Clearly men cannot be trusted with power or wealth.
curated: Harvey Weinstein, another total creep
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Jesus. I remember Ashley Judd telling that story a few years back, without naming names. I’m glad she’s naming him now.
To be strictly fair, I suspect that once there are enough women in positions of power the same thing will happen. (And the people defending Weinstein now will say “see, you lot aren’t perfect either, therefore he should be allowed to do whatever he likes”.) Humans cannot be trusted with power or wealth. That’s a benefit of organisations, diluting the power so that bad people can’t be as nasty as they’d like to be.
I agree that enormous wealth/power inequality often leads to those at the top treating people at the bottom like shit. However, I suspect it’s going to be a good long while after there are a lot of women in power before we read multiple stories about overweight, unattractive female producers inviting up-and-coming young male actors to meetings at their hotel room, then demanding a sensual massage while parading around in the nude.
Not that it would be acceptable for a fit, attractive producer to sexually harass someone – it just illustrates the disproportionate sense of entitlement that men in power typically feel. People have been socialized for so long to value a woman’s appearance over all else and to reward men and stigmatize women for casual sex that I suspect the social pressures against abusive behavior for women is baked in fairly deep. Maybe I’m wrong – hey for all I know it’s already happening all the time – it just feels like we live in a culture where that kind of behavior would be heavily reinforced for men and heavily discouraged for women for a while.
Also, while the system is partially to blame, it is possible to be incredibly rich and not be a gigantic, egotistical, abusive asshole. Capitalism tends to reward a more-more-more, take-take-take value system, but please don’t let people off the hook just because they’re rich and powerful. The temptations are strong, sure, but Weinstein chose to be a dick and the board members (and presumably many other powerful people in Hollywood) chose to look the other way for years to protect their paychecks. People in power should be held to the highest standards, not the lowest. Otherwise, who knows what could happen? A completely unqualified reality TV star might miraculously con his way into possession of the nuclear launch codes.
That *may* be true. But what we see now may be as much a function of capitalism — wealth = power — as it is misogyny. I’d like to think that it’s not impossible that we could build a better world that would eliminate disparities of power and that would value cooperation and empathy rather than competition and sociopathy. In fact, that’s probably what we’ll need to survive as a civilization, if not as a species.
I know, I’m a crazy dreamer! But I am.
No wonder he was a big defender of Polanski. Wonder if HW’s political connections will help him stay out of jail. He didn’t donate all that money for nothing.
It was disturbing to read that, when he was finally fired, it was “in light of new information about misconduct by Harvey Weinstein that has emerged in the past few days.” I thought: How much worse could his conduct get?
But according to the Times, “In an interview, Lance Maerov, one of the company’s four board members, said it had been brought to their attention that Mr. Weinstein had violated the company’s code of conduct at some point in the past week, but he would not specify what the violation was.” So maybe it was a parking violation.
Can we please go back to the timeline where the butterfly survived?
A thing well worth considering: the sort of man who does this, and the sort of man (and woman) who thinks it’s acceptable to do this if the money keeps rolling in, are the people who determine what gets onto cinema and TV screens and large parts of our popular culture.