"What Should We Say About David Bowie and Lori Maddox?"

"There are two underlying assumptions here that I question: first, that we either have to write off David Bowie in deference to the women, or write off the women in deference to David Bowie—that we can’t value one without devaluing the other. The second is that it’s a critical dodge to even bring up the fact that we’re talking about the 1970s...

Reading Solnit on this, you can understand how Lori Maddox could have possibly developed not just a sincere desire to fuck adult men but the channels to do it basically in public; why an entire scene encouraged her, photographed her, gave her drugs that made all of it feel better, loved her for it, celebrated her for it, for years. You can understand that the way she consented to the loss of her virginity could have been the way women have consented throughout history—under implicit duress and formative coercion, and yet as wholeheartedly as we could understand.

There are no precise enough words or satisfying enough conclusions to fully account for her story, or any like it. It’s easy to see what Bowie represents here: a sexual norm that has always appallingly favored men, and the abuse that stems from and surpasses even that. It is easy to denounce the part Bowie played in this, even with any number of purportedly mitigating factors: the political context, Maddox’s story, the fact that he lived with generosity and openness, the less generous fact that his synapses were perpetually blitzed with cocaine. It is less easy to turn over what Maddox evinces in this narrative, from the late 1970s to her account of it now—which is that women have developed the vastly unfair, nonetheless remarkable, and still essential ability to find pleasure and freedom in a system that oppresses them."

http://jezebel.com/what-should-we-say-about-david-bowie-and-lori-maddox-1754533894

FB: This is so intelligently, thoughtfully written. It will make you think bigger thoughts, and help you navigate a lot of similar stories. "There are two underlying assumptions here that I question: first, that we either have to write off David Bowie in deference to the women, or write off the women in deference to David Bowie—that we can’t value one without devaluing the other. The second is that it’s a critical dodge to even bring up the fact that we’re talking about the 1970s..."