Under fire, the NFL thinks pink

October 6, 2014

A shout-out to two former colleagues covering the NFL’s domestic abuse crisis.

Jane McManus of ESPN continues her fine reporting with a piece on the NFL’s addition of more women to the team that will ultimately help clean up this mess. A revelation: Off the Field, the NFL wives organization, is just being included in the discussion now. (Apparently, a first letter from the wives to the league was lost. What a surprise.)

If you’ve been reading this blog, then you know that Jane and I worked together at The Journal News, a Gannett publication. One of our estimable colleagues was longtime religion reporter Gary Stern, who contributed a piece on the entwined lives of NFL commish Roger Goodell and suspended player Ray Rice in the paper’s Oct. 5 edition. ...

Hope to end domestic violence

September 12, 2014

The story of Ray Rice coldcocking then-fiancée Janay Rice and a possible NFL cover-up of the act is not going away. The National Organization of Women has called for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to step down, this as former FBI director Robert Mueller is appointed to lead an investigation into what the NFL knew and when it knew it.

There has been much written about the subject and much of that misguided. People think with their hearts, their loins and their wallets. They see what they want to see. But in this case – in most cases – we need to think with our minds. Here are the incontrovertible facts, as I posted them on ESPN: Ray Rice assaulted the woman who became his wife, the former Janay Palmer, and Goodell exercised abysmal leadership in responding to that act. Both men should be gone from the NFL – permanently.

It does not matter if what happens between a husband and wife is private. (The assault took place in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino, a public place.) It doesn’t matter that the Atlantic City district attorney chose not to prosecute, although I’m sure that is being investigated, too. And most important, it really doesn’t matter if Mrs. Rice confronted her husband on the elevator or why she dated, married and stayed with him. Nor is it in anyway material that she is pleading for privacy as her world unravels, thanks to her husband.

All that matters here is that Rice assaulted his future wife, and the league chose to slap him on the wrist with a two-game suspension at first while possibly sweeping under the rug any knowledge of the video capturing the act. ...

'Hercules,' part deux

August 11, 2014

Following a train of thought, I thought I’d expand on the previous post concerning the new movie “Hercules.”

I suppose there is a segment of society that won’t see it – or admit to seeing it. But to me pop culture is culture, too, and thus a starting point for intellectual discussion. Indeed, the film sent me scurrying to my bookshelves for a childhood favorite, Philip E. Slater’s psychoanalytic “The Glory of Hera” (Beacon Press), a book so old that it cost $3.95. (Actually, it’s not that old. It was published in 1968.)

Slater paints a portrait of a complex character – a man who is at once gay and straight, masculine and feminine, a lover of family and its destroyer, mother-identified and mother-loathing, victim and victimizer, monster and martyr, all-too-human being and transcendent god. Hercules – Heracles in Greek – is all this, because his myth changed as Greece evolved. He is a metaphor then for the birth of a nation. And more...

The Rock rolls in “Hercules”

August 10, 2014

"I like the gods,” my friend novelist and movie blogger Barbara Nachman says as we exit the new “Hercules,” starring Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, in the title role.

I do, too. The Greek gods were among my childhood companions, offering thrilling stories and transcendence without the guilt trip of modern religion. (A well-known classicist, who shall remain nameless here, once told me she would take the Greek gods over the Abrahamic one any day of the week and twice on Sundays, so to speak.)

This being the age of post-modernism, the gods are nowhere to be found in the new “Hercules,” and that’s too bad, because they’re such an entertaining lot and because the ancient Greeks believed in them – or at least the stories they could spin off of them – so passionately. (Certainly, the Greco-Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great did. He saw Hercules – Heracles in Greek, Hercules in Latin – as one of his paternal ancestors.)

Making a movie about an ancient Greek legend when you imply that the legend is really part PR campaign, part empowerment exercise, well, it doesn’t quite cut it, does it?

Otherwise, the new “Herc” is a not-bad movie that fits...

The NFL’s female trouble

August 4, 2014

Hard to believe but it’s already football season, and God, it’s off to a dreadful start, isn’t it, what with former coach and analyst Tony Dunghy saying he wouldn’t want Michael Sam, foreseeing trouble ahead for the NFL’s first openly gay player, and then Baltimore Raven Ray Rice getting a slap on the wrist for allegedly beating his wife in an Atlantic City elevator when she was still his fiancée.

This has been compounded by ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith saying that women should be careful not to provoke men, for which he received a week suspension. Now ESPN ombudsman Robert A. Lipsyte has weighed in, saying, “Smith’s attempts at coherency are often as exciting as Tim Tebow’s scrambling.”

OK, people, let’s start with the easiest of the problems here. Why drag Tim Tebow – a man who has never shown women anything but respect – into this? Here’s a guy who’s training hard, hoping to get back into the NFL, unwilling to give up on his dream. There’s something at once poignant and commendable about this. But the NFL culture – which rejected him – can’t stop making fun of him even as it uses him to draw eyeballs. Pathetic.

But there’s something more serious going on here.

Are marriage and career incompatible?

July 28, 2014

celebrity couple. It was an enviable lifestyle for those yearning to be rich and famous, but McIlroy’s main motivation was to be remembered for his golf. So in May, with the wedding invitations on the way, he broke off the couple’s engagement.”

Let’s set aside the implication that marriage to Wozniacki would’ve necessarily produced a sort of Duke and Duchess of Windsor lifestyle, with the pair jet-setting from one party to another. And let’s leave off the devastation McIlroy’s last-minute exit caused Wozniacki – a subject I’ve blogged about before...

The rose and the sword: Laurel Gouveia, an appreciation

June 17, 2014

The arrival in movie theaters of the film “Maleficent” marks the return of the archetype – cliché might be a better word – of the Wicked Stepmother but with a twist.

Post-feminist Hollywood is no dummy. It knows in the 21st-century that its filmmakers cannot afford to reinforce the sexist notion of the older woman out to get the Pretty Young Thing, which is the basis of “Cinderella,” “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” So there has to be a subplot about how the Pretty Young Thing’s daddy did Maleficent wrong when she was a pretty young thing.

You can revise a fairy tale to make the villain more of an antiheroine. You cannot, however, change history. The classic fairy tales, like much of culture, were created by men, who have feared the power of women, particularly the power of older women.

As they age, women develop a certain wisdom, a sophisticated, fluid sexuality – to say nothing of a disposable income. They’re no longer waiting to be rescued or impregnated by men, if indeed they ever were. They are free, and that’s powerful and frightening, particularly to the sex that has always held all the toys in the sandbox.

Because of their bodily cycles, women remain, though, the more visible reminder that we are all, if we’re lucky, going to get old. And we’re all going to die. Men don’t like that. With the Pretty Young Thing, they can pretend to be virile forever. With the powerful Crone archetype, eh, not so much.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stepmothers and female archetypes this past weekend with the passing of my own stepmother, Laurel Gouveia, after a long illness.