Crikey, #MeToo even has its own Wikipedia page with a list of VIPs who’d responded to actress Melissa Milano’s original…Tweet, post Harvey Weinstein accusations. Also included are about 14 international similar hashtags, and a list of related hashtags. Ack, the following (hundreds?) of Public Figures have been mentioned on the hundreds of thousands (and growing) hashtags on Twittr and Facebook “when discussing their experiences with inappropriate behavior of a sexual nature (including but not limited to harassment, assault, etc.) or gender discrimination”.
So the names on the list are just suggested as being in one or more of those categories? Is this akin to being found guilty by social media outrage? Are the numbers of Retweets even further damning ‘evidence’?
I’d been wondering aloud to Mr. wd the other day if there are any Twitter hashtags dedicated to women who’ve been accused of similar behaviors, or even men accusing other men of the same things. And lo and behold, I’d been following a story and ended up at the Boston Globe, and had spied this on the right sidebar: ‘Four men allege sexual misconduct by Senate president’s husband’, Nov. 11. (Bryon Hefner, then the fiancé of Senate President Stanley Rosenberg)
Are men loth to report the same or similar behaviors given that males are strong, women are weak physically theme? Surely if a lot of these behaviors are about the imbalance of power, women might be engaging in it, no? But in 2010 the CDC reported that 40% of all domestic violence is against males, not that I mean to conflate domestic violence with sexual assaults, etc.
But moving on, I’d seen a story about Terry Crews, former football player, now actor, and he spoke about his male Hollywood talent agent grabbing his package. How does someone not reflexively raise a knee when assaulted like that? Are many afraid of coming forward believing they’d be slut-shamed as (gasp) closeted gays? IIRC, Crews had mentioned that possibility.
Zo. I began thinking that Jason’s one guise as #MeThree was reflecting those issues, but largely it seems it’s a reactionary response to #MeToo, although there are so many overlaps on these accounts, as with #HimThough. HimThough? wth? Here’s #HowIwillChange on twitter.
But the accused are dropping like flies, being asked to ‘step down’ from Congress, fired summarily because the women accusers are ‘believable’, ‘more have come forward’, etc. Or: just jumping on the bandwagons because they’re being invited to?
Now according to two pieces at wsws.org, the NewYorkSlimes is huuuuge in this movement, apparently getting able assists by Bezos’s WaPo.
‘Repressive political agenda of the “sexual harassment” campaign comes into the open’, David Walsh, 28 November 2017, wsws.org
“This campaign has nothing to do with protecting women—especially working-class women—against sexual harassment, let alone criminal violence and other forms of exploitation and repression. With each passing day, the reactionary, anti-democratic and socially and politically repressive political agenda of the current media-driven campaign is becoming increasingly explicit.
Anyone foolish or naïve enough to be roped in by it ought to be brought to their senses by some of the filth that is emerging, including the demented article by Stephen Marche in this Sunday’s New York Times on the brutality of the male libido, which states that self-castration may be one answer to the problem.” [snip]
“Approaching matters from a slightly different angle, the Sunday Times column (“The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido”) by Marche, a Toronto-based writer well connected to the Canadian media and political establishment, is simply unhinged.
Marche refers to “the nature of men in general,” “the grotesquerie of their sexuality,” “the ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido,” “the implicit brutality of male sexuality” and cites the contention of the ultra-reactionary “radical feminist” Andrea Dworkin that “the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis.” Marche goes on to invoke, approvingly by virtue of its context, the example of “the great [third century A.D.] Catholic theologian Origen,” who “castrated himself.”
“Implying that sex is a disease, Marche asserts that “there remains no cure for human desire.” What, then, should be done about it? Referencing Freud, he writes: “The idea of the Oedipus complex contained an implicit case for the requirements of strenuous repression: If you let boys be boys, they will murder their fathers and sleep with their mothers.”
“Is his self-loathing a posture, designed to curry favor with the gender politics crowd, or is it genuine? Perhaps only Mr. Marche can answer this question. But whatever the answer, his sick and rotten ideas are being published in the New York Times. Only a deeply reactionary political agenda makes use of such polluted conceptions.”
“The contempt for democratic rights in the sexual harassment campaign comes out more and more clearly.
Increasingly, commentators flaunt their lack of concern about the innocence or guilt of those accused.
Teen Vogue columnist Emily Lindin explained on Twitter: “I’m actually not at all concerned about innocent men losing their jobs over false allegations of sexual assault or harassment” and, later, “If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.”
Olivia Goldhill headlined her piece at Quartz, “Naming abusers online may be ‘mob justice’ but it’s still justice.” Goldhill doesn’t seem to get the point of the phrase “mob justice,” i.e., that it is no justice at all.”
After a scathing mini-review of Christine Emba’s Washington Post column, “Let’s rethink sex”, he polemicizes:
“Where is this rubbish coming from? Out of this backwardness will appear—much to the surprise and dismay of some—efforts to outlaw all sorts of sexual activity, including extramarital sex, or “fornication” as Emba refers to it, gay marriage and other forms of sexuality disapproved of by the new Victorians.”
Side note: many of the 167 comments took issues w/ Walsh.)
Re: Being asked to hop aboard bandwagons, this morning’s OMG ‘‘The public humiliation and destruction of Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine’; 5 December 2017, wsws.org
“The sexual misconduct campaign in the US is metastasizing and in its reactionary sweep and recklessness borrowing elements from the McCarthyite purges of the 1950s, the New England witch trials of the 1690s and even the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages.
The Times is leading the gutter press in actively soliciting allegations, claims or rumors about alleged sexual misdeeds and heresies—heterosexual and homosexual alike—committed by prominent individuals. The newspaper has devoted considerable resources to tracking down such stories for the purposes of blackening a given personality’s name and eviscerating him or her.” [nip]
The editorial cites age of consent ages in the three states, etc., and notes that Levine wasn’t charged with any crime, and that the Slimes quoted Peter Gelb, the general manager of the opera as saying “Since I’ve been at the Met there has not been a single instance of somebody coming forward to make a complaint, ever, about Levine in recent Met history.”
“The Metropolitan’s action is a cowardly capitulation to the hysteria incited by the filthy New York Times, whose demented publisher and editors are sniffing the bed sheets of the nation in search of sexual malefactors. As it publishes new denunciations each day, the newspaper calls on the public to keep it supplied with reports of sexual heresy.
Given the fact that until recently homosexuals were forced in many cases to conceal their sexual orientation and lead double lives, and that this, in fact, remains the situation for prominent gay people in various fields today, the particular vulnerability of homosexual performers and celebrities is obvious. The venomous attack on and “disappearing” of Kevin Spacey was not accidental. The theater, film and arts are being especially targeted, with an unmistakable whiff of the Nazi assault on “degenerate art.”
…which I assume implies that Levine is gay? Yes, some of the commenters quoted the accusing student’s name in the Times OP. “abused over 100 times? for years? non-consensual, then? Ach; who can say? He really really wanted to learn violin from Levine?
“The Times is offering itself up here as the authoritative, intrusive moral bedrock of American society in these troubling days of “fake news” and “Russian propaganda.”
Having repudiated the social reforms of the New Deal and the Great Society periods, the political establishment seems bent on repudiating the “sexual revolution” as well.”
And of course this society (if one can call it a single unit) and many other cultures have long been sexist, and often misogynist as well. But when I read a woman on #MeToo reporting that ‘accusation against X for sexual harassment in the workplace threw me into a recurrence of my original PTSD when I was harassed 20 years ago are’ minimizing the issue of actual rape. But one shouldn’t be allowed to make an accusation (especially anonymously) that lead to firings and ruined careers that Teen Vogue columnist Emily Lindin can live with”.
See the figures cited in ‘‘The Need for a Cultural Shift on Gender-based Violence’, by Laura Finley, Dec. 5, Counterpunch.
Her personal story is so snooze-worthy for most any working woman’s life that it didn’t even cause a ripple with me, although I’m quite a bit older, but that’s part of her point. The last 45 years of my life were spent as an ‘accidental feminist’. That was the day that some #Asshat pinched my bum when waiting on him at a restaurant/bar in Breckenridge, CO, and I whipped off my apron, threw it on the bar…and walked out, telling the manager: “fuck that.” And got a job on a construction crew, along with my friend Betsy.
Just for those who’d participated at Firedoglake back in the day, Quentin Tarantino had weighed in on Harvey Weinstein saying “Tarantino on Weinstein: ‘I Knew Enough to Do More Than I Did’
Periodically I’d peek into her twit account to see what might be up with her, including her health, when one day I’d seen she’d tweeted for the first and only time since Nov. 2014:
(She’d worked with him on ‘Natural Born Killers’.) Oh, my; here’s the account one of the Jody Cantor’s account; lotta dirt there. @jodikantor
‘NY Times investigative reporter, author, CBS contributor. I’ll have mine truthful, with a side of dark chocolate.’
Blink. Blink.
Meanwhile, Herr Trump is still Tweedle-Deeing his support for Roy Monroe with a twist on FDR’s quote:
‘He may be a pedophile, but hell, he’s OUR pedophile!’
Please weigh in at will. Will anything useful come of it, even a coming mini-documentary? Will it help stop ubiquitous prison rape of either gender? Or is just another major distraction by way of the NYT and WaPo hoping no one notices how much inequality and brutal oppression of the rabble classes is afoot in Amerika, as wsws posits? from the Wiki:
“On October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano encouraged spreading the phrase as part of an awareness campaign to show the scale and ubiquity of the problem, tweeting: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” Way-ull, yay-uss, the magnitude…
Will making sure that more women are in the top echelons of corporate Amerika help?
Or any Congressional bills such as “Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced a bill aimed at making sexual harassment complaints easier to report on Capitol Hill.” We know how much good it did when the military made it easier to report rape, don’t we?
Cheryl Sandberg thinks they’ll be a backlash from all this, and women will be less likely to be hired.
From the Independent’s Annie Corchoran: The so-called ‘tipping point’ for sexual harassment has come and gone, and nothing’s really changed
“Those at the top need to readdress the balance of power and create an environment which not only condemns sexual assault but also seeks justice for the victims. The best a victim can hope for is that her accuser is shamed in the media for a few days and loses a job or two before everything goes back to normal. And that’s just not good enough.”
Will #HowIWillChange stem the tide?
bet ya can take the NYT’s facts straight to the bank:
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
i’m shutting down for the night; days start for me about 4:30. but la luna bella (two days on the wane) just rose in a cleft between two la plata mountains: belissimo! with ariga with five main stars and shaped like a jewel below and a bit westward, with orion rising a bit southward. all of it reminding that we are all truly made of stardust. one family, all related to the san bushmen in africa.
rest well.
Between Emmett Till and Anita Hill
About Emmett Till
View at Medium.com
Laurie Penny’s latest:
https://longreads.com/2017/12/05/the-consent-of-the-ungoverned/
The sexual misconduct campaign is indeed metastasizing and in a lot of ways in the crazy ways it did several times before in the anxieties over missing children, day school pedophiles, and the perennial pro-sex and anti-sex feminist debates (so Andrea Dworkin updates us on her thoughts or do some lazy writers recycle her ideas for copy?)
It is not about sex, it is about power in institutions that gets manifested as demands for sex. And it gets polluted with partisan politics and craziness of all stripes, including firing Sam Seder for blatant satire.
Whatever it turns out to be, it will be incomplete, twisted in some ways to ensure that the opposite of the intent gets done by the end of this spasm of the anxiety. And it will promptly end when twice-removed Judge Roy Moore gets seated in the US Senate (unless Doug Jones does). And then churches and schools go back to keeping teens sexual ignorant (Ha!) and politicians drone on about how Roe v. Wade encourages women to abort their fetuses. But Lordy, did the Focus on the Family folks swing around to support Roy Moore.
But there are funny moments: John Oliver and Dustin Hoffman, for example. Upbraiding a screen actor who came of age smack dab in the era of Hugh Hefner, striking star status with a film about…er…plastics…and Mrs. Robinson. How far do you want to go back, John Oliver?
And in the midst of this is an article about Alt-Right females are complaining about Alt-Right males not being too nice. Echoes of the feminism that sprouted out of the 1960s Movement.
And here we are again with the frustration of a lot of ladies with really long term sexual harassment in workplaces. And the greater frustration as you explore those workplaces deep in the service workplaces.
Meanwhile, identity politics never seems quite to get at the sort of sexual politics Kate Millett described almost 50 years ago.
It’s tough. There are some like Weinstein and Trump who use they place in society to create impunity that only some huge social force can undo. In his small town milieu, Roy Moore strove hard for the impunity and the double standard that emphasized his playing by the rules and the waywardness of the the girls.
Given the religious, social, media, political, and other barriers to actual accountability, it will likely take some rollback of nazism in the mainsteam to have a good effect. It the rhetoric of denial gets challenged enough, there might be some good effect. If “boys will be boys” persists as the recognized social norm, a new and larger generation of self-privileged men will wade into the institutions of US society.
Of course the surface you see on the media hit the notables and not what actually might be happening in the workplaces in small towns or the reasons for the police calls in the middle of the night.
Some people are too early to congratulate themselves. Hope it changes as much as the 1960s changed the range of occupations.
what a considered comment, thd; thank you. and before i forget, here’s the hyperlink to the strategy camp essay. i hadn’t noticed at first that there even was a link, ay yi yi.
on edit: my try at bringing a single essay there didn’t work, one needs to scroll down to get the piece referenced.
wnen i was waking up this morning emmet till came to mind, although in a circuitous way, but not anita hill, amazingly enough, so thanks for that as well. laurie penny’s is long, so i’ll read it later. dworkin just a name i remembered vaguely, so i can’t answer that. but woooot! had to look up sam seder as well, and what an hilarious joke, but worse, very similar to one of the trots at wsws asking ‘can one offer some defense of kevin spacey?’ almost all of it based on…what a magnificent/award-winning actor he is. zillions of comments, most in agreement. pffff, he’s always creeped me out, but i heard so many folks noting ‘what a weird way to come out: in defense of… whatever attacks on youngish males he was accused of.
i agree about the power differential and sexual attacks and harassment, but 1) those are not equal, and 2) among women in power, are their similar acts unexamined, do you reckon?
oh, and yeppers, time mag’s person of the year is indeed #metoo, in the guise of ‘the silence breakers‘. quite a long exposé/essay it looks like, names and faces i’m totally unfamiliar with. (as w/ sam seder). more later, i really want my toast. ;-)
‘dworkin’s thoughts from the afterlife’? gads, she crossed over/died/transitioned in 2005 according to da wiki, but her most recent tweet is from…2012. now ain’t that spooky? jeez, why can i remember the catch-all ‘sexual misconduct’, but that’s part of the problem, to me, as in that longish laundry list that the Wiki mentions.
i swear on the sam seder story it was buzzfeed who’d accused him, by way of a ‘alt-righter’. but remember, that media org is on the PropOrNot okey-dokey list. ;-)
but dangit, i got caught up scanning dworkin’s wiki page, searching for an finding those who knew what she’d be saying now, etc. one extrapolation was that she believed that neither men nor women believed that they were…what, meaningful, significant, maybe. yes, the latter. porn as one major basis for sexual violence, i forget what else.
but agreed, it just may end up having the opposite of the ‘intended effect’ depending on what that really is was. busting powerful males? could it focus more on the rabble classes in their work environments, rape in prison, refugees, as whozzit in the OP hopes? are the men-folk on the #howIwillChange account all VIPs virtue signaing w/ or w/out meaning? ‘calling a woman bitch or bossy’? well, i guess. i very briefly scanned the Time person of the year piece, w/ glamour photos galore, and caught this:
“At the federal level, the House and Senate have passed new rules requiring members of Congress and their staff to complete mandatory sexual-harassment training. A handful of Senators have also introduced legislation to rein in what are known as mandatory arbitration agreements—legal clauses that can appear in employee contracts that prevent workers from suing their employers in court for any reason, including sexual harassment. Some 60 million American workers are currently bound by them.”
was it that piece that noted how often those trainings ‘backfire’? oh, for a memory. more as i have time. i’m jammed w/ honey-do’s for mr. wd i’d half promised for…yesterday, not that he really cares…
and ta for the dustin hoffman/john oliver deconstruction. ooof, it was everywhere!!! i never watched, but oliver is by way of a librul god, isn’t he?
i only made it thru laurie penny’s essay to caitlin johnstone’s. yes, she’s on fire, as is penny, as to ‘rape’ as the one issue that supercedes all others for women (i.e. ‘let the big boys have their anticapitalist revolution, we’ll talk about rape issues later’, or something like that). but a male commenter on johnstone’s mentioned rape rates w/ men as victims, so i bingled and found:
‘When Men Are Raped’; a new study reveals that men are often the victims of sexual assault, and women are often the perpetrators.’ slate.com
“Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men.
“…if the survey (bureau of justice study) is sensitive and specific enough—as vulnerable. A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator.”
now the many links went to studies we weren’t privvy to, so i dunno if sex or simply power were the underlying factors in most cases, or if that were brought into the study at all; but it should have, imo.
but seeing headlines as to how many Ds are calling for franken to resign, called for conyers to resign, it’s clear that they’e distancing themselves from the alleged perps to demonstrate just how much they care about women, as the putative ‘party of the people’.
Walsh’s piece is a clear case of the overreach he purports to be reporting on/about/against. Newton’s 3rd law again? Seems like perpetual motion.
If it’s about power (of course it is), then total domination by women in positions of power might alter the sexual dynamic — and, I dunno, maybe make life net-easier for many women — but it won’t solve the power problem. When faced with the simpleton’s solution of “If only women/people of color were more in more prominent positions of power, then…”, one is tempted to cite the last president or second-to-last secretary of state as fine counter-proof. But that does disservice to equal opportunity analysis of the role of Institutionalization.
That several toads’ have been revealed seems great and I would hope that a new era of non-silence would help curtail much of the same from continuing to happen. Ironically, the latest has provided the motive & opportunity to indeed make false allegations. And as was recently evidenced by the new president and the estate he rode in on, his side is better at using moments like this to smear their would-be opposition. It was, a rather DNCish movement that began the #fakenews alarm that 45 embraced to make a mockery of CNN and the like. And since everyone knows that the mainstream media is propaganda plain & pure, only partisan ideologues would defend the likes of CNN or FOX or MSNBC. As this relates to sexual harassment, I suspect that the Senator from Minnesota has fallen victim to not only such a campaign, but because of his belonging to the oh-so woke brand he represents, he cannot outright deny the claims against him because that would put him into the camp that doesn’t believe women.
Most revealing is who is untouchable in this scenario. It tends politician, but only strong applies to presidents and ex-presidents. Poppy and Bubba and Trump, oh my!
do you mean that walsh’s overreach includes ‘over-turning the sexual revolution as well as…’ i think he was waxing polemical and one paragraph i’d even written ‘polemicizes’, but then changed it, recalling this passage from their ‘The public humiliation and destruction of Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine’ editorial’ and charges of homosexuality being used as weapons, if not crimes.
““There will be many other victims as this drive escalates, and most of them will be unknown and unable to fight back. The Times, Washington Post and the rest are legitimizing the reactivation of vice squads in search of violations of “decency.” Homes will be invaded and bedrooms entered, and cell phones and computers turned into omnipresent surveillance mechanisms, enabling the authorities to follow who is having sex with whom, in real time.
The fear of exposure creates a mood of terror, which is the aim of the operation: to intimidate, to clamp down on opposition and dissent, to shut people up.
All of this opens up new avenues for moral and political blackmail. Obey the interrogators or else!”
now that’s polemical over-reach, but that’s the point of polemics, isn’t it?
same for the hope/wish for women prezes, prime ministers, tra la la..globally. yeah, that hasn’t worked out so well, has it. and i’ve often cringed at glen ford’s ‘black police for black communities’; it would have to be how and who they’re told to police, wouldn’t it? the adage ‘when a cop zip on the uniform of the oppressor class…’
i guess i still think that sexual assaults are about both power and libido/sex, but almost in the way of a capitalist ownership society, including the fact that sex sells products. well, i’m getting fuzzy on what i mean, but clearly forced sex is enjoyable only for sociopaths, imo.
now i confess i’d had to check whether or not #meToo was spawned by trump’s pussy-grabbing braggadocio, but apparently it was weintein’s accusers. then…on with the rest. i love and admire your thoughts on why the ‘woke’ progressive franken can’t afford to ‘not believe’ his accusers; how many times have attorneys advised their clients ‘not to recall, remember’? although, i haven’t clicked into the ‘more come forward to accuse franken’ headlines to know who, for what, etc.
they finally hounded john conyers to resign, and the ‘they’ included not only pelosi, but the house black caucus. will they hold a special election or let peeps run for his seat that begins in 2018? pretty key district in MI iirc.
more as i read and consider. thanks for the critical thinking and imagining, davidly.
“i guess i still think that sexual assaults are about both power and libido/sex…”
Certainly sexual assaults wouldn’t exist without both elements, and the sexual element gets too easily dismissed in the discussion about what drives them. Still, minus the sex, it’s remains criminal, minus the power, i.e. coercion, it is not. Even if castration is/were an effective measure, the fact remains that once the power element is removed, the assault is rendered impossible. I think that’s where what’s-his-boys NYT piece goes wrong. It’s all well and good to point out something people are missing, but Walsh is right about that one. An erect penis is only more powerful than the female sexual energy when the structure (hierarchy, physical strength) of the male is more powerful than that of the female.
walsh was referencing marche’s having channeled dworkin on “the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis”. i did look at her twit acct, and she is sincerely a polemicist, hard to say what’s satire, what’s belief, for me.
you may be correct in your take that sexual assaults wouldn’t exist w/o both, but ha! now i’m picturing some assaults (grabbing in public, say) as falling under a rubric of humiliation by power’. but we start gettin’ in the weeds w/ all the categories the wiki had provided. i did click on a couple of the ‘names listed’ or whatever in the wiki, and one or two had had their wikis updated, but the only 2 i checked…all the reports were anonymous. ‘mary, who dinnae want her last named used for this report’…stuff.
i hadn’t checked the marche wild, untamed libido thing, as when i started this i was out of times clicks, but it’s weird that he didn’t (or if he hadn’t) mention chemical castration, which is a whole different ballgame. who was the texas judge who was offering that to males he was sentencing…as an alternative?
on edit: could you amplify on this, please? “Still, minus the sex, it’s remains criminal.”
Yeah, as flawed as the peer review is, a judge dudn’t even need that to decide what twisted logic passes for sentencing. There must be serious challenges to that based on cruel and unusual punishment (or equivalent) statutes alone.
Sex without the consent is assault. A wholly non-sexual assault upon a person is also assault. Sex is just sex.
thanks for explaining what you’d meant; i’d misread, i guess. as ever, i still swear one day i’ll learn to read. but as far as ‘criminal’ goes, that also depends what the courts say, not what the law says. and stir in color, gender of all sorts, we know how it goes as far as verdicts.
it seems i may have read too many #metoo stories, theories, partisan and color divides, so i’ll need to see which phrases and images won’t stop resonating…and bring a couple. i know one or two are from the author of thd’s ‘strategy camp’ essay, one or two from the root.
tweets w/ videos of herr T’s 16 accusers are up, demanding he be investigated. i didn’t listen for a few reasons, but investigate? only congress can order it, right? mmm-hmmmm; not likely, unless a palace coup?
0′ L00K, Folks; BERNANK$TER$ :
explain the relevance, please, bruce?
signed clueless in double-lame, CO
on edit: maybe rape of the rabble by the fed patriarchs’? but that leaves out janet yellen, doesn’t it?
he truly is a scorched-earth monster, isn’t he?
‘Trump holds up the proclamation he signed that the United States recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel’, RT
“Israel is a sovereign nation with a right like every other sovereign nation to determine its own capital. Acknowledging this is a fact is a necessary condition for achieving peace,” continued the US President, who called Israel “one of the most successful democracies in the world.”
w/ an able assist by his zionist homie…
‘The Cover That Time Forgot: Why We’re Placing #MeToo’s Tarana Burke Front and Center’, the glowup, the root
“The nonprofit and accompanying campaign, created by social activist and survivor Tarana Burke more than a decade ago—was reinvigorated when long-whispered allegations against entertainment mogul Harvey Weinstein sparked public outrage—bringing #MeToo to the forefront of our collective consciousness.
But while it was no surprise that Time rightfully considered the #MeToo movement the most influential entity of this year, it was shocking and disappointing to see that its cover layout, which featured five women of varying ethnicities, ages and levels of fame, conspicuously excluded the woman behind it.
In fact, even the accompanying article seemed to undervalue Burke’s work in creating this moment of reckoning—which extends far beyond creating a hashtag—vaguely labeling her an “activist” in her portrait and benignly stating:
‘The phrase was first used more than a decade ago by social activist Tarana Burke as part of her work building solidarity among young survivors of harassment and assault.’
Online, the responses to Time’s cover layout have ranged from anger to begrudging acceptance; marked by the typical bargaining that often punctuates the conversations of black women at the crossroads of intersectionality.”
gabriella union speaking to NYT (via ‘the root):
“I think the floodgates have opened for white women,” she told the Times. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence whose pain has been taken seriously. Whose pain we have showed historically and continued to show. Whose pain is tolerable and whose pain is intolerable. And whose pain needs to be addressed now.
“If those people hadn’t been Hollywood royalty,” she asked, in reference to some of the women who first spoke out about Harvey Weinstein. “If they hadn’t been approachable. If they hadn’t been people who have had access to parts and roles and true inclusion in Hollywood, would we have believed?”
aaaaand…al franken just resigned from the senate. rolling stone. quotes galore here from…self-righteous D accusing colleagues.
Anything distractive to take our eyes off the prize of the 1%’s Booty, $T0LEN from US ALL ! OR, if we’re gonna go after predators of the defenseless, howzabout CLINT0N-level FRAU’D$ (e.g., HAITI) 0r PED0PHILIC Abuses (ibid, HAITI), fer Crissakes in this season of the child?
sorry to be so long; i’ve been keepin’ my head down to work on my next diary.
ah, an analogy of distractions!
“At the federal level, the House and Senate have passed new rules requiring members of Congress and their staff to complete mandatory sexual-harassment training. A handful of Senators have also introduced legislation to rein in what are known as mandatory arbitration agreements—legal clauses that can appear in employee contracts that prevent workers from suing their employers in court for any reason, including sexual harassment. Some 60 million American workers are currently bound by them.”
(I admit i’m having a hard time believing the stats about men being raped/sexually harassed. never happened to me, never heard any guy ever talk about it. as adults, I mean. the only time I ever hear, in real life, about men being raped it’s prison or cops. oh yeah…while we are on the subject of sexual assault, does rape as policy in the US prison system count?)
Unless there is massive structural change in the power dynamics esp. of work, I fail to see how the new puritanism will not make people, esp. women, *more* dependent on their employer. is there no connection b/n things like the awfulness of the budget under consideration & the manufacture of dependency in which abuse of all kinds thrives? injecting hysteria about crime & abuse into such a system does nothing to change the system & only reinforces it. what the hell kind of country forbids employees from suing their employers for groping them, etc., any way? (oh yeah, fuck reforming the system. how about burning it down? for starters?)
found here:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/06/educ-d06.html
“Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, defended the sharp reduction—or outright elimination—of the estate tax on inherited wealth. “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” he told the Des Moines Register. “As opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.””
and
“Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who played a central role in drafting the tax legislation, made similar comments defending the Senate’s failure to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which extends Medicaid coverage to 9 million children in low-income families. “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything,” he said, referring to poor children, not the idle rich.”
think these people give a flying fuck about harassment/etc. in the work place? one quote from CS Lewis I like, though it’s in the language of personal morality: hypocrisy is vice’s tribute to virtue. How stupid, naïve, etc., does a person have to be to not see that Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell, etc., *must* stand up & posture about sexual abuse? they’ve got a brand to maintain. and, Cronos-like, without hesitation, the system will devour its children and people like Pelosi will have no qualm or quiver of conscience tossing a few Frankens & Conyers on the fire.
think we’ll end sexual abuse when the sex drive is “satisfied” thru buying & consuming fetishized garbage? “Downy Soap will put that smile on your husband’s face that gives you that erotic thrill.” “think how many chicks you can pick up in a Lexus?” Think we’ll end sexual abuse when the function of the dominant institution of our society, the military, is rape?
and whose name is not being destroyed in this campaign? let’s name a few: Arnold Schwarzenneger, Phil Mickelson (big pro golfer), Paul McCartney, Bill Clinton. who else? I suggest we ban all Tchaikovsky music given his predilection for serf boys. ban Cosi Fan Tutte while we are at it. why stop there?
I expect some day real soon someone (Surgeon General? nah, it’s the Trump admin after all) will admonish women to continue having sex with men, revolting rape factories though we be, as “duty to the nation.” the duty being, you know, procreation. ok, maybe not. but, as w/the new college campus sexual police, I expect after the furor dies down a bit, we’ll all be more fearful, conformist and separated from each other.
oh, and conditioned to the habits of slander. not unlike the anti-Russia b.s.
speaking of commodity fetishism:
Pt I of a reply, #MeThreetooalso. great handle, you wag, and how glad i do be that you’ve surfaced. i get a bit concerned for you, and i reckon others here share that as well.
some of that data was from the prison system, but my guess is that you and i are/were neither the class, color, nor gender that likely would be the typical male rape victim. and i’d further bet that there are many reasons that males hold that secret as hell, as do male victims of domestic violence.
neat law about not being allowed to sue employers, though. just grin and bear it (bare it?). dagnabbit, gotta go for now. more soon.
“the senate needs sensitivity training.” lol. just like the cops need training in hand gun management. when I was living in D.C., several female former interns in the House said to me one inviolable rule was: never get on an elevator alone with a male congresscritter. I’m sure this also is good advice for the young fellers too, what w/pot belly buffalos like Dennis Hastert looking to rut, page after page. I bet Dennis & some young Scooter or Biff shared a Francesca da Rimini moment or two: & they read no more from The Fountainhead that day.
just at what the hell point does one stop saying either 1) it’s a few bad apples who can be reformed by telling them not to grab someone’s genitals; or 2) it’s a male thing? and recognize that we, as a society, are socialized into violence & cruelty, of all kinds, and it is rewarded? to “successful” people other people are objects to be used & discarded when useful, a la Al Franken (who can now do Stuart Smalley in the mirror to himself.) and getting caught is the real crime.
i’m sure male reticence to discuss sex abuse of all kinds is a big factor. still having trouble buying it.
i’d heard a hella lotta groping went on in the cloakrooms, but that’s likely what you meant w ‘pages’. i’m not saying i believe those men rape stats, and as i said, but i do think i put the link in so folks might take a gander, though not at the original docs, lest one scroll thru pdfs. no thanks. ;-)
oh gds, what was stuart smalley’s tag line? never mind, i can look it up sometime, but it was hilarious stuff. and your mention of it apropos. the dems who cleaned his clock are high-fiving one another cuz “unlike the Rs, we police ourselves!” wish somebody’d come forward on pelosi, though. or the bern.
“…and recognize that we, as a society, are socialized into violence & cruelty, of all kinds, and it is rewarded?” women help kill millions in wars abroad, approve torture, say…it’s the price we pay for freedom.
but ewwww, my brain needs a bath after your dennis hastert image….
“Unless there is massive structural change in the power dynamics esp. of work, I fail to see how the new puritanism will not make people, esp. women, *more* dependent on their employer.”
the most enjoyable answer to that is “more women in positions at the top in bidness and corporations” cuz women are liable to be more…just. okey-dokey, smokey. yeah, them womyns are always more tuned in to suffering under males, but when they become the pinnacles of g’mints, bidnesses? how’d hillary do on the board of walmart? supremely well, i’d imagine./s
OFM on the grassley and hatch ‘welfare queens’ quote, glad to see the snark wsws brought. i like the c.s. lewis quote, too, when he’s right, he’s right. when he’s wrong, he’s…boring, although i still like his ideas on suffering, god notwithstanding. and at least he hadn’t done the ‘where were you when god created the heavens and the earth?’ schtick response..
some sure note that #meToo is the newest iteration of mccarthyism after russia-gate, but…to me, it mutes the voices of actually raped women voices and stories, especially the dark/tawny-skinned or lgbtq being disbelieved, as above. but white womyns are so much more believable. riiiight?
bu yeah, context is everything…except…when it’s not. sex has been commodified for some people, classes, forever. and in advertising. dworkin thought sexual violence was all about porn, teevee, movies, and it sure wouldn’t have helped, but…the cause? nah.
interesting list: were those names on the wiki ‘mentioned’ lists? well, bubba would have been, but dunno about the others. glen campell, hello? yep: times and context. love your ads, too, but yeah, the new puritanism shouldn’t get in the way of actual rape culture. ‘don’t call her bossy’?