by Dr. Susan Block.

An author and a dominatrix grace my sweet 16^th Bedside Chat of the Coronapocalypse, but not just any author and not just any Domme.

The brilliant JoAnn Wypijewski joins us for a stimulating discussion of her remarkable new book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life, that anyone who cares about sexuality and society should read right now.

Then the stunning, stylish and rather sadistic Mistress Courtney zooms in from London to deliver some wicked whipping, shackling, sensuous foot teasing and FemDom philosophy that could teach #MeToo a thing or two about how to put naughty men in their “proper” place.

Mistress Courtney, JoAnn Wypijewski, Sunshine & Me.

Together these ladies, along with the bonobos, help me to open the doors and windows of the Church of #MeToo, airing out the sex-panicked sanctuary with a fresh breeze of insight, passion and mind-blowing sexual revelation.

Roger Stone Unleashed! Free Chelsea & Julian!

Inspired by FDR’s Fireside Chats, my Bedside Chats aim to inform, nurture, inspire and entertain in similarly scary times.

We start with a shout-out to our beloved Bonobo Ana, currently in the hospital. No, it’s not COVID, thank Goddess. She just had some serious surgery and she’s doing astonishingly well.

Getting Corny with Ana & Miguel. Photo: Harry Sapien

Ana Muy Fuerte! We love you!

Then we move onto a little news. The gnarly, nepotistic Narcissist-in-Chief has commuted the prison sentence of his old lover—I mean, friend—of over three decades, Roger Stone.

This has induced much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth on the right and left. After all, even disgraced President “Tricky Dick” Nixon—whose sneering face is tattooed, with revolting affection, between Stone’s shoulder blades—didn’t try to pull off a trick like this.

 Nixon didn’t give Presidential clemency to the convicted criminals who did his dirty work. But the Trumpus has done just that for the noxious, obnoxious Roger Stone with nary a concern for his integrity since at this point, 1) everyone knows he doesn’t have any integrity, 2) the people who are upset about Stone already despise tRump, 3) his base either doesn’t care or are “energized,” 4) he yearns desperately for Stone’s notorious dirty tricks and silver-tongued flattery to fluff up his flaccid campaign.

Preternaturally Annoying Swinger, & Fascist Jackboot-Licking Gadfly, Roger Stone.

Roger Stone is a lying, preening, fascist jackboot-licking embarrassment to fellow swingers, kinksters, cuckolds and big hat lovers everywhere. I elaborate on this in greater detail in “Roger Stoned and Swinging.”

However, his crimes of lying, threats and obstruction, though vile, are not violent. So, I have no problem with Agent Orange commuting Stone’s sentence if—and this is a HUGE if—we also release ALL nonviolent prisoners from America’s bloated, outrageously unfair, COVID-infected Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).

Let’s start with Chelsea Manning! She exposed violent crimes of the US Military; she didn’t commit any violent crimes. Send her home with a damn ankle bracelet, if you want to spy on her.

And free Julian Assange! Who are we as a people if we let this publisher—who simply published the documents of whistleblowers like Chelsea—die in jail?

Prison is a long-term chokehold. It should be reserved only for the most physically dangerous humans among us.

The Supremes Go Bonobos! How About #MeToo?

In the good news department: The U.S. Supreme Court’s mostly conservative judges chosen by right-wing Presidents are making some great progressive pro-LGBTQ, pro-Dreamers, anti-Trump, pro-Native American and pro-Female rulings.

Hey, hey, it’s the Bonobo Way.

Supreme Court of Bonoboville. Photo: Unscene Abe

Why is The Bonobo Way of female empowerment and male well-being so important for us to understand, especially concerning the #MeToo movement and changing attitudes towards sex?

Ah, sex….

If you recall, back in the fall of 2017, the sweet pussies of the #MeToo “Reckoning” pounced like tigresses on powerful men with grabby hands, many of whom were fired or publicly disgraced for their sins of sex and power and, for the most part, rightfully so.

Meowwww! These pussies have claws.

Sadly, #MeToo did not bring down the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief, despite him being accused of sexual assault by over 25 women.

This is one reason why I ritualistically whip our tRump effigy’s pink furry balls and tiny mushroom peepee every Saturday night. This time, we have him under gag order with a mask since finally, the Anti-Masker-in-Chief wore one publicly.

And really, it’s such a pleasure and a relief to see that big mouth covered up.

Bonobos are the perfect female empowerment Great Ape paradigm, proving that true “femocracy” is not just a crazy feminist fantasy, but a real, viable way of life

Even though #MeToo never brought down Trumpty Dumpty, it has been a powerful, rather bonoboësque movement for female empowerment throughout the world.

Bonobos are the perfect female empowerment Great Ape paradigm, proving that true “femocracy” is not just a crazy feminist fantasy, but a real, viable way of life, practiced successfully for many millennia by humanity’s closest genetic cousins, the bonobo apes, and maybe even by our prehistoric hunter/gatherer human ancestors.

Like the #MeToo movement, bonobo female solidarity supports female empowerment among bonobos, and one reason for that strong sense of sisterhood is… (wait for it) SEX.

That is, bonobo females have sex with each other, at least as often as they do it with guys. I’m not saying we humans need to have more gal/gal sex (though that’s not a bad idea). I am saying that bonobos show us that being “gay” or bisexual, is as natural and good for the individual and the community as being “straight.”

They’re also pretty polyamorous, kind of like Will and Jada Pinkett Smith with August Alsina, but without the Red Table Drama.

And there’s another key element to the Bonobo Way that the #MeToo movement seems to be missing, and that is male well-neing. I call it #MeToo+. One vital reason rape is relatively rare and murder is non-existent among bonobos is that bonobo males get laid… a LOT.

This is partly because the females often aggressively pursue sex—maybe because they don’t get slut-shamed for it. Horny bonobo males also can have sex with each other (remember, they’re all bi or pansexual). There are no incels in bonobo society. This erotic abundance cools them out, lowering bonobo male hormonal levels of what human culture understands as “toxic masculinity” and elevating their aptitude for love.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it than getting laid. Bonobos exhibit a deep sense of inclusivity, high levels of empathy, many expressions of affection, openness toward strangers, a tendency to reconcile and forgive transgressions after punishment is dispensed (usually by the older females), generosity with food, sharing and caring about even the naughtiest of males.

Whacking the Presidunce for his many Crimes of the Week. Photo: Unscene Abe

I’ve long felt that to keep #MeToo viable, we ought to factor this sense of “male well-being” into the female empowerment equation, like the bonobos do.

But how do we do that as humans? Well, it’s complicated…

So, I explore that question and much more with two great guests, an author and a dominatrix.

We get to the meat of the matter with our literary guest, giving us a lot to chew on, followed by a delicious dessert of kinky eye candy with our FemDom guest. So it’s a full meal of serious discussion and sexy fun!

JoAnn Wypijewski: Behind the #MeToo Headlines

EXCERPTS FROM THIS JOURNAL APPEAR ON COUNTERPUNCH

We start with the wise, scholarly and very sapiosexual JoAnn Wypijewski, veteran journalist, writer and editor Zooming in to join us from her stacked library in New York City.

JoAnn pulls up to Bonoboville in her 1963 Valiant convertible. Photo: Author

A former editor at The Nation, now on the editorial committee of the New Left Review, co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair and Kevin Alexander Gray of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, published in 2014 (the early years of Black Lives Matter), JoAnn writes for The Nation, New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Mother Jones and Harper’s, as well CounterPunch, where I write too, and which is how, one dark and steamy night in 2015, she found me.

Vrooming up to the curb in her too-cool-for-school 1963 Valiant convertible, she won the hearts of Bonoboville upon arrival.

We all had ourselves a very good time just hanging out by the car and at the old Bonoboville bar, having a car-side chat, followed by a bar-side chat and then back to that cool car again, drinking and chatting about sex, cars, politics and bonobos.

In the middle of our chat, a female friend came in from a night out, plopped down on a barstool and mused, “I think I was raped.” Describing what happened that night, she recalled that she agreed to have sex, even though deep inside, she didn’t really want to. She wasn’t physically attracted to the guy, but she was interested in what he could do for her career. She never pushed him away, said “no” or asked him to “stop,” but she hoped her unarticulated revulsion would persuade the man to stop the sex and, ideally, resume their delightful conversation about how he could help her attain stardom.

Dumb Dude didn’t take the hint. Since she never tried to stop him or even said “no,” she somewhat reluctantly concluded that she wasn’t raped, but had made the common mistake of agreeing to have lousy sex in exchange for getting professional help which she never really received.

Nothing wrong with Quid Pro Quo sex (it’s the basis for most sex work), but get paid upfront, Grrl!

Still, we empathized with her regret and, though this was a good two years before #MeToo emerged, we talked about the changing, sometimes confusing attitudes toward and even definitions of “rape,” “sexual assault,” “sexual harassment” and other problems, “sins” and peccadillos that night.

What a pleasure to chat with JoAnn who has devoted so much of her venerable career in journalism to investigating and often championing human sexuality in our erotophobic culture. 

Live from New York: It’s JoAnn Wypijewski!

And now here she is on DrSuzy.Tv, having come out with a wonderful new book with a very long name: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life  (Verso). The luxurious length of the title underlines how important it is sometimes to discuss things fully, and how, when we talk or write in soundbites, we miss the illuminating truths of life’s real messiness.

JoAnn’s book explores that messiness brilliantly, if not conclusively, examining sex scandals and sex panics over the last three decades, from the Central Park 5 to Harvey Weinstein, Abu Ghraib to Woody Allen and much more. She’s even got my old nemesis Dr. Laura Schlesinger and my great mentor Dr. Betty Dodson in there.

She opens the title chapter by sharing a story of passionate, unplanned sex between a young boss and a younger intern. At the end of the tale, she reveals that the boss was her, inviting the reader to think about ingrained assumptions regarding sex between subordinates and supervisors.

JoAnn intensifies the story during our Bedside Chat, including juicy details, like (I’m paraphrasing here; listen above or watch below for JoAnn’s exact words),  “His kisses were so sweet,” “He was beautiful, like a Greek God,” “I said, “You know I can’t hire you now’,” “He was shocked,” “We did it anyway,” “I hired him anyway…”—making vividly clear the messiness of this incredible, unforgettable, un-regrettable sexual experience.

No regrets for her, no complaints from him, JoAnn’s true tale challenges us to think about how, in the #MeToo era, we might view that consensual, if “messy,” erotic encounter, especially if the roles were reversed and the ages expanded a bit. What if the boss was an older man and the young intern was female? Probably, many would view it as sexual assault, especially if someone with a media megaphone described it that way.

“Sex panic” is buttressed by “poisoned solidarity” …. the thrill of mob revenge on the “monster” who is, all too often, a scapegoat.

Of course, no decent person supports rape or any nonconsensual sex, least of all a staunch feminist like JoAnn. Nevertheless, as a long-time human rights advocate and sexual freedom fighter, she notes that the fear of sexual assault—as well as of consensual sex that isn’t “appropriate”—can be terribly destructive in far-ranging ways.

For example, society’s purported desire to “save” sex workers from “trafficking” has certainly done more harm than good, as JoAnn writes: “the shutdown of Backpage, the most popular internet ad site for sex work, and the subsequent nervous decision by Craigslist to discontinue its Personals section (both 2018) was part of a putative safety campaign that has made sex workers less safe and less independent. The Justice Department’s onslaught against Backpage, touted as a blow against sex trafficking, has had the opposite effect, because the site had closely monitored ads and alerted law enforcement to suspected exploitation. As so often, a protection campaign on behalf of women and children protects neither.”

Of course, we’ve been talking about this for years on DrSuzy.Tv, mostly with sex workers themselves, so it’s great to hear it through the acutely articulate voice of a veteran journalist like JoAnn.

“We’ll take your ads,” offers Capt’n Max, as we show off copies of Speakeasy Magazine, the first edition, featuring Daniele Watts and Chef Be*Live in Splosh ‘n’ Art.

Sex Panic!

One of the main themes of What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo is “sex panic,” a.k.a. moral panic, which JoAnn defines as “a social eruption fanned by the media and characterized by alarm over innocence (stereotypically, white women and children) imperiled. The predator is a lurking, mutable social presence, a menace against which the populace must be mobilized—and has been since at least the ‘white slavery’ panic of 1880s–1910s, but almost continuously since the mid-twentieth century. That politics of fear has not been trivial. Examples range from the fever over (homo) ’sexual psychopaths’ (1950s) to serial rages since the late 1960s against: sex education; gay ‘sex rings,’ gay teachers, gay threats to family; ‘stranger danger’; Crime!; Porn!; satanic ritual abuse in day care; sexual abuse dug up from ‘repressed memory’; AIDS predators; ‘superpredators’; internet predators; Sex Offenders as a separate category of human being; ‘pedophile priests’; epidemic campus rape… Sex figures as a preternatural danger, emotion swamps reason, monsters abound, and protection demands any sacrifice, including the suppression of opposing views.”

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life (Verso Press) Author JoAnn Wypijewski on DrSuzy.Tv

This is the erotophobic culture in which we reside and that very few question, especially when news of a fresh sex scandal spills like an errant ejaculation into our innocent news feeds.

JoAnn Wypijewski is one of the few. With courage, compassion and a veteran journalist’s attention to detail, she investigates and explores the stories of the real human beings behind the sex panicked headlines of our times—“at the cusp of the liberationist ’60s and the fear-jacked backlash”—in What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo.

“Sex panic” is buttressed by “poisoned solidarity,” an apt concept JoAnn often uses, coined by anthropologist Roger Lancaster, author of Sex Panic and the Punitive State, the thrill of mob revenge on the “monster” who is, all too often, a scapegoat.

It’s sad to see a positive term like “solidarity” being “poisoned,” but it happens too often to ignore, everywhere from the deep group passions of witch hunts to the Daddy-fetishizing delusions of Hitler’s Third Reich, Mussolini’s fascismo and tRump’s base.

Though the thrill of poisoned solidarity in relation to sex panic didn’t start with social media, it has greatly expanded with it. But the phenomenon goes way back, at least to the celebratory mobs gathered around dead men swinging from trees.

“It should be impossible to think of sex and accusation and not think about race,” writes JoAnn. “White America lynched some 4,000 black people, mostly men, from 1877 to 1968.” She considers the powerful influence of the wildly racist, KKK-positive 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which popularized and “nationalized white panic, sex panic and the idea that an aggrieved white populace has a right to commandeer justice.”

Many of these lynchings started with sexual accusations by white women against black men.

“I expect that progressives today presume that all those white women were lying,” writes JoAnn, leaving the reader to wonder: What might that mean about today’s accusations.

It’s interesting that the term “MeToo,” created by African American activist Tarana Burke to help mostly women and girls of color acknowledge sexual abuse and begin to speak about trauma, exploded as a hashtag in Hollywood, based on accusations from mostly white women.

Hollywood didn’t invent the human “predator,” JoAnn writes, but it developed the idea as a compelling “character” for mass culture. “As the Bad Man, the predator exists to authorize the bad that the Good Man does, to convert it into good, and thus to affirm that justice is whatever the white avenger says it is: undebatably, the only process due.”

JoAnn’s book has an astute chapter on shunned filmmaker Woody Allen and the flimsiness of the “charge” against him that he molested his daughter Dylan during a family gathering at Mia Farrow’s house when the two were separated.

In a way, Woody’s unadjudicated, mob-dispensed public disgrace birthed the #MeToo movement in the person of Woody’s own estranged son (who may or may not be his biological offspring), Ronan Farrow, the “Good Man” of #MeToo. Meanwhile, Ronan’s brother, Moses Farrow, tells a very different story.

When I reflect on Woody’s predicament, I think about his old movie The Front, but instead of the Commies being the worst evil imaginable, it’s the Pervies.

Personally, I believe in Free Speech for all, even the many liars among us. People, private publishing houses and film companies have the right to boycott, insult, not watch, produce or publish Woody Allen. It’s possible that history will judge him more kindly than his peers, as it did another literary darling who was also branded a degenerate in his day: Oscar Wilde.

Poor Oscar was imprisoned for two years where the harsh treatment greatly worsened his fragile health, contributing to his death three years later at the age of 46. Public humiliation is one thing (it’s even a fetish!), but when it comes to incarceration, well, that’s a much harsher punishment than social media scorn, yet not as bad as lynching, though it’s all related.

We turn our chat to JoAnn’s views of Harvey Weinstein’s New York trial, which she attended as a public observer. Whatever may or may not be true about Harvey Weinstein the man, the mogul, the monster and the bully, what JoAnn describes is a travesty of justice under the law.

Listen above or watch below for her story of Weinstein accuser Jessica Mann’s unbelievable testimony and other outrages at the Weinstein trial.

We talked about the “monsterization of Weinstein” in the media and the courtroom, accompanied by the depiction of his victims as absolutely powerless to stop him, even when he left them alone with total freedom to get away.  

“What was so depressing at a feminist level about the Weinstein trial was the ideology underlining it of absolute female disempowerment,” she said.

Suddenly, as we’re chatting about Jessica Mann’s strange, inherently contradictory testimony—how she didn’t really *mean* it when she complimented Weinstein, wrote him adoring notes, said she missed him, came back for more, etc.—JoAnn loses her Internet connection and disappears. It’s almost as if my old Yale classmate, Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., proud of his big win against Weinstein and not happy to be reasonably questioned about it, somehow finds a way to cut JoAnn’s Internet.

Then suddenly, as we’re chatting about Jessica Mann’s strange testimony on the witness stand, JoAnn loses her Internet. It’s almost like my old Yale classmate, Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., proud of his big win against Weinstein and not happy to be reasonably questioned about it, somehow found a way to disconnect us.

Just kidding, Cy!

Grinning gamely as I figure out what to do when we lose JoAnn. Photo: Harry Sapien

But that reminds me to mention JoAnn’s disturbing story of JoAnn’s disturbing story of Harvard Law Professor and House Master (“master” being the old title for a professor who supervises the on-campus residential life of a group of undergraduates, which has been officially put out to pasture by the oh-so-culturally-sensitive Ivies, but is still used colloquially) Ronald Sullivan, the first Black House Master in Harvard’s history, removed from that post last year because his brief presence as an attorney on the Harvey Weinstein defense team was said to make some of his students feel “unsafe.”

The old American judicial adage that everyone—especially the defendant who is “seen as guilty”—deserves legal representation, didn’t appear to phase the Harvard students or administrators who relieved Ronald Sullivan and his wife of their Master titles. Feelings of “fear” and “discomfort” regarding a “Master” helping a “Monster” trumped any concerns about justice under the law or the defendant’s right to the attorney of his choice.

Horrors of Abu Ghraib

I put off talking more about Weinstein until JoAnn returns; my terrific tech team keeps reassuring me, “We’re getting her back!” but I have no idea how long that will take.

So I pivot from Hollywood 2020 to Baghdad 2004 and the shocking military “detainee” sex scandal of Abu Ghraib.

JoAnn’s book has an excellent chapter on Abu Ghraib, much of it based on her attendance at a very different kind of court proceeding, the U.S. military trial of 21-year-old Lynndie England who was convicted, essentially, of torturing prisoners for fun (and kinky fun at that!), while the rest of the military *only* practiced torture for serious purposes. JoAnn covered all the big trials of Abu Ghraib, which is a lot more than can be said for the mainstream media which, though salivating nonstop over “The Photos” when they appeared, were largely MIA when it came to covering all but the first of the trials.

Abu Ghraib “Theater of Cruelty.” Photo: Harry Sapien

Like everybody else, I was appalled and fascinated by “The Photos”; I wrote about them for Counterpunch as “Bush’s POW Porn,” and I made a collage, “The Theater of Cruelty,” (with a hat tip to Antonin Artaud) which I talked about as I waited for JoAnn to reconnect. Also, like everybody else, I felt that 21-year-old Lynndie and her cohort soldiers were the guilty perpetrators of these frankly abusive and fairly outrageous stunts and, of course, they ought to be disciplined. But the perpetrators of the war itself, the Rape of Iraq, the Afghanistan invasion and the culture of routine torture that predated it and festered in its wake, were far guiltier. Humiliation is really awful, but murder is a hell of a lot worse. If anyone was going to prison, it ought to have been the Murderers-in-Chief, Bush, Dick and Rummy the Bechtel-Dummy.

And then there’s Gina Haspel, who supervised “black sites” which set the pattern for prisons like Abu Ghraib, and as a reward for her steady stewardship of America’s notorious torture palaces, was promoted to head up the CIA as its first female director.

One of the legal people who “accommodated” the American torture of detainees and later, as a judge, ruled that War on Terror prisoners have no habeas corpus rights, was Brett Kavanaugh, now Supreme Court Justice of the United States, and yes, JoAnn has another insightful, nuanced chapter about Lying, Crying Brett in her book. 

“The Ron Jeremy Police”

At this point, JoAnn appears on our screen as suddenly as she disappears.

DrSuzy.Tv Broadcast Bay featuring Unscene Abe and Mars FX. Photo: Harry Sapien

We chat a bit more about Abu Ghraib and Harvey (listen above or watch below, and also check out JoAnn’s amazing post-show letter to me at the end of this section), then we move onto a subject that is closer to home.

As you may know, An old friend of ours, Ron Jeremy, probably the world’s most famous male porn star, was arrested a few weeks ago, and is now locked up in LA’s notorious Twin Towers jail on $6.6 million bail, several women having accused him of “forcible rape” and assault. Check out my interview with Ron’s assistant, Albert Minero, Jr., on Bedside Chat 14, for more details.

We’re running out of time (ah, time!), and JoAnn has only learned of the Ron Jeremy scandal in the past couple of days, but she is naturally skeptical of another sex scandal that has so many similarities to the Weinstein case. The big difference is that this one is inside the porn industry and its “conventions,” the blatantly slutty underbelly of the more discreetly slutty Hollywood.

JoAnn wonders what’s up the sleeve of Ron’s most prominent public critic, Ginger Banks.

Capt’n Max, no stranger to the wrath of the police in pursuit of sex “monsters,” even if they’re just publishers, points out that in an interview, Ginger declares herself to be “the Ron Jeremy police.”

Interesting title to give yourself.

Like the “Karens” who try to “police” people of color as though they themselves wear a badge, or actually call the police on specious grounds, Ginger has the zeal of a crusader who wants to “change” the porn industry, weeding it of old-school icons like Ron and John Stagliano, with the help of the #MeToo mob (porno division), as well as the police, who find it so much easier to arrest pornographers than truly dangerous criminals.

Most of the porn industry leaders appear to be taking Ginger’s side against their old friend, sex icon and dependable moneymaker, “The Hedgehog.” However, there are almost as many thumbs-down as thumbs-up on Ginger’s interview, a much more negative ratio than other interviews on that channel.

Ron’s case came along too late to find its way into What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. But the book includes a wealth of cases and stories, culled from 30 years of sex scandal-focused investigative journalism, accompanied by an effervescent curiosity, diamond-sharp wisdom that is rarely heard these days (or any day) and a sense of compassion that seems to envelope the reader in the author’s warm, strong arms.

At least, it enveloped me.

But now we really have to go. JoAnn ends our chat as she ends her book, with a pithy quote from the late great James Baldwin about how we need to guard against “habits of thought that reinforce and sustain the habits of power.”

Perhaps, before we say yes to the next invitation to poisoned solidarity out of “habit,” as we so easily and often do, we should try to think for ourselves.

I’ll sum it up with one of my favorite quotes from What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: “Marx was wrong. Sex, not religion, is the heart in a heartless world.”

In her closing, Weinstein’s lead attorney, Donna Rotunno, made a remarkable declaration: “Jessica Mann is a victim of the state.”

Then, the day after our Bedside Chat, JoAnn wrote me an email that’s so eloquent, it made me cry. I’ve reprinted it here:

I had a lot of fun. There was something I wanted to say about Ron that I forgot, but I think it’s a longer conversation. Reading up on him, I was struck by something that kept coming through the stories, that reminded me of Weinstein. And I had a question for you, because it really is a psych/sex therapist question:

— What happens to a person’s sense of boundaries between performance and personality when he’s in a situation where he is expected to behave a certain way, is rewarded for that performance, is identified in some part of his society with that performance? If everyone expects Weinstein to be a bully (leave aside the sex allegations for a moment), and he gets results as a bully, what’s to stop him from being a bully? And if he’s a bully in work life, might he not be a bully in sex life? Might it not bleed over? With Ron, if everyone expects him to be grabby, to be outrageous, might not the performer and the personality sometimes blur? or the social expectations of the crowd shape/distort the person’s attitudes away from the crowd?

— Isn’t it a little like dog training? I mean, I know we’re higher than dogs (though maybe not bonobos), but the training aspect, the reward aspect, it has to do something to you.

— With Weinstein (also an ugly man, and then, later, a very physically damaged man) I kept thinking about what he might have made of those emails that flattered him, in which a woman said she loved him, was grateful to him; said he was sort of adorable (I can’t remember the phrase), complimented his eyes (!) Why wouldn’t someone in receipt of emails saying When can I see you? think she wants to see him. If she says, I tried to change my plane ticket but couldn’t and I’m so bummed, why wouldn’t he want to think she was telling the truth? If they’ve had sex once and she comes back for more, why wouldn’t he think there was will on her part?

Ron said he thought a lot of the woman who complain about him had ‘buyer’s remorse’. And maybe Weinstein’s women did too.  But the deeper question is the message they send, and the expected results.

What was so depressing at a feminist level about the Weinstein trial was the ideology underlining it of absolute female disempowerment. 

So that no decision a woman made could be truly hers.

She was a child, in need of protection.

She could lie, and need face no consequences. He must intuit everything. In fact, he must read her letters not at face value, not as a human in need of love, of affirmation, but as a businessman, calculating that every word must be calculated, must be false.

And she is utterly irresponsible — because of course “he has so much power”.

Pussy power was nowhere considered in that courtroom — and it’s true, hard to introduce unless Weinstein himself had testified (which he wanted to).

But plain old personal dynamic power.

The power of “I love you”.

Who doesn’t want to believe that?

That’s the essence of the monsterization of Weinstein. He was not just portrayed to be physically repulsive (and what beautiful, young, nubile woman would want to be with such an ugly, ugly man?). He was not just portrayed as a power freak, an irascible person, a bully. He had to be seen outside all ordinary human emotions: a figure for whom ‘I love you”, “I want you,” do not work their magic.

Like Caliban, he was meant to be so aware of his subhuman, monstrous position that he should have known no one could ever utter a kindness except as a calculation for future reward.

So buried in all those words is another psych question too: Not only how can we even imagine what all this did to him (what was going on in his head), but what does the excusing away of really anti-social behavior on the part of the women say about their psyches? and the society that wants to pass this off as “normal”?

I mean, to me, either the women in court were pathological liars or … and this I think was totally true for Jessica Mann … they had tied their identity to Weinstein, had bet on him, had let their friends know, had had sex with him maybe to get somewhere (in Mann’s case, maybe also out of ‘compassion’ as she testified, maybe, as she wrote to her boyfriend, because he was the only one who could see past the mess of  her life), and then in 2017 it became very clear that they had made a bad bet. Now Weinstein was toast. Identification with him could only be toxic, so what do you do when you might lose everything, and be judged as a silly slut by the very industry that set the rules of the casting couch and simultaneously stigmatized anyone who lived too openly by them? Mann needed a new identity. In her position, a girl of not much talent but a dogged sense of survival, all she maybe thought she could do was to take on a new identity, one now hallowed by Hollywood: victim; better, Weinstein’s victim.

And now she’s able to sue for civil damages, which she couldn’t have without a criminal conviction, so she’ll get some money.

But much as I loathed her, I also thought, how she’s being exploited by the prosecution and the civil attorneys.

In her closing Weinstein’s lead attorney, Donna Rotunno, made a remarkable declaration: “Jessica Mann is a victim of the state.”

And Weinstein may have done terrible, terrible things, but you figure: this is the DA of NYC, with all its resources, all its investigators and lawyers and police, all the accusers (80, I think), and these two cases are the best they could come up with?

I don’t know enough about Ron’s case or his accusers, having made only a really superficial reading yesterday. but I do wonder if there might be anything similarly at play in his case.

2017: he’s suddenly made a dirty old man; blasted on Twitter and Youtube, fodder for Blake’s policing crusade; object of tremendous, explosive accusation — in an industry that, like aboveground Hollywood, is full of people clawing for position, clawing for survival, clawing to get paid.

For anyone who had a consensual relationship with him, or a regrettable hook-up, or anyone who was hoping for some cash, or a different identity, or who knows what messy combination, wouldn’t he be an awfully easy target?

P.S. to that long message — sorry, but I thought you’d find this interesting.

In the hall at the Weinstein trial I met and got to talking with a prominent feminist activist. She was horrified by the trial. She thought it would end in acquittal (and should); I thought it would end in a hung jury.

But we were talking about  this question of communication and expectations and the terrain of sex relations being normalized in the courtroom.

She said, with real alarm: “What does this say to our daughters about how to communicate sexually? What does it say to our sons?!”

Valiant Bonobos. Photo: Max

What, indeed, does it say? Food for deep thought and for our next Bedside Chat when I look forward to answering JoAnn’s probing questions (though, in a way, she answers them herself right in the email). I’m also excited to ask this exceptionally astute woman a few more questions of my own so she can help me—and you, my darling readers, listeners and viewers—to make sense of this sex panicky world of ours.

Meanwhile, stay tuned and study up! Read JoAnn Wypiewski’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life.

EXCERPTS FROM THIS JOURNAL APPEAR ON COUNTERPUNCH

Mistress Courtney Takes Control

Our second guest is awaiting us like a Queen on a throne in a stylishly designed and well-equipped, red brick-walled dungeon in London, the town of aristocratic spankophiles, buggers and buggees.

Mistress Courtney zooms into DrSuzy.Tv from her London Dungeon.

Decked out in a sumptuous long leather coat, corset, miniskirt and stiletto heels, her long wavy golden hair framing her face like a halo of naughtiness, the beautiful, sensual and sadistic Mistress Courtney looks every inch (or centimeter), the classic and quite classy professional Dominatrix that she is.

Behind her, a slim male slave named Presley, clad in nothing but bright orange boxers, kneels obediently.

She gets up and sits down on his back as if he were a stool.

#GoBonobos for human furniture!

Very stylish.

We talk about how she evolved into a pro-Domme. Basically, Ms. Courtney was modeling while doing other odd jobs like event management. During a shoot, she was asked to dominate one of the other models, and she took to it like a swan to the lake (sounds more graceful than “like a duck to water,” and Mistress Courtney is nothing if not graceful).

Mistress Courtney in leather corset talks about pleasure and pain on DrSuzy.Tv. Then she steps on a slave, and I show her My Red Bottoms.

Then we talk about #MeToo. Mistress Courtney considers herself a supporter of the movement. I float the idea of #MeToo influencers taking a page from the Dominatrix playbook (as they also should from the female-empowered bonobos) in how to discipline naughty males and keep them coming back for more.

Mistress Courtney is game.

I ask her if she really enjoys and gets turned on from subjugating men, or is it just a job she’s good at?

She explains that she expresses dominant side in two different ways: 1) as a “service provider” for submissive clients who pay her handsomely to dominate them in just the way they like to be dominated, and 2) as a true Domina who does what she likes with slaves of her choosing which she expresses in her videos and private life.

Speaking of private life, Mistress Courtney, complex creature that she is, has a boyfriend with whom she engages in passionate, somewhat kinky sex, minus the Dominant/submissive roles.  She’s especially aroused after she’s had a good domination session. Lucky boyfriend. 

Mistress Courtney administers corporal punishment in a British boarding school setting.

The BF is also quite a good cameraman, though this Queen looks fabulous from every angle.

In between chats, she shackles Presley to the wall and swats his thin shoulders several times with her wicked whip, then caresses the areas where she’s hurt him.

Mistress Courtney is a specialist in after-play and impact play, as well as the interplay of pleasure and pain in sex and kink.

She also shows off her bare foot, including her slightly dirty sole (pun intended).

Indeed, her feet are the heart and soul of her work as she often uses to trample men and provide CBT (cock and ball torture).

And no, CBT is not authorized by the American Military, so don’t get any ideas, Lyndy.

The Mistress also enjoys having her feet worshiped if the toes are sucked “properly.”

She even has toegasms!

Mistress Courtney’s slightly dirty sole.

Then before we can say, “wiggle your toes,” the clock strikes (spanks?) midnight and it’s time to get into our pumpkin and go.

Bonobos Away

This show really flies by, technical difficulties and all.

Bonobos love to kiss. Photo: Lola ya Bonobo

I shout-out credits for my necklace, made by Bonobo Conservation Initiative, under the direction of our old friend Sally Coxe, a gift from my wonderful client Robert; my “I Bonobo You” arm band by The Bonobo Project (Ashley Stone); and most of the bonobo images we show are from Lola ya Bonobo, founded by our friend, Claudine Andre.

Sadly, bonobos are also susceptible to COVID-19, so they are currently in quarantine at Lola and in other sanctuaries, zoos and primate centers.

Donate to help save the bonobos!

Capt’n Max, Sunshine McWane, Harry Sapien (and his new love, Stormy the Blow-up Doll) mask-up and assemble for a group photo (see “Supreme Court of Bonoboville” above), though it feels a little lonely without Ana. The good news is that she’s on the mend and will be back with us sooner than we expected!

Since Ana’s Cocina is closed for a few weeks, we order Carl’s Junior for the after-party which is to Ana’s cooking what a tRump speech is to Cornel West.

So Do We. Photo: Selfie

Then, turned on from JoAnn’s sapiosexual description of making out with her intern and Mistress Courtney’s pretty pedicured toes, my Captain and I remove our masks to kiss-kiss-kiss, come-come-come and drift off into dreamy, steamy (it’s getting hot in here!) heaven.

 July 11, 2020 Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is a world renowned LA sex therapist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure and horny housewife, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels. For speaking engagements, call 213-291-9497.

Bedside Chat 16: #MeToo, Sex Panic & FemDom Power PHOTO ALBUM