One Year Later

It’s just about one year after Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker exposé of Harvey Weinstein was published and revealed decades of sexual harassment and worse in Hollywood and got the ball rolling on the #MeToo movement. What remarkable is what hasn’t happened.

The revelations have hardly spread past entertainment, infotainment, and politics. Even within entertainment there hasn’t been the tsunami of revelations that everyone expected.

What conclusions should we draw?

9 comments… add one
  • steve Link

    Out in the real world people are afraid of losing their jobs. It also isn’t worth it to go after people for stuff that happened years ago if they aren’t a celeb or a politician.

    Steve

  • Out in the real world people are afraid of losing their jobs.

    I would phrase it a bit differently. Other sectors implemented the measures that were necessary long ago. Entertainment, infotainment, and politics are laggers.

  • CuriousOnlooker Link

    What surprises me is there are no proposals for systematic change.

    Like strict rules on off-work hour activities; use of chaperones; a system for filing complaints (for Hollywood) or reform of the existing system (for DC)

  • Guarneri Link

    I wouldn’t discount the taking into account the personality types attracted to those industries, both perps and victims. Anyone here have any desire to use their position of power to boink the intern, secretarial or fresh talent pool?

    I didn’t think so.

  • steve Link

    “Other sectors implemented the measures that were necessary long ago.”

    That could be true, but how would we know? And is it working? Seems like it could also be true that the big corporations are better at keeping stuff out of the news. It also doesn’t make the front pages when a CEO for a non Fortune 500 company gets caught. It seems to me like there are not uncommonly stories like the one at the link, but they dont make the front page like it would with a celebrity or a politician. I would bet that if we had some way to generate a good baseline, we would find that it has decreased, but far from nonexistent as a problem.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-12/here-s-what-happens-to-a-startup-after-a-sexual-harassment-scandal

    Steve

  • mercer Link

    I think women will put up with more for a chance at an entertainment career than with more mundane jobs. To quote someone from the field: ” And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” It has been that way in Hollywood for decades. I doubt any Walmart manager would say anything similar.

  • Be careful of what you’re saying. The average annual earnings of a member of SAG-AFTRA is under $30,000 and the median is substantially lower. Are you saying that women are willing to prostitute themselves for “a chance”?

  • Andy Link

    I know a large number of professional women, primarily engineers and scientists. All of them have stories of creepy guys, sexual harassment and workplace environments that were decidedly “boys clubs.” In several cases, these were the first women engineers in what had been a largely male world.

    It was frustrating, annoying and sometimes scary for them, but the harassment they experienced was nothing compared to Weinstein.

    As I noted before about the Catholic Church abuse problems, the biggest factor is power dynamics. In both the Catholic Church and in many parts of entertainment, there is a hierarchy that is unaccountable with few “exit” opportunities short of quitting the Church or entertainment completely. A Weinstein could, and did, wreck the careers of actresses who did not comply because he had a huge sway over the industry generally. Most other fields of employment, by contrast, offer exit opportunities and don’t have people in positions where they can destroy your career. If your boss is a perv at an engineering firm, you can get a job elsewhere as long as you have the skills. I don’t think it works that way with actors.

  • TarsTarkas Link

    1. A few too many ‘champions of feminism’ got burned and IMO there was a don’t ask don’t tell crackdown on its use among ‘friends’ of the movement.
    2. #MeToo got corralled into the Democrats’ playbook (the Kavanaugh ploy being just the most celebrated example, there are others) and became just another tool in their dirty-tricks bag.
    3. The unproveable and evidence-free claims of Ford et al has made a lot of people, especially middle-class women, both angry at the potential misuse of #MeToo on their male relations and fearful that real abuse will now be just dismissed as ‘fake accusations’.

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