TBH I have a suspicion that this drive against sexual harassment in Hollywood/the media is going to be what this wave of...
TBH I have a suspicion that this drive against sexual harassment in Hollywood/the media is going to be what this wave of American feminist energy exhausts itself on. Like McCarthy going after the Army, or more to the point the way the last one exhausted itself on national political figures.
I’m interpreting three recent pieces of evidence here,
FIRST, the Buzzfeed thing a few weeks ago about Milo’s correspondence, the revelation that media bluechecks in acceptable standing with The Consensus were secretly at least allies-of-convenience with Breitbart in the culture war, to the point that VICE’s womens’ vertical editor was setting up hit pieces mocking Lindy West
SECOND, Weinstein thing itself. Which I suppose is really a few things - for one just the scale of the gap between public and private faces, the extent to which you could push feminism and never expect it to bite you in the ass. But also the scope of what that unleashed - people talking about going after all the great and powerful, and everyone who worked for/with them as enablers. And more than big name lives/reputations, the MONEY. Not just from direct judgement/settlement costs, or PR/goodwill losses, or the loss of key figures in a creative connections industry, but stuff that triggers off that. Stuff like “breach of fiduciary duty” lawsuits against individual board members, stuff like nuisance lawsuits with weak claims filed in hope of being paid off lest they get to discovery and find some skeletons in the closet.
THIRD, this “Shitty Media Men” list from this week – everything about it. The fact that there are editors and senior figures from all sorts of millennial click farms and “left” media outlets salted all through there. The fact that people who *contributed* to it immediately split on “full speed ahead, weaponize it” and “wait a lot of this is petty a/o unproven”. Most of all the fact it leaked immediately and everyone on it and everyone who should be now knows they’ve got a target on their back.
So, tipping your hand on picking an existential fight with the ENTIRE liberal culturemaking apparatus to the tune of nine figures if not more and a thorough purging, armed with the liberal cultural norms and narratives you JUST learned they’re a lot less committed to than it seemed, WHILE the conservative chunk of the country that wants to tear your norms down, the one that apparatus is perfectly capable of turning to against you, is on the advance?
Wew lasses. Wew.
I at the very least expect to see some Oscar-bait that turns on false rape claims in the next few years. One about that Rolling Stone article, at minimum (Shattered Glass 2: Shattered Glass?)