y va marquer wrote:
The assertion that the Weinstein's of this world can do "a lot more for a lot longer" because of the environment created by Hollywood is supported by what kind of objective evidence?
You think, for example, that someone such as a manager in a relatively small family run business wouldn't get away with the same?
You guys speak about workplaces as if they were all corporate and run by people either evolved, savvy or ethical enough to promote a healthy culture, to observe the regulations and norms that govern employee protection.
I read an interview with Rebecca Traister (who's been writing about these things for decades) on the train earlier, and she brings up the interesting point that it's partly because these Hollywood men, as well as the bulk of their accusers, are generally upper class, or (in the latter case) have access to media channels where they get to be heard that so many stories break: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2017/11/rebecca_traister_on_the_coming_backlash_to_this_sexual_harassment_moment.html
If you look at the worlds that this has affected most, which I would probably say are politics, journalism, and Hollywood, they’re all fields where the bad actors—no pun intended—are somewhat famous, and where the people making the accusations are either somewhat well known, or have access to journalists who can write about this.
Yes.
It makes you think that this is a class thing in the sense that, there are a lot of women who are in jobs where this is not the case, probably paid less on the whole, and it’s much harder for them to get their story out.
It’s much harder for them to get their story out, in an infrastructure sense. Like, what is the degree of separation between them and the press? What are the access points to get to people in the media?
But this is a class story in part, because it’s also about security and stability. So this is happening in fields right now where, yes, the accused perpetrators are themselves well-known, and therefore there’s an editorial argument to be made about, “Oh readers will recognize who they are and they’ll read with interest” and everything. But it’s also true that the people who are in their fields, who have gotten close enough to experience abuse, are in, by definition, kind of high-paying fields. Even the sense of a whisper network itself, sort of involves a degree of safety net, that you have a network of colleagues or friends who you would whisper to to begin with.
This is the visible part of the rape culture because it's newsworthy. It's the smallest tip of the iceberg, not the iceberg itself. We can't afford to think that monsters are few and far between when absolutely everything we know about people, particularly men in power at any level in any field, tells us differently. Great power make for great corruption, but power is not an absolute concept. On every level of society it's defined in relation to those who have less of it.
That fact doesn't diminish the power and truth of the stories that are being told right now. But if those stories don't make people react in everyday life and bring on change on less visible levels then we have allowed their larger potential to be somewhat wasted.
