The arguments made by liberal hypocrites as to why -- and how -- Hillary Clinton lost her bid for the presidency in 2016 are astounding. What’s even more astounding is how this topic is still consuming them, ten months after the election was over.
HBO’s David Simon, the creator of the hit show The Wire, was on PBS’ Charlie Rose on September 11, along with co-producer George Pelecanos and actress Maggie Gyllenhaal to discuss their new graphic porn drama The Deuce. While Simon and Gyllenhaal actually stated that pornography was unhealthy for American culture, their reasoning was lacking substance, especially when Simon called Hillary’s loss “the last primal scream of white males in this society.”
Regardless of the degrading, graphic content in the actual show, Simon decided that the real theme of The Deuce was “an opportunity to discuss gender politics,” especially in terms of misogyny. As a result of a pornified culture, misogyny was what allowed Trump’s win, in Simon’s opinion: “I think in some basic way, something has been transformed in terms of how men and women look at each other, especially how men look at women and what they feel entitled to, and I think this last election cycle really defined that in a way that surprised.”
Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal agreed, “I think we thought we were in a different place than we were, and after the results of the election it was laid bare, it was all on the table, the level of misogyny that we’re living with every day, you know, and you can’t make a show about porn without some aspect of it exploring misogyny.”
She explained further, “And it’s kind of an amazing time now that I think we’ve all been forced to take a look at where we really are in a lot of ways but let’s just talk right now about in terms of misogyny and sexism in America, it’s an amazing time to be talking about this show, to be airing this show, you know, where that’s such a major theme.”
It’s ironic that these people think this show is such a great statement against pornography, when, instead, the pilot alone portrays 5 graphic sex scenes, which are unbelievably degrading and somewhat gratuitous. Even Gyllenhaal admitted to Rose, while describing a sex scene on the air, that “I can’t think of a more degrading image. It’s also funny, kind of, like in a sick way, totally exploitive…”
But the ultimate factor in the election, according to Simon, (who is, in fact, a white man), was white supremacy.
Below is a transcript:
CHARLIE ROSE: Is there any relevance here to the idea of Charlottesville and racism?
DAVID SIMON: Well, if you ask me politically what’s going on at this moment in the country, I would say the backlash against women and and the backlash against people of color is distinctly linked, in the sense of, you know, in the most optimistic way that I can imagine, putting it--I think we’re looking at a moment which is the last primal scream of white males in this society, that last moment of “I just lived through eight years of a president of color, you are now asking me to buy in on a female president, and I’m going to go kicking and screaming because what was mine, what I perceived to be my status and privilege within the culture is now being laid bare as entirely vulnerable, and I’m fighting back. And I don’t think you can divorce that from the phenomenon that is Donald Trump.
ROSE: How do you write that?
SIMON: Well, if any character just said what I just said, we would have taken him off the page.
In an interview with The Guardian, Simon went on to say that “There’s no doubt if Hillary Clinton had been a man, she would be president now.”
He also said in the same interview that the recent election “said to me 25 to 30 percent of our population is foolish and untrustworthy and incapable of self-governance, and that a demagogue in the right circumstances with the right amount of manipulation can go a long way. It also said that for all of [Clinton's] flaws, and she was not a perfect candidate in any sense, a much more plausible female candidate was at that moment in time problematic for America. We demonstrated a distaste for the idea of a woman president that transformed a lot of votes. I certainly woke up in a different America from the one that I thought I was in.”
The widespread culture of pornography in America has indeed resulted in a horrific era of violence and disrespect towards women as human beings. But to say that it is the reason behind Clinton’s loss is a grave misunderstanding of what misogyny actually is. For Simon and Gyllenhaal, criticizing the very business that their product represents is blatant hypocrisy.
