Caper and liver crostini
Weinstein scandal shows little has really changed
How wonderful to see Maggie Beer's beautiful, smiling face on page 14 today. She is such a treasure and if anyone is going to get through to us all that we need to eat well it is Maggie. She teamed up with leading Alzheimer's researcher Professor Ralph Martins to fight one of the most debilitating diseases of later years and the proceeds of her new book, Maggie's Recipes for Life, will be shared between the Maggie Beer Foundation and the Lions Alzheimer's Research Foundation. You will find it in stores now.
Following a clean-up of your diet, you might be in the mood to bake, as Kathy Paterson was after a good spring clean of the house, right down to the spices in the pantry, on page 8.
There is a real website called Imahollywoodexecutivewhore.com. “You either owe me an apology or a blow job. Your choice.” “You fire a guy you create a rival. You fire a woman you create a housewife.”
These are quotes from fictional tyrannical Hollywood agent Ari Gold. Whereas Harvey Weinstein is a tyrannical real-life Hollywood producer.
Last week in a bombshell investigation the New York Times revealed that Weinstein, who is married, had paid settlements to at least eight different women who have accused him of sexual harassment over decades.
Actress Ashley Judd told the Times that Weinstein sexually harassed her in a hotel room at the Beverly Hills Peninsula. Other women reported demands for massages, professional interactions undertaken with Weinstein naked, and a news anchor went on the record to say Weinstein wanked into a pot plant in front of her.
It is indecorous how much glee I get from rubbernecking at the downfall of various dirty old rootbags. I’m not proud of this. It feels like some sort of righteous personal payback.
It is gratuitous, since I wasn’t abused by any of them. But as any women who has pandered to any older man’s ego in the nubile days of her career (most of us) might intuit, there is an unseemly sense of “booyah!” when the karma bus makes a welcome stop. I am aware I shouldn’t enjoy it this much.
Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, now Harvey Weinstein. Conservative or liberal, they are a certain sort of doughy jowled power player who thought they ruled the world and were owed massages and whatever they wanted from sycophants because they were wrinkly and rich.
So it feels satisfying to say guess what, smug douches, times they are a changin’. Sort of.
Some commentators say this latest revelation is a sign our consciousness has been raised, and we can have a public conversation where women feel they can speak their truth. But I’m not so sure we’ve got there yet.
Because in reality the repercussions have been mixed: Cosby is set to go to trial again next year, Ailes and O’Reilly lost powerful jobs but walked away with millions, not to mention Donald Trump being elected President after he boasted on an Access Hollywood tape “you can do anything”.
Weinstein well knows the way the game is played and it seems he hopes to get away by acting out his part in the usual hand-wringing repentance script. Even if on
This is not just toxic masculinity. It is abuse of power, pure and simple.
taking a close reading of his mea culpa statement you see that if he really is penitent, the tone is all wrong.
On one hand he blames coming of age in the 60s and confesses to being a dinosaur. But at the same time he accuses the Times of reckless reporting and says he plans to sue the paper for US$50 million ($70.5m). I guess old intimidation tactics die hard.
Maybe we are not making quite as much progress dismantling the patriarchy as we might think. We’re not so “woke” as we might hope in 2017, what New York magazine calls the Year of the Sociopathic Baby-Man.
I can’t help noticing that all these men seem to have been perennial sexual hazards for decades but most of them (with the exception of Trump) only seem to face any kind of consequences when they are already weakened, their power waning and their careers on the way out. (Ailes was 76 when he was ousted from Fox News, O’Reilly 68, Bill Cosby is 80 and Weinstein is 66.) No one seemed to feel able to confront them publicly at the height of their power. Hollywood and the establishment, especially Silicon Valley, still thrives on a power imbalance, and fetishises the image of the male genius.
Alongside the stories of sexual harassment, Weinstein was revealed to be an equal opportunities bully, intimidating male underlings, getting a male writer in a headlock at a launch function, berating the husband of a film director. So this is not just toxic masculinity. It is abuse of power, pure and simple.
“Toxic masculinity implies that masculinity is the core problem here, and suggests that a tiny bit of masculinity might also be a tiny bit poisonous. Using the word masculinity suggests that all men have a toxic core,” Heather Havrilesky writes in New York magazine.
Abuse through imposition of your will on someone who has no ability to resist or defend themselves from you is an exertion of power on the powerless.
So before we celebrate prematurely the death of sexist dinosaurs, I feel obliged to sadly note Trump’s Administration just made it harder for women to get contraceptives and put out an edict which will allow religious charities or schools that receive government funding to free an unmarried employee who becomes pregnant or an employee who marries a same-sex partner.
The more it changes . . .