She moved her body hard against a sharpened metal spoon He promised her protection for the issue of her womb He offered her an orgy in a many mirrored room The review asks optimistically, “Could the plural ‘Ladies’ mean rejection of his former womanizing self?” Like much of Cohen’s work, the answer of the title song’s lyrics is full of poetic ambiguity: He was taken to task in a harsh review of his album “Death of a Ladies’ Man” in 1978 by Chateleine magazine, in a piece cleverly titled “Death of a Ladies’ Chavaunist.” Similarly, it is not only in the wake of the #MeToo movement that elements of Cohen’s life and artistry come across as, for lack of a better term, super creepy. The current generation’s disgust with “Beautiful Losers” is not just hindsight in the year it was published, it was reviewed as “the most revolting book ever written in Canada” (and also “the most interesting Canadian book of the year”) by the largest Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star. If its graphic depictions of masturbation do not make you want to vomit, I can assure you that its appropriative depictions of Indigenous women will. His second novel, “Beautiful Losers,” published in 1966, is considered a classic of postmodern Canadian fiction - and also a book so grotesque and problematic that it can no longer be studied in many university classrooms. Shortly before releasing “Suzanne,” his first hit song in 1967, Cohen was a fledgling, experimental writer living in Montreal.
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