Weinstein ouster just first step of penance

Hollywood must change way women are treated

The horrific allegations against Harvey Weinstein have summoned forth images that will play in our heads on a loop for days, months, maybe years.

Those images — detailed with sickening exactitude in the pages of the New York Times and the New Yorker, and also in the harrowing personal testimonies that have emerged since — scarcely bear repeating here. But they are part of the reason why the courage of the women who have gone on the record so far can never be overstated.

I hope, but wouldn’t dare assume, that in sharing their stories, these survivors have begun to liberate themselves from the last vestige of Weinstein’s power to wound, humiliate and silence them.

But their courage comes at a cost, as true courage always does.

Weinstein may have been one of the more malignant offenders in an industry built on the everyday abuse and exploitation of women, but we risk turning cynicism into moral blindness if we suggest that this exploitation is a normal or acceptable state of affairs — as if part of the job of being an actress, or any woman in the movie business, is to submit to a certain degree of exploitation. Forget it, babe; it’s Hollywood.

The Weinstein accusations haven’t just created a host of terrible new images; they have also sullied some earlier ones.

It’s all but unbearable now to watch a TV clip of an actress — be it Meryl Streep, Renee Zellweger, Jennifer Lawrence or someone else — standing in front of a microphone and thanking the room, especially when she gets around to thanking Weinstein.

It was Weinstein’s genius for the system that ultimately earned him his fame, his power, his currency. And it was the gradual devaluing of that currency in recent years that, as many have suggested, allowed his alleged abuses to be brought into the open. That’s why it feels so significant that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided to expel Weinstein from its ranks.

The academy decision felt like an act of not only punishment but also penance, a ritual cleansing.

It’s an honorable sentiment, if also a premature one. Weinstein may be finished, but he was neither the first nor the last Hollywood power player to treat women reprehensibly.

True, lasting, meaningful change will require even more vigilance than it takes to call out other abusers and their enablers, or to mount an academy removal campaign against Roman Polanski or Bill Cosby, as many observers have already suggested.

It will require, among other things, a persistent, exhaustive commitment to hiring female directors and placing women in positions of leadership.

It will require the kind of work that compels us to look back at this moment, with its painful outpouring of truth, and feel an honest measure of gratitude. Not to Weinstein, whose name, by rights, we will never hear spoken from an awards-show stage again, but to all the women he allegedly had and tried to have his way with, the women he promised to lift up, never dreaming that they would one day bring him down.