In like Flynn

One of the inbuilt strategies of patriarchy is to enable excuses for men and their heinous behaviour. The perpetrators of violence abuse and assault are often vindicated through victim-blaming tendencies of lawyers, cops, magistrates, journalists and of course the entire rest of the world.

An alternate strategy, rather than excusing the heinous behaviour of men, is to glorify it. Painting bad men as charming, devilish heros, the ones that “all” women want and “all” men want to be like. Patriarchy loves this strategy even more than the excusing strategy, because it casts a much longer shadow and is far more enduring. Julian Assange will be forgotten soon. Mark McInnes already has been. But Errol Flynn is still around to continue fighting for the cause, to give men permission to be fucking arseholes.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to Sydney’s classic rock station, 95.3. ‘Classic’ being code for masculinist because it is mostly men who get played there, white men that is, and a few token white women. Anyway the old ‘classic’ Australian Crawl song, Errol, came on, and I was like yeah that’s right, men slapping each other on the back, enabling each other’s arseholery, contributing to the perpetuation of the memory of each other’s arseholery…that’s what they do. I knew Errol Flynn had had a rape charge at one time, but I wasn’t sure of the details. .

When I got home, I dug around in a box of my father’s old books that have been taking up space in the garage, and I fished out the old copy of Flynn’s autobiography “My wicked, wicked ways”. How cute, to have been so rewarded for scumbaggery that you can actually advertise it openly that you are a scumbag, confident that it will only produce yet more social approval.

The book was written by Flynn with the help of a ghost writer and was not actually published until after he died of alcohol and drug abuse in 1959. It is interesting to note that this edition was re-published in 1985, no doubt as part of the backlash against second wave feminism, or maybe the Australian Crawl tribute in 1981 generated some kind of renewed interest. I was stoned for the 80s so I don’t recall very much.

So I start reading this book. Apparently after Flynn’s death, his father Professor Flynn, marine biologist, made a statement that his son had lived his life the way all men would if they only had the courage to. I cannot verify this statement but I have no doubt that it’s the goddamn truth. Flynn really did epitomise white male privilege and entitlement. Even without those two non-convictions for statutory rape, he would be a hero in the eyes of most men. He was a violent thug, born into privilege, who treated the planet as a personal resource.

After assaulting his way to expulsion from a couple of different posh private schools, Flynn left Australia after stealing some jewellery from a woman he had been sleeping with, and took off up to New Guinea. He rationalises this theft as an act of a survival. This is pretty much the theme of the entire book, life treated him unfairly and so he had to do bad things to get by. He may have been one of the early MRAs; white, male, able-bodied, and obsessed with playing the victim utterly oblivious to his own privilege. Later in the book Flynn blames his violence (he hurled a cat against a wall because it woke him up) and his alcohol abuse (he makes no mention of his heroin use) on the fact that Hollywood typecast him as a swashbuckler and he hadn’t necessarily wanted to be a swashbuckler, you see. It was all very unfair, all that money and assets that he pissed away, that he had obtained through being thought of as good-looking, apparently that didn’t make up for the fact that he wanted to play serious roles despite the fact that he just couldn’t act.

The man’s entire life was spent wallowing in privilege. When he ran away to New Guinea he traded on his powerful colonising white man status to obtain jobs that he was unqualified to hold. Jobs through which he helped destroy the natural enviroment and exploit the economy of a developing nation. He kept slaves, Kanakas, he bought and sold human beings, he deceived local tribal elders. When he found a young girl who had survived the massacre of her village by another tribe he took her home and kept her as his personal domestic/sex slave. On another occasion he bartered two pigs for the twelve year old daughter of a village chief. He reminds us constantly that in New Guinea there is ‘no such thing as age’ so you see it’s all totally cool, they weren’t really children because they weren’t even really people because they weren’t white, so raping is ok and everything.

I know that Errol Flynn fans will say that it was a different era then, people didn’t know any better then, and perhaps there is a grain of truth in that, but hey, the damned book was still published as recently as 1985. The tribute song was written in 1981, albeit by rich white boys, but during what was probably a more enlightened era than the one we live in now, and it’s still getting air play in 2010! The man is still a hero despite the fact that he was sleeping with a 16 year old girl at the time of his death, and had been since she was only 14. His cocaine and heroin abuse was commonly known, his raping of girls was commonly known. In his book he openly brags about perpetrating violence, theft, and cruelty to animals (he also tricked a shark into swallowing dynamite and injected ammonia into a crocodile’s arse to make it move for his failed under-water film attempt). He claimed to have attempted to write a script for a stage play, an hilarious play all about how stupid and pathetic woman are. Yet the man continues to be a legend. Why?

Having said all that, why the hell would he not be? He sailed around in a boat, colonising, oppressing, assaulting and raping his way around the world. He got married but refused to live with his wives and continued to live as a bachelor. He fucked girl children. He got rich and famous and a reputation for sexual prowess. He fucking hated women. He was an ultimate embodiment of patriarchal power. This is what men want. Or, as summed up by the knobs of the Australian music industry, “Oh Errol, I would give everything just to be like him”. Like the rich white boyz of Australian Crawl, Flynn is often represented as some kind of rebel, who thumbed his nose at The Establishment. All the while benefiting from it. Like Assange, it’s said that that same establishment singled him out unfairly and victimised him. Using women to do it.

Message to men: You suck as human beings. You are the fatal disease of this planet.