Even More (Rape Culture)

[#rapeculture]

The lede from Reuters:

Amazon Studios chief Roy Price was put on an immediate leave of absence Thursday, the company said, following allegations that he harassed a producer and ignored an actress’s claim of a sexual assault by producer Harvey Weinstein.

Prognostication being more or less the art of capricious but not quite arbitrary projection, a certain obvious question arises: How many entertainment execs are about to fall? One of the interesting questions becomes whether Tinseltown is about to explode into a million billion tiny, glittering pieces; Hollywood, after all, is a town that has long needed more than just an enema.

There is an alternative at least as obvious as the question itself, that maybe one or two more high-profile entertainment executives might fall from grace, and then society will decide that we have discovered and weeded out the few bad seeds, and get on with show business as usual.

And, hey, maybe the next round can be in the music industry, so we can finally free Kesha, but society probably needs a couple years off, first. You know, only a few at a time. I mean, there are only a few bad seeds, y’know, at any one time.

(cough)

Just compared to shattering Hollywood, which itself seems unlikely, what, really, is the chance this is the beginning of a chain reaction lashing severely through the halls of American financial and commercial power tearing away significant chunks of institutionalized rape culture?

(sigh)

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Image note: Detail of frame from Attack on Titan episode 6, “The World the Girl Saw”.

Reuters Staff. “Amazon Studios chief Roy Price suspended following harassment allegation”. Reuters. 12 October 2017.

An Alleged Million Moms (Jazz Mix)

[Deliberately catty sigh]

One Million Moms, the vehemently right-wing group known for getting worked up over everything from Toys ‘R’ Us to Oreo Cookies to Chobani yogurt, is back with what could be its most obnoxious conviction yet.

This time, the group is targeting Jazz Jennings, the remarkable transgender teen who has inspired so many through her LGBT advocacy work and TLC series, “I Am Jazz.”

In two separate blog posts, one of which was titled “God doesn’t make mistakes (but humans do),” One Million Moms condemned the team behind “I Am Jazz,” arguing that the show aims “to desensitize America’s youth.”

“The show is attempting to normalize the transgender lifestyle and make it appear OK while using a young cast member to lure a young audience,” officials wrote in the blog.

(Wong)

I am of two minds about this sort of thing. “We don’t follow this group’s logic,” notes HuffPo Gay Voices Senior Editor Curtis M. Wong, “but when have they been logical?”

It is a fair question, but also one that begs recursively. To wit, we might wonder why we should bother attending the antics in this particular psychomoral cesspit when we already know they are both excrementally wrong and nearly entirely ineffective?