The ugly truth about Hollywood glamour

It’s a nasty time for Hollywood glamour. The continuing revelations that began with reports of Harvey Weinstein’s predatory sexual behavior have already tarnished Awards Season, as winter is known in sunny l. a. . Misery and evil seem to lurk behind the happy red-carpet smiles.

After accompanying numerous articles on Weinstein’s abuses, the photos of Gwyneth Paltrow posing along side her Oscar for Shakespeare crazy in her demure pink dress will never look the same . They now have an ominous undertone. Is there slightly of a grimace in her due to Weinstein and Miramax? Is he groping her backside along side his unseen hand? At what cost were such movies produced?

Glamour is typically an illusion. It hides flaws, distractions, and energy — the face lift , the Spanx under the red carpet gown, the bruises on the action star’s stunt double, the countless audition rejections. (The old Scots’ word “glamour” originally denoted a literal spell that made people see things that weren’t there.)

Most of what’s hidden is just ordinary. When young fan Jane Wilkie toured RKO Studios in 1940, she was disillusioned to determine Rogers chewing gum. “Wrigley struck down an idol,” she recalled decades later. “It hadn’t occurred to me that movie stars chewed gum, wheezed with head colds, or used the rest room .” Even stars are only human.

Glamour’s illusion can also hide darker realities, concealing not merely the tedious and mundane but the horrific. Glamour may do quite disguise abuse. It can feed it.

The glamour of stardom draws aspiring actors to Hollywood, but it isn’t the only glamour the entertainment business offers. Unmentioned amid the recent revelations is what makes the role of movie, TV, or music impresario enticing to many men: the promise of easy sex with beautiful young women. “I always felt that i wont to be pursuing shared feelings,” Charlie Rose said in response to allegations of unwanted sexual advances and a propensity to parade nude before young female assistants. He may indeed have believed they didn’t mind. After all, as a famous reality-show host boasted, “When you’re a star they permit you to appear the hay . you'll do anything.”

Or take the recent l. a. Times article detailing sexual-misconduct allegations against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and Hollywood player Brett Ratner. Amid charges of coerced sex, the piece portrays their “playboy lifestyle” of all-night clubbing, “party pad” homes, and effortlessly available women. during a 2007 book, Simmons wrote that as a young film student Ratner “was willing to undertake to to anything to be of use. After he hung around slightly and located out that I liked models, then he made it his business to need me to every model’s apartment he could find.”

These are artistic milieus, where the bohemian ideal of free love reigns, providing a friendly environment for men who happily ignore its implicit inegalitarianism. “I came aged within the 60s and 70s” was Weinstein’s original excuse. the principles were different then. Peace, love, and understanding. If it feels good, do it. Only a prude would object. Never mind that she’s just not into you.

We’re now seeing what this version of glamour conceals. This sex isn’t free or effortless. It isn’t countercultural, modern, or liberal. There’s nothing enlightened or artistic about it. It’s gross and quite touch pathetic. And it’s as retrograde as Zeus’s many rapes, exacted from unwilling subjects who come to despise the predator, his accomplices, and, all too often, themselves.

Virginia Postrel is that the author of the power of Glamour: Longing and thus the Art of Visual Persuasion and a columnist for Bloomberg View and Reason magazine