A World of Cheese, For your Pleasure

Some thoughts on Guy Cloutier

Quelle est la difference entre Guy Cloutier et René Angélil ?

I want to weigh in on the current Guy Cloutier affair here in Quebec, but before I do, I would like to present what I asked my girlfriend Rose to write. These are her thoughts, straight from her brain. I'll comment afterwards.

It is safe to assume that most of the francophone population in Quebec will be watching Nathalie Simard’s interview with Paul Arcand. Réseau TVA has agreed to pay $100 000 to the Fondation Nathalie Simard in order to make this unique interview.

Any girl growing up in Quebec in the 80s must have had at least one record by the young Nathalie. My own pictures as an 8 year-old shows me with the then popular “Nathalie Simard hairdo”, and more than one dog has been named “Chibouki” after Nathalie’s record “Donne la patte à Chibouki”. Later, I remember quite a few girls in my neighbourhood buying memberships to “Le Village de Nathalie”, a weekly TV program detailing Nathalie’s life in a dream village with a talking mailbox. Membership gave access to a newsletter, an autographed poster of Nathalie Simard and a membership card. She later made at least two comebacks, one when she released a record in the early 90s with her brother René “Tourne la page”, and another when she was hosting a show featuring young talents in the late 90s. In between those two comebacks, she made the news for fraud perpetrated with her now ex-husband. The news that her manager Guy Cloutier had abused of two young people brought her name to the lips of many.

A year after the Cloutier affair broke out, she finally comes out as one of the manager’s victims. Big surprise. No, not really. We all knew it, and are already waiting for her book to come out.

www.jugement.qc.ca has put the details of the accusations from a year ago on its front page for the public to read. Apart from the many disgusting acts Guy Cloutier performed on his pubescent victim, we learn from this accusation that Nathalie Simard fell in love with her abuser as she reached adolescence. This is hardly rare in the case of abused girls. She later felt ashamed of it.

To many readers, this reminds us of another young successful singer. Like Nathalie, Céline Dion fell in love with her manager as an adolescent. While it was never revealed at what time exactly they had sex, Dion’s mother once said in a TV interview that she suspected her daughter was having an intimate relationship with René Angelil before she was 18. But she did not say anything because she valued what René was doing for her daughter’s career. The same motivation fuelled Nathalie Simard’s mother as she may have closed her eyes to hints that her daughter was abused.

We will never know when Céline Dion and René Angelil’s intimate relationship started. The main difference here is that René Angelil married Céline Dion. Guy Cloutier did not marry Nathalie Simard (he was already in a relationship). Had he done that, perhaps Nathalie’s young hope for love would not have been thwarted and she would not have recognized that she suffered through abuse. Guy Cloutier would still be considered a dedicated manager like Angelil is. The lid would have remained closed on the real nature of their relationship, just as perhaps it did in Céline Dion’s case.

This is very interesting. I asked a coworker if he knew René Angelil. He immediately replied, “That pedophile rapist bastard?! He’s an example of most people around here: they believe that Angelil got away with serious crimes. Yet they all look away. Another coworker just said, “If René Angelil gave you five million dollars, would you let him fuck you?...(nodding head) Alllll night.” Another said that he’d subcontract the job to our gay colleague, but that’s not the point.

If the state knows that a crime has taken place, or even if it has reason to think that something has taken place, doesn’t it have the responsibility to take action? At least ask some questions? For Christ’s sakes, when my brother was being investigated for drug crimes, they knew he hadn’t done anything, but thought that he might, so they set him up. You know, just in fucking case. But here we have an apparent clear case of sexual abuse of a minor, but somehow it’s perfectly okay to just let it slide. Maybe there’s a statute of limitations on this sort of crime.

At some point she fell in love with M. Cloutier. Rose speculates that had they gotten married, he would have avoided jail time, and Guy would be regarded as a devoted husband and promoter. This suggests that Céline Dion is still “under the veil”, or perhaps so afraid of his wrath that she would never think of ratting him out. Imagine if Cloutier had indulged her. Maybe things would be really different. On the other hand, I did see the interview last night. She maintains that she never wanted to have sex or do anything with him except for the time that she was in love with him, around age 16-17. He used to tell her that she was fat (at 120 pounds), not that pretty but that she had a “beau ‘ti cul” (pretty little ass). Easy to see how this type of thing could, over time, warp a vulnerable young mind. Not everyone is equipped to deal with this sort of manipulation.

The thing that I find most offensive is that not only is the state turning a blind eye, but so is everyone else. What would it take for people to feel as though action should be taken?

The 12-year-old baby

This girl is possibly the most curious medical case in terms of age-related [I would say] illnesses ever recorded. Apparently quite unique. There are no other cases recorded. The girl in the picture is 12 years old. She looks and acts like she's 8 months old. It's spooky as hell (if it's a real story). Apparently this girl is living wayyy against the odds. She has cheated death a number of times already. A lemon-sized tumour shrank away on its own and hasn't returned.

Maybe she's like Yoda, or Yoda is like her, that is. Yoda may have taken a century to mature, and then ended up being one of the greatest Jedi ever. That's it, she's a Jedi.

Blogging is over?

Apparently blogging is pretty much on its way out now, with only the loyalists and the hopelessly out-of-date (update!). Oh well, we know we're still cool, right?

Right?

TCBF

Whenever you buy something, you often do not just spend $x on the item and that is all. For example, when you buy a car, you pay $x for the car. But then you have to spend $a per week on gas, $b per month on maintenance, $c on your license plates and so on. So the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is $(x + 52a + 12b + c + whatever else) = $y for the first year, and $z per year thereafter. TCO is studied heavily in business, particularly manufacturing and technology.

I saw a woman this morning on the metro. She had great hair. It looked as though she had just gotten it done. She seemed rather proud of it and was admiring her reflection in the window of the car we were on. It occurred to me that she likely gets her hair done regularly, and that it isn't cheap. She seems to be the type of woman with a high Total Cost of Being Female (TCBF).

Have there been any studies of TCBF? Or TCBM? Let's assume that the average woman uses average things and has average needs, and we will not factor in the necessities of life such as food, shelter, water and high-speed Internet. Let's also assume that she is white, in reasonable health and in her 30s. She's not obsessed with her hair, but she gets it done on a bimonthly basis. Hairstylists for women cost 50% more than for men. She uses typical feminine hygiene products and so on. So you factor in tampons, pads, etc. You've got beauty products. Toilet paper is used much more than men.

Time costs are there, too. She has to spend 15-20 minutes more than Mr. Average per day getting ready to go to work, and 30 minutes to go out with friends, or events. Let's say she does this twice a month, and 6 times in December. If she has custody of one child, and the going-out costs decrease dramatically, but the child-rearing costs make up for it by a factor of 20, both money-wise and time-wise. What else is there? Lots, but I am thinking off the top of my head.

If you factor all this in, then women really don't have a lot of spare time or money. In fact, if men and women were paid the same, at the end of the day, women should have less disposable income, because they are women. But does this mean that they are being paid less? Maybe not. Perhaps the statistic that women are paid 70% of what men are paid is bogus, but the TCBF is much higher than the TCBM. (Oddly enough, women are apparently better at saving money than men are, although I haven't verified this.)

So what do you think? Am I talking right out of my ass here? What else should be included in the calculation of TCBF and TCBM? This would be a really interesting social study if it hasn't been done yet, especially if it suggests that that key 70% earnings statistic is not accurate.