He’s fast and he’s cool
He’s from the school that loves and leaves ’em
A pity if it grieves ’em
Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’s not a fool. – Leslie Bricusse
Though few ignoramuses ever hesitate to open their mouths about subjects they know literally nothing about, it never ceases to amaze me when they do so in such a way as to openly reveal their ignorance to anyone with even the most cursory familiarity with the topic, especially when a few minutes of research would have given them the ability to sound as though they knew something about it. Case in point, this recent Forbes article about the new James Bond movie, Skyfall; the writer seems to be familiar with at least the most recent movies in the franchise, but not the books or the Sean Connery films. And the so-called “sex trafficking experts” he interviews wear their cluelessness like a badge of honor. The article contains a major spoiler, but it’s not necessary for me to repeat it in order to discuss the problem:
When it comes to his treatment of women, James Bond has never been a nice man…but in Skyfall…007 reaches a new level of not-niceness: having sex with and otherwise exploiting a captive victim of sexual trafficking. And it’s not at all charming to professional advocates for victims of…trafficking…Sexual hyper-aggressiveness and putting women in harm’s way are trademarks of the Bond franchise, of course. They’re a big part of why the protagonist is often decried as a misogynist and even a psychopath…But those elements are uniquely problematic when set in the context of a character who’s a victim of ongoing sexual violence and intimidation, say…experts [who have not] seen the film yet…
I’m not going to take the cheap shot of pointing out that it is, after all, just a movie; dramatic media do have the power to move and influence people as well as entertain them, so though the character and his adventures are fictional I don’t think it’s really fair to dismiss it as one might a bad cartoon. But it’s equally unfair to discuss Bond and his actions outside of his own fictional universe, which is the largest and least forgivable mistake these soi-disant “experts” make. It’s true that they are totally ignorant of the psychology of sex workers and the realities of our work, and that they subscribe to the dehumanizing dogma that a victimized woman is completely incapable of choice or agency forever after. But those factors are less important when talking about a fictional world because there may be some plot device in the film, some imaginary drug, secret brainwashing technique or science-fiction mind control device which does indeed turn the “trafficked” character into a pliable sex slave. I don’t know because I haven’t seen the picture…and neither have they! In other words, they have the amazing gall to criticize a film they have not even seen on the basis of what others have told them, and in doing so reveal a total unfamiliarity with the rest of the franchise. But though I haven’t seen this installment I am certainly familiar with the character and his history, the first two decades of the series and the contents of some of the novels, and that makes me more than qualified to completely trash this moronic article.
The writer reveals his lack of perspective from the very first sentence with the opening qualifier “when it comes to women”; he later states that some have referred to Bond as “misogynistic”. But anyone familiar with the books and early movies knows that this is rubbish; Bond’s amorality is in no way limited to women. I’m not sure I’d go as far as to label him a psychopath, but it’s clear that one of the things which makes him such a dangerous and effective agent is that he does not let anything get in the way of accomplishing his missions. Whether by nature or training, Bond is able to completely shed any sense of honor, ethics or human decency and does not let anyone – man, woman or beast – get in the way of his goal. After his run on Danger Man Patrick McGoohan was the most highly-paid television actor in the world, and he was invited to star in the very first Bond flick, Dr. No; he turned it down flat because he didn’t want to be typecast as someone so completely amoral.
The writer also refers to Bond as “sexually hyper-aggressive”, and while that’s certainly true it ignores another important part of the character’s mythos; he is supposed to have such “mojo” that no woman can resist him. Even this factor alone blows the “exploiting a captive victim” idiocy to teeny, tiny bits: if literally no woman can resist Bond, why should the “trafficked” character be any different? And if his sexual power is of such literal irresistibility that it can be considered coercive, surely that’s the case with every woman he beds; this renders moot the claim that this movie’s situation is “uniquely problematic” and returns us to the fact of Bond’s amorality. Furthermore, if these “experts” had seen any of the early films they’d know that he’s had sex with imprisoned, entrapped or desperate women on many occasions, and a strong argument could be made that Tatiana Romanova of From Russia With Love was a victim of “sex trafficking” because she was ordered to cross international boundaries and romance Bond by a criminal she believed to be her superior in the Russian spy agency (in other words, she was transported under false pretenses to have sex for someone else’s profit). In short, 007’s liaisons with women have never been politically correct, and calling the exploitation of a desperate woman “a new level of not-niceness” demonstrates that the writer is unfamiliar with the fact that in Goldfinger Bond “cured” Pussy Galore’s lesbianism by raping her.
But the most glaring factual and moral error of all lies in the fact that the “00” in Bond’s number means he has license to kill, a fact which I daresay even most culturally-literate people who have never seen even one of the movies are familiar. He is allowed to MURDER whenever he feels it’s necessary to his mission, yet the trafficking fanatics claim that seducing or even making sexual demands of a vulnerable woman is somehow a greater moral offense? This is nothing less than a return to the old Victorian concept that rape is a “fate worse than death”. And though I wish it were limited to women making asinine comments about movies, it permeates all of their rhetoric on sex work and rape (and is the primary reason the penalties for sex crimes are so wildly out of proportion to all other offenses). Every time someone acts as though rape were worse than murder, or refers to sex work as “women being bought and sold”, consider what is actually being said: that a woman’s entire self and value reside in her sexual “purity”, so to violate that is tantamount to destroying her and the sale of sexual services is equivalent to sale of her entire being. And that incredibly vile real-life doctrine is vastly more misogynistic than anything of which the fictional James Bond can credibly be accused.
In the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia (by John Clute, etc), it says that McGoohan was also very puritanical, and that he would not allow No 6 in “The Prisoner” to kiss anyone (though I think he might have done when he was in another body – I’m not sure). If this was so, his doing the Bond films would have been very problematical for this reason as well.
For the rest of your piece, you’re right, it is funny how people can have problems with some kinds of amorality and not others; though in the books that I’ve read (early ones) Bond does not seem to be that amoral in general; he seems to be really stuck on the women he is with in “Casino Royale” and “Moonraker” – also (I’ve just remembered) the one in “Live and Let Die.”
The “honey trap” is a time honoured espionage technique, where real governments all over the world specially train and send women (and men) out to seduce and compromise enemy targets, which basically makes the intelligence agencies both traffickers and pimps.
For example, one of China’s four lengendary beauties, Xishi, was used to seduce a rival king and to render him so infatuated that he became useless, leading to the fall of his kingdom. By modern standards, she was a helpless victim who was trafficked and made into a prostitute by a minister of her own government. Yet both the minister and Xishi are honoured as patriots.
In fact, it would be only logical to assume that James Bond, who can kill anyone and everyone without blinking, would have just as few reservations regarding the treatment of women. Who would want a PC assassin anyway?
Swear to God this world is run by 10th graders.
krulac,
You give them waaay too much credit. These people are still stuck in the “Girls (or Guys) have COOOTIES!” stage.
You beat me to the honey trap reference. A male version of that was hilariously mocked on Archer, who is supposed to be like James Bond. And really, Bond is a walking Honey Trap and using the logic expressed in that article, the spy himself is a trafficked victim.
And MST3K mocked the idea of a PC assassin in one of their early skits. Crow T. Robot wrote a screenplay wherein the hero-assassin and the villain “talked through their problem” by expressing their feelings and motivations and actions. It was hilarious but also showed the problem with an assassin that would have too much of a moral center.
As Bond put it in Casino Royale:
That’s why I’ve always liked the John Cusack offering Grosse Pointe Blank..
Maggie, I’m afraid you missed Bond’s greatest transgression. The character has convinced the world that a Martini can be made with vodka.
I have to side with 007 here. I can’t stand gin in that sort of concentration. I told my sister I might like it better if the proportions were reversed. She suggested that such a drink could be called a “tinimar.”
A vodka martini is OK, not my favorite by a long shot, but I don’t feel like I’m drinking a Christmas tree.
I reviewed the Bond films on my own site last year and noted how blatantly the early films had Bond and his opponents use sex as a weapon. The scene between him and Miss Taro in Dr. No, for example. This has always been a part of the Bondverse. Now people want to be surprised by it?
Meh, In the’60’s Life did a pictoral about real hippies. No problems. In the 90’s they re-ran the article and now PC crowd screamed it was “child pornography” since hippie children seem to run under a “clothing optional” policy. Moral panic at it’s worst.
And the irony there is – the PC crowd are the ideological descendants of the hippies. Whodathunkit?
Remember in the late Eighties they wanted to make Bond more PC? Timothy Dalton is a fine actor, but the version of the character he was given to work with was licensed to fail.
In the movie version of Goldfinger Pussy’s* lesbianism was downplayed, and the rape was softened to the point of becoming mere seduction.
* One has to wonder, what the HELL were Mr. and Mrs. Galore thinking?
I liked Dalton. Not as much as Connery, but I thought “The Living Daylights” female lead as good as most and I thought that Dalton’s Bond in “License to Kill” was almost as ruthless as he needed to be.
* They were feline aficionados???
“There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.”
Frank Zappa
re the comment on the influence of the movies (or any media, for that matter). This is perhaps fortunate, given the number of people who have watched Bond films as compared to those who have listened to Zappa songs.
Bond is an assassin (he’s not really a spy). He always has been. He’s the hero because he’s OUR hitman, shooting bad guys. In pysch terms Bond would be closer to a sociopath; which is actually pretty close to the personality of a successful secret agent.
And I love this quote; “…experts [who have not] seen the film yet…” That sums up many censors in a nutshell. They don’t need to see the film to know that it’s wrong, and should be altered to suit their version of reality. (As opposed to the late Justice Douglas, who refused to view porn films that were part of cases sent to the Supreme Court, because he was going to vote that they should be protected speech; but that he didn’t have to watch them because ruling they were lawful didn’t mean they were any good.)
Barbaric! In modern times we use electrodes like any good, civilized folk would.
That made me genuinely laugh. And made me think of, But I’m a Cheerleader!
I think you should watch the film.
This is just because I think it’s a good film, not because watching it will make you more informed.
What about his marriage in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”?
Featured the first Bond ski chase. The ending was a horrid downer, and Lazenby got stuck with it as the first post-Connery Bond.
“problematic”
This translated from bullshit academic newspeak into plain english is: “I have a problem with this” or “I take offense”.
and here is a classic example of its use…
http://www.socialjusticeleague.net/2011/09/how-to-be-a-fan-of-problematic-things/
My brain shorted out after the tenth repetition. I kept hoping it was satire…
OK, I have seen the film, and really, getting comments from people who haven’t seen it based on a description that he doesn’t actually quote? What’s the phrase, “yellow journalism”?
From the article (minor spoilers):
You’d have to be pretty delusional to hit this as an interpretation. First, it is Bond who tells Sévérine her history, by surmise. She neither confirms nor denies it openly (that I recall from having seen it Sunday), so she can’t possibly have confided anything in him but her fears and her desire to see Silva dead. Second, I’m curious as to what power or authority Bond has over her that he was abusing in the shower. If this was different from any other Bond seduction, I’d like to know how. And she invited him. Coercive? Not really. Exploitative, absolutely. In fact, in terms of the movie mythos, there are only two women he doesn’t/can’t exploit: Moneypenny and his late wife.
Further distortions: the article references Bond abusing drugs and alcohol. Naturally, it’s taken entirely out of context, and ignoring the fact that he spent some time after having been shot twice (rifle and pistol) in a short space of time, plus being in a miles-long chase and fight and then taking what looked like a 200-m fall from a bridge in the mountains of Turkey. I don’t think I’d be able to lift a glass to drink from all the drugs I’d be taking after something like that, let alone walking around and nailing one of the local girls.
Again, what? He never promised to free her. He never promised anything, which he never does anyway: it’s all about implication and people believing what they want to believe. He said he could help her, not that he would, but in either case, he needed access. “Can you kill him?” she asked. Bond smiled, “Someone usually dies.” And how anyone could conceive of her being Bond’s prisoner, especially as she is already Silva’s? It is to laugh. In short order, however, they’re both in restraints, she is beaten soundly and used for an emotional torture game between Bond and Silva, both knowing how it will end. In Bond’s usual sociopathic way, his comment was that it was a waste of good Scotch. Which, of course, runs counter to the writer’s claim that “In the following scene [to the “coercive” sex romp], they arrive at Silva’s stronghold, and Silva promptly kills Sévérine.” There is a good ten minutes of screen time prior to her death after the arrival at the stronghold (filled with all sorts of exposition), and story time is at least overnight. This particular writer seems hell-bent on proving his point, even if it means stretching and distorting the film’s plot.
I hope he’s a better technology writer than he is a movie reviewer, but I don’t think I care to find out, if this is a fair sample of his writing.
Bond’s “mojo” sounds a lot like Prince Charming in the Fables comic book (about various people from legends, nursery rhymes and fairy tales living in our modern world after having been forced to flee their homelands…longish story). Prince Charming can seduce just about any woman…but he’s been through three failed marriages and a long list of extra-marital relationships. As he says himself, “I’m no good at the happily-ever-after part.” To his credit, he does realize what sort of person he is, and while his exes are generally bitter toward him, they all also agree that he’s absolute dynamite in the sack.
Some fairly useless Bond trivia: His ‘007’ designation actually dates back to Elizabeth I. Her spymaster, John Dee (also a noted occultist) would mark all of his correspondance with her with the numbers 007. The 00 signified that the contents were ‘for your eyes only’. Dee chose the 7 because the number had mystical connotations.
I have to disagree with the murder comment. Spies, like soldiers, killing under government command are not murderers unless the motive for giving the order is an improper one, and I don’t recall a Bond film where that was true.
That is a semantic fig leaf that governments use to disguise the nature of their actions and societies use to hide the unpalatable truth.
Unless the killing is done in the heat of self defence, it is always murder. Just ask the relatives of the dead.
This is especially true of “collateral damage”. Not every person in the Evil Villain’s HQ is a deranged killer or even simply evil. There will be security guards, janitors, cooks, clerks, mechanics, and so on. But they all die when Bond sets off the self destruct system.
Besides, it was established at the Nazi war crimes tribunals that “I was obeying orders” was not a valid defence. Assassins do not even have the excuse of the “heat of battle”.
I am not making a moral judement, merely saying that one man’s “justified killing/execution” is always another’s “murder”.
Taken to its logical conclusion, then, Israel can never rightfully defend itself against Palestinian rocket attacks, since its enemies always hide among the non-combatant population to guarantee plenty of collateral damage.
Anyone who accepts that is complicit in the upcoming second Holocaust.
I will not discuss the subject of Israel or the holocaust as it is a sure way to make a mess of Maggie’s blog, but generally speaking, all war is murder from somebody’s point of view.
That does not necessarily make me anti-war under all circumstances. It merely means that I do not delude myself into thinking that a war I support is somehow morally superior. It is just the use of deadly violence to attain an objective, and the recipient of said violence will always consider it murder.
I thought Bond was a bit of satire…
Bond is a bit too well known to be an effective secret agent.
Perhaps we should just ban violence, hints of violence, reports of violence or anything mentioning it, including that violence which prevents other types of violence, and then ban any depiction of sexual acts that defy the active-consent model propagated by various colleges in their behavior codes.
That will magically sanitize all art, and be even more effective if made retroactive, just imagine the pyres, and will therefore cure humans of all possible evil.
Also cure humans of being human, but what’s a niggly little point like that in the effort to create the New Pure Reformed Human Experience?
“Every time someone acts as though rape as worse than murder, or refers to sex work as “women being bought and sold”, consider what is actually being said: that a woman’s entire self and value reside in her sexual “purity”, so to violate that is tantamount to destroying her and the sale of sexual services is equivalent to sale of her entire being.”
This is eye-opening. Thank you for writing it. My wife has remarked that she’d rather be murdered than raped and it has always left me a little confused. This point of view really clears up the motivation behind that phrase.
Your wife probably just picked it up from others, without really thinking it through. But anyone who’s actually been raped (as I have) can tell you that it isn’t remotely as serious as death; in fact, it’s not even as bad as a vicious assault (though obviously some rapes are part of vicious assaults). Any woman who insists otherwise has almost certainly never been raped, and if she has she’s being dishonest about her feelings or else why didn’t she commit suicide after? If the memory of rape were really worse than death she would simply choose death and be done with it.
Credit.
on November 16, 2012 at 11:37 am | ReplyRich
Btw, I’m sure you rival Severine with her affect and it’s effect on men. You are a Muse, too? Ref: Macau casino scene from Skyfall
Thank you for your reply. Her mother was raped and has instilled in her an unrealistic fear. She gets extremely defensive about the whole subject as if it were a woman-only issue.
[…] Is James Bond a misogynist? Yes of course he is; he’s also an amoral assassin. More straight talking and common sense […]
Just saw the movie and have to agree that the trafficking bozos have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s clear that Severine is acting as her own agent. The only way you can describe what happens as victimization is if you assume her *former* status in the sex trade has permanently incapable of making decisions. Also, it’s clear that the hold her employer has over her is much more about violence and threat than sex.
Amazing, it actually does help if you watch a movie before talking about it.
That’s radical talk!