I recently removed all of Mario Batali's cookbooks from my bookshelf

For years my go to cookbooks were the Frugal Gourmet books, until the pedophilia allegations came out. Now they sit in a box in the attic. I won't even donate them.

Cosby was the worst for me. My brothers and I would listen to his records for hours when we were kids. I can still recite a lot of his routines from memory, but I no longer listen.

Woody Allen (personally, I have stopped wanting to watch his movies, and find Manhattan in particular troubling)

There are a couple of movies that I would still watch, but I don't seek them out, nor have I watched any of his more recent stuff.

Bowie

I don't begrudge Bowie. I have more problems with Jimmy Page. Still not sure where I fall on him.

Christie

Baby!sis was visiting a couple three weeks ago, and we got onto the topic of And Then There Were None whilst strolling along the Cliff Walk in Newport. I stopped her dead when I told her what the original title of the novel was. There is casual racism in a lot of older books (Chandler, Sayers, older Stout...) although perhaps not as blatant. It usually won't stop me from reading, but it does make me pause a bit.

Contrast that with, say, Alfred Hitchcock, whose work tends to be more critically acclaimed the more personal his work gets. Vertigo is rated as the greatest film of all time, but it's a really fucking creepy gross movie given what we know about Hitchcock now.

I love Vertigo exactly because it's Hitchcock baring his kinks on screen. It's very intense and weird and you wouldn't be able to tolerate it if you weren't sucked into Jimmy Stewart's nice-guy persona.

I have more problems with Jimmy Page. Still not sure where I fall on him.

His whole thing with Lori Maddox is hard to parse from a contemporary perspective.

I love Vertigo exactly because it's Hitchcock baring his kinks on screen.

Except that he would go on to more or less act them out in real life on Tippi Hedren.

Yeah, Tumblr does that too. I think there was stuff that was glossed over at the time because fandom deified him, and I think there's shit leveled at him now that's unfair.

Agreed. And some of the interpersonal crap around CC that he gets blamed for is a lot more complicated than Tumblr claims, which is frustrating as hell. I remember what was happening at the time!

Joss is interesting in that regard, because the quality of his work suffers in direct proportion to how much he gives in to his worst impulses. And not just because it's icky; it's like all quality control gets thrown out the window as he tries to shoehorn his baggage into the script.

THIS. The worst parts of AoU for me were the ones where his baggage was overwhelming and cringe-worthy.

His whole thing with Lori Maddox is hard to parse from a contemporary perspective.

There's a LOT of the 1970s that's hard to parse and, given her tendency to be a somewhat unreliable narrator (see [link] ), I am still not sure where I fall on that one. Or the 1970s in general.

Except to say that the past really is a foreign country and the sexual history of my circle back in our teens would raise modern eyebrows, yet isn't what most of us feel harmed by now. Even those of us who have been through a lot of therapy! (Exceptions would be people who were REALLY underage with people who were already in their 20s, probably.)

(Also...this sort of ties into a thing where I think we can retroactively damage ourselves unnecessarily, which is the sort of conversation to be had over serious cocktails.)

Polanski is a horror show. But Bitter Moon was very important to me in the days where I didn't know the specifics of the assault and just knew the common knowledge version of statutory rape. So.

Except that he would go on to more or less act them out in real life on Tippi Hedren.

That's why it's better to make weird movies than weird gestures!

I have to say that I am coming down on the side of Chris Hardwick, after those other girlfriends of his stated they did not see any of that kind of behavior from his, during many years with him. This is partially, I realize, due to very personal reasons. The woman who wrote the article cheated on Hardwick, and my ex-DH cheated on me and then told all of our friends about how my behavior had driven him to it. Her article had a feel of the same kind of self-justification to it. But I realize that is based on my own biases.

Allen, Cosby, Spacey and Weinstein can rot in Hell and I am not interested in giving them another of my hard-earned dollars.

I am a person who just can't with either Roald Dahl or Miguel Ferrar because of mini-series as a formative age.

Allen, Cosby and Weinstein can rot in hell. But I can't avoid all Miramax- it seems like there is a lot of it, and some of it is Enchanted April. I was never a big fan, though.

I am pretty sure I knew about Spacey through theatre gossip, so I can't quite write him off because I feel a little complicit that I continued watching him. But also was not a big fan. I think I liked him most in a really small part in Henry and June.

I feel personally affronted by Joss, but I think his work is good to talk about and I would be less annoyed with affairs with age appropriate women if he also hadn't said he was around all these needy young women he couldn't touch. Eew. I am around beautiful young men and women a lot, and I get total mom crushes, but no.

I feel semi conflicted about giving Bowie a pass, but it also doesn't seem like his behavior continued outside the context of the 70's nor after he was married to Iman or even after he was a real adult and not a young rock star. My feeling is that he might feel bad in retrospect, unlike the other guys whose apologies are startlingly blind seeming.

I have to say that I am coming down on the side of Chris Hardwick, after those other girlfriends of his stated they did not see any of that kind of behavior from his, during many years with him.

The ex who hit, bit, and choked me never did that with anyone else as far as I could tell. I've been told he'd never hurt a fly.

He did, however, hurt me.

After which, but only after which, I cheated on him. Because I was looking for a way to escape somehow and I was 20 and it fucked me up so badly that I somehow couldn't just leave so I needed someone to help me get out of there and one thing led to another. This is a not uncommon motivation for women when they've been abused, in my experience. (People cheat for all kinds of reasons. Some are less awful than others. Not that any are great, but I understand some of them on a visceral level.)

That many people who worked with Hardwick over the years weren't entirely shocked would lead me to believe her, even if my own experience didn't.

I can live a fulfilling life without ever seeing another Woody Allen or Roman Polanski movie or Bill Cosby media offering.

Joss pissed me off severely in AoU. And when he wasn't pissing me off, he bored me. All moral issues aside, that's hard to forgive, especially in the context of a superhero movie. Will the issues that have come to light about Joss keep me from watching his stuff? Eh, I've rewatched The Avengers since the news broke, so I guess not. And if I hear he's doing something that's really awesome in the future and it's not too hard to get ahold of (i.e., not on HBO), I might give it a shot. But if I have money and time for one movie next year, and I have the choice between Taika Waititi, Patty Jenkins, or Joss, Joss will not be making the cut. While I was really into Buffy and Angel I would have made a point to check out anything else Joss did. Now, it's easier for me to find a lot of really good artists making a lot of neat media, and given the choice between something made by someone with a bit of ick about him and something else made by someone without that ( as far as we know at the time), I'm going to have to hear something really awesome about the former property to chose it over the latter.

I think Joss is an entitled white dude and has very skeevy attitudes towards women. I'm trying to sort out whether I think there's a continuum of predatory behavior, and I think the answer is yes. It's not just "Weinstein" and "not-Weinstein." (To be crystal clear, no one here has said or implied this. I'm just working it through in my head.)

Given that there's a continuum, I think what Joss did is predatory. Does it rise to the level of Harvey Weinstein? No. But just because he didn't destroy women's acting careers doesn't mean it wasn't gross and predatory. Not legally actionable (as far as we know right now), but gross.

I still love the first Avengers movie to pieces. I still love BTVS and Angel. I rewatch them, and I'm fine with that, though there are some themes that make me cringe in retrospect.

Will I watch his new stuff? Eh, maybe, though that's honestly dependent on whether or not it seems like it might be my cup of tea. Whereas I will not watch any more Woody Allen movies ever. (And even though I recognized that Manhattan was skeevy as shit the very first time I watched it, I still really loved it. Not anymore. He and his movies can die in a fire.)