Feminists Were Struck Dumb

Growing more grotesque by the moment, the Harvey Weinstein saga is effectively a liberal progressive feminist saga.

Camille Paglia declared that feminists were hypocritical to give Bill Clinton a pass for sexual harassment and rape. Appalling and deplorable are better words… because Weinstein, and other more right leaning accused predators like Ailes and O’Reilly were never accused of the felonies that Bill Clinton was accused of. And each time you hear a feminist drone on about power imbalance sexual abuse, think also of the intern who hooked up with the president.

As Weinstein understands well, if you are a feminist male and if you contribute generously to feminist causes, you will be excused and exonerated for whatever you have done to women. Even now, Weinstein is trying to rehabilitate his reputation by declaring that he will fight the good fight against the NRA and Donald Trump.

While we are at it, kudos to the New York Times for exposing the story. And to Bari Weiss for asking whether the double standard is still operating. You know which double standard: the one that feminists established when they defended Bill Clinton. What did Harvey Weinstein learn from their reaction? Namely, feminists were offering up women as sacrificial victims to advance their cause. Ideology trumps the well-being of women.

If you navigated the right waters you knew all about Harvey Weinstein. None of it was secret. All of it was covered up. Feminists knew and kept it all secret. They were afraid of Weinstein and were afraid of his power… which he exercised ruthlessly. Dare we call this a conspiracy of silence?

Feminist writer Rebecca Traister described an astonishing encounter that she and her then-boyfriend Andrew Goldman had with Weinstein. For the record, it all happened in public. An ordinary citizen would have been arrested for assault.

In her words:

In my mid-20s, I became a reporter and fact checker at the New York Observer, and part of my beat was covering the film business in New York. The night before the 2000 election, I was working on a story — perhaps my first seriously reported story — about O, the violent reimagining of Othello that Miramax’s Dimension division was then sitting on, perhaps out of deference to the cringey clean-media message of the Al Gore–Joe Lieberman campaign, which Weinstein was publicly supporting; already there was talk of Weinstein’s ambitions in Democratic politics. After Weinstein failed to respond to my calls for comment, I was sent, on Election Eve 2000, to cover a book party he was hosting, along with my colleague Andrew Goldman. Weinstein didn’t like my question about O, there was an altercation; though the recording has alas been lost to time, I recall that he called me a cunt and declared that he was glad he was the “fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town.” When my colleague Andrew (who was also then my boyfriend) intervened, first calming him down and then trying to extract an apology, Weinstein went nuclear, pushing Andrew down a set of steps inside the Tribeca Grand — knocking him over with such force that his tape recorder hit a woman, who suffered long-term injury — and dragging Andrew, in a headlock, onto Sixth Avenue.

Such was the power of Harvey Weinstein in 2000 that despite the dozens of camera flashes that went off on that sidewalk that night, capturing the sight of an enormously famous film executive trying to pound in the head of a young newspaper reporter, I have never once seen a photo. Back then, Harvey could spin — or suppress — anything; there were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine.

It wasn’t just the power of Harvey Weinstein. This event and the surrounding silence stands as an indictment of the media, especially the liberal media, most especially movement feminists, who rush to the battlements to destroy any male who made a disparaging sexually-charged remark but who fall silent when it comes to a man who supports their cause.

The moral of the story: feminists care far more about their cause than about women. By excusing sexual harassment practiced by men who pretend to support their cause, they are not just excusing, they are encouraging such men to do what they want to women. And No, this is not blaming the victim... Weinstein's victims will receive very little support from most feminists. In truth, I am suggesting that you cannot blame it all on the patriarchy-- when feminists excused Bill Clinton they made some kinds of sexual harassment permissible.