Friday, Sep 5, 2008
From groping the breasts of TV hosts to making crudely sexist comments, Arnold Schwarzenegger has given machismo a bad name.
Aug 30, 2003 | For Arnold Schwarzenegger -- bodybuilder, movie star, family man and gubernatorial candidate -- the world of women has always been full of wonderful surprises.
One day when you're a young man pumping iron at Gold's Gym in Venice, Calif., a "black girl" shows up naked, and all the guys get to take her upstairs for a gang bang. Out in public in the free-wheeling '70s, stewardesses, waitresses and teachers -- "a great many teachers," actually -- walk right up and say, "I really dig your body and want to fuck the shit out of you." Now and again, "a blonde with great tits and a great ass" turns out to be as "smart as her breasts look." And in your mid-50s, a role in a Hollywood movie gives you the once-in-a-lifetime chance to "take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury her face in a toilet bowl."
"How many times do you get away with this?" Schwarzenegger asked Entertainment Weekly in a story published earlier this summer. He may be about to find out.
Since he announced his candidacy on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" nearly a month ago, Schwarzenegger has enjoyed a mainstream-media free ride the likes of which is usually accorded only to men whose initials are George W. Bush. Despite the media largesse and Schwarzenegger's efforts to position himself as a pro-choice moderate, the actor's place in the polls has been less than dominant -- depending on which poll you trust, he's either even with anonymous Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante or just behind him. And now, new attention to his ways with women is calling into question the viability of the actor's run for governor in California.
The problem for Schwarzenegger isn't just a 1977 interview with Oui magazine that surfaced this week -- although, with references to oral sex and group sex and admissions of drug use, the interview is clearly a problem. The real risk for Schwarzenegger is that women, the religious right and the Bush White House itself will be turned off by a pattern of raunchy talk -- and allegations of raunchy behavior -- that began in the 1970s and apparently continues into the present.
In anecdote after anecdote, article after article, from the 1977 Oui article to a July interview in Esquire, Schwarzenegger comes across a man who speaks in the rudest and crudest fashion possible about women, men and the things they sometimes do together. And if allegations made about Schwarzenegger in a 2001 piece in Premiere are true, his over-the-top and up-the-skirt attitudes about women translate to actions as well.
San Francisco-based journalist Connie Matthiessen got a hot blast of Schwarzenegger raunch when she happened across the actor in the mid-1980s. In an interview Friday with Salon, she recalled that she didn't know who Schwarzenegger was and had never seen him before. When a friend pointed him out to her in a Santa Monica, Calif., cafe, Matthiessen couldn't help but stare at his massive, muscle-bound physique. Schwarzenegger shot a look back her, and snarled: "The dildo convention is next door."
"He said it in such a mean way," Matthiessen says. "I was across the room, and it was such a brutal conversation. It felt like he had just slapped me, it was so contemptuous and dismissive and nasty."
It wasn't the first time that Schwarzenegger talked that way to -- or about -- women, and it certainly wasn't the last.
If California voters somehow get a closer look at this X-rated, seemingly misogynist side of Arnold Schwarzenegger -- that is, if their local newspapers and TV stations stop talking of Schwarzenegger's attitudes in G-rated sound bites and begin to delve into the brutal crudeness of it all -- they may soon begin to decide that there is a lot to not like about the man who would be governor.
"Arnold Schwarzenegger's sexual stereotypes are beyond the pale," said Katherine Pillar, the Los Angeles-based executive vice president of Feminist Majority, a national women's organization working for women's rights and empowerment. "It's so appalling. He has shown a very disrespectful attitude about women, a lot of sexual stereotypes, and he clearly hasn't outgrown it. I think the women of California have to ask themselves: Would they want this man to be governor, and, frankly, can they trust him?"
The Oui interview, now 26 years past, seems to capture the essence of the Austrian bodybuilder -- a young man on the cusp of fame, living the L.A. high life with little sign of self-consciousness or self-criticism.
Oui: Can you push yourself too far?
Schwarzenegger: ... Injuries happen when your mind is beyond your body, largely when you think you're King Kong and lift weights heavier than the body can handle. At the same time, though, we generally manage to have a good time. Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, at Gold's -- the gym in Venice, Calif., where all the top guys train -- there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together.
Oui: A gang bang?
Schwarzenegger: Yes, but not everybody, just the guys who can fuck in front of other guys. Not everybody can do that. Some think that they don't have a big-enough cock, so they can't get a hard-on. Having chicks around is the kind of thing that breaks up the intense training. It gives you relief, and then you go back to the serious stuff.
Freelance writer Peter Manso interviewed Schwarzenegger for the porn magazine Oui in 1977. He spent several days with the 29-year-old bodybuilder as he traveled through the Northeast promoting the low-budget documentary "Pumping Iron." Manso was struck, he told Salon this week, by two things from his travels with Arnold: how Schwarzenegger effortlessly charmed his way out of getting busted when a security guard caught the two of them smoking a joint in a museum stairwell, and how Schwarzenegger inserted a sexual undercurrent into every encounter with every woman he met.
"You could not walk down the street with Arnold Schwarzenegger without sensing the flirtation," Manso said. "He seemed to be chemically incapable of having an exchange with any female without there being sexual innuendo or sexual byplay."
Schwarzenegger all but admitted as much in the '77 interview. Manso quoted Schwarzenegger as saying that he had been "approached by waitresses, stewardesses, teachers -- come to think of it, there have been a great many teachers, women who are smart. Their trip is such a mental one that they are often attracted to men who are big and muscular." Manso asked Schwarzenegger if he felt "exploited" by such women. Arnold said no. "I'd feel used only if I didn't get something out of it," he said. "If a girl comes on strong and says, 'I dig your body and want to fuck the shit out of you,' I just decide whether or not I like her. If I do take her home, I try to make sure I get just as much out of it as she does. The word 'exploited' therefore wouldn't apply."
Manso's five-page interview with Schwarzenegger was buried under the dust in a thousand guys' closets until somebody named kozmo23 put a copy of it up for bid on eBay last week. He billed it as the interview Schwarzenegger would "prefer to bury" in a "deep hole," and he urged bidders to snap up a copy before Gov. Davis beat them to it. By Wednesday night, thesmokinggun.com had "leased" a copy of the interview and posted it on the Web; by Thursday morning, Matt Drudge was hyping the piece as "shock interview" in which Schwarzenegger "pumps up orgies and dope." By the end of the day Thursday, the bidding on kozmo23's magazine had topped $700, and additional copies of the issue were beginning to sprout up on eBay.
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