WTF is going on?

A pertinent question considering the world we’re living in

Every few months I like to check up on Harvey Weinstein. What, I wonder, is happening to that old rogue? How are things hanging in his neck of the incarceration system? And I don’t mean that in relation to his former fellow in the #MeToo fraternity — the late Jeffrey Epstein. How many women are still reeling from Weinstein’s particular approach to spreading the largesse around? Eighty-seven and counting have come forward with sordid tales of hotel suites and bathrobes (and we all know the statistics about underreporting this sort of thing). I, for one, can never again look at those fluffy white hotel bathrobes in the same way. Never mind the funny terry cloth slippers that make a shuffler out of everyone.

Speaking of shuffling — how is Weinstein’s zimmer frame holding up under the weight of all the social opprobrium?

Reports from his lawyers last week, in an attempt to keep him from being extradited from New York to LA, indicate that he’s falling apart. Quite literally. Apparently he’s lost four teeth in the last year. I can see them dropping, like his stock, from his mouth into his prison gruel. And to add insult to injury, he’s now practically blind. You know what they say causes blindness? Something like a latterday Oedipus. Freud could have had a field day with this set of psychosomatic manifestations.

The World Health Organisation’s report on sexual violence said this about the motivations of a sexual offender: “Sexual violence serves to compensate for feelings of helplessness, to reassure the offender about his sexual adequacy, to assert his identity, to retain status among his peers, to defend against sexual anxieties, to achieve sexual gratification and to discharge frustration.”

Makes sense. Remember the swagger of the man? It must be especially hard, going by his mental state, during Oscar season. How the mighty have fallen — orthodontically speaking.