https://newrepublic.com/
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as Times film critic Manohla Dargis and others have noted, the basic structure of abuse in the Weinstein case (the powerful producer preying on young actresses) has existed since the beginning of Hollywood. The first known use of the phrase “casting couch” was in 1931, and the reality it describes was already familiar by then. Structurally, the casting couch reflects a core inequality within the film industry: There are many young women who want to work in Hollywood and only a few powerful producers who have the access to the money needed to make movies.
These young women also exist in an attention economy, which often ensures that the only chips they have to bargain with are their attractiveness and sexual availability. The studio bosses, meanwhile, have the power of capital behind them. Movies are extremely expensive, and only the studio producers can green light a project or build up a career. Of course, once an actress becomes famous, she has a little bit more leverage, but she can only gain that power by going through the producer. And as the career of stars like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe show, even famous female stars can be abused.
Beyond economic power, producers have sway over the vast publicity industries that flourish around Hollywood. Weinstein in particular was a master of the publicity machine, thanks to his relationship with figures like Tina Brown, the Condé Nast magazine line, and the gossip columns of the New York Post. Indeed, it could be argued that Weinstein’s true talent wasn’t so much as a filmmaker (where his taste was frankly middlebrow) but rather in publicity. He knew how to create buzz around even mediocre movies like Shakespeare in Love, winning them countless Academy Awards
Of course, for Weinstein and his professional cohort of super-producers, could destroy careers just as easily. As Ronan Farrow reports in The New Yorker, “Multiple sources said that Weinstein frequently bragged about planting items in media outlets about those who spoke against him; these sources feared that they might be similarly targeted. Several pointed to [actress Ambra Battilan Gutierrez’s] case, in 2015: after she went to the police, negative items discussing her sexual history and impugning her credibility began rapidly appearing in New York gossip pages.” Weinstein was able to get way with his alleged abuse because of the massive inequality between him and his victims. He had star power, wealth, and a compliant media network. None of the normal institutional checks that might restrain a powerful person applied to him.
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Weinstein’s power to abuse came from his position at the top of a hierarchy. And as New York’s Rebecca Traister noted [https://www.thecut.com/2017/
Is there any way to challenge figures like Weinstein while they are still in power? This is a question that has implications far beyond Hollywood. Star power, bolstered by economic inequality, is pervasive in American society. The United States now has a TV star president who is also a serial sexual abuser. CEOs are also treated like stars, even when they allow abuse to flourish, as with Uber. And abusive stars have long been tolerated in the media (Bill O’Reilly) and sports (Floyd Mayweather Jr.).
If a name like Rebecca Traister doesn't jump out for you, it jumped out for John Halle, a composer, music professor, and blogger.
An Intercept piece from last year by Zaid Jilani contains the useful observation that now disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein was not only one of the chief bankrollers of the Clinton campaign, he was an informal campaign advisor. In frequent contact with Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook, Weinstein was particularly concerned with Sanders’ inroads into Clinton’s support among women and African American voters.
One component of the strategy to head this off involved tarring Sanders male supporters as “Bernie Bros“. Those on the receiving end of the smear will recall that it consisted of raising doubts about Sanders supporters’ commitment to civil rights while accusing them of opposing Clinton based on their inability to accept female leadership. Some of them, it was claimed, went farther in directing obscene misogynist attacks on Clinton’s supporters on social media platforms.
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What is worth mentioning are not the smears themselves but those who were circulating them. Among them were New York pundits Rebecca Traister, Joan Walsh and others who were quick to point to Sanders’s supporters “reminding their feminist peers that misogyny and bitter gender resentments are not — as they have never been — the sole province of the American right,” thereby doing their part to foment the myth that they were comparable to and in some cases little better than the benighted “deplorables” on the other side of the aisle.
This was dishonest and plenty reprehensible then. What makes it in retrospect even more so is that, as we now know, Weinstein’s predations were common knowledge to Traister, Walsh and others in the elite media circles they inhabit.
Indeed, Traister herself now admits [https://www.thecut.com/2017/
But she “never really thought of trying to write the story” about Weinstein’s predations, even though she was aware of many incidents similar to those which have now come to light. She is only speaking out now that others have taken the risk-and not incidentally only after Weinstein’s checks were banked by the Clinton campaign and cashed by many of Traister’s friends working within it.
How do Traister and others justify giving Weinstein a pass on his all too real assaults while circulating smears against those whose only crime was supporting a candidate disapproved of by the Democratic Party Wall Street wing? [emphasis added]
No doubt they will not deign to answer “impertinent” questions from media unknowns like myself.
But the main conclusion is unescapable: when they emanate from the purveyors of respectable conventional wisdom, charges of sexism, racism and anti-semitism have nothing to do with achieving justice for the victims. Rather they often function as a weapon against those attempting challenges to Weinstein and similar plutocrats who have owned and operated the Democratic Party for decades.
None of this, of course, is meant to deny the existence of institutional white supremacy, misogyny and even anti-semtism.
But compromised sources such as Traister should be viewed with extreme suspicion: their accusations along these lines invariably have an agenda-one which involves protecting those in the club. Which is, as George Carlin famously noted, the same club that they use to beat over the head those of us who aren’t in it, and never will be.
It is worth wondering, a little bit, why Harvey Weinstein's reputation and conduct have only come up for public examination with respect to his treatment of women after Clinton's campaign lost the electoral vote to Donald Trump. A particularly jaded and cynical proposal might have it that inside of a calendar year from Clinton losing to Trump, Hollywood and other elite industry top-tier people found it was no longer worthwhile to look the other way amidst the allegations that could have been made earlier against Weinstein. It's not clear yet that what we're having is a moment of increased cultural awareness. People in all sorts of industries may continue to be as nasty and rapacious and exploitive as they have been for generations. But what may have changed since the election of Trump is that in the midst of a reality-TV star gaining power after having said what he could get away with to someone within the Hollywood scene, Hollywood has to divest itself of blue state practitioners of such things in order to retain any slight shred of foundation for moral outrage at the current President's track record for dealing with women.
But, as Halle has noted with more than an implication of complaint, the journalists who have only lately decided it was okay to share what they saw and heard about Weinstein were, last year, some of the people warning about "Bernie bros". I can't remember a single supporter of Sanders I knew in the Seattle area who could have been called a Bernie bro, whatever that meant. if in the long run Clinton campaign sidelining of Sanders played a role in the rise of Trump as a candidate whom Clinton couldn't defeat in the Electoral College then one of the explanations for the rise of Trump could be the mendacity with which journalists impugned the Sanders campaign in favor of Clinton despite having decades of knowledge that someone among the Clinton patronage culture was reportedly no better toward women than the Republican candidate.
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