There’s no getting away from it.
MeToo is a movement that can’t be stopped.
First they got the bad guys. Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, etc. etc.
The MeToo movement did the world a favor. Harvey and his gang were out-and-out rapists who deserved to be (you should pardon the expression) exposed and punished.
Then MeToo got a few of the “open bathrobe” guys who whose silly ideas of seduction would have Hugh Heffner spinning in his grave.
My favorite was the TV personality who, when he saw the young woman he invited for an intimate dinner at his apartment staring at him naked in his open bathrobe – that’s when Charlie … rose.
Sorry about that, old joke. I couldn’t help myself.
So far thousands of men have been MeToo’ed.
So far the press has found them all guilty.
The reporter who has made a career out of the MeToo movement is Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ronan Farrow, who may have a secret of his own.
He single-handedly has turned The New Yorker into a modern-day version of Confidential magazine.
Farrow, who hates his father Woody Allen and has accused him of unspeakable things, looks exactly like Frank Sinatra, who was married to his mother Mia Farrow before Woody Allen.
In an interview with the writer Maureen Orth, Mia Farrow said lost her virginity to Frank Sinatra and married him when she was 21 and he was 50. She also says she continued to see Sinatra throughout her 13-year relationship with Woody Allen. Do you think Sinatra was the real father of Ronan Farrow? Farrow is handsome and looks exactly like Sinatra and, thank God, he bears no resemblance to Woody.
Sinatra should be named the patron saint of the MeToo movement.
He dallied with thousands of women in his lifetime. Not a single woman ever MeToo’ed him.
But what about the guys who are being dragged through the mud, often anonymously, by someone who is piling on because the MeToo movement gets automatic press coverage and when you’re named … you’re blamed?
Is everyone named guilty? Should they all lose their careers and be punished?
What about disc jockey Jonathan Schwartz, Garrison Keillor, Al Franken, George H.W. Bush, Dustin Hoffman, Louis C.K., Russell Simmons?
What about Tom Brokaw? Are they kidding? Tom Brokaw? Of course Brokaw is innocent. After they came after Tom Brokaw whom are they going after next? Tom Hanks?
How about Matt Lauer? He had consensual affairs with women he worked with. He never forced himself on anyone. He had extra-marital affairs and that’s his business. Yet he was thrown under the bus by NBC executives and fired.
I would love to see these same executives being cross-examined under oath and asked if they ever had an affair with someone with whom they worked.
How about Aziz Ansari? The woman who slept with him admitted that the sex they had was consensual but she anonymously turned him in and said it was the worst night of her life. She said after arriving at his apartment in Manhattan they exchanged small talk and drank wine. “It was white,” she said. “I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.” Oh, the cad. The nasty, unthinking, mean-spirited guy. She didn’t get to choose the wine. No wonder she tried to ruin his career.
Ansari’s statement was from September of last year: “I met a woman at a party. We exchanged numbers. We texted back and forth and eventually went on a date. We went out to dinner, and afterwards we ended up engaging in sexual activity, which by all indications was completely consensual.
“The next day, I got a text from her saying that although ‘it may have seemed okay,’ upon further reflection, she felt uncomfortable. It was true that everything did seem okay to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned.”
Now, before many of the women who are loyal, enthusiastic followers of the MeToo movement decide to have me burned at the stake, listen to my side of the story.
MeToo has been a great movement and has helped rid this country of some disgusting predators who deserved to be exposed for the world to see.
But what about those people who may be anonymously using this movement for all the wrong reasons? Revenge, or out-and-out anger at some man who they feel did them wrong 20 or 30 or 40 years ago.
I don’t buy anonymous accusations.
I didn’t buy them when a despot like Joe McCarthy destroyed a lot of innocent peoples’ lives by calling them Communists. I didn’t buy it when people, out of fear and to save their own lives, turned on people who were their friends.
A case in point is the accusations against Les Moonves, who heads up CBS and is the latest in the MeToo barrel.
I don’t know if Moonves is guilty or not.
I think a woman who has worked with him for years had a good take on Les Moonves, and her words about MeToo are relevant.
CBS Films chief Terry Press said she is struggling to reconcile her personal experiences working for Les Moonves with a portrait painted in a recent New Yorker article of the network head as a serial harasser of women.
“As is often the case, this kind of story generates as many questions as answers,” Press wrote on her personal Facebook page. “I do not believe that it is my place to question the accounts put forth by the women but I do find myself asking that if we are examining the industry as it existed decades before through the lens of 2018 should we also discuss a path to learning, reconciliation, and forgiveness?
“To reach a point where we can accept some space between zero accountability and complete destruction, we must first grapple with the issue of equivalency,” Press wrote.
“If we paint episodes of vulgar (and deeply regrettable) behavior from 20 years ago with the same brush as serial criminal behavior, we will never move forward and more importantly, we eschew the complicated nuances of context for the easier path of absolutes.
“Outrage is a valuable commodity … but its usefulness can be diminished by overuse. And understanding and learning from the past is the only way towards a future that reflects real change.”
That’s a smart woman. And that’s a smart statement.
But if you’re a man reading this, don’t think you’re out of the woods yet.
MeToo may not end when they run out of famous people.
I think someday there will be a MeToo chapter in every town in the country.
And if you’re a 75-year-old man living in, let’s say, Keokuk, Iowa, and let’s say in 1959 you gave your 16-year-old girlfriend Susie a hickey (do they give hickeys in Iowa?) on her neck while you were making out in the back seat of your car. And you did it after she begged you to stop because if her father saw it he would ground her, and he saw it and he did.
There is no statue of limitations with MeToo and Susie has been waiting all these years to get back at you. Susie is going to turn you in and it will be reported in your local Keokuk newspaper. You’re ruined.
Multiply that by millions of unwanted hickeys … millions of opened bras … millions of women who as teenage girls have said “We shouldn’t” and then finally agreed “We should” when the guy she was making out with started begging.
That gives you millions of women who have been waiting all these years to get even. And MeToo is the instrument they will use for revenge.
Maybe we’ve been worrying about “Big Brother” all these years and it’s “Big Sister” we have to fear.
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