Ethical Movies

Well, before I see any film I'll check in advance if Harvey Weinstein, or any of the Mirimax people, had anything to do with it. We just saw "Thor: Ragnarok" last week, and I can't believe Weinstein was a part of the production, but who knows these days?

I'm not planning a lot of trips to the movie house, in any case. I'm disgusted by these people, all of them.

At the Atlantic:

Is there any way to be an ethical moviegoer in the post-Weinstein era? @christinebader considers https://t.co/I4s50hq2LR pic.twitter.com/JKGVa8OA8e

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) November 15, 2017

We're All Are Implicated in the Post-Weinstein Reckoning

From Rebecca Traister, a very radical feminist, at the New Yorker's "The Cut," "Your Reckoning. And Mine":

This essay by Rebecca Traister is very good: https://t.co/rHykoF2G44

— Lindsey Adler (@lindseyadler) November 13, 2017

The anger window is open. For decades, centuries, it was closed: Something bad happened to you, you shoved it down, you maybe told someone but probably didn’t get much satisfaction — emotional or practical — from the confession. Maybe you even got blowback. No one really cared, and certainly no one was going to do anything about it.

But for the past six weeks, since reports of one movie producer’s serial predation blew a Harvey-size hole in the news cycle, there is suddenly space, air, for women to talk. To yell, in fact. To make dangerous lists and call reporters and text with their friends about everything that’s been suppressed.

This is not feminism as we’ve known it in its contemporary rebirth — packaged into think pieces or nonprofits or Eve Ensler plays or Beyoncé VMA performances. That stuff has its place and is necessary in its own way. This is different. This is ’70s-style, organic, mass, radical rage, exploding in unpredictable directions. It is loud, thanks to the human megaphone that is social media and the “whisper networks” that are now less about speaking sotto voce than about frantically typed texts and all-caps group chats.

Really powerful white men are losing jobs — that never happens. Women (and some men) are breaking their silence and telling painful and intimate stories to reporters, who in turn are putting them on the front pages of major newspapers.

It’s wild and not entirely fun. Because the stories are awful, yes. And because the conditions that created this perfect storm of female rage — the suffocating ubiquity of harassment and abuse; the election of a multiply accused predator who now controls the courts and the agencies that are supposed to protect us from criminal and discriminatory acts — are so grim.

But it’s also harrowing because it’s confusing; because the wrath may be fierce, but it is not uncomplicated. In the shock of the house lights having been suddenly brought up — of being forced to stare at the ugly scaffolding on which so much of our professional lives has been built — we’ve had scant chance to parse what exactly is inflaming us and who. It’s our tormentors, obviously, but sometimes also our friends, our mentors, ourselves.

Since the reports of Weinstein’s malevolence began to gush, I’ve received somewhere between five and 20 emails every day from women wanting to tell me their experiences: of being groped or leered at or rubbed up against in their workplaces. They tell me about all kinds of men — actors and publishers; judges and philanthropists; store managers and social-justice advocates; my own colleagues, past and present — who’ve hurt them or someone they know. It happened yesterday or two years ago or 20. Few can speak on the record, but they all want to recount how the events changed their lives, shaped their careers; some wish to confess their guilt for not reporting the behavior and thus endangering those who came after them. There are also women who do want to go on the record, women who’ve summoned armies of brave colleagues ready to finally out their repellent bosses. To many of them I must say that their guy isn’t well known enough, that the stories are now so plentiful that offenders must meet a certain bar of notoriety, or power, or villainy, before they’re considered newsworthy.

This is part of what makes me, and them, angry: this replication of hierarchies — hierarchies of harm and privilege — even now. “It’s a ‘seeing the matrix’ moment,” says one woman whom I didn’t know personally before last week, some of whose deepest secrets and sharpest fears and most animating furies I’m now privy to. “It’s an absolutely bizarre thing to go through, and it’s fucking exhausting and horrible, and I hate it. And I’m glad. I’m so glad we’re doing it. And I’m in hell.”

Part of the challenge, for me, has been in my exchanges with men — the friends and colleagues self-aware enough to be uneasy, to know they’re on a list somewhere or imagine that they might be. They text and call, not quite saying why, but leaving no doubt: They once cheated with a colleague; they once made a pass they suspect was wrong; they aren’t sure if they got consent that one time. Are they condemned? What is the nature and severity of their crime? The anxiety of this — how to speak to guys who seek feminist absolution but whom I suspect to be compromised — is real. Some of my friends have no patience for men’s sudden penchant for introspection, but I’m a sucker; I feel for them. When they reach out, my impulse is to comfort. But reason — and a determination not to placate, not now — drives me to be direct, colder than usual: Yes, this is a problem. In fact, it’s your problem. Seek to address it.

Then there are the men who are looking at the world with fresh eyes, who are startled by the unseemly parade of sexual molesters and manipulators — the cascading allegations against Louis C.K., the conservative former judge and Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, and so many more. These men have begun to understand my journalistic beat for the first time: They didn’t know it was this bad. They didn’t see how systemic, architectural, it was — how they were part of it even if they didn’t paw anyone, didn’t rape anyone. This faction includes my husband, a criminal-defense attorney who’s definitely not ignorant of the pervasiveness of sexual assault, yet reads the endless stream of reports with furrowed brow. “Who does this?” he asks. “Who does this?” Then one night, with genuine feeling: “How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?”

At elementary-school drop-off, a friend who’s a theater director tells me he’s been sorting through his own memories. “There’s this one woman, and I did ask her out, but only after she’d auditioned and hadn’t gotten the part. I wrote her, like I write to all actors who I don’t cast, to explain why. And then in that email, I asked if she wanted to go to a Holocaust puppet show with me. She said yes, and we went out a few times. This was probably 2004. Do you think that was bad?”

I laugh, put my hand on his arm, and tell him no, it doesn’t sound bad, but in fact I don’t know: Maybe it was bad or maybe it was human and they really liked each other. We are turning over incidents that don’t fall into the categories that have been established — a spectrum that runs from Weinstein-level brutality to non-rapey but creepy massages to lurid-but-risible pickup lines — and wondering whether or how any of it relates to actual desire for another person.

Still, I’m half-frustrated by men who can’t differentiate between harmless flirtation and harassment, because I believe that most women can. The other half of me is glad that these guys are doing this accounting, reflecting on the instances in which they wielded power. Maybe some didn’t realize at the time that they were putting the objects of their attention at a disadvantage, but I must acknowledge that some, even my friends, surely did....

*****

When I thought about my #metoo moments, I first recalled the restaurant manager who instructed me to keep my blouse unbuttoned as I served pizzas with fried eggs on top, about the manager at Bruegger’s Bagels who’d rub his dick against my ass as he passed me setting out the cream cheeses in the morning. I’ve never had a job in which there wasn’t a resident harasser, but in my post-college life, I believed I’d stayed out of his crosshairs.

Perhaps, in the story I’ve told myself, it was because I was never wowed by powerful men, sensing on some visceral level that they were mostly full of shit. I gravitated toward female mentors instead. But even given my wariness of Important Men, as a young woman I could never truly believe that members of the opposite sex could be as cartoonishly grotesque as they sometimes were.

I once heard that a choking person reflexively leaves the room, embarrassed for others to see her gasping for breath. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s how I’ve dealt with harassment. One time on the subway, the man next to me wound his hand under my thigh and between my legs, as I sat there debating whether or not to stand up or scream because I didn’t want to embarrass him on a full train. That’s why, when an important writer took me to coffee, offering to help me find a new job, and asked if I’d ever fantasized about fucking a married man, I simply laughed maniacally, as if he’d just made a joke about a 65-year-old man who suggests to a 25-year-old woman that she fuck him during a professional coffee...

Keep reading.

Vanity Fair Editors Unimpressed with Radhika Jones' Sense of Style

Oh brother. She's a hot chick, with a Ph.D. from Columbia to boot!

Planning to read every single word of @radhikajones’ Vanity Fair. https://t.co/twGaDiVJWn

— jodikantor (@jodikantor) November 11, 2017

So this is the way our brilliant colleague who just shot the moon gets written about. https://t.co/WMq3NdgLt6

— jodikantor (@jodikantor) November 17, 2017

Welcome to Condé Nast!

Radhika Jones is learning the ways of One World Trade. Having been named the new editor in chief of Vanity Fair only this week, Jones, 44, headed to downtown Manhattan to get acquainted with the magazine’s staff.

But while Jones may have been editorial director of the books department at The New York Times, an alum of Time magazine and The Paris Review, a graduate of Harvard and holds a doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia — none of this impressed Condé Nast-ers. They, instead, were aghast over her sense of style.

WWD observed one of the company’s fashion editors in candid conversation with industry peers remarking not on the context of Jones’ first visit, but rather the outfit she wore.

“She seemed nervous. The outfit was interesting,” the staffer noted. According to the fashion editor — who omitted Jones’ admirable literary accomplishments from conversation — the incoming editor wore a navy shiftdress strewn with zippers, a garment deemed as “iffy” at best.

Jones’ choice of hosiery proved most offensive, according to the editor. For the occasion, Jones had chosen a pair of tights — not in a neutral black or gray as is common in the halls of Vogue — but rather a pair covered with illustrated, cartoon foxes.

The animal caricatures may have also been too much for Vogue editor in chief and Condé Nast artistic director Anna Wintour, who is said to have fixed one of her trademark stoic glares upon Jones’ hosiery throughout the duration of the staff meeting.

Unnerved by Jones’ choice of legwear — and Wintour’s reaction — the fashion editor proclaimed to her friends: “I’m not sure if I should include a new pair of tights in her welcome basket.” Jones is said to begin her new role on Dec. 11.

Still more at that Twitter link above.

Jesmyn Ward Wins National Book Award for the Second Time

She's on the top of my list for next reads. In fact, I have her first novel, Salvage the Bones, on the table nearby here.

She won for that book, and then this week for her second novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing.

That's quite a set of accomplishments, no matter your ideology.

National Book Awards Fiction Prize: Jesmyn Ward's 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'https://t.co/U33zExNCbv

— Michiko Kakutani (@michikokakutani) November 16, 2017

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93.1 Jack FM, KCBS Los Angeles

The Sound went down yesterday at 1:00pm. The station had a good run. The outpouring (and mourning, literally) was unheard of, man. That said, the last song I heard yesterday was Bad Company's "Moving On," so that's what I'm gonna do, heh.

Not sure what I'll be listening to, but I like Jack FM, which is still on the radio. Here's the set list from this morning:

Pumped Up Kicks
Foster The People
9:43 AM

Jimi Hendrix
Purple Haze
9:40 AM

Incubus
Pardon Me
9:43 AM

Real Life
Send Me An Angel
9:25 AM

Pat Benatar
Love Is A Battlefield
9:21 AM

Vance Joy
Riptide
9:17 AM

Fleetwood Mac
You Make Lovin' Fun
9:14 AM

Billy Idol
White Wedding
9:10 AM

Stone Temple Pilots
Interstate Love Song
9:07 AM

O.M.D
If You Leave
8:54 AM

Aerosmith
Love In An Elevator
8:51 AM

Outkast
Hey Ya!
8:47 AM

X Ambassadors
Renegades
8:39 AM

Queen
Fat Bottomed Girls
8:35 AM

David Bowie
Modern Love
8:23 AM

Michael Jackson
Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
8:19 AM

Foo Fighters
My Hero
8:15 AM

Dead Or Alive
You Spin Me Round
8:12 AM

The Black Keys
Lonely Boy
8:08 AM

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
The Waiting
8:05 AM

Definitely eclectic. A nice change of pace perhaps. Or, moving on.

49ers Wide Receiver Marquise Goodwin Played Sunday After Death of Premature Son (VIDEO)

This is a good family. And this is a heartbreaking story. They have faith. Their faith helped make it through the crisis. And his prayer in the end zone Sunday, seen at the video, is for the ages.

Wow.

At CBS This Morning:

Slut-Shaming Al Franken's Accuser

So, Leeann Tweeden appeared on the cover of Playboy? So, she's a slut and is open game for Democrat sexual assailants, like Al Franken.

The "self-proclaimed nasty woman" is Vivian Copeland, who's apparently just earned her fifteen minutes of fame.

At Twitchy:

TWISTED: Self-proclaimed 'nasty woman' crawls INTO THE GUTTER to victim-shame Leeann Tweeden https://t.co/MELn9CgXmQ

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) November 17, 2017

Here's Franken's accuser. A far cry from the little girls Moore groped (and why haven't you spoken out about that you horrible hypocrite) or the respectable women who've accused YOU. pic.twitter.com/Id76FjN4LE

— Vivian Copeland (@Belairviv) November 17, 2017

Leeann Tweeden as she appeared on TV to accuse @alfranken and her nude centerfold from Playboy. Quite the transformation. I don't care what party a person belongs to. Perverts need to be held accountable but false accusations aren't cool, either. pic.twitter.com/WfZXcOl1bP

— Vivian Copeland (@Belairviv) November 17, 2017

A Tale of Two Scandals

Bob Menendez vs. Roy Moore.

Talk about a tale of two scandals! Check out our updated graph on the Roy Moore coverage vs. the Sen. Menendez corruption trial. Full Study: https://t.co/vSVz2pqDKU pic.twitter.com/mXWVTEH0Vf

— MediaResearchCenter (@theMRC) November 14, 2017

Thank you @thetorontosun for paying attention to #SleazeBobMenendez ! https://t.co/RaELyFwaRJ

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) November 16, 2017

From @michellemalkin: Silence on Sleaze-Bob Menendez. https://t.co/aKwfuBG5Eu pic.twitter.com/eUy26EwU2y

— Toronto Sun (@TheTorontoSun) November 16, 2017

.@SenateMajLdr, you do require that all those accused step down or be expelled including @SenatorMenendez who likes them "young and inexperienced".. https://t.co/EhnqOTYwDL

— Crusader MAGA 🇺🇸 (@MSPOA) November 16, 2017

He's Got a Point

He would be Robert Stacy McCain, in light of all the sexual assault allegations, for example, here: "Al Franken."

Dear Creepy Liberal Guys: Virtue-signaling, by demanding draconian punishment for sexual harassment, won't help you, once you are accused yourself. Wake the fuck up. Feminists hate you, too.

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) November 17, 2017

Al Franken

I'm seriously blown away by the sheer volume of sexual assault allegations floating to the top of the much right now. Some are serious, some not so much, but why have all these been suppressed for so long?

I'd like to see more actual evidence of wrongdoing in most of these cases, for example, more than he said/she said. And of course less politics. Stop defending your side while simultaneously attacking your enemies. Of course, leftists come out far, far worse, since they're the full on social justice warriors with mountains of demons coming out of the left's collective closet: Just now all these hip progressives are retroactively calling for Bill Clinton's resignation? Give me a freakin' break.

In any case, Al Franken's an idiot and a loser, but then, he's a Democrat, so I repeat myself:

KABC anchor: Senator Al Franken Kissed and Groped Me Without My Consent, And There’s Nothing Funny About It https://t.co/lG4A1ZTUhC pic.twitter.com/EYIzr9ok2s

— Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) November 16, 2017

Here's Michelle Goldberg, who is very far left, at the New York Times:

Franken Should Go via @NYTimes https://t.co/usa9edBGXD

— Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn) November 17, 2017

And also, Kate Harding, who's got me blocked on Twitter, defending the Al Frankenstein predator:

'As I write this, only one woman has alleged that Franken assaulted her.' Guys, (if you are a Democrat) you get a pass for assaulting 'only one woman.' More than that though, is too much. https://t.co/hyQMVYL7DG

— Kirsten Powers (@KirstenPowers) November 17, 2017

More on this later, man.

Why Do Fewer and Fewer Americans Trust the Mainstream Media?

Here's Sharyl Attkisson, for Prager University:



And check out Ms. Sharyl's book, The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote.

William D. Gairdner, The Great Divide

At Amazon, William D. Gairdner, The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree Hardcover.

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Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

At Amazon, Angela Flournoy, The Turner House: A Novel.

Coup d'État in Zimbabwe as Mugabe Under House Arrest

This looks like the real thing, at the Telegraph U.K., "Zimbabwe crisis: Army 'secures' Robert Mugabe and takes control of Harare."



And from Ms. Rukmini:

Every coup I covered in Africa in the 7 yrs I was there started with soldiers seizing state TV. https://t.co/YetvXnRDaP

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) November 15, 2017

“We just changed the head of the train,” says official in Zimbabwe, where president is under house arrest post-coup https://t.co/PP8sQobU1l

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) November 15, 2017

Countdown at 'The Sound'

Following-up from last week, "The Sound is Going Down."

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Excited for Christmas

Via London's Daily Mail, on Twitter:

We all have one friend who's already this excited for Christmas! 😂😂🎄 (Listen with your 🔊 on!) via @DailyMail pic.twitter.com/vXtqoETq9F

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) November 5, 2017

Stylin'

Seen on Twitter, a couple of weeks back:

pic.twitter.com/E2AvMKVTmj

— 😜ϦαϦᏋᏇϴᖇlᎴ😜 (@babeworld247) October 31, 2017

The Trump Wave

Or is that an anti-Trump wave, lol?

At Der Spiegel:

New @DerSpiegel cover: Washington, one year after pic.twitter.com/s2BANHmD5E

— Mathieu von Rohr (@mathieuvonrohr) November 3, 2017