David Bowie Was A Man

David Bowie, Dearly Beloved, dead now, we are to pay tribute: how he was the innovator dreamboyish archangel of art-rock, the Man Who Fell to Earth, carved of angles and illusion, ever morphing, grinning sidewise sly mutant shapeshifter, an outsider, an alien: he was so different, wasn’t he? With one blue eye, the other hazel. As if he weren’t even human. As if he weren’t a man at all. Hair a shock of chemical-electric orange a blaze sleek over the razored elegance of that beautifully strange face, painted vivid cyan and scarlet or powdered pearl. His body lithe, the hairlessness of it, milk-skinned delicate. As if he weren’t a man at all. With arch grace through calculated spectacle the man born David Robert Jones crafted an image, or a sequence of images spanning four decades, of an exotic supernal creature – David Bowie – he could inhabit and perform for the watching world. The images trhough which he raced made him unrecognizable as a Man – capital M here to mean: a male, allegiant to masculinity as a beneficiary//benefactor of patriarchy – to the humble citizenry of the workaday world it was his aim to transcend, by way of sequins and a superficial chaos of sex role signifiers. That the fascinating creature on stage or on TV was a Man lapsed into obscurity, because of how he dressed, the way that he looked. Singularly a master of artifice the Man who was David Bowie made himself appear strikingly to be something Other. Not a Man at all. And he was a brilliant artist, and he wrote songs that never get tired and he sang them fiercely, do you think I did not love him, too? How he stood slanted and voice shuddered through him, do you think I did not love him, too? How I longed to run forever through the blue cement night of some razed chain-link cage of a city with a friend running behind me my hands in theirs locked against loneliness as we ran, we would not stop running, this trance-scene a private dimension scored by “Heroes” on repeat as I rode alone, eyes closed, on the bus home from the greyness of high school? And I did not want my life to be boring, I thought David Bowie was beautiful. I, too, wanted to be beautiful. If you say run, I’ll run with you. To retreat into incandescent vivid-glitter technicolor dreamscapes remote from the mousy woe of my girl-life. David Bowie passed down to we the lowly visions of living differently; how could we not love him for it? How tempting to forget: David Bowie was a Man.

He was born on Planet Earth. He was brought up a boy. He moved through the world as a Man. It is important we do not forget this simple truth, for what reminds us David Bowie was a Man, not an alien aristocrat, what drags the cosmonaut crashing back down to earth exposed as a terrestrial being, is the dull, sour awfulness of one footnote in his legend, written out as inconsequential and without relevance from the story we are supposed to tell of David Bowie, Dearly Beloved, but which no level of reverence for any man’s art or vision will ever compel me to ignore: his treatment of women and girls.

Lori Mattix was one of a circle of girls who converged upon the nightclubs on West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip in quest of close contact with the rock-n-roll male elite of the 1970s. Because these girls were by legal definition children they were called “baby groupies.” They were very popular: eminent adult men would invite them to VIP lounges and concerts and have sex with them. For baby groupies life was a party; they were having a fabulous time, desired as they were by famous and talented men—what more could a girl dream of? Lori Mattix was 14, or 15, or 13 – some haziness surrounds her actual age; she has stated she was 14 so I’ll take her at her word – when she met David Bowie at the E Club, during his Ziggy Stardust tour (1972-1973). He would have been 26 at the time. That is my age now. David Bowie let Mattix know he wanted to take her to his hotel room. She was scared; she was a virgin; she didn’t want to follow the man to his room. So they just talked. Five months later, when David Bowie was back in Hollywood, when Mattix was five months deeper into the baby groupie lifestyle of drugs, alcohol, and flirtatious socializing with adult males, and of course five months more mature, she received a call at her mother’s house from David Bowie’s bodyguard. David Bowie wanted to take her out to dinner. Since Mattix did not have any homework that night – in any case school was not a priority of hers, she says: “Fuck homework” – she agreed to go to dinner with David Bowie, if she could bring her friend Sable Starr, who she knew wanted to have sex with David Bowie. She thought Starr and David Bowie could have sex, and she could just hang out and have fun. Starr and Mattix were taken by limousine to the Rainbow Bar & Grill to meet David Bowie and his body guard. At the restaurant in a private room at a corner table Mattix says the bodyguard rolled enormous blunts for them, John Lennon & Yoko Ono popped over to say hi, they were drinking cocktails. Then during dinner everyone had to leave the restaurant because a man yelled David Bowie was a faggot; the bodyguard pinned the man down and the girls and David Bowie were escorted out a side door back into the limousine, which delivered them to the hotel where David Bowie was staying in an “enormous suite.” Mattix was more and more fascinated by David Bowie. He excused himself to the bedroom, leaving the girls with his bodyguard, who supplied them with champagne and hash. When the bedroom door opened again David Bowie stood in the doorway in a red and orange and yellow kimono. He looked at Mattix, he said: “Lori, can you come with me?” David Bowie took Mattix through his bedroom into the bathroom where he dropped his kimono, climbed into the bathtub. David Bowie asked Mattix to wash him. Of course she did, she says. After Mattix had bathed him to his satisfaction, David Bowie led her back to the bedroom, gently undressed her, and proceeded to “de-virginize” her. Starr, in the other room, was upset that Mattix had gotten to fuck Bowie and she hadn’t; when Mattix told Bowie her friend was sad he graciously kindly very thoughtfully said: “Well, darling, bring her in.” With signature gentleness we can be sure David Bowie then had sex with Mattix and Starr together¹.

IN REVIEW:

•      David Bowie asked a young girl he had previously expressed interest in fucking, who had been previously reluctant to being fucked by him, on a date.
•      David Bowie had his bodyguard provide two young girls, at least one of whom he intended to fuck, with drugs.
•      David Bowie brought two young girls to his hotel suite, intending to fuck at least one of them, where his bodyguard provided them with more drugs and alcohol.
•      David Bowie asked a young girl he intended to fuck to bathe him.
•      David Bowie fucked a 13?14?15?-year-old girl and then he fucked her friend, too.

David Bowie’s predatory sexual relations with Lori Mattix (and Sable Starr) reveal what his mascara and fancy dress and posturing disguised. David Bowie was a Man.

Since David Bowie’s death on Monday, a number of writers have published articles raising the uncomfortable issue of David Bowie’s record of sex with children, to disrupt the surge of eulogistic exaltation over a man who may have been a great artist, but was not necessarily a pure-glowing example of otherworldly goodness. There has also been a re-surfacing of the rape allegations made by a woman against David Bowie in 1987. The charges were dropped; David Bowie dismissed them as a ridiculous desperate plea for attention by his accuser. So too did the world, because in rape cases are He-said-She-said and when that “He” is an internationally adored cultural icon, what “She” says counts for even less than the nothing it usually counts for. Because they don’t want their Star’s shine dulled by the possibility he was a Man people are now writing: “I remember those rape charges. They never came to anything.” (as if most rape charges do? come to anything? most rapists are never convicted—don’t dare forget it.) Consensus has been reached: nobody wants to hear about that shit again. Because people in general want to worship their Gods in peace, writers who have drawn attention to the murkier, manlier realms of David Bowie’s legend have been subject to outrage and vitriol.  

This outrage has been channeled along three main lines of backlash. First, there is the unreasoned appalled indignation of the grieving fan. David Bowie’s passing has prompted people around the world to throw themselves to the cruel earth sobbing and pounding their fists into the ground wailing WHY OH WHY and when, in the midst of this agony over a stranger’s natural death from a relatively common disease, they are forced to confront by way of articles on the internet that perhaps the deceased was not in fact Christ Our Lord & Savior, they cannot view the reminder of Bowie’s history of sexual predation as anything but a spiteful attempt to blight his memory. They wonder how anyone could be so low. So disrespectful. This dismissal of the reality that David Bowie, as an adult male, pursued sex with girl-children, reduces to a red-faced shriek of HOW DARE YOU? Followed by: Shut up, bitch. Once this initial convulsion of ire has run its course, the next route to negation taken by the self-appointed protectors of Bowie’s legacy is the suggestion any effort to hold Bowie accountable for having sex with young girls is absurd, because, hey man, it was the Seventies. Those were wild times. It was really anything-goes back then; everyone was on drugs and fucking children, life was like this sultry orgiastic freak-out of porno decadence, hey man, everyone was getting into (men’s concept of) sexual liberation back then, like, even young girls, everyone was experimenting, it was just a whole different world back then, man. For David Bowie in the context of the 1970s to have sex with young girls stands as a practice totally removed from a similarly renowned, wealthy, powerful man having sex with young girls today. There is no way to measure the right- or wrong-ness of what happened in that moment in history by any contemporary metric. Well, I think that’s interesting, because from my understanding in the 1970s, human society existed as a global male supremacist patriarchy (see also: white supremacist, imperialist, anthropocentric), in which men were the possessors of social power and privilege while women were for the most part dependent on men for their economic, physical, and psychological survival; and in this fresh new year of 2016, human society – it seems to me – persists as a global male supremacist patriarchy (see also: white supremacist, imperialist, anthropocentric), men continue to possess the bulk of social power and privilege, women continue to be for the most part – though less so thanks to the progress made by the women’s movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s – dependent upon men for our survival. And in the 1970s, children were dependent on adults, adults had more power than children, and children were not adults; today, children remain dependent on adults, adults still hold sway over children’s lives. Children were not adults then; they are not adults now. I am 26 years old, David Bowie’s age when he brought Lori Mattix up to his hotel room to have sex with her. I have a younger sister who is approximately a year older than Lori Mattix was when she lost her virginity to David Bowie. My younger sister and I are in very different places in our lives, our bodies are different, we think differently, we have had a different range of life experiences: these are differences that would have been equally real between us in the 1970s. Some things do not change: the patriarchy is not a novel development, nor is the difference between an adult and a child. We can add as well that the difference in power between a celebrity and a “civilian” admirer of that celebrity is another cultural constant. The celebrity is in a position of greater power relative to the fan, just as the male is relative to the female, and the adult to the child. So, it does not compute to assert that an adult male celebrity having sex with a female child fan of his in the seventies is some vastly disparate phenomenon from a man in David Bowie’s position doing the same thing today, therefore voiding any analysis within contemporary understandings of social reality. The unequal distribution of power that marked the sex David Bowie had with Lori Mattix as inherently exploitative was real then, no matter the color palate or density of shag carpeting in the hotel room where that sex took place. “The Swinging Seventies” do not excuse David Bowie’s behavior.

Nor can his behavior be shrugged off as too petty to merit denouncement. Here the sentiment is: of course David Bowie had sex with young girls, he was a rock star, rock stars have sex with whomever they like, all rock stars have sex with teenage girls. That’s life. I hear the echoes: boys will be boys will be boys will be boys will boys. And boys will grow up to be men. Men with power do what they want to do. What men want to do, when they have power, is have sex with young girls. Naturally. The underlying message is that David Bowie was entitled to have sex with young girls, because of his successes as an artist, and that it is normal he would sexually covet children, because young girls are high-grade sex objects. In the male supremacist sexual model females are converted into objects for the purpose of men’s sexual gratification, their thing-bodies of varying value based on the relative worth of their physical attributes. Youth is of particularly high sexual capital, because at bottom the sexuality of male supremacy is driven by the eroticization of inequality: for sex to be sexy, the man should be in control, the female should submit to him. A child’s body is smaller, she is more mentally pliable, more trusting, impressionable. Her powerlessness as female is magnified by her powerlessness as a child, making her an unusually delectable sexual plaything indeed. Fucking her, the man can experience most fully his own strength, virility, power, because she is so fragile so little, her body beneath him. Young boys are similarly sexualized, though to a lesser degree than girls, since the female body is more thoroughly objectified than the male body, always, within patriarchy. Virginity is also of high sexual capital, because the imperialist imperative of the masculinist fuck designates it a special thrill to claim unspoiled territory. His phallic flag the first planted in the taintless soil of her flesh: he was there first: henceforth, she will be forever his.  Due to the high sexual market value of virgin girl-children, their bodies have been sanctified as rare delicacies on reserve for men whose greatness places them outside the realm of pedestrian morality, ethics, responsibility, law. Thus male martyrs are promised harems of virgins in the afterlife. In earthbound life, rock stars and other exceptional men are at liberty to have sex with virginal girl-children. Or boy-children, if such is their preference (see: Allen Ginsberg). Lesser men envy them for it; they, too, would have sex with young girls (or boys), if they could only attain sufficient levels of greatness to earn the right. We cannot blame Bowie for the sex he had with children because he was doing what any man in his position would have done. David Bowie was a Man.

It is normal, in a male supremacist society, for men to desire sex with female children. That does not make it acceptable. David Bowie was a Man. He did what any man would do, given the male supremacist culture in which men’s desires and behaviors are shaped. That makes his actions intelligible but it does not make them acceptable. What I’m telling you is that male supremacy, and the intense sexualization of young girls it promotes, and the special license it gives exceptional men to use young girls sexually, is unacceptable. Much of what is normal we have no reason to excuse. Here’s an example: when I meet a woman, and I speak to her for a while, I get to know her, we talk, we come to trust one another, it is normal that in time I will learn that once or more than once in her life, usually more than once, a man has hurt her and that hurt has been sexual. The injury may have been a scrape, which healed to a scar, or it may have been a wound she is still stitching shut for herself each day to avoid bleeding out. Many women I know experienced fear and confusion in their girlhoods as a result of an encounter with an adult man’s sexual desire for them. When I was 14, I was approached by a man who thought he could buy me for sex. My experience is not remarkable; it is normal, yet I do not accept it. Another word for normal is: endemic. I will not accept an adult male sexuality that fetishizes the body of the girl-child, because I know how women are harmed by the normalcy of this corrupted sexuality. Young girls are trafficked as sex slaves to meet the demands of men who want to fuck girl-children; young girls are sold by their parents into the sex trade or they sell themselves for their families’ sake, because they know their bodies’ worth. Young girls are violated by their adult male fathers, step-fathers, uncles, their older brothers. In a recent study 30% of women in a sample of 3700+ individuals reported being sexually abused as children. The ordinariness of atrocity is no excuse for David Bowie.

Trivializing out of the annals of history male artists’ exploitative and degrading treatment of girls and women by dismissing it as too tangential to these men’s artistic greatness to bear dignifying, by calling the careless or vicious treatment of girls//women by men a normal unavoidable fact of life (better get used to it, bitch), or by attempting to frame instances of such treatment as relics of a distant era impossible to subject to contemporary analysis is the classic response of male supremacist culture to complaints of its heroes’ crimes against women.

A more recent development is the erasure of men’s sexual taste for the exploitation of others through invocation of the fashionable concept of “female agency.” Writers who have been so bankrupt in piety as to note that, technically, legally, David Bowie on at least one known occasion perpetrated statutory rape, a crime, by having sex with two underage girls when he was a 26-year-old man, and that perhaps this incident should be recognized as some kind of blot on his record, something worth remembering in any case, are now being shamed for disrespecting the girl involved by failing to properly recognize her agency in having sex with David Bowie. Thus the focus is neatly displaced from what David Bowie the Man did onto what Lori Mattix, the young girl, did. In the name of agency we are reminded that Mattix wanted to have sex with David Bowie. She wanted it. This makes a lot of sense to a lot of people because it is generally presumed that whatever has happened to a girl, she wanted it, at the bottom of everything, and then also because David Bowie was a sexy man with whom legions of people wanted to have sex. So the girl wanted it: David Bowie did nothing wrong. The sex Lori Mattix had with David Bowie as a ninth-grade girl given drugs and alcohol after being conveyed to his hotel in a limousine was extremely, totally, unquestionably consensual. That the sex act by law could not be consensual because Mattix was not old enough to consent is unspeakable, because she remembers what happened as consensual, this magical encounter in which a man like God (she says) had her over a table. It was a high point in her life. We are told: when you say David Bowie exploited a young girl you impose your narrative on her you make her a victim you are the rapist: respect the child’s agency, she wanted it, girls want to have sex with adult men: ignore David Bowie’s actions completely. Mattix has never thought of herself as sexually exploited, not in her affairs with David Bowie (26), or Jimmy Page (~29), or Mick Jagger (~30); she also does not remember being a child at the time of these affairs. Mattix states: “…you need to understand that I didn’t think of myself as underage.” But then, is there a woman in the world who as a teenager would’ve labeled herself “underage”? Recognizing as the primary struggle of adolescence the construction of a non-child self while still being a child, it is obvious why few teenagers would race to self-identify as “underage.” Immeasurable adolescent energy is devoted to rebelling against the perception that they, teenagers, are children, and for girls that rebellion frequently takes a sexual form, as all female rebellions are encouraged to do within patrirachal society—so that men may benefit from them. The teenage girl sets out to prove she is not a kid anymore and the proof she serves is “her” sexuality: the sexuality she has learned should be hers from the child-sexualizing male supremacist culture that is the water she swims in, the air she breathes. It is a sexuality collaged together of images she has absorbed from movies, advertising, fashion magazines, each a media product manufactured as patriarchal propaganda to guarantee girls internalize a very specific concept of female sexuality: the one men want them to have. She dresses up. Flaunts her girl’s body. She is a woman now. What women do is have sex with men. She certainly does not consider herself underage. Nonetheless, she is a child. Sure as hell David Bowie knew the girl was underage when with the intention of having sex with her he had his bodyguard call her mother’s house to ask her out. Though perhaps this being the case we ought to give him a posthumous award for having the decency to respect a 14-year-old girl’s agency, by fucking her?

Because she wanted it.

I believe Mattix when she says the sex she had with David Bowie was consensual. Although she was, by law, a victim of statutory rape, the question here need not be whether or not David Bowie was a rapist. The ostensible victim of the crime does not see herself as a rape victim so it is not my place to call her one. That does not mean that when David Bowie actively sought to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, when he brought her to his hotel and supplied her with drugs and alcohol, when he asked a 14-year-old girl to give him a bath, his behavior was not exploitative or creepy or vomit-inducing or criminal. Situations of sexual exploitation are often not so straightforward as “forced sex=rape=BAD.” But the complexity of these situations does not neutralize their badness. The question is not whether a young girl involved in a scene that revolved around young girls presenting themselves as sexual objects for the entertainment of a male elite wanted to have sex with a member of that male elite. The question does not have to do with the girl at all, but with David Bowie: why did he decide to have sex with a female child? And the question has to do with the culture in which the sex occurred: why do adult men desire sexual access to female children, and why do female children become baby groupies, their energies devoted to winning the prized sexual attention of their adult male idols? Why do female children become baby groupies, while male children grow up to be rock stars? These are my questions. I have some ideas as to answers and certainly I can tell you a little bit about why a female child might want to have sex with a man like David Bowie. I listened to David Bowie especially in ninth grade. In ninth grade I was 13, then I was 14, and if David Bowie – preferably: Low era, if I get to choose – had appeared in my threshold in a red kimono had he called me darling and asked me to give him a bath, I would have thought it was weird he wanted a bath, but that would not have stopped me from consenting to whatever he wanted to do with me; I would’ve have given myself to him, and it would have seemed to me then this dreamy fantastic miracle, to be David Bowie’s girl, whatever that entailed. Because David Bowie was a beautiful genius, and if he wanted me that would mean there was something special enough in me that a beautiful genius would want me and therefore there was something good in me, I was of some value, and that David Bowie the idol saw it in me confirmed it. Being desired by a beautiful genius would have seemed as close to being a beautiful genius as seemed possible for me. It is part of our indoctrination through girlhood to learn our value in relation to men’s sexual desire for us. The more exceptional the man who desires us, the higher our own value. We learn to aspire to be desired because to be desired is to be validated as a person worth something. A girl worth something. A girl who matters, with her own place in the world. A girl who can make her place in the world the bed of an internationally renowned rock-n-roll singer undeniably is a girl who matters. Lori Mattix asks us, “Who wouldn’t want to lose their virginity to David Bowie?” Who. Who. Who. Maybe a girl who had access to a dream for herself more personal and active than having sex with a rock star. A girl in a world where women weren’t defined by the men they had sex with. Maybe it would never occur to such a girl, in such a world, that losing her virginity to David Bowie would be the apex of her achievement as a human being. She could be whole in herself. As it is in our male supremacist society in our culture girls want to lose their virginity to David Bowie and men like him because  we are  systematically socialized to crave nothing so vehemently as the male stamp of approval – his desire, his hands on our bodies – that marks us prom queen and princess, the loved girl, the special one. We want very badly to be loved. We get fucked. We find ourselves alone in hotel rooms with adult men we know desire something from us, like our virginity, and we want to earn their love so we can know how special, truly special and worth something, how beautiful we are. In men’s eyes. Of course. I know now why we want it or need it; I did not know then why, I just knew the need, when I was a child who would have had sex with David Bowie, but the men who have sex with girl-children know the longing of the girl-child to be made special as only a man can make a girl special. They see that ache and they exploit it. A man like David Bowie would have known the power he wielded over a girl like Lori Mattix. David Bowie was a Man.

In judging David Bowie for having sex with a child it is not the girl’s motivation that should be on our minds: it is David Bowie’s motivation, David Bowie’s actions, David Bowie’s agency. Do not talk to me about a girl’s agency to have sex with powerful men. I will tell you I understand how invested a male-dominated culture is in the idea that young girls should be able to have sex with adult men, because adult men want to have sex with young girls. Let’s talk instead about a culture that sexualizes children and permits its most privileged men to prey upon the vulnerabilities implanted in those children, groomed from the time they are tiny to be preyed upon by men. Then I will talk to you about my vision of a culture girls can grow up in without praying nightly to be fucked by rock stars so they can be special because girls will know that they are special innately, as whole beings of integrity and value, without ever needing the proof of a man’s desire.

No. Reverence for the dead dictates our conversation take a different course. One in which no one so much as murmurs of David Bowie’s sex with children or the rape charges against him or his role in the movie Labyrinth as a goblin in a codpiece who psychologically tortures a teenage girl to seduce her, or the sexist Orientalism of his hit song “China Girl” and its music video. The unheroic tidbits of David Bowie’s life and career are to be purged from the record so that he can rise to his rightful place in the pantheon: a God. Especially anything he may have done to girls and to women is sorted into the unmentionable heap, to be forgotten, since what men do to girls and to women rarely matters, as they say, in the scheme of things. David Bowie was a visionary, a masterful entertainer, an artistic genius, a loving father, a devoted husband to the fashion model he married; with a foxy flicker of blue eyeliner wink silver lamé lightning David Bowie flung gender and sexuality into a dizzy tumult, making visible the beauty of difference for swarms of outsiders hungry for a star who would give them space to love themselves when elsewhere they were hated, and all of this is to trump the acrid nagging stinging little fact of the sameness beneath the veneer of difference, exposed in our knowledge that David Bowie the rock star sought out sex with a girl-child. Those of us who would demand this be remembered, rather than erased in service of a purer legend, are assumed to have some vendetta against David Bowie, that we would stomp to dust the contributions he made as an artist entirely because of one tiny microscopic infintesmal who-cares thing which didn’t matter then, and doesn’t matter now: his treatment of girls and women. I want to tell you it mattered then, and it matters now: how men treat girls and women.

David Bowie was a Man. We have evidence he treated girls and women the way men do.

The reality that David Bowie, being a man, took sexual advantage of girl-children (at least two) who idolized him, and may have raped a woman in 1987, is not irreconcilable with the equally real reality that he was an extraordinary artist. Why should it shock us? Why should it even disappoint us? Entitlement to sexual access to female bodies is a primary privilege of male power within male supremacist society, so when the most powerful men capitalize on that privilege, using girls and women in ways that men in general are given range to use us, exploitatively, sleazily, with contempt or disrespect, in ways that objectify and diminish us, it confuses me that anyone would be astonished. In our society these are the things that men do. David Bowie wanted to have sex with a girl-child; he could and he did. In our society this is the way that men treat girls, women. Growing up a girl dying to be an artist, a writer, over the years I learned that many of the male artists I admired and whose work I still admire treated girls and women like sex-trash-toys; I learned how they abused women’s bodies and women’s personhood, I learned how they raped girls or women or beat their wives or bought women as sex-things or condemned women as essentially cunts with deadweight of bothersome shit attached and so it does not devastate me to acknowledge the reality that David Bowie exploited a young girl’s awe of his star’s glitter to gain sexual access to her, because I had zero reason  – given what I know about the world I live in – to have expected anything else from him. David Bowie was not an alien. David Bowie was not a monster. David Bowie was a Man. And that is why we cannot ignore what he did: other men do these same things. David Bowie was a Man. What men do, to girls, to women: it always matters.

 

 

FURTHER READING:

*http://www.alternet.org/culture/dark-side-david-bowie

*http://rebeccahains.com/2016/01/11/reconciling-david-bowies-genius-with-rape/

*https://medium.com/@modernistwitch/human-alien-human-6b4a12a3f0a#.96r1zr4x5

NOTES