It’s good that women are naming and shaming highly placed sexual harassers / predators in the entertainment and media sector. But I don’t think it will change anything.
The reactions make me pessimistic. Several conservative media figures showed how clueless they remain by suggesting the solution is to further constrain the behavior of victims — e.g., “Wish you’d followed the Pence Rule now, huh, libtards?”
Others, like WaPo’s Dana Milbank, are horrified to learn they were oblivious to the hostile environment their female colleagues confront, but they’re still clueless about how their own oafish behavior contributes to it:
I and many other male alumni of the New Republic, feminists all, are shaken by what we’ve learned this week. We weren’t a conspiracy of silence, but we were in a cone of ignorance. My friend Franklin Foer, a former editor, recalls being uncomfortable with Wieseltier’s lewd comments when he first arrived at the magazine. But “they just seemed accepted. I said nothing — and certainly didn’t think hard enough about how those remarks would be suggestive of private behavior or created a hostile environment.”
That would be Dana “Mad Bitch Beer” Milbank. His co-sketcher, Chris Cillizza, seems to bob to the top of the media tank somehow, like a particularly buoyant (and untalented) turd. And his takeaway from the Weinstein scandal was that Hillary Clinton allowed X number of days to pass before speaking about it publicly. Hey, maybe y’all are part of the problem, even if you keep your paws off your coworkers’ boobs?
The disheartening thing is that, for the foreseeable future, we are doomed to live in the world these schmucks built. Rebecca Traister published a powerful piece making that point in New York Magazine. An excerpt of “Our National Narratives Are Still Being Shaped by Lecherous, Powerful Men” follows:
In hearing these individual tales, we’re not only learning about individual trespasses but for the first time getting a view of the matrix in which we’ve all been living: We see that the men who have had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers are in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories…
And while it may feel cathartic for some women to finally get to say things they’ve been waiting years to say, this does not undo the damage. We can’t go back in time and have the story of Hillary Clinton written by people who have not been accused of pressing their erections into the shoulders of young women who worked for them.
We cannot retroactively resituate the women who left jobs, who left their whole careers because the navigation of the risks, these daily diminutions and abuses, drove them out. Nor can we retroactively see the movies they would have made or the art they would have promoted, or read the news as they might have reported it.
This tsunami of stories doesn’t just reveal the way that men have grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it shows us that they did it all while building the very world in which we still have to live.
Yeah, what she said. It’s really not surprising Trump could get elected in such a world, when you look at it from that perspective.