If you are at all interested in the way our culture treats women, the way the Mimi Alford book detailing her affair with John F Kennedy plays out in public will be a fascinating marker for what people really believe. And to grasp what will be behind this, we need to take a brief excursion into politics.
The Kennedy family have a powerful incentive to discredit Alford. JFK is the family gold mine and the rest of them have, for the most part, been basking in the glory flowing from it ever since. But it's not just them, there is a huge swath of the population whose entire political belief system is built around the Camelot mythology. This includes even people who don't think Kennedy is that important to them.
Don't believe me? Well consider hate. Do you worry about an atmosphere of hate and polarization that is poisoning our politics? Well, that comes from the Kennedy mythology. There is, in fact, absolutely no evidence that we live an era where there is unprecedented hatred and division that plagues our culture and politics. Racism, sexism and poverty still exist to be sure but there is probably no other time in history when these things weren't much worse than they are today.
We live in an extraordinarily blessed era. Every day we should be walking around feeling grateful to have it so good. Even now, somewhere in the midst of a giant recession, we live incredibly well. And yet there is a huge portion of our culture devoted to making you believe that everything is horrible and getting worse. There is a civic religion whose goal is to convince everyone that our culture and politics is poison.
And the Kennedy mythology is at the centre of that civic religion:
And the only way the true believers will be able to prevent that is to defuse the Alford threat. How can they do that? Well, character assassination is a favourite approach. Another is to try and brush it off as not news: nothing to see here folks, we've heard all this before. Watch for the New York Times review of the book as they tend to set the tone. Whatever they do will be emulated by most of the press.
What's interesting about Mimi from my perspective though is how familiar her story sounds. I mean, if you keep track of stories about how girls are out of control, how the changing sexual mores have left them vulnerable and confused in recent years, then you can't help but look at Mimi and think, "This was already happening fifty years ago!" And if it was already happening fifty years ago, then maybe that is the thing that isn't news. Maybe Mimi Alford did what she did and Kennedy got away with it because that is what is a lot of girls are like. Because that is what a lot of girls have always been like.
I'm not saying she wasn't exploited by Kennedy and his attendant pimps. She was. But that exploitation was possible because of certain truths about women's sexuality that we like to hide from ourselves even now. We still treat girls like they are from some special class of innocent-yet-morally-superior beings. An awful lot of "feminism" is really about maintaining that mythology that girls are helpless victims of constant rape and abuse. But only a tiny percentage of women are raped. Far more girls are like young Mimi and are exploited not by making them do what they don't want to do but rather by assisting them to do the thing they very much do want to do.
And now we get to see just how she gets treated for daring to tell us this.
The Kennedy family have a powerful incentive to discredit Alford. JFK is the family gold mine and the rest of them have, for the most part, been basking in the glory flowing from it ever since. But it's not just them, there is a huge swath of the population whose entire political belief system is built around the Camelot mythology. This includes even people who don't think Kennedy is that important to them.
Don't believe me? Well consider hate. Do you worry about an atmosphere of hate and polarization that is poisoning our politics? Well, that comes from the Kennedy mythology. There is, in fact, absolutely no evidence that we live an era where there is unprecedented hatred and division that plagues our culture and politics. Racism, sexism and poverty still exist to be sure but there is probably no other time in history when these things weren't much worse than they are today.
We live in an extraordinarily blessed era. Every day we should be walking around feeling grateful to have it so good. Even now, somewhere in the midst of a giant recession, we live incredibly well. And yet there is a huge portion of our culture devoted to making you believe that everything is horrible and getting worse. There is a civic religion whose goal is to convince everyone that our culture and politics is poison.
And the Kennedy mythology is at the centre of that civic religion:
I shouted out, Who killed the Kennedys?Yeah, JFK was like Jesus man and he died for our sins. For the true believers, those sins are embodied in this mythological hatred and division that plague us. The revelation that JFK was actually a horrid and vulgar little man who richly deserves our contempt threatens to bring down not just one political dynasty but an entire civic religion.
When after all, it was you and me.
And the only way the true believers will be able to prevent that is to defuse the Alford threat. How can they do that? Well, character assassination is a favourite approach. Another is to try and brush it off as not news: nothing to see here folks, we've heard all this before. Watch for the New York Times review of the book as they tend to set the tone. Whatever they do will be emulated by most of the press.
What's interesting about Mimi from my perspective though is how familiar her story sounds. I mean, if you keep track of stories about how girls are out of control, how the changing sexual mores have left them vulnerable and confused in recent years, then you can't help but look at Mimi and think, "This was already happening fifty years ago!" And if it was already happening fifty years ago, then maybe that is the thing that isn't news. Maybe Mimi Alford did what she did and Kennedy got away with it because that is what is a lot of girls are like. Because that is what a lot of girls have always been like.
I'm not saying she wasn't exploited by Kennedy and his attendant pimps. She was. But that exploitation was possible because of certain truths about women's sexuality that we like to hide from ourselves even now. We still treat girls like they are from some special class of innocent-yet-morally-superior beings. An awful lot of "feminism" is really about maintaining that mythology that girls are helpless victims of constant rape and abuse. But only a tiny percentage of women are raped. Far more girls are like young Mimi and are exploited not by making them do what they don't want to do but rather by assisting them to do the thing they very much do want to do.
And now we get to see just how she gets treated for daring to tell us this.
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