“Childhood has no forebodings…no memories of outlived sorrow.” — George Eliot.

I’m guessing this Mad Men scene happened some time during season #1, or in 2007 or thereabouts — 15 damn years ago. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) looks so young; Peggy Olson (played by the then-25-year-old Elizabeth Moss) looks even younger. And my God, what a flaming, irredeemable, culturally stunted asshole Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) was. Matthew Weiner was really on his game back then. Has the spirit left him? The Romanoffs didn’t work for me.

“And yet, of course, the age that I am makes [such a scene] extremely challenging because we aren’t used to seeing untreated bodies on the screen. To be truly honest, I will never ever be happy with my body. It will never happen. I was brainwashed too early on. I cannot undo those neural pathways.” — Good Luck To You, Leo Grande star Emma Thompson discussing her full-frontal nude scene with Cinema Cafe during Sundance 2022.

A few days later (1.26.22) I reviewed Sophie Hyde’s “sex positive” two-hander. I basically agreed with everyone else’s favorable opinions while — concurrently! — agreeing with Thompson’s above statement, but phrased in my own way.

I was all but tarred and feathered for the latter…for mentioning the unmentionable by stating that (a) while the body positivity movement was well and good in terms of discouraging self-loathing tendencies among older or overweight women, at the same time it was (b) kind of off on its own lunar trajectory because most people don’t exactly relish the idea of watching nude scenes with fleshy women who are over, say, 40 or 45. (Or men for that matter.)

Several HE comment-thread scolds came after me with spears, swords, slander, slaps, handguns and grenades. I was all but vivisected. Such is the nature of your delightful spray-pissers on this site.

I described Leo Grande — three sexual and very personal encounters in an English hotel room over 97 minutes, plus one in a hotel bar — as an intimate, occasionally amusing, open-hearted exploration of an older woman’s sexuality, and that it makes it very clear what a transformational thing good sex can be (nothing wrong with that!).

I also said that most of us have problems with older or overweight people performing nude scenes or sex scenes, and that I wouldn’t want to see a nude scene with anyone who’s too old or saggy or out of shape. And yet the idea of older women enjoying sex as much as any 17 or 22 or 38 or 46 year-old is lovely and delightful, and that conceptually speaking if an actress of Thompson’s age wants to do a full-frontal nude scene, fine.

And then came a statement that only a truly evil person would vocalize. I said that if a 45-plus actress wants to do a nude scene, she should do what she can to leapfrog or transcend the concerns that Thompson herself has admitted having about her own body, and to bite the bullet by paying for a nice, mild tummy tuck and a subtle but artful boob lift. (And maybe an ass lift.) You think Paulina Porizkova would argue against this?

I’ve had work done on my eye bags, eyelids, neck wattle and thinning hair, and believe me I look much, much better because of these modest measures. There’s nothing wrong with resorting to touch-ups when age, biology and gravity start to work against you.

Again — last January Thompson said that she “will never ever be happy” with her body, and a few days after that I said two things — (1) no moviegoer will ever he delighted about ogling a body that’s seen better days, and (2) Thompson has nothing to worry about if she just pays a visit to my Prague friendos — they’ll fix her right up and with no one the wiser. What is so fucking awful about that? We’re all going to wrinkle and wither and die anyway so you might as well face old age with a little Prague fortification.

Parental rights activist Will Estrada to N.Y. Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who’s a total trans-advocating wokester, posted on 6.16.22:

Estrada: “I’ve been amazed, Lulu, that Terry McAuliffe could have absolutely said in that debate with Glenn Youngkin, ‘I absolutely agree with you, Glenn. Parental rights are important. Every teacher will tell you they want the parents to be engaged, but we have to be careful that parents don’t make the wild west in public schools.’ And when we look at what’s happening with parental rights, it’s flooring me.

“My mind is blown that you just don’t have politicians from both sides saying we’re going to respect this and then maybe nuance it in different ways instead of doubling down on this insane concept that parents shouldn’t be involved in the education of their children.

“It would be so easy for people to just do the Bill Clinton, I feel your pain, I understand it, I’m engaged in my children’s education. And then kind of nuance different things. But instead we’re seeing the opposite. And it boggles my mind. It’s political malpractice.”

Garcia-Navarro: “I think what I hear you saying is that you think Democrats are missing the opportunity to also embrace the parents’ rights movement, which you think is available to anyone.”

“Estrada: “Exactly. You look at some of the surveys and Americans, even those who identify as liberal-leaning and identify as Democrat, and certainly moderates, and completely certainly Republicans they view this as (a) one party supports parental rights, the Republican Party, and (b) one party opposes parental rights, the Democrat party. And that shouldn’t be the case.

“Parental rights are a bipartisan issue. And so I feel like the Democrat Party is missing a moment and it’s going to hurt them.”

Answer: Because they’re worth it.

On the subject of tweeners and young teens behaving in a way that has struck some as impossibly entitled and impudent and fickle…”a whole field of fucking brats”, Adam Carolla says the following at the 11:15 mark:

“We used to have a heirarchy. For instance, when I grew up I was scared shitless of every one of my friends’ dads. You would never…I was in my house a year and a half ago, and one of my daughters’ friends roller-skated past me in my house…can you imagine roller-skating in a friend’s house when we were nine or ten years old?….you go into the kitchen now, just randomly walking into your kitchen and one of your kid’s friends will just be making waffles…when we were kids, on the very off chance that we might go out to dinner?…no one wanted our input as to what restaurant we’re going to…now the conversation starts with “we’re going out to the restaurant” and the kid says “I don’t want Mexican food”…when we were growing up it was “we’re going out to dinner, we’re fucking lucky, zip it.

“The key component [today] is ‘you fucked up the kids, you fucked up your own life, and you’ve fucked up society because [somebody] will have to hire one of these little fuckers when they turn 22.'”

Remember hang-ups? In the ’60s accusing a person of being hung up was a fairly serious put-down. Hang-ups were a key definer of middle-class neurotics — people who were into guilt and maintaining appearances, who embraced shallow concerns and inhibitions — people who believed in scrubbing kitchen floors and mowing their lawns on Saturdays, who did’t get high or drop acid or listen to Bob Dylan or attend the Newport Folk Festival.

I’m not saying that people who did get high and wear buckskin fringe jackets and listened to Dylan and so on weren’t hung-up, but the cliche prevailed — strictly embraced middle-class values and lifestyles and prohibitions were seen as a kind of prison.

I’m asking because I haven’t heard anyone accuse anyone else of being hung-up for decades. Excluding Republicans and conservative psychos like Lauren Boebert, are people hung-up about anything these days?

I think they are, yeah.

The first Urban Dictionary definition of “hung-up” reads as follows: “When all you think about is one person, and you can’t stop thinking about them.” The fourth definition: “Stereotyped, repetitive and seemingly purposeless movements. Compulsive fascination with and performance of repetitive, mechanical tasks, such as assembling and disassembling, collecting, or sorting household objects.”

Here’s another definition: “When you’re locked into processing the world according to (I’m sorry to mention this but it just came to me) woke doctrine….when all you can think about is whether this or that person or activity or political position is on the right side (i.e., yours)…when delivering or creating social justice for oppressed or less fortunate people and/or punishing their oppressors is pretty much everything.”

As it happens two of 2022’s finest films so far, Chloe Okuno‘s Watcher and Audrey Diwan‘s Happening, begin streaming tomorrow — Tuesday, 6.21. Both directed by women, of course, and both, coincidentally or not, are IFC releases. These films are X factor — they stick to your ribs. Plus Watcher is a ’60s or ’70s Roman Polanski film.