On the grounds that “some people in Hollywood mix sex and business is not news,” I initially ignored the New York Times “news” articles on Harvey Weinstein and his interactions with various women in the film industry.
But a friend sent me Weinstein’s recently published mea culpa and it is kind of interesting:
Over the last year, I’ve asked Lisa Bloom to tutor me, and she’s put together a team of people. I’ve brought on therapists
I so respect all women, and regret what happened. [he regrets having sex with the women who said “yes,” or he regrets the public complaints by the women who said “no”?]
I am going to need a place to channel that anger, so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party. I’m going to do it at the same place I had my Bar Mitzvah. I’m making a movie about our President, perhaps we can make it a joint retirement party.
America’s gun-lovers and the Trumpenfuhrer are now going to be attacked by a naked Harvey Weinstein, fresh from the shower, leading a platoon of attractive young script girls (now referred to as “Script supervisor”)? Or is there an existing army arrayed against the NRA and/or Trump that is eager to be led by Mr. Weinstein?
[Separately, how does this work in our transgender age:
One year ago, I began organizing a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women directors at USC.
Why can’t any student identify as a woman long enough to apply for this scholarship? Is the scholarship revoked if it is awarded to a student who identifies as a woman but, halfway through the semester, decides to identify as a different gender?]
It’s a pretty poor attempt at re-directing attention. Maybe if he suddenly remembers he had been referring to his organs with names of guns, and now he discovered his toxic masculinity was causing all this…
> Why can’t any student identify as a woman long enough to apply for this scholarship? Is the scholarship revoked if it is awarded to a student who identifies as a woman but, halfway through the semester, decides to identify as a different gender?
Like every time you ask this question, the answer is obvious — because doing so deceptively would involve a ton of emotional and physical work, such that almost nobody wants to undergo it for the purpose of maybe getting a scholarship.
I note that this is the same reason that women mostly continue to work instead of just being professional child-bearing-and-support-obtaining machines, your other favorite thing to be confused about.
I can’t tell how seriously you take these complaints, but you repeat them constantly and they really don’t make any sense to me. Society isn’t designed to make undesirable actions physically impossible. It’s designed to discourage them. You don’t need to design every system for six nines of reliability.
Marshall, we are moving towards a society where any person can identify with any gender he or she pleases. It used to be that changing genders required years of convincing psychiatrists of the sincerity of your intentions. Not any more.
Update: Lisa Bloom has dumped Mr. Weinstein as a client. Apparently she was happy to cash checks from this guy right up until the story broke.
Marshall: I am disappointed that you think it is “undesirable” when a man begins to identify as a woman and that this should be “discouraged.”
He sounds almost as bad as Bill Clinton.
I personally never meet with women one-on-one unless I have my attorney and a videographer present.
Harvey Weinstein adopted several crackpot causes over recent year and is totally washed up. He does look like a very successful movie star of the past, Curley Howard of Three Stooges without a beard, but Curly was very funny and lovable and a gun enthusiast, and worked in a gun club when he was young. Harvey Weinstein needs to ‘goslow’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I5UqtQbHhU and rethink his career.
@a pet
The movie star that Harvey Weinstein most resembles is Shrek.
If Malia Obama were to come forward with charges against Weinstein (Malia worked in Manhattan for his co from February until her matriculation at Harvard ’21), I might begin to understand this better.
Maybe stories like this show how specious the claims are that sexual harassment is responsible for keeping women out of the tech industry. I’m going to make an educated guess that sexual harassment from the likes of Weinstein is at least as prevalent in the movie industry as in the tech industry, yet there is no shortage of women trying to become actresses!
@Karen J: the obvious counter-argument is that being a star Hollywood actress is far more rewarding, in both financial and social status terms, than being a software developer. One could draw the obvious parallel that even if taking illegal, dangerous steroids could make somebody a better programmer, I doubt many people would start taking them to become better programmers, even though many, many men have done so to become star professional athletes.
@Alex: Is the glamor of working with Harvey Weinstein so powerful it causes women to endure sexual harassment that they would not tolerate in the tech scene? Well, maybe…I think my general point still stands, though. There are plenty of cases of sexual harassment, much like this one, in less thrilling fields like law, finance, and academia. Yet women have made far more progress towards gender parity in most of those other arenas. All sexual harassment is a bad thing, obviously, and I’m glad people are speaking out against egregious offenders. But my (very off topic) thought is that the tech scene is not uniquely bad by comparison to plenty of other fields women do seek to enter.
(For the record, I think social factors are the major reason women don’t enter tech/engineering, but I think the continued emphasis on sexual harassment as the primary problem is incorrect.)