It sounded cool and tough guy thing at the time to quite a lot of people. And the books also contain open racism.
Let's chalk it to improvement over time. It is not cool not classy anymore. But it is also good to remember that it used to be acceptable thing to say for cool guy, so that we don't idealize past.
This is not about the art, it is about the man. While he was a great actor, style icon, artist, and had a tremendously interesting life, he was also quite explicitly misogynistic in several interviews.
I get that. We can criticize that aspect surely. However, if you like the performance like it. Disconnect the person from the performance and from the larger context (his movies were complicit in sexism).
Look, consensual people can engage in degrading stuff, but we don’t come down on that because we believe that’s a private matter between consenting adults.
edit: interesting, went from +2 to -1 in a minute. Going to take this time to point out Hacker News's routine degradation of women as well now that it's on full display again.
So I’m not saying you _have_ to like his art. But merely they are not one and the same. It’s okay to not like him or his characters, but it’s not okay to conflate the two.
Yeah, fortunetaly the movie industry was not a reflection of society. I mean, it's not like any of our parents or grandparents approved of any of this, right?
Our grandparents generation had more domestic violence then we do. Parents were in between. The domestic violence was much more accepted by those people. So, it is safe to say quite a few approved.
They even had jokes that approved that sort of thinking.
I mean, they did. That's the implicit critique; it's a relic of a darker time at least in societies that try a bit better today to treat people as peers.
So the people we love get away with an implied critique (nudge nudge wink wink), but we hurl stones at anyone famous?
Changing makes us better. Virtue signaling does not. Assuming we're monotonously moving towards tolerance and treating people better is also extremely arrogant. The comments to this post demonstrates that with great clarity. Sean Connery isn't even cold and already people line up to piss on his grave.
Next time someone in your family dies, are you going to list their moral shortcomings? The "but" right after listing their accomplishments and good sides? "BUT...he didn't like Asian people, spoke ill of jews and objectified women and stared at Mrs Jenkins daughers tits whenever he could. He ate red meat and belonged to a religion that terrorized much of the world for a thousand years".
Of course not.
But then again, Sean Connery isn't a person to any of us. He is just a symbol of something it is okay to hate. So pissing on his grave is somehow permissible.
What annoys me isn't that people get upset about his views. What upsets me is that people have the absolutely disgusting idea that pissing on his grave makes them better. It doesn't. It just means they are a different kind of asshole.