cliterature

I have previously blogged about how cleaning products are now being presented in advertising like gigolos, luring us away from our boring husband (or old boyfriend?) products (mops, none-skin-softening dish soap etc). Apparently adultery metaphors are hot in the advertising world.  Now the Health Discovery channel is in on the act. Trying to lure us away from bad foots and seduce us with nutrition. But, um…

Seduced by a carrot, really? Is this co-sponsored by the American Carrot Council trying to subliminally push the appeal of the dual purpose vegetable? Also, isn’t the whole problem with junk food the short-term thrill of “attractive” tastes and, um, “mouth feel” leading to unbalanced and/or excessive food intake? That is, we need to stay with reliable, good-for-us carrot rather than jump out the window into the fluffy white-bread arms of Mr. Sexyburger? (Not the other way around).

The site has a photo feature titled, disparagingly, “weight Loss Fads”. This apparently includes the title thumbnail, a women boxing (obviously for weight loss? Obviously a hilarious fad?) and Gloria Swanson* (excerpted here)using hand-weights (ditto?).  If women exercising is innately hilarious I do wonder about the overall goal of the program and why Bally fitness are apparently so deeply involved in it (as advertisers).

I also find the absence of any real science rather patronising.  Informational articles like this piece about soda never do more than non-specific hand-wave at ”stacks of research”, “new research” and “a study, out of the University of Texas”.  The reader is assumed to not want to, or be able to, understand the source material? Would a citation in a foot note be that bad, if only because the people who did the research probably deserve some credit? (Let alone because I might not trust the copy-writer’s interpretation of their data).

 * Gloria Swanson was a dedicated and influential proponent of healthy nutrition, including rather progressive attitudes about natural foods, vegetarianism and yoga–she lobbied for the first American law limited pesticide levels in foods.  She was also an astounding actress and founded successful companies producing make-up and clothing.  Frankly, she deserves more respect than this.

Pat Boone wrote a book for teenagers in 1958 called (with an excess of ‘Aw, Shucks’ styling) ‘Twixt Twelve and Twenty.  It is predictable that I would have quite a lot to say about such a book, not least the idea that a man who eloped and married at 19 might be the best choice for advice.  Nevertheless the idea of making a more general statement was eclipsed by my reaction to one small section.  Beneath the title “Sweet Sixteen” the following is said of (and to) girls of the ages 15 and 16:

“…there are even more rules of conduct for girls at this stage. One of them is that, even if a fellow runs like a three-legged hippopotamus, he must be the pursuer. In this game of hide-and-seek the male is always’”it.” The girl who makes the advance tips her hand immediately. That throws the game, for if she’s “it” then the fellow has to run hide, and usually does. This I know, from experience. Of course girls do have subtle ways of reversing the game. For example:

There once was a maiden of Siam
Who said to her lover, young Kiam,
“If you kiss me, of course
You will have to use force–
But you’re certainly stronger than I am.”

Undoubtedly, she got kissed.  But down Nashville way, we would have seen right through her.  We didn’t cotton to “bold” girls in Tennesse.  The fact is that one of the best ways for a galt o catch a guy is to let him chase her!”

It is hard to even remember a time when it was respectable to believe, and to advise children, that no means yes.  And this without even considering for a second that this might lead to a situation where a boy, or indeed a man, fails to accurately distinguish between a no that means yes and a no that actually means no–let alone how to deal with the consequences of the error.

It is an old joke to say “the masculine embraces the feminine”, meaning that one can (a.k.a. once could) say “he” or “man”; and be understood to mean “a person” or “the human species”.  It is, in my opinion, archaic to assume that using a term that is male can be assumed to include men and women.  But if anyone is going to be archaic I suppose it is going to be the Pope who is tasked with head up one of the biggest, oldest traditions on the planet, the Catholic faith. 

But a beleif can be ancient and progressive.  For example, the the Pope’s Christmas message touched on the preservation of our planet–a bridge between ancient and modern ideas of stewardship and protection.  Specifically Christianity and environmentalism.

However, three years ago Pope Benedict gave his Christmas message in gender neutral terms.  So my appreciation of his 2008 message was undermined by the confusion of jumbled genders in passages such as: “Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Creed, the Church cannot and should not limit itself to transmitting to its faithful only the message of salvation. She has a responsibility for Creation, and it should validate this responsibility in public. In so doing, it should defend not just the earth, water and air as gifts of Creation that belong to everyone. She should also protect man from destroying himself.

And is this use of the masculine to embrace all humanity as casual an unintentional anachronism?  I would argue that it is, in fact, a deliberate step back from gender neutrality–given the very next part of the message:

“It is necessary to have something like an ecology of man, understood in the right sense. It is not outdated metaphysics when the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this natural order be respected. This has to do with faith in the Creator and listening to the language of creation, which, if disregarded, would be man’s self-destruction and therefore a destruction of God’s work itself. That which has come to be expressed and understood with the term ‘gender’ effectively results in man’s self-emancipation from Creation (nature) and from the Creator. Man wants to do everything by himself and to decide always and exclusively about anything that concerns him personally. But this is to live against truth, to live against the Spirit Creator. The tropical rain forests deserve our protection, yes, but man does not deserve it less as a Creature of the Spirit himself, in whom is inscribed a message that does not mean a contradiction of human freedom but its condition.”

This makes is clear to me that a deliberate choice was made to desert the use of gender-neutral language and insist that the female listener subsume herself within a male identity.  And further that the interests of the Earth are to be subordinate to preserving what is presumed to be the correct role for humans, which differ depending in being of the male and female sex–with an explicit repudiation even of the notion of culturally-created gender.  And, lest the full implications of this be missed, the very next passage goes further:

“The great theologians of Scholasticism described matrimony - which is the lifelong bond between a man and a woman - as a sacrament of Creation, that the Creator himself instituted, and that Christ, without changing the message of Creation, welcomed in the story of his alliance with men. Part of the announcement that the Church should bring to men is a testimonial for the Spirit Creator present in all of nature, but specially in the nature of man, who was created in the image of God.”

I am not a person of faith, but I have a reverent and deep respect for ancient and ongoing beliefs that are at the core of human culture.  Most people believe in God and religion is a great force that moves across the face of the planet.  The Catholic church and Christian leaders in general have increasingly embraced the need to protect the planet.  But so long as this secular and universal concern is explicilyt subordinated to an agenda of opposing divorce, gay marriage, extra-marital sex and evolving gender roles I doubt our ability to overcome the selfishness of pollution and wastage that is threatening to irrevocably degrade the planet.

I do not expect the Catholic faith to change in its position on these issues.  But I did hope that the common cause of inter-faith communication and protection of the planet could be raised above, or held equal to, agendas that are less universal and less inclusive. 

The Pope’s message should, of course, be tailored to those of the Catholic faith, but three years ago it reached out to and indeed embraced those from other religions and secular traditions.  In 2008 it is beginning to sound more like there is no room for us at the Inn*.  Women, animals, and the wider environment may come in from the cold–so long as we accept the idea that the creator made a place for us in the basement, not in the living-room.

*”Inn” in the Bible being a translation of a word meaning “upper room”.  At the time of Jesus’ birth a house often had an upper floor for the people and a lower room in which animals were kept. 

This is the time of year where people start to bring up trivia, such as that the reindeer ostensibly pulling Santa’s sleigh would–if they have antlers–be female (or castrated males).  Bull reindeer, you see, shed their antlers before Christmas.  It is interesting that it matters.  Are Santa’s deer presumed to be male because they do physical labor, or on some weird assumption that only males have horns.  This is true of some species, but in most horned species both the male and female go equipped.  (And that would include common livestock like cows, sheep and goats of their horns were not surgically removed).I spend quite a lot of time on this blog questioning what people assume about gender.   But it is worth considering that although the meaning of gender beyond chromosomal and anatomical domain is disputed, gender itself is a categpory even broader than species.  That is, there are far more individual out there that are female, than that are human.  This is not to say that I have more in common with a female giraffe than a male human (although it may sometimes feel that way) but that the meaning of gender can be considered across species boundaries.

It is said that in technical terms, only humans have “gender” which implies a cultural meaning attached to perceived male-ness or female-ness.  Animals are described, in most scientific publications, as being of the male or male ’sex’ not ‘gender’.  But I have recently noticed a number of exceptions.  This may be simply because ’sex’ is a word that makes people uncomfortable because it is now used vastly more often to refer to copulation than to specify between male and female.

I would argue that referring to an animals “gender” is equally justifiable because animals are also treated differently, by their own species and others including our own, depending on whether they are male or female.  And this is not only for innate and unchanging biological reasons, but also due to what individuals learn during their lifetime–due to within and between species culture.  I would argue that more sentient species of animal have a basic concept of their own gender and that of other animals that goes beyond reflexive reproductive acts.

And animals are a diverse and shocking lot when viewed with an open mindm rather than through the lens of Disney-fied assumptions that plague even scientific endeavors.  Research focused for a long time on male combat, not female choice.  On aggression and not bonding and appeasement.  In the animal king/queen and drone-dom every  norm of femininity from size to nurturing role is reversed as a norm in some species, and by at least some individuals in every species.  Even if you hold animals do not have “gender” not every animal of a certain sex follows the life path typical for the species.  Some either do not want to, or chose not to breed, some are homosexual in their focus, some are poor or abusive parents, some fill the role in their community more typical of the other sex. In short, every ‘deviancy’ painted as unnatural in humans is found in other animals.

So by saying sex is more pervasive than species I am not say it is more rigid and standardised–quite the reverse.  Looking at the mouth brooder, the lilytrotter, the reindeer and the honeybee, it is in fact flexibility and diversity of sex roles that we see.

And p.s. to be perfectly honest, why are Santa’s reindeer shown with antlers?  I suspect it is because later days artists find that embellishment aesthetically pleasing, and no other reason.  After all, Santa doesn’t employ all that many fact checkers to protects his brand and trademarks from such misrepresentation.   (Although, if Santa is sensible the team are non-breeding girls and eunuchs rather than bulls exhausted after the rut or pregnant females.)

In Peverse Crimes in History the authors write “Countess Bathory is also of especial interest because she is a woman.” But there reasoning is not what you might suspect as they continue: “Female sadists and mass-murderers have been less frequent than males ones, though perhaps only because women have less often attained positions of power where large-scale crimes are possible.”  Bathory was a 16th century Hungarian countess and is often mentioned in relation to the invention of the modern notion of vampires, because she amused herself torturing and murdering and is often described in this book, and many others, as bathing in their blood.

It might seem that the importance of power, and its associated immunity, is clear in that Bathory was the only person directly implicated in the murders who was not executed as a result.  She was declared insane and walled up within her apartment to spend the rest of her life in isolation and darkness where she lived for four more years and died at the age of 54.  But there is another explanation, that her two son-in-laws didn’t want her convicted as her property would revert to the throne–and dammit they married for that castle and the meant to have it. 

Add to that–it is often said that Countess Bathory bathed in blood, the basis for her fame as a proto-vampire, but this does not seem to be the case.  This morbid detail arose in fables and tales that appeared after Bathory’s death and can be easily falsified as many documents relating to her life and the trial of her servants and associated are a matter of public record.  The closest accurate detail is that some of her victims were bitten, but there is no indication of blood being consumed or otherwise enjoyed (the vampire equivalent of ‘not inhaling’ at best).

So, maybe it is a good point that if more women had enough power to be kill over 600 people before anyone felt the need to intervene, more women might be mass murders.  But she achieved power from her noble father, retained by a noble marraige, was taught how to torture woman by her husband and (temporarily) escaped death through the actions of her daughters’ husbands.  And as for the bloo fable, it was suggested I suppose to explain how a women could be a mass-murderer.  What acceptable reason could they could come up with that would drive a female to such extremes?

Vanity.

 So there we go.  A woman so powerful she is now remembered almost entirely for something she never did.

In a previous post I wrote about the difference between a sex object (like a pinup) and a person (like a model).  I have been thinking about this again as I read the notices posted after the death yesterday of Betty/Bettie Page from a heart attack. 

“Bettie” was the name she used as a model during the very early years of pinup and fetish photography (throughout the late 1940s and the 1950’s), and that became even more famous as an icon in the mainstream pop culture pinup revival that began in the late 1970s and continues today.    And it is because of this, and under this name, that she her loss is most often lamented. 

Bettie Page was a popular model because of her willingness to pose naked and in fetish scenarios at a time when erotic photography was legally suppressed and vehemently condemned by mainstream culture.  Her distinctive appearance. versatility and the prolific availability of her work through several prominent early pin up photographers and magazines meant Bettie became a preeminent pinup model.  She epitomised the suggestive, playful and occasionally kinky quality of early pin ups photography and colored the first commercial photo-fetish material. And it should not be overlooked that Bettie’s work in collaboration with these photographers was excellent. It stood out from the run of the mill material of the era–Bettie’s photographs show a woman at ease, often looking directly at the camera with an arch and unapologetic gaze.

In later years, when legal limits lifted and almost any kind of explicit pornography could be made and marketed many models and photographers looked back to the 50’s to try and recapture an age where an image could be both sexual and innocent, where it could be non-explicit and also extremely erotic. The pinup aesthetic was revived first in counter-culture album covers, tattoo and car art, and fine and fetish art homages–moving into the mainstream through kitch revival and now appears on everything from Christmas light to aprons. Right on the forefront of this revival was Bettie Page–her diverse and extensive modeling made her the perfect model for retrospective books and documentaries and the most recognisable model of her era to reference in a derivative work.

The Bettie images were powerful, sensual and had an wholesomely shamelss air that moved the pin up into the mainstream and opened the door to respectable careers in erotica. There is someone, however, who seems to slip between the cracks of our remembrances–and that is Betty. Betty was a girl who experienced state care, child abuse and rape. She grabbed the modelling opportunities she was given and excelled in that role. Despite strong education in art and acting, pin up modelling was her best option.  She never really had access to ostensibly respectable career paths. Betty she crafted her excellence out of pragmatic necessity, and given other options, would likely have made different choices.

Betty was paid poorly for her work and some of her most iconic shots made the (male) photographer wealthy while she earn only a small flat fee–and modern collections of her work were mostly made without paying her even the courtesy of getting in touch (let alone money). Her pictures are of a powerful woman, spanking another girl, draped over wild animals, her eyes always dark and challenging–as she was simultaneously being manipulated and literally exploited by those standing behind the camera whose gaze we take on every time we look at one of her pictures.

Betty was a woman of strong Christian faith who married her school sweetheart, but divorced him. She left modelling and for many years tried to pursue missionary work, repudiating her former career and remarried her husband partly to remove the obstacle a divorce represented in pursuing her religious calling. Betty was a woman who divorced her husband again, went rhough marraige and divorce with another man, and came to be at peace and unashamed of her re-surging pinup celebrity. She had done it for the money, she said, and she eventually embraced the security it gave her throughout life that no husband ever did.  In her later years she said: “God approves of nudity. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were naked as jaybirds.”

Betty was a woman best known as jungle queen and dominatrix–embodying extreme self-confidence–who almost never allowed herself to be photographed or filmed in her later years, embarrassed at her weight and the normal effects of aging. Speaking of her modelling years she always seemed bemused at her fame, citing average looks, unattractive skin and perceived dependence on heavily make up. Betty never thought of herself as beautiful. But she left a legacy of interviews that put her work in the context of her life and those times. She ensured that her voice and her story has also been preserved.

Pictures of Bettie from the 50s are iconic, historical, and pivotal artifacts in our culture–touchstones of the new feminism where sexuality is part of female character and female power. Sexuality without sin–sensuality with style–and girl-next-door normalisation of fetish. But the life of Betty is in many ways greater than that legacy. She struggled to reconcile faith with erotic employment. She would wield a whip and take part in the most exotic scenarios, but never showed her vagina and never took part in intercourse. Betty apparently struggled with mental illness, experienced poverty and had few enduring friends to offer support when it was need most. Every single relationship in her life was changeable and ambiguous–with her father, her husband, her God, her photographers, with money, with her siblings and even her own image.

Bettie is an icon. All across the media Bettie is being eulogized, appreciated and mourned–and that is as it should be. But Betty was a woman, and a lesson. She struggled, she was exploited, she excelled, she faced many challenges and she is in many way an archetype of normal female existence, albeit one writ large. She did her best and her best could damned good. But she experienced equal amounts of the worst in life, giving and receiving betrayal, violence and despair. Through sheer tenacity and talent Betty made it through all this over 85 years of an extraordinary life; a life that also deserves to be celebrated as much as the photographs taken during less than a decade of modelling work.

Rest in peace, Betty. A candle that flickered but burned right down to the base before it went out. 

I might have something more substantive to say tomorrow but it occurs to me that I talked about howTheda Bara is most famous for what are essentially pin-up shot.  But then I didn’t show you any.  But to recognise that there was indeed a person behind the sex object I will also provide some of her better known statements. 

I am also throwing in a little Servalan (a character played by Jacqueline Pearce)… just because.  And by ‘just because’ I mean that female characters that are powerful, sexual and unapologetic are hard to come by and need to be appreciated more. (Oh, and because 80’s costuming has to be seen to be believed).

The quotations are in bold, my comments are in italics.

 Theda Bara

The reason good women like me and flock to my pictures is that there is a little bit of vampire instinct in every woman. Not to mention any man too….

To understand those days, you must consider that people believed what they saw on the screen….Audiences thought the stars were the way they saw them. How much has this really changed?

I have the face of a vampire, but the heart of a feminist. In case anyone thinks feminism was invented in the 60’s.

Servalan

TRAVIS: You’re almost as ruthless as I am. / SERVALAN: You underestimate me, Travis. It’s the one advantage of sexist stereotypes, isn’t it?

VILA: Her idea of chivalry is never to shoot a blind man in the back. Interesting to even attribute the idea of chivalry to a female character, even sarcastically….

SERVALAN: Responsibility is something I have never evaded.

SERVALAN: There is something you should realise. There are no women like me. I am unique. That makes me rather dangerous. It is a common modern message that we are all unique, but it is generally meant to be a pretty positive affirmation (we are all beautiful snowflakes)–not a real cast iron ego (a.k.a. “balls).

JOBAN: The council ask ‘where is Blake’s head?’ And we have no answer.
SERVALAN: You shall have it.
JOBAN: The answer, or his head?
SERVALAN: Both.
Salome was a femme fatale for asking for a man’s head–Servalan is Pussy Puissant for intending to go and get it herself. (p.s. Theda Bara played Salome, so there is kind of a connection here).

SERVALAN: Where there’s life, there’s threat.
Dew dops on roses and whiskers on kittens are all very well. But of a girl is going to get ahead (figuratively or literally) she’s gotta be vigilant.

If you have other favorite quotations for Theda Bara or Servalan please let me know.  And if you have interesting women, real and fictional, to suggest–please do!

Today I picked up some reproduction posters for some of my favorite movies, well–two favorite movies and a fascinating actress.  Since then I have been thinking particularly about the actress depicted on the far right.  The movie La Belle Russe is (or, more accurately, was) a early twentieth century melodrama based on a good twin almost having her life destroyed by a bad twin (believe it or not, a common and popular story type at the time).  But the actress Theda Bara is now known more than any of her films, partly because so few of them remain. 

Theda Bara was one of the earliest “vampire women”, shortened to “vamps”.  But to say that Theda Bara is iconic is, to some extent, to miss the point.

 It is true now, and was even more true then, that an actress could employ a sexy persona and profit by it in gaining memorable roles that showcase her beauty and to some extent her talent.  But once an actress has made the choice to vamp it up they are likely to become type cast and excluded from the ‘respectable’ dramatic roles that film buffs covet and preserve.  Theda Bara felt this restriction acutely and made several attempts to escape her dark and sensual persona, writing about her efforts in a 1919 Vanity Fair article entitled, optimistically, “The Ex-Vampire”[pdf].

So what is remembered about Theda Bara is in fact largely a studio created mask.  Even more than more modern vamps like Marilyn Monroe, Theda Bara is remembered mainly through still, costumed images: “a long succession of rags, bones and hanks of hair” (from ‘A Fool There Was’).  Sloe-eyed and silent, and no matter how luminous,  her work was not valued enough that her films were preserved–only 6 of her 43 known films can be viewed in full today and 2 of these are relatively trivial short comedies made at the end of her career.  (The 4 longer works can be viewed here)

And La Belle Russe is not one of the movies that exists today. The poster on the wall represents not so much Theda Bara’s work as an actress, as how thoroughly her efforts were ultimately not appreciated. The famous vamp: a poster for which the movie was lost–a cat’s head blocking the view of a woman’s face–an actress promoted as exotically Arabian but actually a Jew–the vamp’s name that almost obliterates Theodosia Burr Goodman.

Of course, most woman from her age are not remembered at all. So by becoming a sexualised celebrity Theodosia/Theda become a shadow of her real self–yet an enduring one.  So perhaps she is more like a vampire than ever, immortally beautiful but at the sacrifice of the greater part of herself.  (And her entire family immortalised her legacy by changing their name from Goodman to Bara). 

And it must be noted that although, in her career, Theda never did become an ex-vampire–afterwards she did become a respectable married woman.  And it may be that this act ultimately contributed to the slimness of her legacy.  Theda Bara worked as an actress for 12 years, but could certainly have continued, and indeed expressed an interest in doing so.  However her husband did not consider acting an appropriate activity for a married woman and so she she receded into a comfortable retirement.

Theda Bara represents something insidious about taking on the role of the vamp.  She was arguably the most famous actress of her time and certainly Fox Studio’s greatest star, and images of her beauty have become icons of her era.  But in taking on this darkly sexual role Theda Bara became both the most loved, and also the most lost, of all the film femme fatales.  Is it simply that an actress who opens herself to being depicted as both lovely and lustful will be profitably adored but never fully respected even by the industry that creates and cultivates her “vamp” image?  And is this still true today?

Below is a recent cover of Newsweek featuring Sarah Palin.  As one blogger commented: “Wow. Kind of sexy, and just kind of weird at the same time.”  I think it could, at best, be considered a questionable choice.  What, I wonder, is the point being made by showing Palin with a shotgun over her shoulder?  It is a file photo from 2002, robbed of its original context as a hunting snapshot.  My take on it is that it hopes to gain gratuitous attention by combining Palin as a topical personality with a strange deep seated sex-fear weirdness embedded in our culture and apparent in other ‘chicks with guns’ photographs.

Take, for example, two more pictures from my Irving Klaw pinup collection.  Is this what flits through the mind in finding a rather ordinary, fully dressed picture of a hunter with a gun ”sexy”?  Here we have a girl was no pockets but a big pistol–who certainly seems happy to see you.  And another with a nice rifle and a serious lack of buttons (poor girl).  Neither is terribly explicit and the gun is clearly there for a fetishistic reason that only a Freudian could truly appreciate.

Not that I think the essential element is any kind of penis envy, at least not directly.  I think the interesting element is a tension between ‘feminine’ helplessness and the sheer lethality of firepower.  The message, as with the movie still below, is pure noir.  It is this woman is dangerous, maybe even fem-fatal [sic].

And that, ultimately, may be what the Newsweek cover was saying.  And although, Lord knows, I am no Palin supporter I think there is a strand of misogyny mixed in here.  If Cheney actually shooting someone is widely seen as just funny, why is Palin just holding a gun so provocative?  Sometimes a gun is, after all, just a gun.

A man was recently convincted in the UK for posting a fictional story about torturing and murdering the real life band Girls Aloud.   A Scotland Yard spokesperson reported said: “The test is whether the material is likely to deprave or corrupt those reading or viewing it.”  I call bollocks.  I actually agree with suppressing material about murdering real people if, in context, it could be seen as a threat or encouragement to really attack them.  But the idea that a fiction story will “deprave or corrupt” the reader seems outright ridiculous to me.  But the line between fantasy and reality is fuzzier than many people like to acknowledge.  My thinking is more that if someone came already depraved as hell, this story might suggest the band as appropriate victims–it is like hate speech but against individuals not a race or religion.  Which is firmer ground psychologically speaking, but still not a really good basis for suppressing a fictional work let alone prosecuting the author.  I am just kinda okay with ambiguity and going with my gut feeling about where this example falls along the scale of social acceptability.

Another example of screwing with the fact/fiction so-called boundary is, of course, OJ Simpson’s ‘If I Did It’.  For those of you who have been living under a rock, let me explain.  If ‘If I Did It’ is a book in which Mr. Simpson explains how he would have killed his late wife, if he had, which he sort of  didn’t (under criminal court, although just to muddy things further a civil court found him guilty).  Which makes it something like alleged fiction–the other side of the coin from Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (which was presented as factual but actually largely fiction).  Simpson’s charming little book about domestic homicide was picked up by Beauford Press (yes, speaking of two side of a coin, this is the same Beauford Press who I, as I previously commented, picked up The Jewel Of Medina). But on this book I also find myself conflicted but in agreement with the law.  Perhaps because there is, horribly, no way the victim could be considered still under threat–and perhaps also because the proceeds go to her family and it is published with their blessing.  OJ Simpson, meanwhile, may finally get locked away for the rest of his natural life, albeit for a different crime.