The Weekly Review: May 5 - 11 – The Grouchy Editor

The news is awful, again, this week. But you already knew that. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels, repeating the same gripes week after week. My complaints, in general, can be summed up in two words: “Biden bad.”

We are planning a new category for The Grouchy Editor. It will be called “The Male Gaze.” The male gaze is in the doldrums these days, having fallen into disfavor with the “woke” and disappearing from reliable havens of the past like Hollywood movies. In mainstream films today, you are more likely to see a bottomless male than a topless female.

We’re going to do our small part to rescue the male gaze. This week’s “Review” is a taste of what’s to come.

You should never, ever grab or pinch a young woman’s bottom. Unless she asks you to. Or unless she is a Hollywood starlet hoping to impress and you are a famous director.

I thought of this when I learned of 25-year-old TikTok star Natalie Reynolds, who pushes the envelope — to put it mildly — for hits, views and likes. Reynolds is the “naked woman” referred to in the New York Post headline above.

Her videos range from cringe-inducing to borderline illegal. In one, she infiltrates a Florida neighborhood for convicted sex offenders. In another, she apparently harms (kills?) small animals. I’m not sure about the legality of these videos, but I do know I have no intention of watching them.

On the other hand, I can’t resist a good ass-grabbing video, which seems to be Reynolds’ specialty:

Above, random dude grabs a piece of Natalie’s ass

Above, Natalie asks a stranger if he will take pictures of her butt

It’s hard to say who gets off more on this focus on Reynolds’s derriere, the random dudes or Reynolds herself. How else to explain her post below, in which her bottom takes a two-minute beating?

All of this ass-grabbing put me in mind of famous ass-grabbing from the past. Like the scene below from David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, in which starlet Charlie Spradling allows Nicolas Cage to, uh, examine her rear end:

Below, Cage and Laura Dern discuss the Spradling grab:

Spradling appeared in a number of mainstream movies in the 1980s-90s. Below, a screen capture from Mirror Mirror, in which she showers before succumbing to a gruesome murder, followed by her first video appearance in a soft-porn thing called High Seas Fantasy, when she was about 20.