Brave

Brave by Rose McGowan was originally posted on YouTube on June 21, 2021, but you can watch it on Rumble or listen on PodBean now. This one hit my radar after watching her take down hypocrites all over Twitter. I mean, of course I knew who Rose McGowan was, I was a young 20 something when Charmed was big, and I watched Grindhouse when it came out on DVD…too cheap for theaters. But books, as you may have guessed, are my preferred medium, so after watching Ms. McGowan on Twitter and finding out she wrote I book, a copy of it immediately joined my collection.

So, this book is her autobiography/horror story.  What’s with the horror stories this month? Rose was born in a cult in Italy.  A literal cult, you may have heard of the Children of God? Which later “evolved” to call itself simply The Family? Well, she was born among them. So, she grew up knowing what a cult was. She seems surprised that she fell into the cult of Hollywood as an adult, but realistically, you gravitate towards what you know, even if you know it’s bad for you. How else to explain repetition in bad relationships? It takes a conscious act of will to recognize a pattern and break it. I certainly dated a string of not awesome boyfriends before I specifically chose better for myself.

Anyway, after a dramatic escape from The Family in Italy with her father, stepmother, and siblings, McGowan bounced around between Colorado and Oregon, between her father and her mother’s house. Again, patterns repeat themselves, as Rose recounts some pretty horrifying incidents at her mother’s house with a string of men her mother dated, none of whom were nice people. Eventually, Rose ended up in Hollywood.

Now, near as I can tell, she definitively hated the Hollywood lifestyle. And how not? She recounted in horrifying detail her rape by Harvey Weinstein, and she spends a significant portion of the book calling out Hollywood for the depravity that is endemic in the system. And the depravity is truly sickening. You know from previous videos that I’m a cryer. And I cried several times while reading this book. Because it is sad, how much abuse she suffered. And I don’t think Rose wants anyone’s pity because she got herself out. But she does want to raise awareness of the sickness that infects the cult of Hollywood, and since the media controls the message, from Hollywood the rest of the planet.

Rose is pretty candid about the multiple assaults she experienced, about the various romances she experienced, the good and the bad, her relationship with her family, and her opinions about media, Hollywood, and what information we are being sold by Hollywood. Which I do agree with. We don’t pay nearly enough attention to the messages being pedaled by Hollywood. Where she started to lose me was brushing everything as being the fault of the Patriarchy.

I get that Rose was badly mistreated. But I disagree with painting anything with a very broad brush. “The Patriarchy” brought us things like the Sistine Chapel, Notre Dame Cathedral, Pyramids at Giza, Declaration of Independence, Eiffel Tower…civilization was built by the Patriarchy. I don’t think we should be throwing the baby out with the proverbial bath water. That Rose was mistreated is horrifying. That Hollywood is rotten to the core and corrupting everything it comes in contact with is, to me at least, indisputable. And taking Hollywood as a microcosm that is a patriarchy in the dictionary definition of the term “ a system of society in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.” Checks out. It passes the bullshit meter. If it didn’t, media wouldn’t make such a big deal about when women do something extraordinary, like direct a box office smash hit. So yes, I would agree that men run all the things in Hollywood, and this contributes to the rot. But I don’t believe that extends as far out in to mainstream America as Rose believes. Strong men protect and build, they don’t abuse. Weak men abuse.  As Jordan Peterson says, “if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.” Weak men-built Hollywood as their own personal playground, because they knew they could not actually compete in the real world where strong women would have the ability to reject them. Hollywood is the construct of weak men, not the mythical patriarchy, that boogeyman of modern-day feminists.

So overall I’m mixed on this book. I think Rose’s story is important, I think it’s important for girls with Hollywood dreams to be aware of the snake pit they want to walk into. And I do admire Rose for fighting her way out of that snake pit. It takes a great deal of strength to survive what she did. But I can’t blame half the population for crimes they did not commit, by an accident of birth. No one chooses to be born boy or girl, black, white, or brown. Accidents of birth do not automatically garner you a guilty sentence for crimes you did not commit, just because you happened to be born “X”.