… don’t wait for a good woman. She doesn’t exist. There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts. The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.”
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/13275.Charles_Bukowski
Roald Dahl: James and the Giant Peach. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Matilda. Roald Dahl is a childhood icon to so many, which makes discovering a change to the first edition of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all the more unsettling. In the first published edition, the Oompa-Loompas were not Oompa-Loompas at all, but “a tribe plucked from the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.” Dahl offhandedly states “Wonka keeps them in the factory, where they have replaced the sacked white workers. Wonka’s little slaves are delighted with their new circumstances.” In early manuscripts, a young black Charlie is also helped by Wonka into a lifesize chocolate mold of a boy, forgotten inside, covered in chocolate and left unseen or unheard until he saves Wonka’s wife from a robbery and is rewarded with his freedom and a chocolate shop. Finally, in his Revolting Rhymes, Dahl labels Cinderella, “a dirty slut.”
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ENB82ZKq2os/V2kPQzqEyMI/AAAAAAAAVv8/YsrMMzTXS…
Rudyard Kipling: Read “The White Man’s Burden.” Enough Said.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rudyard-Kipling
T. S. Eliot: The publisher, playwright, essayist and winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature stated, “What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” His poem “Burbank with a Baedeker,” makes his anti-Semitic views blatantly clear: “The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs. …”
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18540.T_S_Eliot
Miles Davis: Frances Davis, Davis’s first wife, openly stated, “I actually left running for my life—more than once.” In the memoir Miles, Davis admits to the abuse of nearly all his wives, though reviewers, myself included, weren’t’t convinced by the apologies. The Atlantic perhaps said it best:
‘His treatment of women is contemptible: he isn’t averse to slugging them to keep them in line. It isn’t bad enough that he talks with unconvincing remorse of hitting his own women; the story intended to illustrate Billy Eckstine’s tough-guy credentials [wherein] Eckstine slapping a would-be girlfriend while Davis looks on approvingly.’
Whatever Davis’s contributions to music, he was abominable to his romantic partners and women in general.
https://www.amazon.com/Miles-Davis/dp/1451643187
Ezra Pound: Pound publicly accused Jewish money-lenders, or his own strange conspiratorial recasting of legitimate business, as the primary causes of World Wars I and II. Later, Pound let his true colors show on Italian Radio when he said, “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew,” and “The big Jew has rotted every nation he has wormed into.” Pound was later imprisoned for treason, and was acquitted on account of mental illness, landing him in the New Jersey St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in lieu of jail time. From St. Elizabeth’s he penned letters claiming a newfound tolerance: “I am ‘of course’ not anti-Semitic.” But as historians have noted, the “of course” and his unnecessary air quotation of it, makes for a reluctant and more likely sarcastic apology.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/30055.Ezra_Pound
Jack London: “I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist…The history of civilization is a history of wandering—a wandering, sword in hand, of strong breeds, clearing away and hewing down the weak and less fit. The dominant races are robbing and slaying in every corner of the globe… [because] they were unable to stand the concentration and sustained effort which pre-eminently mark the races best fitted to live in this world.” Those not “best fitted to live in this world” were written out in the 1910 short story “The Unparalleled Invasion,” in which the United States wages biological warfare on China, then invades and colonizes. The story reports this is “the only possible solution to the Chinese problem” and London’s demeaning and stereotypical representations of non-white peoples details his white supremacist ideas.
Ernest Hemingway: Many know vaguely of the author’s misogyny, particularly the line of his short story “Soldier’s Home,” where the protagonist famously asserts that he prefers French and German girls because “there was not all this talking.” However, Hemingway truly makes his opinions clear in 1943 with this letter to editor Maxwell Perkins concerning the relationship of
Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A woman ruined Scott. … But why couldn’t he have told her to go to hell? Because she was sick. It’s being sick makes them act so bloody awful usually and it’s because they’re sick you can’t treat them as you should. The first great gift for a man is to be healthy and the second, maybe greater, is to fall [in] with healthy women. You can always trade one healthy woman in on another. But start with a sick woman and see where you get. … Anyway let’s leave the subject. If you leave a woman, though, you probably ought to shoot her. It would save enough trouble in the end, even if they hanged you.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1455.Ernest_Hemingway https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1954/hemingway/biographical/
Martin Kilmer (Art Historian): In his 1993 book “Greek Erotica on Attic Red-Figure Vases,” Kilmer describes depictions of rape on ancient vases. First a cup by the Pedieus painter — an artist somewhere in the 500s BCE whose identity is otherwise unknown — wherein men seemingly force women to perform oral sex. Kilmer writes, “we could as easily understand the gesture as meant primarily to provide the counter-force necessary to get the penis into her mouth and to help establishing the rhythm.” In another description of Pedieus painted pottery, the male subject wields a sandal like a paddle while penetrating a woman from behind, but Kilmer argues “the sandal is not a formidable weapon… it is probably the bedroom slipper.”
[alternate image was chosen over original due to highly graphic content] http://www.greek-islands.us/ancient-greece/sex-in-ancient-greece/
Pablo Picasso: The man himself remarked that his work could be categorized into seven distinct styles: Fernande Olivier, Eva Gouel, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque, openly commodifying each of the seven women in his life. Regardless of any romantic feelings for these women, all were notably younger than Picasso. The most damning is Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he met at 46 whilst still married to Khokhlova when Walter was only 17. Unfortunately, Picasso’s children greatly suffered as well. Marina Picasso, one of his granddaughters, revealed in her memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather: “No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius… He needed blood to sign each of his paintings: my father’s blood, my brother’s, my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and mine. He needed the blood of those who loved him.” Throughout his career, Picasso relied on a manipulation of the female body, and often of female consent. Featured below are two examples: a French child sex worker who could not viably consent to her own portraiture in “Fillette a la corbeille fleurie” and the self-explanatory “Minotaur Caressing A Sleeping Woman”
Augeste Rodin: Rodin met Camille Claudel when he was 43 and she was 19. During their seven-year affair, Rodin refused to leave his lifelong partner Rose Beuret. Beuret acted as Rodin’s model and, due to lack of education, was unwelcome in Rodin’s social circle. Claudel rose as a promising student of Rodin’s studio, but throughout the affair are dramatic accounts from friends and family of both parties detailing feuds, promises of marriage, and at least one abortion (to which Claudel’s consent is still very unclear). Claudel ended their relationship in 1892 directly following an abortion. Claudel was unable to acquire the funding and social clout to produce her avant-garde sculptures without Rodin’s backing. Claudel could either surrender her ideas completely to Rodin or collaborate with him, which nearly always led to him standing in the limelight, eclipsing her with his lionized persona. Several of Rodin’s works have evidence of two pairs of hands on them despite sole accreditation to Rodin. Claudel ran away from Rodin’s studio in the late 1890s into a penniless and isolated life, before thirty years in an insane asylum in which she believed Rodin was stalking her, plotting her death, and intending to steal any art she produced. After departing the studio, she never drew or sculpted again. Rodin never visited and openly spread rumors that she was simply an obsessed, scorned student.
https://www.theartstory.org/artist-rodin-auguste.htm
Jackson Pollock: Pollock’s statement “I’d be dead without her,” implicating his wife Lee Krasner, makes it very clear the amount of emotional labor he expected from his wife. Add a few decades of alcoholism, the chronic expectation of her facilitation of his career as an agent, publicist, manager, rehab nurse, muse, and wife… and suddenly his paintings are less exciting. Despite seeking Krasner’s artistic expertise and approval on all his paintings, requiring her connections with galleries and museums, Pollock labeled her as “a woman-painter” multiple times and never attempted to help advance or publicize his wife’s own work. She worked in the studio just beside his, but as she stated: “I’m always going to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock—that’s a matter of fact—but I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, after Pollock.” Notably, in the final year of his life, Pollock, then 44, began seeing Klinger, then 26, and the two were together in the drunken crash that ended his life, Edith Metzger’s and seriously injured Klinger.
https://theconversation.com/heres-looking-at-blue-poles-by-jackson-pollock-51655
The Saga of Woody Allen: To make a long story short of Woody Allen’s many sins in his work and the two in his personal life, the most egregious are the allegations of sexual assault by Dylan Farrow, daughter of his former partner Mia Farrow, and his very unconventional relationship with Soon-Yi. Allen, often labeled ‘the most famous director in the world’, was married to Mia Farrow (who may or may not warrant her own section in this list). Dylan Farrow raised allegations against Allen in August 1992 for sexual abuse and inappropriate conduct throughout her childhood. Farrow and Allen had split in January of that year after Farrow discovered Allen’s nude photos of Soon-Yi and their affair. Allen blamed his ex-wife for the allegations of “an unconscionable and gruesomely damaging manipulation of innocent children for vindictive and self-serving motives.” Although the investigation by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven hospital retained that Allen had not assaulted Dylan, when Allen attempted to sue for sole custody of his and Mia’s adopted children, in addition to his biological son Ronan, the New Haven team refused to testify on Allen’s behalf and destroyed the original notes of the investigation, supplying only a retroactive deposition. The State Prosecutor of Connecticut insisted that while there was “probable cause” to pursue Mr. Allen, no charges would be pressed in order to “save Dylan the trauma of a court appearance.”
Allen’s only biological child, Pulitzer Prize Winning Ronan Farrow, broke the Harvey Weinstein story after being fired from NBC for pursuing the lead. He has spoken out in vehement support of Dylan and against Allen. Just this week, Allen responded to rumors that Ronan may not be his biological son in the aforementioned New York Magazine article by saying: “I think he is, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it. I paid child support for him for his whole childhood, and I don’t think that’s very fair if he’s not mine.”
In regards to Ronan’s mother and his ex-wife, Allen added, “she represented herself as a faithful person, and she certainly wasn’t. Whether she actually became pregnant in an affair she had … ” but never offered any evidence or even anecdotal suspicions as to why he thinks this.
Last but certainly not least: Mia Farrow’s adopted child Soon-Yi was approximately 17 when Woody Allen was still her legal guardian, married to her adoptive mother and their relationship began. Soon-Yi describes first hating Allen on account of his love for her “horrible mother,” believing him to be equally as horrible. In 1990, Allen began inviting Soon-Yi to basketball games in an attempt to “alleviate her shyness.” In 1991, she was asked to leave a summer camp on account of too many calls, and inappropriate conduct with a “Mr. Simon,” who Allen later admitted was himself in a 1992 New York Magazine feature. However, Allen maintains that he and Soon-Yi did not begin sleeping together or begin a particularly romantic relationship until December 1991. The two married in December of 1992 after Allen’s public declaration of love and several news features centered on the happy couple’s convoluted courtship. In his 1979 movie Manhattan, Allen notably plays a 42-year-old divorced television writer dating a 17-year-old girl, probably based off his relationship with actress Stacey Nelkin who later appeared in his 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway. Nelkin, then 17, and Allen, then 42, met in 1977 during the filming of Annie Hall, from which her scenes were cut. Allen has admitted the two dated following filming, when Nelkin was 17 and of age to consent, but denies the relationship between Nelkin and the Manhattan’s subject matter. The film made $39.9 million in the box office, won Allen the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. When Allen’s sexual assault allegations and affair with his stepdaughter hit the press, none of these were revoked despite the parallel subject matter.
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/1/18/16905272/woody-allen-career-over-molestation-allegations