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A Contrarian Crows: Harvey Weinstein
I just want to point out that I defended the slime ball Harvey Weinstein back in 2017.
1: Water flows downhill. Every time. In any system where there are powerful men and supplicative women, water will flow downhill. No amount of moralizing or preaching changes that one whit.
2: None of these women are “victims.” Not one. Any girl or woman who goes to Hollywood knows perfectly well what the cost of admission might be. Indeed, Hollywood is where women sell themselves anyway – so what is the real difference between seducing an audience and seducing a director? I am quite sure there are millions of young women who would cheerfully administer to a Harvey Weinstein if it meant she might get Her Big Break. This is a transaction, as old as the profession itself.
We can stop being surprised or outraged. Get off our high horses. This kind of behavior is baked into the cake: it cannot be “reformed” or eliminated. As long as there are powerful men, and attractive women who want things from them, water will flow downhill.
In the actual trial, I am starting to look… um… prophetic. Yes, he is a slime ball. But no, it is no surprise that Hollywood has a casting couch. Weinstein may not walk. But he is not going to be locked up forever more, either.
Published in General
Harvey Weinstein is merely a scapegoat. There are plenty more Harvey Weinsteins still working blissfully in Hollywood (and not just Hollywood, but academia, DC, the corporate press, etc). For various reasons, there had to be some sort of pressure release from the system, and Somebody had to be made an example of.
Obviously, so much pressure had built up that many Somebodies had to be made examples of, but most of the others have been allowed to slink off into a kind of ignominious retirement.
Some prophecies are not to be crowed about.
And Harvey Weinstein looks like a slimeball, corpulent and unshaven. Who would want advances from that? Yecch!
One of the noticeable things about the height of the the#metoo period was that while it tread broadly across the claims of adult actors and actresses being forced to have sex by powerful men, it only tip-toed up to the other alleged major Hollywood scandal of powerful people having sex with child actors. So the adult sex allegations — real, imagined or overblown — did make it into the public spotlight, but Hollywood was able to beat back the reports of pedophilia from going mainstream. We’ll see if the pending release of Corey Feldman’s documentary changes that in any way (he’s been making the allegations for quite a long time, but his method of releasing the film is … not the normal way documentaries are released, which might or might not play into the credibility of the production and how widely the information gets disseminated).
#MeToo is also about the confusion sown by the sexual revolution about the natures of men and women—what they are, and what they ought to be. Back in the day, even aspiring starlets and child actors would receive at least some minimal protection from the widespread assumption that sex is supposed to be confined to marriage, and any sex that takes place outside of marriage is, by definition, something good men as well as good women don’t do.
I’ve said this before, but the idea that a powerful man’s lawyers would mount, as a defense against a charge of beating and raping his girlfriend, that she likes it like that…would be considered shameful. That a famous college rape case in which a young man dragged a drunk girl behind a dumpster was remarkable in that a couple of other guys passing by assumed that no woman would consent to sex in such a disgusting, dirty, uncomfortable place. And yes, the defense (failed) was she likes it like that.
And who can say for certain that there isn’t a woman somewhere panting for the chance to hook up with a callow stranger for a quickie on broken glass, the scents of rotting food and rat feces wafting about her nostrils? What normal guy, happening upon such a treasure, would pass it up? And anyway, who are we to judge?
The safety net woven, strand by strand, over centuries, there to protect human beings from themselves has been snipped and shredded in a matter of decades. We’re now down to a single, slender thread: Consent.
Quoting so I can “like” it again. Postworthy.
Please remember, too, that the Left has diligently campaigned to get rid of “shame”. Shame implies a higher law governing behavior, and we can’t have anything higher than “my truth”. The Left has campaigned against the “stigma” of most behaviors once thought of as shameful, including prostitution.
Oh, there’s shame! But you’re supposed to be ashamed, uselessly, of things you have no control over. Like being white and male, for example.
Not feelin’ it.
I disagree. While human nature is fixed, culture is something humans are good at changing. That is why we have ethics and moral codes and laws and civilizing. The #MeToo movement is a way of saying, “the Hollywood culture is broken.” I agree and I support the people trying to change the culture. Pass out the scarlet letters and fix this swamp. Speaking of, D.C. is next.
I am fascinated by the idea that a Harvey W could be, at the same time, a superb judge of what would succeed or fail and, without seeming contradiction, able to place actresses in key roles almost interchangeably. Wouldn’t corrupting the system lead to a breakdown in the resulting quality of the product?
Which is it: does talent win out, or are starlets a dime a dozen?
No. It was a way of taking out one’s enemies. Once #metoo started hammering valuable Democrats, it faded away.
There is no credible suggestion of a “fix” to a casting couch culture. And it works both ways – including with children, gays, and women abusing their power as well.
#metoo is a way for women to be victims. But what the Weinstein trial is showing is that at least some of the women who were “victimized” were also playing the game.
Aspiring actresses know they are a dime a dozen. How else do they establish an advantage over their competitors? There is nothing “fair” about any of this, and they all know it. It is not “fair” that some are beautiful and some are not. So the players just take it to its logical extreme.
That is a very perceptive question. My guess is the latter.
He is probably one of the best judges of talent and of what he could get away with that the world has ever known. If an actress could help guarantee the success of a film but wouldn’t sleep with him. He didn’t press himself on her. If an actress was great and was also willing to bend to his will, he moved in.
Paying for sex doesn’t concern me too much but it bothers me that he never made the quality of his films his number one priority.
I wonder. Harvey thought Julia Ormond would be great, and promoted her accordingly. She did not make it. Was Harvey wrong, or was his judgment clouded?
This is the basic problem with all corruption. Kickbacks distort the decision-making process.
I don’t really care if rich dudes get their freak on. I can easily imagine worse jobs than having sex for money. I agree with iWe’s first point absolutely.
I think it entirely possible that Harvey Weinstein raped some ladies though. That bugs me.
That was all patriarchal hooey anyway. Don’t you know, it’s different now and men and women should be allowed to have sex behind dumpsters if they want to.
Harvey was known for making money off movies with limited budgets — big-budget films weren’t his forte, so the Miramax movies in a way were more like the political activist stars’ ‘vanity projects’ of the 1990s and 2000s. They would make their big budget movies without overt political messages that made $$$ for the studios and for themselves, and then did their small budget ‘message’ movies. Those might lose money, but they didn’t cost much, so the loss was based into the equation as the cost of doing business.
With Weinstein, I suppose he could take a flier on an actress he might have the hots for even if she didn’t project well once on screen, as long as her money-losing movie was offset by other lower budget films that did make money and garner awards (and one of the things people did note at the time #metoo hit was that while Harvey was working some TV deals with NBC, his recent track record on theatrical releases was not good, and failure in Hollywood makes up vulnerable to your past transgressions. If you’re not making money for others, you’re not going to be deemed worthy of protection unless you have the goods on other people in the industry).
And, based upon @CJ’s analysis above, who would be a better candidate to use as an example for punishment; the Brad Pitts would/do skate.
Since some of Weinstein’s loudest Hollywood critics defended Roman Polanski as recently as a couple of years ago proves that they are completely full of crap.
Whoever said “Politics is show business (Hollywood) for ugly people” was wrong. Hollywood is show business for ugly people. Some of them are ugly on the inside. Some of them are ugly on the outside. Some of them are both. A relatively few of them are neither.
This is one of those matters about which it is necessary to believe so many contradictory things at once that I’m not surprised that those who can’t think in terms more complex or nuanced than those which can be expressed in Twitter’s current 280-character(?) limit have difficulty with it.
Harvey Weinstein is a slimeball. Ugh. The movie business is corrupt. Young women who go to Hollywood with dreams of stardom who 1) look like the back end of the Brentwood bus, and/or 2) expect to get on top without, at least in part, sleeping their way there, are out of their minds. It was ever thus. Many of these young women stating that they were coerced, unwilling, into sex (or whatever it was) with HW are probably telling part of the truth. They probably did find him repellent. But, hey, the price of fame, right? Whatever it takes. And clearly, from the number of jokes and comments made about Weinstein’s ugly behavior and voracious appetites over this years, his behavior, and that of many others, was an open secret, known to most of the “Hollywood community.” (“Community” is one of those magic words that must be brought to bear, when you’re talking about Lefties. Otherwise, whatever it is you’re saying isn’t “impactful” at all.)
To assume the mantle of unimpeachable moral authority and to “speak out” years, and decades after the fact, with a highly selective rendering of the facts, with regard to a matter almost everyone knew was happening at the time, and to appear shocked, shocked about it is the height of hypocrisy. Totally unsurprising.
If Yeats were writing a poem about this, he’d probably call it Among the Beautiful People, and the last line would probably be something like “How can we know the user from the used?”
Sometimes, it’s just not possible to.
Not exactly. Shame assumes a transcendent truth, the capacity to know it, and the ability to choose. Identitarianism doesn’t assume most of that; identitarianism opposes most of that and instead goes with revenge and race based power. I shouldn’t be ashamed of my male whiteness, they have no need for my shame. They want my destruction suffering.
Yes, well, it’s wonderful to be so concerned about sex workers; a tad less wonderful to have one’s own transactional sexual encounters become publicly known, so… VICTIM!!!
Maybe so, but that doesn’t make it right. I expect men to have better standards than forcing themselves on women. Some of those testimonies if true are outright rape. The quid pro quo came after as a hush incentive. In way this is like child labor laws. Maybe a family is wrong to farm out their child for labor, but when you’re desperate to make ends meet one can understand their predicament. It’s on the employer to keep the moral standard. Harvey W. was in a position of power. It was incumbent on him to not abuse it, no matter what the culture in his industry.
If you remember Greg Gutfeld’s Redeye show on Fox, the last year the host was comedian Tom Shillue. When the Bill Cosby scandal was blowing up, Tom talked about how he thought that Cosby’s behavior was well known in the entertainment industry and couldn’t figure out the reason for the uproar.
This is related to the issue in another couple of threads about how hard it is for people on the left to keep up with where things are going. All these douches really don’t care about Weinstein but being on the wrong side of “Me too” will doom them.
The problem is that we are changing the definition of sexual exploitation. It used to be fairly straight forward. Violence was out, underage was out, everything else while maybe questionable was still legal. Now we want to make it about the woman’s perspective from that point forward or if a woman felt any sort of pressure, or some other fluid definition a group of woman agree to.
Annabella Sciorra’s testimony. Does this sound like rape?
Whatever the Hollywood relationship was, it does to me.
That sounds like rape. Did it actually happen that way? I believe in rule of law and due process. How can we possibly prove that account? If we can’t prove it, then is it justice to recount it as if it were evidence relevant to another accusation? Throw in the other part of the CNN article where the defense claimed Sciorra made a statement to police that “I didn’t report it because I didn’t think it was rape.”
What are we – the rest of us, society, whatever – supposed to do with this account from twenty five years ago? Believe it unquestioningly? Punish someone else based on it? Throw it on the pile of other unprovable accusations hoping that the pile gets big enough that to crush the guy anyway? Like with Cosby, the sheer number of accusers is difficult to get around – I don’t believe that all of them are lying or mistaken. On the other hand, can we take such drastic action like imprisonment on essentially serial he-said she-said?
Did she report it immediately or shortly afterward? If not then why not? If so then that sounds open and shut to me and somebody else needs to answer also.
You can question why women don’t report rapes and abuse right away all you want. But it happens and it happens regularly. And yes, I believe in that article or others I’ve read mentioned Sciorra told someone shortly after the incident.