October 03, 2003
Schwarzenegger the Misogynist
For anyone wondering what I meant when I called Schwarzenegger a Misogynist in the rant The Lion's Den: The Failure of Democracy, I offer this selection of quotes and articles:
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"When you see a blonde with great tits and a great ass, you say to yourself, 'Hey, she must be stupid or must have nothing else to offer', which maybe is the case many times." July, 2003 Esquire Magazine interview.
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"Girls became sex objects. I saw the other bodybuilders using them in this way and I thought it was all right...Whatever I thought might hold me back, I avoided. I crossed girls off my list -- except as tools for my sexual needs." 1977 Memoir, Arnold: the Education of a Bodybuilder
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Excerpts from a LA Times article:
Women Say Schwarzenegger Groped, Humiliated Them
By Gary Cohn, Carla Hall and Robert W. Welkos, Times Staff Writers
"Did he rape me? No," said one woman, who described a 1980 encounter in which she said Schwarzenegger touched her breast. "Did he humiliate me? You bet he did."...
In interviews with The Times, three of the women described their surprise and discomfort when Schwarzenegger grabbed their breasts. A fourth said he reached under her skirt and gripped her buttocks. A fifth woman said Schwarzenegger groped her and tried to remove her bathing suit in a hotel elevator. A sixth said Schwarzenegger pulled her onto his lap and asked whether a certain sexual act had ever been performed on her....
One of the women in the 2001 Premiere article was British television host Anna Richardson, who accused Schwarzenegger of touching her breast. In an interview with The Times, she reiterated that account... "He kept looking at my breasts, kept asking if I worked out," she said. "I went to shake his hand and he grabbed me onto his knee and he said, 'Before you go, I want to know if your breasts are real.'" She said she looked around for help from other people in the room, but nobody came to her assistance. At that point, "he circled my left nipple with his finger and he said, 'Yes, they are real.'" She said he then let her go....
The secretary, then in her 30s, said she sat on a couch opposite Schwarzenegger while the actor and her supervisor talked. When the conversation ended, the secretary said she approached Schwarzenegger to shake his hand and say goodbye. He remained seated, she said, and he slipped his left hand under her skirt and grabbed her right buttock. "He just held on. He held on and said, 'You have a very nice ass.' He said, 'I'd love to work you out.'"....
Another woman, now a wife and mother in her 30s, said she also fell in Schwarzenegger's "sight lines" while working as a crew member on 'Terminator 2' in Fontana. "I was walking on the set and Arnold called out, 'Come here, you sexy devil,' and reached out and pulled me on to his lap," the woman recalled. She said he then whispered in her ear: "Have you ever had a man slide his tongue in your [anus]?" "I didn't know how to react," the woman said. "It was bizarre. What he said was so specifically sexual, it was bizarre..." After the incident, she said, she continued on her way. "I didn't fall apart," she said, but added: "It's embarrassing and degrading when you're doing a job."
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Excerpt from a July 2003 Entertainment Weekly magazine story
But nothing in T3 bears Schwarzenegger's creative stamp more than his epic tussle with the Terminatrix, a battle that begins in a bathroom. The sequence was made longer and more elaborate thanks to the actor's largess--and his singular imagination.
"As we were rehearsing, I saw this toilet bowl," says Schwarzenegger, an impish smile crossing his face. "How many times do you get away with this--to take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury her face in a toilet bowl? I wanted to have something floating in there," he adds. Apparently, he was vetoed. "They thought it was my typical Schwarzenegger overboard," he says. "The thing is, you can do it, because in the end, I didn't do it to a woman--she's a machine! We could get away with it without being crucified by who-knows-what group." (Note to California's Democratic strategists: The soccer-mom set is now yours for the taking!)
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Excerpt from a March 2001 Premiere Magazine story on Arnold Schwarzenegger "Arnold the Barbarian" By John Connolly
Once, he was a box office terminator. But now that Arnold Schwarzenegger has lost some of his muscle in Hollywood, stories of his boorish behavior can no longer be routinely erased. Then again, he'd make a helluva politician. The tabloid press got a nice Christmas present late last year when Arnold Schwarzenegger tore through a day of publicity work in London, promoting his latest film, The 6th Day, which had just opened there. In less than 24 hours, the star was said to have attempted to, as high school boys used to say, cop a little feel from three different female talk-show hosts. The level of consternation expressed by those who received this hands-on treatment from the hulking, Austrian-born international superstar ranged from none whatsoever (Denise Van Outen of The Big Breakfast invites her guests to lie on a bed with her and, hence, probably has a rather elastic definition of what constitutes inappropriate behavior) to irked (on tape, Celebrity interviewer Melanie Sykes looks a little thrown off after Arnold gives her a very definite squeeze on the rib cage, directly under her right breast) to, finally, righteously indignant. Anna Richardson of Big Screen claims that after the cameras stopped rolling for her interview segment, Schwarzenegger, apparently attempting to ascertain whether Richardson's breasts were real, tweaked her nipple and then laughed at her objections. "I left the room quite shaken," she says. "What was more upsetting was that his people rushed to protect him and scapegoated me, and not one person came to apologize afterward."
No apologies, indeed: A subsequent statement from Schwarzenegger attorney Martin Singer characterized Richardson as someone trying to get her "15 minutes of fame." After all, why else would she create such an "outrageous fabrication" (Singer's phrase) against a married man (Schwarzenegger has been wed to NBC's Maria Shriver since 1986) a father of four, someone who ceaselessly espouses family values in the press? On the other hand, the stills of Schwarzenegger grinning as he pats Van Outen's hip or of his give-me-some-sugar-baby expression as he tries to draw Sykes close to him are a little unsettling. Was Arnold jet-lagged? Going through a midlife crisis?
"You don't get it," says a producer who's worked with Schwarzenegger. "That's the way Arnold always behaves. For some reason, [this time] the studio or the publicists couldn't put enough pressure on the women to kill the story." Terminating bad press was once relatively easy for Schwarzenegger, who for much of the '80s and a good part of the '90s was a veritable money-making machine for the studios. And while some of his most recent films have enjoyed less-than-stellar box office performances, he is still a very huge star and one of the highest-paid actors in the world: He reportedly received $25 million for his work in the 1999 disappointment End of Days. Accordingly, Schwarzenegger films are always big-budget affairs; as such, they provide lots of jobs to lots of people and generate lots of money to lots of studio suits and other peripheral players. Arnold is not just a rich movie star; he's the straw that stirs the drinks. The sort of person, in other words, who tends to get indulged. A lot."
"The second I walked into the room," Anna Richardson says, several weeks after the incident, "he was like a dog in heat." Other stories about Schwarzenegger tend to fit her simile. During the production of the 1991 mega-blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a producer on that film recalls Arnold's emerging from his trailer one day and noticing a fortyish female crew member, who was wearing a silk blouse. Arnold went up to the woman, put his hands inside her blouse, and proceeded to pull her breasts out of her bra. Another observer says, "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This woman's nipples were exposed, and here's Arnold and a few of his clones laughing. I went after the woman, who had run to the shelter of a nearby trailer. She was hysterical but refused to press charges for fear of losing her job. It was disgusting."
The full Premiere article is reprinted on the web here:
http://www.slumdance.com/blogs/brian_flemming/archives/000300.html
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Reuters story citing Schwarzenegger's books:
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=3394868
