The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Dear @AnnaKendrick47 …

Posted on | October 17, 2017 | Comments Off on Dear @AnnaKendrick47 …

 

Most of my readers are grown-ups with jobs who vote Republican, so it is necessary for me to explain to them who Anna Kendrick is, and why she has nearly 7 million Twitter followers. She is an actress who was in some vampire movies and did a Disney movie and other stuff.

She is now 32 and incredibly rich. She lives in Hollywood, where she hates Republicans and hangs out with other rich people who hate Republicans. For example, Ms. Kendrick hung out with her fellow rich Republican-hater, Stephen Colbert, talking about her bestselling book, My Boyfriend Dumped Me and I Blame the Republican Party.

No, wait, let me check that title again . . .

 
Scrappy Little Nobody has been critically acclaimed (“funny” and “authentic”) because book critics, while seldom rich, usually hate Republicans, and also like to read books by good-looking women who write about having sex. (Book critics are seldom good-looking, and nobody wants to have sex with a book critic, no matter how much they hate Republicans.) Like most other Republican grown-ups, I’d never heard of Ms. Kendrick or her book until this morning when I stumbled upon a couple of quotes on a feminist Tumblr blog:

“I’m not interested in pretending to be a reluctant participant because you think girls who like sex are a turnoff. If you think girls are supposed to object to sex until they find themselves incapable of resisting your magic penis, f–k you.” (p. 103)

“Lesson for young men: If you want your eventual wife to be excited about [performing oral sex] for forty years, don’t create a generation of women who think enthusiasm for sex is a bad thing.” (p. 105)

These supposedly insightful quotes from Ms. Kendrick’s book are really nothing but recycled talking points from Jessica Valenti’s 2008 book, He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. Feminists expect us to believe that the world is full of men who have a problem with “girls who like sex.”

OK, guys: Show of hands?

Hmmm. No hands went up.

It seems that every guy reading this blog approves of “girls who like sex” and, contrary to Ms. Kendrick’s claims, all these guys “think enthusiasm for sex” is a good thing. So why the discrepancy? Perhaps it’s because the guys reading this blog are grown-ups who vote Republican.

Now that I think about it, however, I approved of “enthusiasm for sex” even when I was a young fool voting for Democrats. But maybe young fools have changed since the Mondale-Ferraro era, so I can’t speak for Ms. Kendrick’s experiences dating rich Republican-haters in Hollywood, including all the boyfriends who dumped her.

That’s basically Ms. Kendrick’s story. When she was 23, she started dating British director Edgar Wright, who was more than 10 years older than her, and who dumped her when she was 27. No one else has ever publicly admitted dating her. Given that it’s been more than four years since her last known boyfriend, it’s probably safe to surmise that Ms. Kendrick has a very bad reputation for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with her “enthusiasm for sex.”

Borderline personality? Bipolar? Obsessive-compulsive disorder? Look, I’m just a blogger, not a psychiatrist, and I’m not qualified to make a professional diagnosis beyond the simple word “crazy.”

Given that 66 million Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, this kind of craziness seems to be at epidemic levels, so she’s not alone. Unless you’re using the word “alone” to describe the fact that nobody wants to date Anna Kendrick, or at least no one is willing to admit dating her.

Who is responsible for creating “a generation of women who think enthusiasm for sex is a bad thing”? I dunno. Harvey Weinstein, maybe? But he’s just another rich Republican-hater, isn’t he? Actually, what we’re confronting is a generation of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend type like Anna Kendrick, who’s been riding the carousel since 19 and now, at age 32, has nothing left to do but sell books about the sex she used to have.

She’s “funny”! She’s “authentic”! She’s as lonely as a book critic!

Like other feminist memoirs, including Jessica Valenti’s Sex Object, Ms. Kendrick’s book is essentially about revenge against the various men who have used and discarded her. All of her ex-boyfriends are shallow jerks who failed to appreciate her unique specialness. The problem in her relationships is never her, but them — or society’s patriarchal double standards, blah, blah, blah. But she’s “funny” and “authentic,” according to the kind of book critics whose job is to praise feminist memoirs. It is apparently impossible for any critic to criticize a feminist memoir; instead they’re just doing P.R. work, writing encomiums that can be excerpted on the cover of the paperback edition. None of those who have heaped praise on Ms. Kendrick’s book were the least bit skeptical about her absurd claim that young men are against women enjoying sex. To doubt any claim in a feminist memoir would be sexism, probably.

Actually, there is a double-standard at work here. Only women get paid to write memoirs about their sex lives. Simon & Schuster isn’t offering book deals to any of Ms. Kendrick’s ex-boyfriends. Critics probably wouldn’t praise Trust Me, Dude, That Bitch Is Crazy, or any of the other “funny” and “authentic” books her exes might write about her.

By the way, where are these ex-boyfriends of hers who “think girls who like sex are a turnoff,” and why haven’t they sued her for libel? She uses pseudonyms for them, but certainly her former roommates know who “Landon” is, for example, and if I were “Landon,” my lawyers would be dragging Anna Kendrick through a nightmare ordeal of litigation. On the other hand, it’s possible that Hollywood is full of guys stupid enough to say the things Ms. Kendrick claims “Landon” said to her, so that nobody can tell the difference between him and any number of similarly clueless Hollywood guys. Or maybe he’s a “composite,” like Obama’s white girlfriend in Dreams From My Father. Nobody cares.

Anyway, now you know who Anna Kendrick is, and it’s probably fun to imagine her, alone with her cats and her Xanax prescription, crying about the “nightmare” of Trump’s election. Maybe she should get in touch with Harvey Weinstein. He might want to discuss the idea of turning her book into a movie. Just a quick meeting at a hotel . . .

What? Too soon?



 

Category: Celebrities, Sex Trouble

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