"It's different when we do it"

Here is the opening of a New York Times movie review:

EARLY in Dee Rees’s film “Pariah” it journeys into a Brooklyn strip club where scantily clad young black women gyrate to a sexy, foul-mouthed rap song. Lascivious customers leer, toss money and revel in their own unbridled lust.

Okay, so where do you think this is going? Do you think the New York Times is going to treat this as a good thing? You can sort of see how a liberal publication like the NYT could get behind "unbridled lust" but it's hard to see the paper treating the exploitation of young black women for the benefit of others' unbridled lust as a good thing. And yet the paper does just that.

What makes it okay for the NYT is who is doing the lusting:

But in “Pariah” the gaze of desire doesn’t emanate from predatory males but A.G.’s, that is aggressive lesbians, who, in a safe space where they enjoy the fellowship of peers, can be true to themselves.

You can tell they are full of crap by the linguistic trick the writer pulls here:

lesbian = aggressive
male = predatory

I suppose only males can be predatory in the same way that only white people can be racist. That's crap. One of the big unreported stories of our times is black-on-black racism. I think you could almost justify not reporting it on the grounds that reporting black-on-black racism might make whites feel that racism is okay. I think that's also crap but I mention it here to note that the NYT's attitude in the case of this movie is the exact opposite. Any male seeing this could reasonably conclude that because New-York-Times-approved black lesbians are doing it then it must be okay for me too.

The other big hint that this is a huge steaming heap of it, is the authenticity card played with the phrase "be true to themselves".  With those two tricks, the paper makes what would be deplorable in any other context seem like a good thing.

An ordinary strip club, after all, is also a "safe place" where men can go to enjoy the fellowship of their peers and be true to themselves. I can go to one and be a disgusting pig towards women in ways I would never dare to in public. Why is that suddenly okay because it's black lesbians doing it?

Except when applied to artifacts, "authenticity" is always just an excuse for questionable if not outright vile behaviour.