Hollywood has never been comfortable with traditional morals and values, so it is rather amusing seeing the industry struggling to figure out how to respond to Will Smith violently assaulting Chris Rock at the Oscars over a joke about Smith's wife Jada.
- Is Will Smith an heroic husband defending his wife's honor before a global audience?
- Is he a patriarchal caveman helping perpetuate toxic masculinity by using his fists to solve problems?
You can see the tension there.
Yet beyond the hopelessly convoluted politics of the moment is a deeper and more troubling dichotomy at play here: Will Smith's aggressive defense of his wife on the Oscars stage occurs alongside his complete and utter spousal neglect of her off the stage.
Smith has already admitted that he and his wife are in an "open marriage." In other words, he allows other men to have sex with his wife.
There are few more potent and enduring symbols of emasculated weakness—and of bad husbandship—than a man standing by while other guys hook up with his wife and make a mockery of their wedding vows.
We should note that Will Smith presumably hooks up with women in his own right, but of course that simply degrades his own personal integrity even further—if you can't defend your wife and your marriage from the impulses and the ego of your own sexual appetites, you're not much of a man or a husband, whatever else you may be.
These are, of course, the fruits of the sexual revolution: Disorder and chaos, disgust and decay. This has been known for decades. When you move away from the square-and-sober arrangement of real, actual marriage in favor of sexual licentiousness and mayhem and gluttony, it's never a good show.
And so at the Oscars this year we saw in Will Smith the curious, poisonous melding of the old order and the new, a mix of savage braggadocio and pathetic effeteness: a man striking another man for joking about his wife on stage while he allows numerous other men to make a far more sickening joke of his wife every other day of the year.
Will Smith feeling the need to violently defend his wife's dignity is, in a certain context, an admirable trait: Every man should be prepared to do so for his own wife, under the right circumstances. That he did so while also tolerating the obscenity of an "open marriage" exposes the incident for the meaningless, useless gesture it was.
Chris Rock may have been right when he called the assault "the greatest night in the history of television," if only because it revealed for us just how low our civilization has sunk, and how much lower we'll doubtlessly continue to go.
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