Two recent news items. The Washington Post lost $100 million in 2025. Also, the great 1981 movie Body Heat is going to be reissued this spring in a deluxe edition by the Criterion Collection.
These two things have a connection in my psyche. In 2018 the Washington Post slandered me over an article I wrote, a piece that specifically cites a scene in Body Heat. I have spent several years kicking the Washington Post, and now that they have all but been destroyed as a media company and are in a death spiral, I’d like to dunk on them one last time as they go under for the final time.
In September 2015, I wrote a piece for Splice Today. It was called “Hard Case Crime: the Beauty of Male Passion.” It was an argument about why I love the publisher Hard Case Crime. I argued the following:
The simplest explanation for the popularity of Hard Case Crime is that the books, like most pulp fiction and the film noir movies it inspired, are about animus—the Jungian term for male passion. Like a Scorsese film, they depict men on the edge when the world is increasingly hostile to dangerous and flamboyant men. In the 1950s, writers like Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett brought readers into a world where carefully manicured lawns, Jell-O and white picket fences hadn’t taken hold. In He Walked by Night, one of my favorite films from the era, the killer literally works underground, sliding into the dark labyrinth of the city’s sewer system to escape detection. Carl Jung wrote about “the shadow,” the part of us that is dark, horny, creative and a bit crazy. In bright and sunny Eisenhower America, crime fiction and film noir were the shadow.
I concluded with this:
Every man who’s fit to live has his own stories about the time, like a Hard Case character, he ducked the police, got in over his head with money, or abandoned himself in pursuit of love or sex. We’ve all climbed up window sills, driven all night, and gotten into fights over a girl. Of course, a man must be able to read a woman’s signals, and it’s a good thing that feminism is teaching young men that no means no and yes means yes. But there’s also that ambiguous middle ground, where the woman seems interested and indicates, whether verbally or not, that the man needs to prove himself to her. And if that man is any kind of man, he’ll allow himself to feel the awesome power, the wonderful beauty, of uncontrollable male passion.
The piece linked to a famous scene in Body Heat. A woman named Maddy Walker is manipulating a man named Ned Racine. Maddy, a bette noir who wants Ned to kill her husband for the insurance money, flirts with Racine to the point that Racine breaks into her home, resulting in a passionate embrace. The point is that Maddy Walker wants Ned Racine to do exactly what he does. She wants him sexually, but more importantly, she is using him to get what she wants.
The scene fits in perfectly with the theme of my piece about male passion – that male passion is a beautiful and powerful thing, but it can also get us into trouble. Moreover, I have also written about the sacred nature of human sexuality and how the devil tries to use sex to reduce us to animals. In other words, while no saint, I was never, and would never, advocate treating women poorly.
All of that went out the window in 2018, when I was swept up in the nightmare over the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. A femme fatale named Christine Blasey Ford falsely accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault and claimed that I was in the room when it happened. It was right out of a Hard Case Crime novel. I’ve written about this for years, including a book called The Devil’s Triangle, and am now in the movie business. But damn, as the Washington Post goes down like Roy Martin at the end of He Walked by Night, I can’t help but put a couple rounds in them myself.
The media, led by the Washington Post, found my article about male passion. To say they went nuts is an understatement. CNN, MSNBC, every liberal website, everyone and their sister was quoting my “shocking and disgusting” embrace of male passion. Stephanie Ruhle got the vapor on live TV. And the Body Heat clip! I was a dangerous caveman. They kept referencing my phrase “ambiguous middle ground” as meaning anything other than it clearly did – that is, a woman decides if a man can approach her, and sometimes she herself is unsure if she wants this as she reads his signals and judges his character.
The worst of all the banshee coverage was the hit piece by Avi Selk in the Washington Post: “What the Man Accused of Being Part of Kavanaugh’s Alleged Sexual Assault Had to Say About Women’s Sexuality.” The piece was an attempt to smear me as advocating violence against women: “Judge has written dozens of columns in the decades since, including several for this newspaper. Femininity, masculinity and sexuality are perennial themes. He has written that disposable razors are too feminine, that former president Barack Obama is practically a woman, and that gay men have infiltrated the priesthood.” All these things were and remain true.
After the article was published, Selk went on MSNBC and had this exchange with Ali Velshi:
VELSHI: He’s a guy who has written a lot about women, and he has expressed what he thinks women’s role in society is. What’s the Cliffs Notes version of this?
AVI SELK (REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST): The Cliffs Notes is he’s never used the words, but he’s the type of person that are sometimes referred to disparagingly as men’s rights activists. He writes about his notion of femininity and masculinity, whereas masculinity is like a man being a man, that quote about unbridled male passion, he’s a fan of, you know, movie scenes of guys, you know, violently taking women and doing things to them.
The great irony is that the Body Heat scene he references has nothing to do with “guys violently taking women and doing things to them.” It’s about a scheming woman manipulating a man to destroy his life – which is exactly what the extortionists and witness tamperers of the Kavanaugh nightmare were doing.
I concluded my piece on Hard Case Crime this way: “Hard Case Crime, and pulp fiction in general, is not about controlling and hurting women, although there’s some of that. It’s an expression of authentic male passion, of sweaty sexiness, in a world of pajama boys, government-mandated health food, and reactionary conservative blowhards.” Of course, I myself can be a reactionary conservative blowhard. My point was just that I was tired of seeing guys giving moral lectures on podcasts and not living real life.
Now, years later, I’m a film festival producer and the Washington Post is all but gone. Like Ned Racine in Body Heat, the paper’s own greed and monomania destroyed it.
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