The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

One reason why anybody might be confused by the messages being pumped all around the world by the entertainment industry is that it is itself highly confused about what is going on. Only a couple of decades ago there was still some awareness of the complexity of male–female relations. There is a famous scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, released in 1989. At an early stage in the film Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford, is in his classroom teaching basic archaeology to a class full of young women. Most of the class seem to be staring rather dreamily at him, and among them is one of their number who throws Professor Jones off his train of thought because she has written ‘Love’ on one eyelid and ‘You’ on the other. And she keeps blinking at him, slowly and meaningfully so that he can read the words and presumably absorb the intention behind them. There are two memes in this scene that were perfectly familiar until we recently pretended that they weren’t. The first is that the teacher–student relationship in learning can have an undercurrent of sex. The ancient Greeks knew this, though there was then, as there is now, a knowledge that any sexual current must always be resisted. Yet it can be there. And the second theme – more important to our purpose here – is that of the predatory, even vampish younger woman preying on the older, more vulnerable, possibly even helpless male. This was a recognized motif throughout most of history and at least as recently as 1989....