Quote of the Day

[Content Note: Sexual assault; objectification; misogyny.]

"He is dressing up crime as art."—Richard Morgan, in a terrific piece about Woody Allen for the Washington Post.

Morgan did something that, according to the staff in the rare-books wing at Princeton University's Firestone Library, he is the first person to do: Read all of Allen's "drafts and scribblings, his psychological and physical cutting-room floor that exists in the 56-box, 57-year personal archives he has been curating" there since 1980.

Of this endeavor, Morgan writes: "I'm the first person to read Allen's collection — the Woody Papers — from cover to cover, and from the very beginning to the very end, Allen, quite simply, drips with repetitious misogyny."

Contrary to what you might reasonably expect, he doesn't approach this subject as though he's the first one to the punch, in the way many men approach subjects like this one. Instead, Morgan made an effort to do something that no other commentator has done, by reading all of Allen's papers, and what he writes here then backs up what (mostly) women, including his victims, have been saying about Allen for a very long time.

I like Morgan's tone here. I appreciate it. There is something nice (for lack of a better word) to me about his clearly being disgusted by all the decades of misogyny he encountered.

It's terribly rare to read a man write on this subject with such obvious contempt.

Morgan, who is himself a survivor of parental abuse and sexual assault, is certainly aware that he will be taken seriously and heard in a way that women have not been on the subject of Woody Allen's abuse. Given that frustrating reality, I am relieved he's not leaving any room for mistaking his position as anything other than one of absolute condemnation.

He is dressing up crime as art.

Yes. He is. And minimizing his crimes by turning them into art, which is cynically defended by seeing him only as the artist and never the criminal.