Now that’s an open relationship
A fascinating article on Tilda Swinton’s complicated love life.
Swinton, most well known as the White Witch in Narnia, has two partners – 67 year old John Byrne and 29 year old Sandro Kopp. Swinton is 47 which using the half plus seven rule means her acceptable range should be 30 to 80.
Byrne also has a second partner, Jeanine Davis who is 42 which is just above his tehcnical lower limit of 40.
Sound complicated but Tilda sums it up:
“I have children with someone else, with whom I’m bringing up my children, and I’ve lived with someone else, my sweetheart for the last three years, and maybe it’s extraordinary that we’re really all friends.”
So if you invite her to dinner, how many do you invite?
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Tags: Tilda Swinton
June 4th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Polyamory’s actually not that exotic… it’s just practised by people who don’t advertise the fact in our current “witch burning” times. No reason why polygamy should be illegal, come to that… provided of course everyone involved is aware of what’s what. I have a couple of acquaintances who seem to make it work as well as Swinton and her partners (they’re not a couple, I mean they’re actually both part of separate polyamorous relationships). Better than the whole drama of cheating and being cheated upon. Though personally I find my chaste, almost monastic existence provides fewer distractions
June 4th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
that’s just disgusting.
June 4th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Individual freedom stands above all else. As long as your acts don’t deny the freedoms of others. That people can choose to live like this, even if I never would, is a sign that the spark of freedom is still alive even after 2000 years of religious persecution.
June 4th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Tilda Swinton’s lifestyle is not what I would call a great argument in favour of individual freedom. A far better one is my freedom of speech and freedom of opinion, which is that a fortysomething woman who forsakes her marital bed for a twentysomething man has serious issues, no matter how much of a doormat her husband may be.
People who are this much of a slave to their whims and passions give hedonism a bad name
D
June 5th, 2008 at 7:49 am
As long as your acts don’t deny the freedoms of others.
What about the freedom of her children to be raised in a normal, loving family?
June 5th, 2008 at 8:17 am
My experience is that artists, including actors, give their best performances in real life, and that their art is a more accurate portrayal of who they are.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:05 am
As Melanie Phillips pointed out recently, it is THIS kind of behaviour on the part of “the elite” that DESTROYS the “lower classes” when it is EMULATED by them……….in fact, its such a short, pithy article, HERE IT IS………..
“Blaming the Poor”
By Melanie Phillips
“In the Sunday Times, India Knight writes:
“”The fact of the matter is that the binge-drinking problem is largely an underclass problem. Teen pregnancies are largely an underclass problem. Teenage crime is largely an underclass problem. Child neglect – we live in a country where a little girl allegedly starved to death in her own home last week – is largely an underclass problem. Our collective problems are largely underclass problems.”"
Absolutely untrue. All these problems, experienced disproportionately by those at the bottom of the heap, were foisted upon them by the overclass of which India Knight is a member. It was the champagne socialist intelligentsia which destroyed the traditional family, demonised men, incentivised mass fatherlessness and declared never-married motherhood an inalienable human right, emptied education of content and cut off the escape routes out of disadvantage by withering the grammar schools, declared morality to be a dirty word, paralysed the police through political correctness, enslaved the poor through dependency on the state and then finally destroyed their brains by telling them to eat cannabis cake while themselves showing the way by snorting cocaine on the Square Mile or in recording studios, or getting legless on Crackdaddy cocktails at Boujis nightclub.
Culture is transmitted top-down, not bottom up. It is the supercilious overclass, with its self-obsessed nihilism and the money to get itself out of trouble, which is responsible for our social degradation and collapse — and it is odious in the extreme to blame those whose lives and prospects it has so irresponsibly and irrevocably destroyed.”
June 5th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Yeah, those evil overclasses, they’re the ones importing tonnes of cocaine, flooding the market, dropping prices and enslaving the chavs (pot is so last decade in the chav classes phil) through addiction.
The evil overclasses are forcing alcopops down the throats of 12 year olds while mum stays at home watching britains got talent, or going to bingo.
You’re a little out of touch with the chav classes phil.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Guarantee you it all ends in tears. What Phil said.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Its a short road from swinging to social breakdown and perversion. Sorry, I’d missed the bigger picture of what phil said.
And no doubt they dont believe in god.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Actually expat you probably have a point. It is the rich liquor companies that are marketing alcopops to teenagers! It is often rich businessmen that are importing drugs to New Zealand.
What an upside-down world. No one cares, just do what you want, individual so-called freedom is our idol.
Does anyone really think that Western civilisation will survive carrying on this way? Does anyone else find this decadence a little sickening?
I hope a new generation arises that does things God’s way, that recognizes God given limits and God’s standards.
June 5th, 2008 at 10:57 am
very interesting quote PhilBest…
here is the link: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/730771/blaming-the-poor.thtml
June 5th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Scott, you are right, the marketers WILL exploit any opening that society gives them. The problem, though, originates with the breakdown in society beginning with the signals from its elites and its political leaders. In fact, one suspects that the “anti-tradition, anti-family” political Left, though it might profess to despise big business, finds it a handy ally in their program of destruction. In the long term, “big business”, by acting as useful idiots in this way, are actually helping to engineer THEIR OWN destruction at the hands of the socialist state that all this is building up to.
June 5th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
A quote of a quote and response, with a response
“” As long as your acts don’t deny the freedoms of others. “, What about the freedom of her children to be raised in a normal, loving family?”
So let’s take on this social foulness called divorce eh! And of course, we should abolish prisons too! Anything else you would like to get rid of while we’re at it?
While I agree with your sentiment, the idea of ‘forbidding’ things is abhorent to me, as it should be to all sensible thinking folks. For instance, if you want to stamp out drugs, make cigarettes, rolling tobacco, pipe tobaco, cigars and alcohol illegal, otherwise take your hypocracy and stuff it where it sits best.
The way to stop these things, including the abandonment of children for any reason, is to make it socially wrong to do them! There was no law change to make single mothers OK, it became socially alright based on the acceptance that the sexual revolution of the 60s had consequences that we ‘had’ to accept. If that had ben rejected by the politicians of subsequent parliaments, and the welfare system was less supportive of ignorance or laziness (sorry, there’s NO reason for anyone to have an unwanted child, the prophilactics available are multitudinous and everyone gets to educate themselves about them in school), In the 50s, the term Bastard was a curse, now it’s more of a blessing – think about it, and start a movement to change it if that’s what you want to do – I’ll probably join you!
(The probable reson why there are so many unwanted pregnancies is that these days in school the concept of TEACHING is outlawed, and so there are no TAUGHT classes on topics such as sex, fatigue and budgeting. If the Student doesn’t Learn after the School put a Learning Opportunity infront of them, it’s not the fault of the teacher, school or ministry!)
June 5th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Polyamory?
Isn’t that sex with a parrot?
June 5th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
There is sound advice from the Bible against polyamory. In marriage, “The two shall become one flesh”; but it more than that: the two, are joined in spirit as well. That is the real problem in human context: sexual relations create unbreakable spiritual bonds, and when more than one relationship is involved muiltiple bonds occur too. This is not a recipe for happy families or even individual lives. Only God can release such bonds through healing by people accepting His Son, Jesus Christ, as their personal Saviour.
June 5th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
“What about the freedom of her children to be raised in a normal, loving family?
Theres no such “freedom”. Theres also no right to be raised in such a household.If you have then then good and great but no one is obliged to provide you with that although any parent worth their salt sould try their best to make it happen.
Sometimes life ain’t fair….or “God” just likes to see suffering and pain….take your pick.
June 5th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Tilda Swinton is one hot MILF!
June 5th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
As long as they’re all consentable and consenting, cool with me that they love each other.
June 5th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Isn’t that sex with a parrot?
She’s not dead, she’s sleeping!
Wait.
Hold on.
Never has a Monty Python reference gone so wrong.
June 5th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Oh shit, the born-agains are here. Time to lock the thread before it descends into a screed of “thou shalt not” posts.
June 5th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Dave Strings, READ THIS:
From “The Coming White Underclass”, By Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal Oct 1993.
(Do look up the whole thing. Do read more of this guy’s writings…….he is like a modern-day non-religious prophet)
EXCERPT:
“As the spatial concentration of illegitimacy reaches critical mass, we should expect the deterioration to be as fast among low-income whites in the 1990s as it was among low-income blacks in the 1960s. My proposition is that illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time — more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else. Doing something about it is not just one more item on the American policy agenda, but should be at the top. Here is what to do:
In the calculus of illegitimacy, the constants are that boys like to sleep with girls and that girls think babies are endearing. Human societies have historically channeled these elemental forces of human behavior via thick walls of rewards and penalties that constrained the overwhelming majority of births to take place within marriage. The past 30 years have seen those walls cave in. It is time to rebuild them.
The ethical underpinning for the policies I am about to describe is this: Bringing a child into the world is the most important thing that most human beings ever do. Bringing a child into the world when one is not emotionally or financially prepared to be a parent is wrong. The child deserves society’s support. The parent does not.
The social justification is this: A society with broad legal freedoms depends crucially on strong nongovernmental institutions to temper and restrain behavior. Of these, marriage is paramount. Either we reverse the current trends in illegitimacy — especially white illegitimacy — or America must, willy-nilly, become an unrecognizably authoritarian, socially segregated, centralized state.
To restore the rewards and penalties of marriage does not require social engineering. Rather, it requires that the state stop interfering with the natural forces that have done the job quite effectively for millennia. Some of the changes I will describe can occur at the federal level; others would involve state laws. For now, the important thing is to agree on what should be done.
I begin with the penalties, of which the most obvious are economic. Throughout human history, a single woman with a small child has not been a viable economic unit. Not being a viable economic unit, neither have the single woman and child been a legitimate social unit. In small numbers, they must be a net drain on the community’s resources. In large numbers, they must destroy the community’s capacity to sustain itself. Mirabile dictu, communities everywhere have augmented the economic penalties of single parenthood with severe social stigma………….”
June 5th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
The concluding paragraph from the above article:
“the brutal truth is that American society as a whole could survive when illegitimacy became epidemic within a comparatively small ethnic minority. It cannot survive the same epidemic among whites.”
June 5th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Does God really keep an eye on what we do in our bedrooms? If so, he’d better go have a chat with Sigmund (I assume he’s up there, though he might be roasting below for even mentioning sex I suppose).
Perhaps the next time you’re all bothering Him you’d ask him to kindly avert His eyes from my boudoir. It’d be better for both of us, honestly.
Ryan… beastiality and necrophilia in the one comment. Well done. I was afraid I was alone in lowering the standards round here
June 5th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Fast forward to The Sunday Times (London), April 2005.
“U.S. Experience shows Britain waht to do with its underclass: Get it off the streets”.
By Charles Murray.
Again, DO READ THE WHOLE THING.
EXCERPTS:
“Underclass is an ugly word, and we live in an age that abhors ugly words, so it is good to hear that the Blair government has devised a cheerier label: Neet, an acronym for “not in education, employment or training”.
Once a government has given a problem a name it must develop effective new strategies for dealing with it. That too is in train, The Sunday Times told us last week, replete with urgent cabinet meetings, study groups roaming about the country and even a “Neet target” to reduce the Neet population by 20% by 2010.
You may use whatever euphemism the government adopts, but it’s still the underclass. Its numbers are not going to be reduced by 20% by 2010. Its numbers will increase. The good news is that the rate of increase will probably begin to slow in a few years and in another decade or two Britain will have learnt to manage the problem–meaning you will have learnt how to keep the underclass from getting underfoot, even though its numbers are undiminished.
When The Sunday Times first asked me to look at the British underclass in 1989, the American underclass was about 15 to 20 years ahead of Britain’s. You were tracking the American experience with remarkable fidelity then and you are still tracking it.
From the beginning I have used the simple-minded assumption that Britain 16 years on would look like America did when I was writing, and that’s more or less the way things have worked out. Nothing about the underclass is rocket science. It’s all basic, the kind of thing our grandparents took for granted. It just has to be rephrased to accommodate today’s delicate sensibilities.
Our grandparents thought bastardy was a problem to be avoided at any cost. Today’s translation: children who grow up without being nurtured by two biological parents are at risk. Poverty isn’t the problem. Inadequate educational opportunities aren’t the problem. Social exclusion isn’t the problem.
Throughout history, societies around the world have been poor, with inadequate educational opportunities and with socially excluded people. Those same societies have been remarkably successful at ensuring that almost all children came into the world with two biological parents committed to their care. That’s the difference between societies with small underclasses (for every society has had an underclass) and with large ones.
Children today usually still have a mother with them. The problem is the growing number of children who have no father and who live in areas where hardly anyone has a father. Girls without fathers tend to be emotionally damaged……….
…………..our grandparents thought you couldn’t “do” with a youngster who wasn’t brought up right. Today’s translation: social programs for intervening with children at risk have consistently meager results. This finding has even longer shelves of analysis than the literature on the children of single parents.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Americans tried everything: pre-school socialization programs, enrichment programs in elementary schools, programs that provided guaranteed jobs for young people without skills, ones that provided on-the-job training, programs that sent young people without skills to residential centers for extended skills training and psychological preparation for the world of work, programs to prevent school dropout, and so on. These are just the efforts aimed at individuals. I won’t even try to list the varieties of programs that went under the heading of “community development”. They were also the most notorious failures.
We know the programs didn’t work because all of them were accompanied by evaluations. I was a program evaluator from 1968 to 1981. The most eminent of America’s experts on program evaluation–a liberal sociologist named Peter Rossi–distilled this vast experience into what he called the Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social program is zero.” The Iron Law has not been overturned by subsequent experience.
I should add a corollary to it, however: “The initial media accounts of social programs that ultimately fail are always positive.” Every training program for young men or parenting program for young women can produce a heart-warming success story for the evening news. None produces long-term group results that survive scrutiny.
None of this experience crosses the Atlantic. When the Blair government began its ambitious job-training programs, I wondered whether anyone within the bowels of the appropriate ministries said: “You know, the Americans tried lots of these things years ago. I wonder how they worked?” But apparently nobody did or nobody listened. Now the government seems ready to admit that the results of the training programs have been dismal. But as it sets off on the next round of bright ideas, I still don’t hear anyone saying: “You know, the Americans tried those programs too . . .”
The bottom line for this accumulation of experience in America is that it is impossible to make up for parenting deficits through outside interventions. I realize this is still an intellectually unacceptable thing to say in Britain. It used to be intellectually unacceptable in the United States as well. No longer. We’ve been there, done that.
Our grandparents’ most basic taken-for-granted understanding, which today’s intellectual and political elites find it hardest to accept, is this: make it easier to behave irresponsibly and more people will behave irresponsibly. The welfare state makes it easier for men to impregnate women without taking responsibility for them, easier for women to raise a baby without the help of a man and easier for men and women to get by without working. There is no changing that situation without reintroducing penalties for irresponsible behavior.
This is the sticking point for every political figure in Britain, Labor or Tory. Frank Field has been miles ahead of other politicians in recognizing the growing problem of the underclass and in speaking out, but last week even he was saying: “Surely we can say that the traditional family unit is the best way to nurture children without making it a campaign to beat up single mums.”
With respect: you cannot. If you want to reduce the number of single mums you have to be ready to say that to bring a child into the world without a father committed to its care is wrong.
The government need not sponsor publicity campaigns to beat up single mums. Put the cost of irresponsible behavior back where it belongs–on the man and the woman, their families and their community–and the recognition that the behavior is wrong will revive instantly, along with powerful social pressures to make sure it happens as seldom as possible.
Some of those pressures will be positive, celebrating marriage as a uniquely valuable institution and bestowing social approval on the bride and groom. Some of those pressures will be negative, consisting of various forms of stigma. This is good. Stigma is one of society’s most efficient methods for controlling destructive behavior…………
……………Now for the good news, if you want to call it that. You don’t need to reduce the underclass to reduce the problems the underclass creates for the rest of us. As evidence, I point to a dog that no longer barks. The underclass, the most important domestic policy issue of the 1980s, is no longer even a topic of conversation in the United States.
The American underclass isn’t any smaller. The three indicators of an underclass–the proportion of children born to single women, criminality among young men and young men who have dropped out of the labor force–have all grown or remained steady during the past 15 years. The underclass is no longer an issue because we successfully put it out of sight and out of mind.
Consider the presence of the underclass in American cities. Fifteen or 20 years ago, the homeless, panhandlers and street hustlers were everywhere. Today they are virtually gone in most cities (San Francisco remains the exception). Graffiti used to be everywhere in American cities. Today it is rare in the better parts of town. You have no idea how depressing graffiti is until you’ve lived without it and then encounter it again, as you do in cities throughout Europe.
The social segregation of the underclass has been nearly perfected. We have not learnt how to compensate for the parenting deficits that cripple the lives of children of the underclass, but we have learnt how to avoid dealing with the consequences.
American children of the middle and upper classes no longer go to school with the children of the underclass. For a number of years, progressive American educators managed to dilute the old principle that a school drew only from a restricted geographic area. That principle has been reinstated so parents can be sure that if they move to the right neighborhood their children won’t have large numbers of disruptive, foul-mouthed, sexually precocious and sometimes violent classmates. Middle and upper-class parents who remain within large cities commonly send their children to private schools.
Increased geographic segregation of the underclass has facilitated social segregation. In many large cities, urban renovation has reclaimed deteriorating downtown areas for glitzy shops and gleaming offices. Gentrification has retrieved much of the urban housing stock that had fallen into disrepair. The “inner city” is seldom literally located in the inner city but in decrepit neighborhoods on the periphery that need not be on the travel route of the rest of us.
Most importantly, America has dealt with its crime problem. The crime rate has dropped by about one-third since the early 1990s. It has dropped even more in the better parts of town. People walk the streets of New York and Chicago without taking the precautions they used to take. Triple-locked doors and bars on the windows are not as necessary as they used to be. People feel safer and are safer.
We didn’t solve the crime problem by learning how to get tough on the causes of crime nor by rehabilitating criminals. We just took them off the streets. As of 2005, more than 2m Americans are incarcerated. That number is inefficiently large–it includes many minor drug offenders–but it responds to the question “Does prison work?”.
If you are willing to pay the price–a price that would amount to a British prison population of roughly 250,000 if your sentencing followed the American model–you can reduce crime dramatically.
All of these are policies that the British political establishment may come to accept in another decade or so. If London were to get a mayor who decided to take the homeless off the streets, scrub away the graffiti and adopt a zero-tolerance policing policy, I suspect he would find the same surge in popularity that Rudy Giuliani experienced in New York.
British parents are increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction with schools, and especially with their spinelessness in dealing with disruptive children. In every area of life that the underclass affects, the public mood is shifting towards support of the American solution. Politicians who covet votes will come around eventually.
Hence my prediction that in 15 years, perhaps less, the underclass/Neet will no longer be a political issue in Britain and urban life for most of you will be more pleasant than it is now. The price will have been a great deal of money spent on prisons and, in effect, the writing-off of a portion of the population as unfit for civil society.
In the United States I have called this the coming of custodial democracy–literally custodial for criminals, figuratively custodial for the neighborhoods we seal away from the rest of us. Custodial democracy is probably headed your way.
It is not a happy solution. On the contrary, it means abandoning a central tenet of a free society–that everyone can exercise equal responsibility for his or her own life. But Britain, like the United States and western Europe, is locked into a welfare state that by its nature generates large numbers of feckless people. If we are unwilling to prevent an underclass by giving responsibility for behavior back to individuals, their families, and communities, custodial democracy is the only option left. “
June 5th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Am I the only one who feels a bit sorry for all those poor widows when the God-botherers start banging on about kids only having a mum? Are they supposed to take the best they can get of the available men? Or just take the arseholes on the basis that any man is better than none?
June 5th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Presumably you would invite “Tilda Swinton and partner” with the layout of the page in such a way that it was very clearly “partner” and not “partners”.
All alternative sexualities have my support, but nothing excuses crashing a party…