This week Serena Williams, seeking a 24th Grand Slam title, reached her breaking point with discrimination, and it appears that her breaking point is now becoming a tipping point for the professional world of women’s tennis.
 
She was playing the US Open women’s final, when the chair umpire issued a warning for a code violation for receiving coaching. Her coach later admitted that he was signaling, but that she had not seen him. She and the umpire had a civil exchange, and it seems that Serena understood that he had rescinded the warning. He hadn’t. A few games later, when she broke her racket in frustration over a play, she was shocked to receive a second warning, with a point docked at the start of her next game.
 
She stalked over to the chair, demanding an apology:  “I have never cheated in my life! I have a daughter and I stand [for] what’s right for her! I have never cheated. You owe me an apology. You will never do another one of my matches!” She continued to challenge the initial warning for coaching, accusing him of attacking her character and demanding an apology. She called him a liar, and then she called him a thief. And that was when the umpire issued the third code violation, resulting in the loss of a game.

Serena stood her ground at the post-match press conference: “I’ve seen other men call other umpires several things…I’m here fighting for women’s rights and for women’s equality… For me to say ‘thief’ and for him to take a game, it made me feel like it was a sexist remark. He’s never taken a game from a man because they said ‘thief.’ For me, it blows my mind.”
 
To put Serena’s outburst into context, she was returning to the game following a harrowing birthing experience. This is something that male athletes can never understand. Here’s a recap on the difficult delivery and the life-threatening post-partum:  After her contractions began, the baby’s heart rate started falling and an emergency cesarean section was performed. Not exactly the ideal scenario, but a common procedure that went smoothly. The baby was born, the cord was cut, and little Olympia was laid on her mother’s chest. Then, in Serena’s words, “Everything went bad.”
 
Serena has a history of blood clots, and because of this, she takes blood thinners. She went off these after the C-section to facilitate the healing of the surgical wound. The day after delivery, she began gasping. Flagging a nurse in the hall, she requested an IV with a blood thinner and a CT scan for clots. The nurse just thought she was confused. A doctor arrived and did an ultrasound. Serena reiterated, “I told you I need a CT scan and a heparin drip.” At this point, the scan was performed, and, indeed, she had clots in her lungs, and the appropriate medication was given. 

Well, her coughing from the clots reopened the C-section wound. She had to return to surgery for the lung clot, and then they found a hemotoma—clotted blood—in her abdomen, from the resumed blood thinner. Another operation, this time to put a filter into a major vein to keep clots out of the lungs. Finally, a week later, she was able to go home. Debilitated from all the crises, she had to stay in bed for six weeks, unable to care for the new baby. She describes the rollercoaster of postpartum emotions: “(The) incredible letdown every time you hear the baby cry ... Or I’ll get angry about the crying, then sad about being angry, and then guilty, like, ‘Why do I feel so sad when I have a beautiful baby?’ The emotions are insane.”
 
So this was just last fall, less than year ago. In July Serena spoke out about the fact she is being drug-tested as much as five times more frequently than any other star tennis player.
 
And then, there was the issue of her tennis outfit. She stepped onto the court at the French Open in a special, full-body compression suit designed to prevent blood clots. Serena explained, “All the moms out there that had a tough pregnancy and have to come back and try to be fierce, in the middle of everything. That’s what this represents. You can’t beat a catsuit, right?” The French indicated she had gone “too far” and banned  her from wearing it. She responded with a one-shoulder-bared, black tutu and compression fishnets.

Serena was aware that she was playing a different game for higher stakes:  “… I’m going to continue to fight for women and for us to have equal. ... I just feel like the fact that I have to go through this is just an example for the next person that has emotions, and that want to express themselves, and they want to be a strong woman. They’re going to be allowed to do that because of today.” Her voice began to shake. “Maybe it didn’t work out for me, but it’s going to work out for the next person.”
 
And all of this reminds me of another Black female athlete who was the subject of massive discrimination, and her breaking point—which was, sadly, so far ahead of her time that it did not result in a tipping point. Except for those of us who have used her example to arrive at our own moments of transformation.
 
I am talking about French former competitive figure skater Surya Bonaly. Originally a competitive gymnast, she began skating at the age of eleven. She eventually became three-time World silver medalist, a five-time European champion, and a nine-time French national champion. She was a three-time Olympian.

Bonaly was coached by her mother, who was not a member of the elite world of skating. They were outside of the network. And Bonaly was Black. Throughout her career, Bonaly was criticized for the athleticism of her skating. She was characterized as a gymnast instead of a dancer. One of her critics made this snarky remark: “I’d like to see her stop jumping for six months and learn to skate.”
 
The “jumping?” Practically unmatched in ambition. Surya was the first female skater to attempt a quadruple jump in competition, even though they were counted as triples, because they fell just shy of four full rotations. But the jump that really put her on the map was the “Bonaly backflip,” which is a backflip landed on one blade. Banned in competition, but a huge crowd-pleaser. In other words, Surya was muscular, daring, and athletic. Figure skating evolved in the late eighteenth century in Europe, incorporating elements of the ballet into circles and figure eights. These balletic roots led to an aesthetic that privileges elegance, lithe physiques, and a feminine ideal reminiscent of ballerinas. Surya’s skating is unapologetically powerful. The same kind of body-type prejudices that kept African American women out of classical ballet companies were applied to Surya.
 
Also, her costumes were usually showier than those of her competitors. She favored bold and unusual colors, with lots of sparkle. In spite of the fact that the judges favored tights, Surya skated barelegged. Possibly the tights she needed did not come in her skin tones.

But I was talking about her breaking point. It was at the 1994 World Championships in Japan. Surya was twenty-one, and, with three Olympic medalists not competing, she had good reason to be optimistic. Bonaly’s final overall score was equal to that of Yuka Sato, who was skating in her home court. There was a 5-4 tiebreaker decision in favor of Yuka, but Surya was not having it. At the awards ceremony, she stood on the floor beside the second place platform, refusing to mount it. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. One of the officials literally manhandled her up onto the platform, but when they hung the second-place medal around her neck, she immediately took it off again. The crowd began to boo.
 

According to the Los Angeles Times, “It came down to a choice between Yuka Sato’s artistry and dynamic footwork and Surya Bonaly’s gymnastic jumping.” Is that coded racism, or  the favoring the home team… or was Bonaly’s program just not as polished, as some would claim? Reviewing the videos later, it’s not all that clear that she was a victim of discrimination, but, for Surya, suffering through years of biased criticism and personal attacks rooted in racist values and traditions, it was the breaking point. She was sure she outskated Yuka Sato, and she was not going to participate in her humiliation by taking that step up to the second place platform and she could not allow that badge of discrimination to hang around her neck. It was an unforgettable moment. She refused to give a press conference and her only statement after the ceremony was “I’m just not lucky.” They could take or leave the sarcasm.
 
Unlike Serena, Surya’s breaking point had come decades before the #MeToo movement was exposing the institutionalized misogyny in the entertainment industry, and also decades before Black producers began to gain control over the representation of their culture and icons in the media.

But after her breaking point, Surya did get the last word. She entered her third Olympics in 1998 with an Achilles tendon injury that kept her from executing her planned routine. She knew she had no chance of medaling, and she was also planning to retire after the Games… so she “called an audible”—that is, she changed the play at the last minute. Three minutes into her free skating routine, as she was coming in backward for what looked like a jump, she suddenly raised her hands over her head and flipped backward into the air. Her legs flew up over her head, and she landed on one blade.  The crowd went wild.
 
It was totally illegal… and legendary. As one Canadian newspaper put it, it was “the most elaborate expletive in Olympic history.” The Washington Post was even more explicit: “Bonaly was making a statement not only as an accomplished skater, but also as a black athlete in one of the world’s whitest sports.”
 
Here is what I wish for all the underrepresented women in the world: May your breakdowns become tipping points, and whenever your excellence lies off the visible light spectrum of  institutions obsessed with color, may you never be afraid to show off and celebrate your brilliance… because you can, and because history will catch up and remember.

I am thinking about children being torn away from their mothers this week. And I remembered a story told by one of my playwriting colleagues, Eva Knowles Johnson.
 
I met Eva in 1989 at the second conference of the newly-formed International Centre for Women Playwrights. It was in Toronto.
 
Eva got up to speak in a large auditorium filled with women playwrights and lined with representatives of the international press. The first thing she did was demand that all the men leave the room. She said that the story she was about to share was “women’s business.” She would not tell it in the presence of men.

I have never forgotten that moment. I had never seen a woman exercise so much authority in my life. She ordered the men out of the room. And they went.
 
Eva Johnson is an Aboriginal Australian poet, actor, director and playwright. She belongs to the Malak Malak people of the Northern Territory, and she is a member of what is known as the “Stolen Generations” in Australia.
 
Between 1910-1970, the Australian government forcibly removed indigenous children from their families as part of a policy of “assimilation.”  Some of the children were adopted by white families, and many remained in institutions. They were taught to reject their heritage and forced to adopt white culture. Eva was taken from her mother at the age of two and placed in a Methodist mission where she was kept for eight years. At the age of ten, she was transferred to an orphanage in Adelaide.

After the men had left the room, Eva told a harrowing story of her abduction. She remembers, as a toddler, her mother running through the bush, holding her in her arms. An Australian soldier on a horse was pursuing them. He bent down and grabbed her, and she did not see her mother again for three decades.
 
She told us about this reunion. The children from the Stolen Generations were never intended to reunite with their families. Neither the parents nor the children were given information about each other, and the children had been renamed.
 
Eva’s mother was in a nursing home watching television, when she saw Eva on television. She may have been watching the acclaimed series “Women of the Sun,” about the lives of four Aboriginal women in Australian society from the 1820s to the 1980s. Eva recognized her daughter on the screen. Even though she had not seen her daughter since that day in the bush, she recognized her. That was the story of how they found each other.

Eva spoke about her work as a director in Australia. I remember her talking about producing a play about the colonization of her people. In her production, all the white male roles were performed by Aboriginal women. She told us that she had been challenged for this casting choice. I have never forgotten her explanation, when she asked who better understood the mind of the white male colonizer than the indigenous woman.
 
Eva Johnson’s work reflects her identity as part of the “Stolen Generation,” and it also addresses cultural identity, Aboriginal Australian women's rights, land rights, slavery, sexism and homophobia. An out and proud lesbian, she lit up the conference with her joy and her exuberance, which was inextricably connected to her awareness of her history. She is a living embodiment of Alice Walker’s affirmation, “Resistance is the secret of joy.”

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-prize-winning classic, is headed to Broadway… or, at least, it was headed for Broadway.
 
The author’s estate has just filed a lawsuit against the producer, Scott Rudin. At issue is his adaptation for stage. The estate attorney claims that it deviates too much from the novel and that this is a violation of their contract, which specifies that they shall not “derogate or depart in any manner from the spirit of the novel nor alter its characters.”
 
As a playwright, I find this case fascinating. As a lesbian, I think that both sides are overlooking the obvious.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, was considered radical in its day. The protagonist, Atticus Finch, is a white attorney who stands up to the prejudice in his small Alabama town, defending an African American man who has been falsely accused of rape by a white woman.

Today, however, the book is seen—rightfully—as exemplifying the racist trope of the Great White Savior.  In a silent tribute to their white champion, they rise spontaneously as Atticus leaves the courtroom. His head bowed in defeat, he neither sees nor acknowledges them.
 
This was the book that Harper Lee wrote. It is an artifact of its time. Although African American authors were writing and publishing, the white-dominated mainstream market was not ready to identify with their perspectives. Lee’s book was an immediate bestseller. It’s my opinion that the popular embrace of the book is contingent on the fact that Atticus loses his case and that the defendant is killed in attempting to escape. Like the trope of the dead lesbian, this reification of the status quo invites self-satisfied expressions of compassion from mainstream readers who are spared the more difficult work of embracing an ending that signals social change.
 
Today the Great White Savior narrative is widely acknowledged as offensive, and one not likely to repay the investment that goes into mounting a Broadway production. This is why, in this dramatic adaptation by Aaron Sorkin, Atticus is portrayed at the outset as a man in denial about the racism of his town—an apologist for prejudice, unwilling to believe that an innocent man can be found guilty.  The role of Calpurnia, the African American woman who cooks for the Finch family, has been rewritten as the agent for Atticus’ awakening. Through a series of confrontations with her employer, she manages to win over the white attorney, mentoring him into the reality of Southern rural racism in 1936. By the end of the play, he has become the Atticus with whom we are familiar, the righteous hero standing against the masses for social justice… but he owes it all to a woman of color.

Actor/musician Evadne Bryan-Perkins notes that this rewrite swaps one racist trope for another--that of the "Magical Negro." This trope relies on a supporting stock character coming to the aid of the white protagonists, helping them discern the error of their ways. (This term was popularized by African American film director Spike Lee in 2001, during his lecture tour of universities, where he was criticizing the unrealistic and stereotyped depictions of African American men in Hollywood cinema.)

But Rudin, the producer, is not just responding to the datedness of the Great White Savior narrative. He also knows his dramaturgy. In theatre, the main character needs to have what is called a “narrative arc.” The protagonist must go on a journey of transformation, starting out at Point A and, two hours later, ending up—ideally—at Point Z. (A dramatic trajectory from Point A to Point B is not likely to carry a play with the gravitas of To Kill a Mockingbird.) The Atticus of the book, tried as he is by circumstances, nevertheless begins with sterling character and social conscience and ends in the same state of  grace. He goes from Point A to Point A.
 
As a playwright, I sympathize with the producer.  He wants a play that is going to work. However, as a playwright who is zealous about her own copyright protections, I have to side with the Harper Lee estate: It is clear that, in giving Atticus a narrative arc, the producer has deviated substantially from the character in the book. In rewriting the role of Calpurnia to be a major voice in the play, the producer has essentially created a new character.

Scout has a huge dramatic arc. In fact, Scout’s coming-to-consciousness about the socials evils of the adult world is the point of the book. She goes from being a naive child who has absorbed the prejudices of her peers, to someone who can break away, incorporating perspectives of the under-represented and standing with the outsiders of the world. Scout watches the trial, literally, from the colored section of the segregated courtroom. At the end of the book, she has traveled from fear of a developmentally disabled neighbor, to recognizing him as an ally and friend.
 
Why not make Scout the central figure in the Broadway show?  In the book, she is six, but she was older in the film. If the play is refracted through the adoring eyes of a child, wouldn't that explain her idealized experience of her father? In the book, Scout accompanies Calpurnia to a Black church, where she has a massive awakening as she sees Calpurnia's transformation of status among members of her own community. No need to violate the contract. Just allow the woman the full and radical context of that scene.

Can a Broadway audience identify with a gender-non-conforming little girl. Why not?  It wouldn’t be the first time. Member of the Wedding, another best-seller by a Southern lesbian author, was adapted for Broadway. It opened in 1950 and ran for more than five hundred performances. A historic production, the cast included Ethel Waters and a young Julie Harris. What is significant here is that the author adapted the book herself, and the character of the tomboy, Frankie, remains as central and unaltered on the stage as she was in the book. 
 
Yes, there will be a problem if Aaron Sorkin stays on to attempt a Scout-centric adaptation. Sorkin’s writing credits include the television series The West Wing, and a roster of tough-talking, political films including A Few Good Men, The American President, Charlie Wilson's War, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs. He has already been questioned about his ability to write dialogue for Harper Lee’s juvenile characters. Asked if they will be expected to “speak Sorkin,” he responded, "Well, they're gonna have to, because I didn't write their language like they were children."
 
As a solution to this author-producer deadlock, I would like to put my name forward as an alternative writer. My credentials include thirty years of creating and performing lesbian roles for the stage, including more than a dozen gender-non-conforming roles for little girls. I invite Mr. Rudin to the webpage for my Butch Visibility Project. I really believe this might work.

The #MeToo campaign is causing a revolution, and I want to make sure that the other, huge percentage of women impacted by these sexual predators are not forgotten. I call us the "#MeNeither women." Read on!

In October of last year, the online #MeToo campaign went viral on international social media sites. The hashtag phrase was created by Tarana Burke, an African American civil rights activist, who coined it in 2006 to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in the culture. Last fall, white actress and activist Alyssa Milano boosted the signal by posting a message on her Twitter account, encouraging survivors of sexual harassment and assault to post #metoo as a status update. She did this as a supportive response to the actresses who were coming forward with their stories of harassment and assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

t#MeToo marks a cultural watershed. In a nutshell, women are being believed.
 
Suddenly immediate action is being taken to remove and replace these predators, without the women needing to win a case in court. For decades powerful men have gotten away with rape and harassment, because they could count on their victims having fewer resources and connections. They could tie up these women in court for decades with costly litigation, as well as smearing their names and destroying their careers. In fact, Weinstein hired private security agencies to collect information on the women who accused him and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. These agencies included Black Cube, a business run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies, with branches all over the world. According to the New Yorker Magazine:

But in October, all of this changed. Women are being believed. We celebrate their courage as well as the international housecleaning that is going on as these predators are being fired and replaced.
 
But there is a hidden side of #MeToo. I call it #MeNeither, to include the victims who are currently not being included in this historic moment. Not all the victims have been assaulted or verbally harassed. In fact, the #MeNeither victims, like myself, are the ones the predators would not touch with a ten-foot pole.

The men who were/are busy raping, coercing, groping, and blackmailing their victims were/are not going to green-light any films about strong women standing up to perpetrators and winning. They were/are not going to fund narratives in which men like themselves are depicted as the bad guys. They were/are not going to foster a culture where they will be called out for their criminal appetites and activities. They did/do promote pornographic narratives where women are objectified, raped, tortured, and mutilated. They did/do promote romantic comedies where the heroine will sacrifice all to stand by her man. They aggressively have/do propagate male supremacy in their enterprises. These predators have colonized our collective imaginations.
 
Here is a partial list (out-of-date the day after posting!) of these mogul predators who have been busted just since October. It speaks for itself. These are men at the highest echelons of the top entertainment and media institutions in the US. Some are also in our government:

 II have been feeling frustrated lately, and I think some of it comes from my friends not understanding what’s going on with me... So I am going to tell you a little bit about that... about  what is actually going on with me.
 
I am disabled. I have celiac disease, which I inherited from my mother. Born in 1920, she was one of the first diagnosed cases of what they used to call “sprue.” Her doctors hadn't realized that gluten was the problem, but they did realize that these sick babies would start to thrive if they were put on a diet consisting of nothing but bananas and oatmeal for the first three years of their lives. So that's what my mother ate.

She did survive, but, sadly, she grew up believing that sprue was a childhood disease that she had outgrown. No one outgrows celiac... at least, not to my knowledge. Because of this misinformation, my mother ate wheat all her life and, consequently, suffered from a huge number of mental and physical disorders. It never occurred to her to have her children tested. As infants, we were not noticeably sick. We grew up eating wheat.
 
I was forty before I realized that I had inherited celiac from her. It took a while for me to connect the dots back to my mother’s “sprue.”  By the time I realized what I had, I was suffering from a wide range of conditions related to poor absorption of nutrients from a compromised gut.  I was running serious deficiencies in the B vitamins, in zinc, in magnesium… and I was severely anemic.  And I wasn't metabolizing fats very well. Every year, I was becoming more and more malnourished.

My condition was compounded by Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).  I was stricken with ME/CFS in the fall of 1987.  It came on like the worst case of flu in my life… except I never recovered. I was desperately sick for about seven years: encephalitis, petit mal seizures, strange rashes, neurofibromyalgia, debilitating migraines, sleep disorders, extreme irritability, vision problems, multiple chemical sensitivities (allergies to everything), cognitive disorders, and fatigue. Fatigue so serious I could not clean the litter box and get the mail from the mailbox on the same day. And an inability to bounce back from even mild physical exertion (post-exertional malaise).
 
I am better now, but here’s the thing: I’m not normal. Not even close. Most people aren’t around me consistently enough to realize the extent of my disability, but it’s like this: I start every day with a certain number of energy chips… let’s say 60 chips. That’s all I’m going to get for the day. And if I try to do things that require more than my allotment of energy chips, I can become incapacitated for more than a week. It's like I go to energy debtor's prison.  It’s really important for me not to spend beyond my limit. 60 chips. No credit cards. No checks. Strictly energy cash, pay-as-you-go.

So most normal folks start their day with, say, 300 energy chips. On an average day, an average person only needs, say,  about 200. Most people never even have to think about it. They do a bunch of things all day until it’s time to go to bed. They end their day with a pile of unused energy chips. They have an abundance of energy for whatever they want to do.
 
But I have to budget. I have to  scrimp. I have to rob Peter to pay Paul.  There’s a whole  lot of calculation and negotiation that goes on in my daily activity log. When I get up in the morning, I look at what I absolutely have to do that day. That gets the first allocation of energy chips. Then I look at the things that have to be done sometime. That’s the next round. If I have any chips left, I can budget for something fun. I am mostly retired, which is a great relief, but just routine cleaning and cooking and keeping up with things like oil changes or dental visits takes much of my energy. I also have to eat a very specialized diet that precludes gluten, dairy, sugar, and prepared foods. I end up needing to cook a lot. It gets exhausting, but if I am not careful, I will wake up in the morning with only 50 chips instead of 60.

Anything emotionally strenuous or physically demanding will run through all my chips and land me in bed. I can’t do aerobic exercise. I can’t deal with dysfunctional dynamics. Drama is a luxury I can’t afford. And travel, because of all the unknowns, crowds, toxins, and changes in plans, is incredibly challenging for me.
 
If you ask me at the last minute to do something, I am very likely going to have to say no. If you ask me at 2 PM about going to a party that night, I probably won’t have saved up the energy chips for it. I was planning to be done with my day by 6 or 7, so most of my chips have already been used up. If you had asked me two days earlier about the party, I could have budgeted, but now it’s too late.
 
Also, as an introvert, I am drained when I am around people, even close friends. Like other introverts,  I recharge my batteries by being alone. (Extroverts are the opposite.) I  have to budget the plans I make to be with people. It can use up all my chips just to host a visitor for a day, or even a half-day. If you come to visit me, come prepared to entertain yourself without me for much of the time. I need most of my time for myself.  Introversion + celiac + ME/CFS = the main reason why I have been single for most of the last 30 years. I just don’t have the energy.

If  I am visiting you, and you have planned a whole bunch of activities, I will probably have to say no to most of them. I can budget for, possibly, one a day.
 
I love the saying, “If you see your glass as half-empty, pour it into a smaller glass and stop bitching.” That is exactly what I have done.

I have moved to a little village where I am two blocks from the library, the post office, the grocery store, the hardware store, and the town hall. I live on an island where there is a national park. I can access breathtaking day hikes in just fifteen minutes. I rarely leave the island… and my cup runneth over with beauty and gratitude.

I write for a limited amount of time every day. I’m often done with my day by 6 or 7 at night. I keep things as simple and easy as I can… and I still feel vulnerable. A flat tire or an emotional tiff can blow the energy budget for the day, and a day of energy debt can cost me an entire week.

Am I controlling? I experience that as an unfair question. I have to live within my energy means. The penalties for overdrawing the account are very severe. How I live isn’t micromanaging to me. It’s prudent self-care. And it's not optional.
 
So, if you are my friend, that’s how I tick. I am disabled all the time. I’m on the energy clock all the time. If you know this about me, and you have empathy, that is a bonus for me. It's fewer energy chips I have to expend when I am around you. And sometimes, believe it or not, I actually get  an extra chip or two from your concern and consideration.  And that is something exquisitely rare and precious to me.

So, there it is. Thanks for reading.

Let’s get back to Thérèse. She was a child. She posed for Balthus on numerous occasions for three years. We cannot know if she wanted to pose for him or if she was ordered by her family to do it. In the case of Thérese Dreaming, the child had to hold an awkward and physically uncomfortable position (both arms held over her head) for long stretches of time. She also had to hold an emotionally excruciating position… exposing her elevated crotch and underwear with her legs wide apart. I would submit that the physical and emotional discomfort of the subject were components in of the painter’s choice of pose.  I would also submit that, if Thérèse is dreaming at all, it is of something to make it stop. In fact, the subject’s eyes appear to be squeezed tightly shut, her eyebrows contracting from the effort.
 
Non-consensual voyeurism is a form of sexual abuse, and a twelve-year-old child is not of age to give consent to exposing herself in her underwear to a painter. Repeated non-consensual voyeurism constitutes stalking. Thérèse Dreaming is actually evidence of a crime—documentation of the crime scene. And, yes, harm is happening. The child is being objectivized, fetishized. In posing, she is being compelled to participate. What is happening to her is a violation of her personhood and of her rights to privacy.

The Met appears to be unclear on this point.
 
Seven years ago, the art world was very unclear about a film by Larry Rivers titled “Growing.” The film had been part of an archive of his work belonging to the Larry Rivers Foundation, but in 1910, it was just sold, with the archive, to New York University.
 
“Growing” was a film in which Rivers filmed his daughters every six months over a period of at least five years. According to one of his daughters, when she objected at the time, he called her “uptight” and  “a bad daughter.”  When she confronted him as a teenagers, he gave the justification that his “intellectual development had been arrested.”

Rivers edited the footage of his naked daughters into a 45-minute film that he was intending to include in a 1981 exhibition of his work. The mother of the girls stopped him.
 
Initially, New York University refused the now-adult daughters’ request that the film be destroyed. They did agree to restrict access to the film for the lifetime of the women, insisting that “Growing” was the work of a great artists and not child pornography.  The public did not agree, and the story went viral. In the end,  NYU did not want the controversy, and they returned the film to the Larry Rivers Foundation. The Foundation has said they will never allow the film to be shown publicly.
 
The simple fact is, “Growing” is child pornography, and it is illegal to buy it or to own it. This is a film where the father’s voice is heard telling his reluctant daughters to take off their clothes. The camera zooms in on the breasts or the genitalia, while the father asks prurient questions about their boyfriends and comments on the changes in their bodies. The filming began, like Balthus’ paintings of Thérèse,  when one of the subjects was eleven.

I blogged about the Larry Rivers situation at the time, and in my blog I made a radical proposition intended to break the deadlock over, “When an important artist makes child pornography is it still art?”  I will repeat that proposition here:
 
I propose that childhood be recognized as a sovereign state, and that children be treated as the indigenous populations of a world colonized by adults.
 
Most folks don’t want to think of children that way, because most of us don’t want to consider how many children are living as captives, how the socialization of the child is really about her colonization. It’s easy for us not to think about children this way, because they do not have a voice, a movement, a lobby, a dime—and they never will.  Children do not have a language specific to their experience with which to frame a paradigm of their sovereignty. And that lack of language is one of the most priceless aspects of their culture. It is a culture of astounding plasticity, adaptability. It is a culture of magic, of naiveté, of gullibility, of heartbreaking innocence and spontaneity… and nearly endless opportunities for exploitation.  

“Cultural restitution” is a term that refers to returning stolen works of art and artifacts and bones of indigenous cultures. When the Nazis raided the museums of Europe to enhance their own prestige, they were operating according to the laws of their own corrupt regime. These seizures are not recognized as legitimate by a world restored to sanity, and, after a slow start, the stolen works of art are being identified and returned. It is immaterial that they may have been sold to third and fourth parties unaware of their original status as Nazi contraband. The rights of the victims have been affirmed.
 
“Cultural restitution” also refers to art and artifacts taken from indigenous cultures to be housed in museums or historical collections. Skeletons and burial artifacts are being returned to the tribes from whom they were taken by archeologists. There is an acknowledgement that a sovereign people have a right to their history and their culture, and that it is a violation of the sovereignty for another people, even a conquering one, to appropriate the artifacts of that history or culture.
 
This obscene film by Larry Rivers was an artifact of his daughters’ raided and stolen childhoods. It was never his to bequeath, and it had no place in the archive passed on to the Larry Rivers Foundation, and New York University had no right to acquire it. It belonged to the daughters.

Thérèse Blanchard is not alive today. She, unlike Rivers’ daughters, cannot stake a claim to the documentation of her abuse. But in continuing to display works like this (and much of Balthus’ canon), we perpetuate the prurience of the perpetrators.
 
Children have a right to their lives, to their experience, to their privacy. And when a colonizing, predatory adult invades this world, exploiting and monetizing their vulnerability and raiding their innocence in the name of “art,” children should have the right of an indigenous people to claim the artifact that bears witness to their invasion and colonization. And if the child victims are no longer here to stake that claim, then we should make sure that these crime-scene artifacts, no matter how "tasteful" or "masterful" the execution, will never be revered as works of art.