me too campaign

Mobo2000 wrote:

I thought the pussyhat protests were great, for example, but I do think the writer has a point that the Occupy movement was critized heavily for not having concrete goals or leaders and this was not the case with pussyhat protesting.   I see that discrepency as coming from the media's inherent bias against giving a fair hearing to anything critical of capitalism, rather than hypocrisy on "the left", unlike the counterpunch writer.

I don't think either applies. The pussycat protest was prompted by Trump's "grab em by the pussy" remark. There was nothing to demand. It was protest intended to call attention to Trump's attitude towards women. It worked. We have had raped and never reported, me too and now times up. All these movements are solidarity building and are impacting people's opinions on what is acceptable behavior towards women. It has empowered women and the court of public opinion has turned against men who are sexual predators regardless of whether or not they have broken a law or committed rape. Sexual coercion is being identified as hostile towards women. The "woman who sleeps her way to the top" meme is being replaced by a narrative illustrating that more often than not women are not sleeping their way to the top by choice but rather being required to offer sexual favors in return for what men get for free, career advancement.

In contrast Occupy began as a protest against Wall Street. There was an opportunity to focus on renewing the New Deal and on banking regulations and trade deals, on developing specific demands. Instead it just sort of died a slow death not that it can't be resurrected. It also put the topic of income inequality on the front page.

Timebandit:   I agree in general that a multiplicity of methods is required for social change.   But that general point doesn't address the specific concerns about civil lawsuits or TimesUp in particular, in that it is primarily a redress available only to the rich.   It also puts the person bringing the person launching the suit in the postion to be countersued, and while rich Hollywood actors can outspend some smaller companies, that will not necessarily be the case with other employers or wealthy Harvey Weinstein wannabes.    There is no guarantee the TimeUp funders are in it for the long haul, and real solutions shouldn't rely on the charity of the rich.     To me that's more George Bush I/thousand points of light territory.

VOTD:  Yes, great info in that NWCL statement.   Is it curious to you why Hollywood has not touted the advantage of unionization for women?   Has there been a positive portrayal of a union in a Hollywood movie since Norma Rae?  

Pondering:    I'm sad to say I don't agree with this characterization of what is happening at all:

Quote:

All these movements are solidarity building and are impacting people's opinions on what is acceptable behavior towards women. It has empowered women and the court of public opinion has turned against men who are sexual predators regardless of whether or not they have broken a law or committed rape. Sexual coercion is being identified as hostile towards women. The "woman who sleeps her way to the top" meme is being replaced by a narrative illustrating that more often than not women are not sleeping their way to the top by choice but rather being required to offer sexual favors in return for what men get for free, career advancement.

Pondering, why do you think the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke when it did?   It's been known for decades, literally decades, and they had witnesses and enough to publish on it in 2014.   

Pondering:   I don't think that's it.   His victims have been rich and famous women for years (decades).   He had an army of lawyers and enablers, and I think he was not unusual in the least within Hollywood.  For every famous woman he harrassed or abused, there were thousands more coming to Hollywood hoping he or someone like him would hand them their golden ticket to fame, who get abused and discarded by the various male gatekeepers of the industry, and never make it on screen.    I think the press cycle about this was launched because a decision made at an editorial level to go ahead on a story they've been sitting on for years, for reasons unknown but likely political.   I don't think Hollywood and this press cycle is responding to a growing awareness coming from the bottom up, I think this is damage control and an attempt to rebrand in time for 2018 elections.  

Had the Harvey Weinstein scandal broken in the month preceeding Trump's election, do you think it would have helped or hurt his chances?  

More generally:  I agree with some of the earlier comments by Smith and Timebandit that this is a moment with possibility, and in some ways it gives me hope and is inspiring that things will be better for women generally in workplaces.   But there is also a large aspect of the current media cycle around workplace harrassment and  #Metoo that are alarming and make me very suspicious.   I am not talking about individual women's stories posted on #Metoo, I am talking about how #Metoo is talked about in the (DNC lead/liberal) media.  

Much of the media commentary around # Metoo seems to function as an ad for facebook and twitter.   The Time Magazine person of the year article, and the recent Toronto star editorial on #Metoo both are examples of this.    The path to justice for women, offered up in the MSM is:  tell your story on twitter, we will take it seriously and publish it, and report on the reaction, and out shame and the fear of losing business, the harrasser will lose his job.    The effectiveness of this depends on the press maintaining their interest, and gives the press all the discretion to decide which #Metoo accounts are worth publicizing and which can be forgotten.   Corey Haim has been telling the same story for almost 20 years, for example.

This path is not solidarity building among the general public, it is very divisive as it provokes a backlash among men and women who are concerned about due process.    I think there are better paths already fought for by countless women over decades that social media / twitter / facebook and the most compliant sympathetic press in the world can't equal -- organize locally, unionize, speak up, assert your legal rights.  

Mobo2000 wrote:

 

VOTD:  Yes, great info in that NWCL statement.   Is it curious to you why Hollywood has not touted the advantage of unionization for women?   Has there been a positive portrayal of a union in a Hollywood movie since Norma Rae?  

*************

 

Despite being about one of the more, shall we say, "colourful" figures in the labour movement, Danny DeVito's film Hoffa has a fairly positive portrayal of unions. The main characters indiscretions are defended in the tag line "He did what he had to do", and the script takes the view that what he did was no worse, and in fact considerably better, than what the owners had been doing to workers.

Also spits in some sacred liberal chalices by, among other things, accurately portraying the Kennedys as Mccarthyite red-baiters.  

 

Have the Concordia University revelations been discussed/reported yet? It's huge news in Montréal - even though it's been an "open secret" at Concordia for decades.

Concordia University vows to probe 'disturbing' allegations of sexual misconduct

Quote:

When asked why the university only began investigations “ when a white man comes forward, ” [Concordia President Alan] Shepard responded that it was only then, on Monday, that he learned about the “open secret.”

Former students, including Montreal author Heather O’Neill, told the CBC that many involved with the program were aware of the misconduct taking place. “Everybody knows” O’Neill said.

“It was not an open secret to me,” responded Shepard. “If I had been aware, I would have acted sooner.”

Here's the Jan. 8 blog post by Mike Spry which broke the silence:

CanLit Accountable

2 Concordia University teachers reassigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct

Quote:

According to the student-run association CASE (Concordia Association for Students in English), two teachers accused of impropriety have been reassigned to other duties.

"As of this moment, the courses taught by the professors named online are being reassigned pending investigation, the books written by those faculty members have been removed from the display window on the sixth floor of the Webster Library Building, and a third party is conducting the investigation," said CASE in a statement released Friday afternoon.

I'm certainly not suggesting there's any little world, in the bigger world, where women (or subordinate men) will necessarily be safe.

It just seems to me that in the arts, what's good or bad (and by extension, who is good or bad, who can succeed and who must fail) consists mostly of the opinion of a few people -- men, generally.  If you're a female mathematician and you solve Fermat's Last Theorem then what your faculty advisor "feels" isn't as important as the fact that every mathematician can see your proof and agree with it. 

But if you're a fiction writer, and some (older, male, spurned, famous) author says that your novel was drivel then you're sunk.  He can punish you for rejecting him far easier than the faculty advisor can disprove your proof, because we take that author's word for what is or isn't good writing in a way that we don't take one individual's word for what is or isn't sound math.  In short, the math guy can't just tell us, he would have to SHOW us.  But the writer only needs to say it.

We expect science to provide proof of things.  In cinema, music or literature, all we need is one genius to tell us what's right.

Thanks for the reality check, Timebandit. Your account of systemic gender discrimination rings true in so many other disciplines that come to mind.

Unionist wrote:

Here's the Jan. 8 blog post by Mike Spry which broke the silence:

Except it didn't break the silence because women were already speaking about it.

But Spry also referenced a previous piece published in 2014 by Toronto-based writer Emma Healey. She had written her own graphic essay revealing a consensual, yet troubling relationship with a prominent author and professor at Concordia University that began when she was a 19-year-old student in 2010.

Moments after Spry's piece was published, Healey shared the piece with the comment: “I published that Hairpin piece five years ago. This is the first time a man this close to the situation has acknowledged it publicly and unequivocally for what it was AND drawn something bigger with it than a self-flagellating Facebook post about f*cking up.”.....

...O’Neill, the award-winning novelist who was a student at Concordia’s creative writing program, quickly took to Twitter to remind everyone that she had been openly and publicly talking about sexual misconduct at Concordia since the late 1990s.

The difference is, a man came forward, or it got attention because the media is on a roll with this topic in the moment.

Timebandit wrote:

Im actually grateful to the Hollywood women who brought this to the fore. We just have to get people to understand that that's not the whole conversation. 

I'm not. They are the 1%. My bet is their perfume companies and clothing lines and the companies they are invested in are rift with sexual abuse of workers along with every other kind of abuse.

It's good that they came forward. There will be a trickle down effect. It moves the conversation forward. But I'm not grateful to them because they aren't doing it for us or for women they are doing it for themselves. These powerful women could be doing so much more both as members of the 1% and as rolemodels.

I found this on my social media this morning - it's an interesting interview on a long view perspective on sexual harrassment, #metoo and generational feminism. Katha Pollitt has been writing on this stuff for about 30 years.

It's interesting to me because I see some fair criticism of older women around harrassment and some unfair criticisms as well. Like anything to do with feminism, it's complicated. There's no getting around, though, that the foundation of #metoo started with the second wave - but this is also an opportunity to think about how we did define feminism and how we're defining it now. Anyway, a quote and a link, have a read.

Isaac Chotiner: What have you made of the generational tensions or differences between different waves of feminism that have arisen lately?

Katha Pollitt: I’m a little bewildered by it, for several reasons. One is that second-wave feminist is being used as a synonym for woman writer of a certain age. I mean, Katie Roiphe is not a second-waver. Daphne Merkin, Andrea Peyser—these women are not feminists at all, in my view. And they are not old enough to be second-wavers. I mean Katie Roiphe was minus 5 years old when The Feminine Mystique was published. So I think I would wish that the young women who are making this claim would read a little bit of history. I found it very offensive when Katie Way, who was the author of that piece on Babe.net about Aziz Ansari, insulted Ashleigh Banfield by calling her a “burgundy lipstick bad highlights second-wave feminist has-been.” I mean, it’s at that point you want to say, “Hello, my pretties, soon you too will be wearing the burgundy lipstick.”

The second point is that the very concepts that these young women are relying on—consent, date rape, acquaintance rape, sexual harassment, believing women, intimate questions of power relations between the sexes—where do they think they got these ideas? They got them from the second wave, those old harridans who are now, in fact, 75 and 80 years old. So that does bother me—the lack of history and the ageism. I mean, the young people always have this idea: It’s like no one ever had sex before I had sex, and no one had these ideas before I had them.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/katha-pollitt-on-second-wave...

NDPP wrote:

#MeToo Movement is 'Kremlin Propaganda' says Russiagate Conspiracy Theorist Louise Mensch

https://on.rt.com/94tv

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/28/trump-tweets-hoax-louise...

"Me Too is, and has always been, Russian propaganda." - Louise Mensch

Latest words of wisdom from Babblers go-to Russiaphobe..

NDPP wrote:

#MeToo Movement is 'Kremlin Propaganda' says Russiagate Conspiracy Theorist Louise Mensch

https://on.rt.com/94tv

"Me Too is, and has always been, Russian propaganda." - Louise Mensch

Latest words of wisdom from Babblers go-to Russiaphobe..

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hayesbrown/putins-spokesperson-compared-metoo-v...

I didn't know where to put this disgusting story so I thought this might be appropriate. I wish this slime would slither back under a rock. I hope the Iranian community in Canada will make sure this latest reincarnation fails.

Roqe, a new Ghomeshi-hosted podcast focusing on “the in-depth life stories, opinions, and identities of personalities in the Iranian diaspora,” quietly launched in mid-April, and has published seven episodes ranging from 36 to 75 minutes in length. Far more slickly produced than his Ideation experiment, it’s the work of an “amazing little team that puts this together each week,” per his shout-out at the end of the latest instalment. The logo evokes those of two CBC series he hosted, Q and >play.

“Roqe” is a Farsi word that, as Ghomeshi explains in the first episode, translates as “candid, or straightforward in conversation.” Nine guests have so far been featured; the next edition is slated to include a pair of “well-known” actors of Iranian descent, one based in Bollywood, the other in Hollywood.

On February 4, Roqe Global Media was incorporated as a for-profit business by Mehrdad Ariannejad, the CEO of Tirgan, a registered charity whose marquee initiative is a biennial festival of Iranian-Canadian arts and culture in Toronto. He and Ghomeshi serve as the sole directors of Roqe Media, which occupies space on the same floor of a North York office building formerly used by Tirgan.

...

Iranian Canadian Congress president Soudeh Ghasemi says that the organization is “extremely disturbed by comments made by Mehrdad Ariannejad speaking about the accusations of sexual violence against Mr. Ghomeshi” — that he “never believed” many of the women and that “many successful people have their enemies and friends.”

“These comments in our opinion are unacceptable and extremely disturbing,” she says in a statement, adding that they “would like to clarify that Mr. Ariannejad currently has no executive role at the ICC and he does not represent the point of view of the ICC on this issue.”

https://www.canadalandshow.com/jian-ghomeshi-roqe-media/