[Trigger warning for vitriolic misogyny.]
"You're a fucking fake. You're a fucking sham. You don't know what the fuck it means to make a man happy. You didn't make me fucking happy. I couldn't make you happy with the best I did for anybody, ever! Ever! You fucking glum cunt! You didn't fucking crack a smile with the tree ceremony up there—nothing! What the fuck do I have to do?! And remember whose fucking roof you're under! You ingrate bitch!"—Mel Gibson, in yet another newly-released recording of his incensed rantings at his former partner, Oksana Grigorieva.
What I find utterly fascinating about these tapes is how they're essentially the end game of an exorbitantly privileged white, straight, cis, able-bodied, Western, Christian, wealthy, famous male person who feels entitled to have a woman behave how he goddamn wants her to behave, and utterly loses his fucking shit because she isn't complying. In every new tape, we hear evidence of the stereotypes with which he's been indoctrinated, including the ownership he believes he has over women.
What is the above quote if not an exaggerated version of the man who exhorts a woman to "Smile!" in a grocery store, and gets miffed if she doesn't immediately brighten on command? How dare you not be happy in my presence? It's all the same shit.
People are talking about Gibson as if he's gone off the rails, but what they should be talking about is how this is the inevitable and superbly ugly result of unfettered—and unexamined—privilege. He didn't go off the rails; he took the train all the way to the end of the line. And it's scary there.
"Fucking Glum Cunt" is so the name of my band, btw.
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