HUNT

HUNT :

What's that?

SKELETON :

Warrant card. 

I wish to offer my resignation with immediate effect.

HUNT :

No. You don't get off that easy.

I want you to stay a copper and know every second of every minute of every day the true depth of your full betrayal of The Force, of Shaz, Ray, yourself.

Jail isn't your sentence, Chris.

I am.

Glenda Cooper wrote in The Daily Telegraph that “women like Hunt because he isn’t a bastard – or at least not to his team. In a world of short-term contracts, job insecurity and portfolio careers, Hunt’s undying loyalty to his squad (even while rabidly insulting them) make us wistful for a time gone by when you had a job (and colleagues) for life.”

“On paper, it should never have happened. 

Hunt is Seventies man writ large and we should be grateful that species is extinct. 

He wears a vest and his hair looks like it was styled during a power cut. 

He runs along towpaths in skimpy orange swimming trunks and has a torso that’s closer to a Party Seven than six pack. 

He has no concept of innocent until proved guilty and thinks it’s acceptable to turn up to a swingers’ evening with a prostitute he’s just busted. 

He’s racist, disablist and homophobic, and he calls his only female detective Flash Knickers. (And he means it as a compliment.) 

In fact when you see Hunt’s qualities spelled out like that, it looks appalling. 

[However] the fact remains: Gene Hunt is my guilty secret, and I know scores of other women feel the same.”

According to India Knight of The Sunday Times, the character has attained the status of an unlikely British sex symbol: “the combination of Power and, shall we say, lack of political correctness can be a potent one – which is why everyone in Britain fell in love with Gene Hunt, the hulking great throwback in the BBC series Life on Mars and that men wanted to be Hunt; women wanted to be with him.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Hunt#Sex_symbol_status

Paglia: Well I’ve seen - I don’t know if this crosses into other countries - that there’s a certain kind of taunting and teasing that men, that boys do with each other that toughens them, where they don’t take things seriously. But a girl’s feelings become extremely hurt if she hears something that’s very tough, sarcastic against her. So I do feel that there are profound differences between the sexes in terms of emotions, in terms of communication patterns. My father used to say that he could never follow women’s conversations. He said women don’t even finish sentences, that women understand immediately what the other woman is saying. And women tend to be more interested in - or have been traditionally more interested in - soap operas. It’s not just that the women were home without jobs. It’s that honestly, I believe that soap opera does reflect, does mirror, the way women talk to each other. These communication patterns have been built up through women - the world of women, which. . . It made sense that there was a division of labor. It wasn’t sexism against women that there was a division of labor. The men went off to hunt and did the dangerous things. The women stayed around the hearth because you had pregnant women, nursing women, older women, that were cooking and so on. 

So I feel that these communication patterns that we’re talking about have been built up over the centuries. Men had to toughen each other to go out. The hunting parties of Native Americans. . . They could be gone for two weeks when the temperature was below zero. Many of them died. The idea that somehow. . . ‘Oh, any kind of separation of the sexes, or different spheres of the sexes, is inherently sexist’. . . That is wrong. 

Peterson: And inherently driven by a Power Dynamic. 

Paglia: The answer to all of this, everything that we’re talking about, is education into early history. Until people understand the Stone Age, the nomadic period, the agrarian era, and how culture, how civilization built up. . . In Mesopotamia - the great irrigation projects. Or in Egypt where you had. . . Centralized government authority became necessary to master these. . . You had a situation, an environmentally difficult situation like the deserts Mesopotamia, or the peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile line along the edges of the Nile. Otherwise, desert landscape. So [understanding] civilization and authority as not necessarily about power grabbing but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole. 

Peterson: That’s exactly the great symbolism of the Great Father. 

Paglia: By reducing all hierarchy to Power, and selfish Power, is utterly naive. It’s ignorant. I say education has to be totally reconstituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past so our young people today, who know nothing about how the world was created that they inhabit, can understand what a marvelous technological paradise they live in. And it’s the product of capitalism, it’s the product of individual innovation. Most of it’s the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now. If you begin in the past and show. . . And also talk about war, because war is the one thing that wakes people up, as we see. 

Peterson: And as we may see.