Oh that reminds me, you know what ‘90s thing I remembered that I’m kind of surprised didn’t come up when we were talking about hanging out in malls hitting on women and going with underage girls?

In Kevin Smith’s 1995′s Mallrats of course the Ben Affleck character’s real villainy was understood as using normie lower-middle-class striving - in his career, with women - to get things he wants, rather than inherently deserving it like witty slacker Brodie.

And the underage girl only fucked him for purposes of empowered upper-middle-class striving, anyway.

Geraldo Rivera’s 1991 Memoir Is a F*ck Fest-Filled Bible of Workplace Harassment

quoms:

Up through yesterday, Geraldo didn’t have much to do with the #MeToo movement until he waded unwisely into the conversation with a Streisand Effect tweet that Matt Lauer’s sexual misconduct-related dismissal from NBC’s Today was “sad” because “news is a flirty business & it seems like the current epidemic of #SexHarassmentAllegations may be criminalizing courtship & conflating it w predation.”

Not satisfied with that, the Fox News host continued. “#SexHarassment,” he said, “should be confined to situations where superior imposes himself on subordinate who feels unable to complain because of power of perp or feared consequences to victim’s employment.”

Rivera later apologized, but not before drawing attention to his own past. Internet users dredged up a clip of Bette Midler describing an assault at the hand(s) of Rivera, and today, the performer tweeted the clip herself, along with the hashtag #MeToo. She publicly stated that Rivera hasn’t apologized to her for the incident.

The Midler clip led me down an internet rabbit hole that led to a 1991 Washington Post book review written by, coincidentally, my now-colleague Lloyd Grove. Grove wasn’t a fan of Rivera’s memoirs, which was unfortunately titled Exposing Myself. His review read as if Rivera had penned the definitive work on how men behave inappropriately in the workplace under the guise of courtship.

Naturally, I had to read it.

serious trigger warning for almost every possible form of sexual harassment/assault, holy shit

also @kontextmaschine​ this seems like fuel for your ‘90s tag

pretty much

You know when I was reading The Nation in the Zack de la Rocha/culture jamming ‘90s between the end of the Cold War and even the Naomi Klein years

Even in my teens I knew to scoff how each issue would have something about some hopeless North Dakota teachers’ strike or something as The Thing That Was Gonna Turn This All Around

It was laughable but in retrospect some of them were the formation of UNITE-HERE or the unionization of hotels and Las Vegas casinos or of home health aides which turned out to be the actual things that DID arrest the slide

Hey you remember how The Onion promoed its breakthrough “Our Dumb Century” book with that “U.S. TROOPS PULL OUT OF VIETNAMESE PEASANT GIRL“ article

So this humorless feminist wave that’s due to mature and die soon, a lot of it you can first see in this 2009 blogpost by Harriet J of Fugitivus, “A woman walks into a rape, uh, bar” and it’s really true, the late ‘90s were like when paintmakers came up with a new color and painters ran wild with it and the color was totally rape jokes

argumate:

tomasnau:

katherinee-wheel:

waititi:

this post did not age well

YIIIIIIIKES

LOL

(to women)

that’s a good point, Spacey is the first time I remember hearing about healthy adult free men getting felt up and not resisting where they were presented as real victims

particularly, I remember one Dan Savage column from the “Hey, Faggot” era where one of the letters was “I just went for a massage and on the table the guy put his thumb in my butt and jerked me off and I was too stunned to do anything and I feel abused”

and the response was like “haha ‘too stunned’ I’m getting tired of the scenarios you guys send in cause you can’t deal that you’re gay”

from Dazed & Confused (1993)

a love letter to writer-director Richard Linklater’s free and easy late ‘1970s Texas adolescence

wherein the incoming high school freshmen are ritually brought of age through supervised exposure to drugs, alcohol, and sex

and formalized beatings and humiliation to establish hierarchy and continuity with previous generations

Friendly reminder that in the ‘90s when the Republicans came after President Bill Clinton over workplace sex with his just-out-of-college intern, amidst multiple accusations of pressing himself on employees and low-status women and rumors of using the Arkansas State Police to advance and cover up his sexual pursuits, the understanding from the left was these wrinkled-up prudes “chasing the Clenis” constituted an attempt to “repeal the Sexual Revolution” that the socially liberalizing post-‘60s electorate properly rejected

Natasha Henstridge (star of Species, the SF pregnancy-trapper entry in the 80s-90s Fatal Attraction/Basic Instinct/Disclosure cycle of “Femme Fatale Monster Posing as Empowered Modern Woman” erotic thriller films) complains director Brett Ratner only ever valued her as a naked body

So “Tales from the Crypt” was the respected early ‘50s horror comic from EC that got squashed in the “Seduction of the Innocent” scare

In 1989 HBO used the brand for a horror anthology series, at the same time Sandman was recasting that comics era as deep myth

It was kinda Twilight Zone in its irony but more visceral, with gore and tits. HBO’s premium cable original programming brand was always “with gore and tits”, before SatC they had an aging boomer sitcom called “Dream On” where the conceit was his retro-themed sexual fantasies were shot as part of the plot

‘90s techworker comic Slavic stereotype SHOWDOWN

Dilbert’s “Elbonians”, the mud-dwelling peasants the protagonists had to deal with AS “new markets opened up by the conclusion of the Cold War”

vs.

User Friendly’s “Pitr”, hostile tech wizard AS “open borders bringing the best skilled labor to the hyperpower”

hello friends

Are we talking early ‘90s, when all the adults got rightsized and the college grads couldn’t get hired so everyone was flannel slackers? Honestly maybe My So-Called Life rebooted as The Wonder Years? Or an Empire Records adaptation?

Later and there’d have to be an Internet angle. A pets.com-era startup in San Francisco, there’s a bike courier as a recurring character and warehouse raves and one episode’s set in Black Rock City

You could maybe meld the two, the slackers work in the cutting-edge coffee bar (cappuccino! how exotic!) on the first floor of the converted loft offices where the startup folks work in Seattle, or something

SO IN OTHER “yeah in retrospect the ‘90s internet thing was a little… huh” news

remember how for a while in the ‘90s web every website was running ads for the X10 wireless camera

and they were significant because they were the first pop-ups, and pop-unders at scale in web history

like, a huge scale in those days

and that was discussed at like slashdot and ars technica and whatnot from like a technical coding standpoint, from a user experience standpoint (furious), from a user experience theory standpoint (furious), from business and legal standpoints

and it was kind of elided or winked at this whole time that the actual content of these ads was “hey, here’s some inconspicuous cameras to use with attractive women”, click to this website as the update to call now from this commercial to buy Pure Moods

only except to buy the hidden camera, to watch women, maybe your babysitter? that was an angle

that paid to put these ads fucking everywhere

if I’m looking back nostalgically on the gender politics of the ‘90s and the early internet I gotta admit that’s fucked up

argumate:

“you should treat her like you would treat another guy! a guy that you found incredibly hot for some reason!”

dat ‘90s promise that it’s not only okay but grrrrreat to welcome girls to guy stuff cause then they’ll be as good and worthy as guys but you can fuck them too

(that in retrospect was obviously subliminated gay issues THANKS Dan Savage)

(I mean, honestly, thanks, ‘90s “Hey, Faggot” Dan Savage* for trying, for making the case and for making it happen, those were a good few years)

* the reference is in the ‘90s Savage required (or edited) all letters to begin with the salutation “Hey, Faggot”, which was his original idea for the column title before “Savage Love”.

Which maybe inspired the “Ask a Mexican!” column that Gustavo Arellano just lost copyright to when he resigned rather than fire his staff under OC Weekly budget cuts

alt-weeklies!

hey remember the 90s when the Æ character was making a comeback?

hey remember the 90s with its Wicca boom and its ridiculous “burning times” myth that was kind of appropriating the whole “R2P” thing that genocide was now our master narrative for legitimizing geopolitics

BUT ALSO clearly a sublimation of the way the ‘80s backlash cut off the '70s liberatory momentum?

good times, good times

the ‘90s are back

(if you want it)

Someone put Alanis Morrisette’s Thank U on at this bar and HOLY SHIT are the ‘90s back

me: I suppose my dream growing up with neoliberalism was if we did it right no one could be abused because they’d all take a God’s-eye-view as their prime level of consciousness and always identify with the winner and appreciate their lower instantiated animal selves as purely incidental objects to be instrumentally used and disposed

also me: are you sure you’re just rationalist-*adjacent*?