I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  My side won, in the end. Three decades later, young feminists regard porn as an unremarkable part of human sexuality, particularly now that we all have cameras on our phones. Being a porn actress is viewed as a potentially empowering career choice—and the women formerly known as hookers and strippers are now sex workers, victims not of false consciousness but of slut-shaming. There’s a dizzy topsy-turviness for many feminists my age, now that nearly every ideological perspective has flipped, left to right and vice versa. In the 1980s, I would have called myself a free-speech absolutist: The correct way to oppose bad speech, as I saw it, was with good speech, strong arguments that cracked weak ones. But I felt this in part because my own speech felt very much at risk of being shut down. And the stakes felt lower, before the Internet, because nobody involved in these debates was literally a Nazi, however much we lobbed that word as an insult. I was wary of campus speech codes, too, when they began to emerge during my undergraduate years. My economic politics were left wing, but my cultural politics were borderline libertarian, and that position did not seem, in those years, to be right wing. In fact, it seemed classically liberal, anti-authoritarian, this gut instinct to resist all forms of governmental—and even institutional—power, as long as I wasn’t harming others. As far as I was concerned, I should be free to decide what I read, what I said, what kind of sex I had, what drugs I took, whether I had an abortion, and so on.

  If my feminism was anti-censorship, this was true not merely intellectually but emotionally. I hated the idea of being a prig, a censor, a label that had stuck to feminists since Prohibition and earlier. In a 1979 New York Times article about Women Against Pornography–run tours of then-seedy Times Square, a young feminist named Barbara Mehrhof described her fear of being seen as “anti-sex” for attending an anti-porn event: “As women, we’re susceptible to that. We’re the puritans, the prigs, and the prudes.” To be seen as humorless was a horror to me, not just in my twenties but into middle age—to a fault, it feels now. (Who was I so desperate to have see me as funny?) Still, those years left me with a lasting repulsion for any attempt to shut down something because it was offensive. I would make up my own mind. I didn’t need to be protected. If my favorite artists could compartmentalize, so could I.

  And I had my favorites. Roman Polanski had raped a thirteen-year-old girl, Samantha Geimer, in 1977 during a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson’s house. He fed her champagne and quaaludes; then, in the hot tub, he coerced her, first into vaginal sex, then into anal sex. I believed that Polanski had been let off easy in the courts. Whenever the case came up, I retweeted a damning Calvin Trillin poem, which satirized the support that was given to Polanski by glib elites such as myself. The second verse reads:

  This man is brilliant, that’s for sure—

  Authentically, a film auteur.

  He gets awards that are his due.

  He knows important people, too—

  Important people just like us.

  And we know how to make a fuss.

  Celebrities would just be fools

  To play by little people’s rules.

  So Roman’s banner we unfurl.

  He only raped one little girl.

  And yet my favorite Roman Polanski movie was Rosemary’s Baby. That, I wouldn’t give up.

  It was a masterpiece, a fraught category. He was a genius, same. The film seemed, somehow, to be both tainted and deepened by his biography. During my senior year in high school, I had a monthlong internship at William Morrow publishing. As part of my job, I’d been asked to mark up the manuscript of Roman Polanski’s memoir, Roman. It was 1984. I was seventeen years old, a judgmental virgin who was fascinated by stories about sex crimes, a sort of prurient prude. In the book, Polanski wrote about his paralyzing grief after the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, who was stabbed to death by Charles Manson’s followers. Numb and reeling, the director flew away from Los Angeles, hiding out in Gstaad at the chalet of a friend, a Swiss industrialist whose hobbies Polanski describes as “flying, skiing, and girls.” The chalet was located near Swiss boarding schools, and to distract himself, Polanski pursued those students, who were my age, sixteen to nineteen. He describes them as “fresh-faced, nubile young girls of all nationalities,” teenagers who were refreshingly uninterested in his films or in gossip about the murder. He found them “more beautiful, in a natural, coltish way, than they ever would be again.” He describes their late-night visits with him, when they snuck out of their dorms, as “forbidden fruit”—from his perspective, he was their sneaky, exciting rebellion, not the other way around. Maybe that was true; I have no way to know. I’ve never spoken to those girls, who would be my age now.

  Rereading the passage, I can’t remember at all how I interpreted his words when I was seventeen: Did I see them, as I do at fifty-one, as not merely sexist but also absurdly clichéd, callow, ridiculous, or maybe simply grotesque, coming from such a worldly man, in the context of such a wrenching tragedy? Or did I take them, when I was seventeen, at face value—as a compliment, with their implication that girls my age were a sort of delicacy, our inexperience a soothing opiate for men in trouble? Polanski’s book is a strange document. There are deeply moving passages about his childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland; his account of Tate’s murder is heartbreaking. But, eventually, the book shrivels into propaganda for Polanski’s self-image as a worldly martyr, a genius hounded by prudes. He paints Geimer and her family in a crude, cruel light: To him, she’s merely some American bore, unlike those “nubile young girls of all nationalities.” He makes the rape itself seem like her fault, almost an accident, by occluding the details and never mentioning anal sex. Geimer is just some trap he stumbled into.

  Geimer’s own memoir, The Girl, was published in 2013. It’s a far better book and certainly miles more generous to her rapist than he ever was to her. It also presents a surprising philosophy that lets Polanski fans off the hook: She argues that both she and Polanski were brutalized by the legal system, and, in particular, by a corrupt judge, Justice Laurence Rittenband, who violated the deal he’d brokered with both the prosecution and the defense. She believes that Polanski’s paid his price. She describes the crime in graphic detail—making it quite clear that it was rape, not consensual sex—but she also says that she’s forgiven him. In 2018, in the wake of #MeToo, Geimer was explicit about her reaction to anyone who used her name to ban Polanski’s art, calling it “puritanism and censorship dressed as empowerment.” She isn’t interested in seeing his career destroyed: “How would that help me?”

  Does Geimer’s book make it safer for fans to watch Rosemary’s Baby than the films of Woody Allen? Is that what “listen to women” means, or does it mean something much different, far less granular? The tougher question was Rosemary’s Baby itself, one of the world’s sharper portraits of rape culture. The story of a sweet young wife who gets tricked into bearing the devil’s spawn, it’s a rudely funny allegory about the biological prison of reproduction, the psychological trap disguised as nature. In it, Mia Farrow gives one of her best performances as a perfect portrait of gaslit femininity, her hair clipped like a novice nun, whispering into a phone booth for help that will never come. Rosemary’s Baby is a thriller about dependency, about false consciousness, about being a carrier for patriarchy—and about helplessly granting it your love, because it’s easier to submit to that power than to fight, if you know that you can’t win. (The movie also makes a strong case against marrying an actor or renting above your price point.)

  When you look at Rosemary’s Baby sideways, it becomes a darkly funny cautionary tale that could have been written by Andrea Dworkin, a description that I intend as a compliment. The movie also contains one of the most unsettling rape scenes ever filmed, specifically because it draws no distinction between the humor and the horror, the camera gazing at Mia Farrow’s huge eyes, drugged and dilated and ringed in kohl, as they stare straight into the devil�
��s mask. The movie was a feminist masterpiece created by a sex criminal.

  It is impossible for a casual viewer to say if those themes were an incidental or a purposeful expression by a director who knew something about deals with the devil. But as time passed, and norms about sexual assault shifted, I clung to Rosemary’s Baby. I owned the Criterion disc. I had lent it to pregnant friends, because there was something reassuring about seeing a movie that ratified your deepest paranoia: You weren’t crazy to feel crazy. The movie was a lens that let us see more clearly what it meant to be a woman in a sexist world, the world that could produce a man like Polanski. Should we smash that lens?

  * * *

  —

  And yet, insisting that I could and should hold on to the art of terrible men also required me to be perpetually forgetful, to detach myself in a way that felt strangely unhealthy. In 1990, I’d read a volume of essays by the poet Pearl Cleage called Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth. I was twenty-four at the time, working as a secretary for an industrial real estate company in Atlanta. In my off hours, I did volunteer work at a rape crisis hotline and, with my boyfriend, had co-founded a gay-rights organization for heterosexual allies called Straight but Not Narrow. Cleage’s book, which was intended as a clapback to Shahrazad Ali’s much-publicized The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman, was featured at Charis Books, the feminist bookstore that had become my regular hangout. One night, I went to a reading where Cleage performed the title piece. It was an essay about Miles Davis, whose album Kind of Blue had helped Cleage through her divorce. A male friend had given her the album; Cleage turned it into a musical agent of seduction and healing, the soundtrack for her single-woman’s bohemian apartment. Just as Woody Allen movies had been for me, Miles Davis was the symbol for Cleage of female sophistication.

  Later on, however, Cleage learned more about her hero. Miles Davis was a violent abuser who had beaten his wife, the actress Cicely Tyson. Davis hadn’t merely committed those crimes, either: He’d bragged about them, treating them as a sign of masculine prowess. In his autobiography, he wrote about a night when Tyson called 911 after Davis had “slapped the shit” out of her for having brought over a friend whom he didn’t like. Tyson ran, terrified, and hid in the couple’s basement; but when the cops arrived, Davis spent time, upstairs, bonding with them, joking around. Once they drove away, Davis went downstairs. “Before I knew it, I had slapped her again. So she never did pull that kind of shit on me again,” he wrote.

  In Mad at Miles, Cleage thinks out loud about her own response to learning these facts. “I tried to just forget about it. But that didn’t work.” In the essay, she keeps returning to a rhetorical refrain that slowly becomes deliberately, darkly comic (there were waves of nervous, excited laughter during the reading), as she repeats this underlined and italicized phrase: “He is guilty of self-confessed violent crimes against women such that we should break his albums, burn his tapes and scratch up his CDs until he acknowledges and apologizes and rethinks his position on The Woman Question.” She raises this varyingly as a question, as a provocation, a joke, and a demand. Each time she says it, she follows the phrase with a brief, parenthetical, amused reexamination of how those words sound when spoken out loud, which alters as she moves through the essay: “It gets easier to say the more you say it. It’s starting to sound almost legitimate, isn’t it?”

  The essay flips the moral lens a few times. In its final phase, Cleage does a fascinating pivot: She decided to try out the premise from a new angle, by changing the demographics. What if the victims in question had been black men, not black women? What if Miles Davis were instead…Kenny G? “I can’t help wondering what our reaction would be if, say, Kenny [Gee]—a resourceful, crossover white male who is selling well enough in our community these days to tie with Anita Baker and Luther Vandross as the seduction music of choice for black urban professionals between the ages of twenty and forty-five…What if Kenny [Gee] was revealed to be kicking black men’s asses all over the country in between concert appearances and recording sessions? What if Kenny [Gee] wrote a book saying that sometimes he had to slap black men around a little just to make them cool out and leave him the fuck alone so he could get some peace and quiet?”

  Would Kenny G, she asks, “be the music we would play when our black male friends came to call?” The final paragraph is an oracular list of questions, which plays out Cleage’s conclusions with musical force. “How can they hit us and still be our heroes?…Our leaders? Our husbands? Our lovers? Our geniuses? Our friends?” She concludes with two sentences. The first is “And the answer is…they can’t.” The second is, “Can they?”

  Back when I heard Cleage’s essay, nearly three decades ago, clapping with the audience on our rickety chairs in Charis Books, I remember finding it convincing, but I clearly also tucked it away, designating it as a manifesto that I agreed with but would, somehow, never apply in real life. That’s what often happens with any challenging idea: You absorb it, you nod, you clap, and then you alter it once it’s inside you. Over the years, when I thought of Cleage’s essay, which I tended to do whenever the subject of separating the artist from the art came up, I had erased my memory of the line, “They can’t.” I preferred, “Can they?” This was even truer once I became an arts critic. I liked to let questions override answers. When you could linger inside the question, it let you keep looking at the art itself, and I had to find a way to keep doing that.

  The question of what to do also changed for me, as it does for many people, depending on who the artist was. I was most confident in arguing that we should not reject the art of bad men when it came to artists I did not love, a situation that made the ethical choice abstract. Bill Cosby, for instance, had never been my guy. Even at his height in the 1980s, I hadn’t memorized Cosby’s shaggy-dog comedy routines or read his books about family life. During the years when The Cosby Show was a blockbuster, I watched largely out of cultural obligation, because I recognized—in a stiff suburban white-guilt way that afflicted me even as a child—that the show was “opening doors.” In contrast, I genuinely adored the show’s spin-off, A Different World, which was set at a Morehouse-ish historically black university, a joyfully varied universe of black perspectives, a romantic series that dramatized intra-community tensions that were new to me. I loved the original Roseanne, too, back when it felt like Cosby’s sitcom mirror. But Cosby made me itch, in particular the character he played, OB/GYN Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, with his cutesy condescension, that hangdog horny-little-boy style he directed at his elegant wife, Clair. I particularly hated the way he behaved with his son, Theo, mocking him for his vulnerabilities. But none of this mattered too deeply, because Bill Cosby wasn’t somebody that I dreamed about giving cookies to.

  Around the turn of the century, as I began reading the coverage in The Philadelphia Inquirer, I recognized that Cosby’s admirable “Dr. Bill Cosby” character was, like Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, what the equally fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter used to describe as his “human suit.” Cosby’s celebrity persona was public relations for his private self: It was that thing that made him look normal and safe to the world; it got him access to his victims. When a pre-release copy of Mark Whitaker’s Cosby biography landed on my desk, I flipped through the index. There was nothing about the dozens of allegations of Cosby drugging women. I threw the galley in the garbage, just like Intercourse. It wasn’t a real biography if it left those stories out. But the Cosby revelations didn’t make me question my own judgment; they only reinforced it.

  When the debate began about how best to respond to Cosby’s art, I argued—and would still argue—that it made no sense to ban, or to erase (to delete, to cancel), The Cosby Show. (Or his early hit show I Spy, for that matter, or the popular kids’ cartoon Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.) As far as I was concerned, The Cosby Show should still be available for anyone to view, and not only because it was a collaborative project, c
reated by more people than just Cosby. It was a crucial show if you wanted to understand the history of sitcoms, television, race, masculinity, and, especially, the vast influence of Cosby himself: how his cracked brand of affable, bullying fatherhood had become so seductive and so influential. Modern television made much less sense without The Cosby Show. It was the key follow-up to the family shows of the 1950s, like Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, diversifying TV’s patriarchal franchise. It was a crucial precursor to the black family sitcoms that followed in its wake, among them Kenya Barris’s black-ish, a show that replicated and complicated its vision of the childlike dad. The Cosby Show was the crossover catalyst for the wave of black nineties sitcoms that launched networks like Fox. It was the model for respectability politics against which a hip, incendiary series like Atlanta stood, thirty years later. It was an ancient argument in sitcom form with Norman Lear, whose work Cosby had loathed because he thought Lear made racism look cute. Erase The Cosby Show and you can’t see television as clearly.

  Also, The Cosby Show was a different show when you actually watched it. It was a representational trailblazer—but also an all-black family sitcom on which no one talked about race. There’s no episode in which Dr. Huxtable gives Theo “The Talk,” about staying safe in a white world. There are no debates about internecine tensions within the African American community, as there were nearly every week on A Different World. Visually and musically, The Cosby Show teemed with signifiers of African American identity (kente cloth, anti-apartheid posters, jazz, and R & B). But its obsession was not race but gender. Over and over, Dr. Huxtable lectures younger men that they should respect women, never condescend to them, treat them as more than servants. Dr. Huxtable’s marriage with Clair is offered up as an ethical model to Theo, to Rudy’s chauvinist friend Bud, to Sondra’s insecure fiancé, Elvin. (These episodes grew shadows when Cosby’s crimes came out: In one episode, after Clair reams Elvin for sexism, she leaves to get him coffee. “When she brings the coffee back, if I were you, I wouldn’t drink it,” says Cosby.) Dr. Huxtable’s central role is as a performative male feminist, his respect for women the gong that the show beats again and again. That’s Cosby’s deepest contradiction, the tension that still feels worth wrestling with, not despite but because of its disturbing qualities. It’s the contradiction that shaped the generation that watched it.