I wrote this at my phone a few weeks ago and didn't publish it.
Harvey Weinstein is caught. He is stopped in his tracks. He is hit from all sides. I don't need to hit someone who's already being hit.
I am also not about to lecture the people who were victimized by him about how they are supposed to feel about him. They have every right to speak about that, privately or publicly. They don't owe him forgiveness. They don't owe him prayers for his recovery as a person. They can hate him for the rest of their lives; it is their right as people who were violated to feel what they feel. Particularly after having felt that they had to be silent about it for so many years, it is probable that their rage will be at its height at this time and the pressure of having had to hold it back will propel it for a while. Their process is theirs; it's not for me to tell them how to have that process.
Unfortunately, anger does run out as a motivator for permanent change, and if you try to depend on it as your energy source, you will suffer. Your relationships will suffer. Your ability to think, speak, write and decide will suffer. People also do get tired of hearing strident voices, so even if your anger never runs out, people will stop listening.
Permanent change depends on toil. That sounds bad, but it's not really that bad. You have to read. You have to write. You have to synthesize information so that you can both understand it and impart it to other people. You have to be able to reason both inductively and deductively. You have to be informed about context. There is no one emotion that can sustain a person for a lifetime (or less than a lifetime); not anger, not sadness, not love, not even one of the many emotions that people feel. Fortunately, you don't have to depend on an emotion; it is enough to know that a situation is bad to have the motivation to try to stop it.
What causes permanent change? Brilliant speeches? Maybe; however, who placed the podium? Who organized the gathering? Who ordered the pens, paper and other supplies for everyone who contributed to the speech being given? How does the person who wrote the speech know how to read and write? How does that person know what's right and wrong and how to talk about right and wrong so that other people are persuaded?
Woe to the people who volunteer to support a cause who think that every day will feel brilliant and have a resounding soundtrack. Most days won't.
I am also thinking about the people who have known and worked with Mr. Weinstein for years. You don't have to stop being someone's friend, even if that person has to pay a lot of money to people whom he has harmed, even if he is publicly disgraced, even if he has to go to jail. One of the things that encourages sexual misconduct is that it is often (perhaps more often than not) perpetrated by people who are not bad people in other ways. That's why the victims of people who are able to be secretive about it for years are frequently not believed. I don't know that it's helpful to condemn an entire person when it's obvious that not everything that the person did is bad; that does not help the person be the side of him or her that isn't bad.
I'm not at all saying that Mr. Weinstein shouldn't have consequences for what he did. I'm saying that it takes less effort for the industry that enabled his behavior for decades to scapegoat him, now that his behavior is known to the public, then for the people whom he hasn't abused to offer him what everyone needs when he or she is having a crisis; phone calls, emails, time spent listening and talking, discussions about how and why the industry enabled his behavior and the behavior of other people who did what he did (and who won't stop doing it if the industry doesn't change), discussions of gender and how the industry perceives gender and portrays gender, discussions of society and power and the role of the entertainment industry in both reflecting and shaping reality. Those are a few of the things that they could all discuss.
YOU'RE BAD. Nobody wants to hear that, and nobody wants to believe it about people whom they know. That's why denial is so powerful. It's not only the crime itself that hurts a victim; the denial around it that takes on such insane proportions forces social and professional burdens on the victim that are impossible to carry. That's why it doesn't help to turn Mr. Weinstein into a public caricature, a bogeyman. All it will do is add another layer of denial, another increment on the ruler against which perpetrators will measure their own behavior, while they and everyone around them other than their victims deny that their behavior is happening. "I'm not/he/she isn't like Harvey Weinstein," for decades, until you and everyone who enables you have to admit that you are.
The Internet is a powerful tool, and to publicly condemn someone in the century during which the Internet is established technology is an infinite version of this:
There's no excusing Mr. Weinstein's behavior. What I'm saying is that how people talk and write in the 21st century needs to be calibrated to the power to be heard that everyone who has Internet access has. During all of history before the last several years of the 20th century, a person who yelled was heard by more people than someone who scribbled a few sentences, unless the scribbler had a printing press and other people could read. The 21st century is a time when a few sentences can be read by millions of people, everywhere in the world, in less than a second. Using a megaphone to talk into someone's ear will make that person deaf, or hostile to you, even if what you're saying is right.
During the first few years of my homelessness, I was so overwhelmed and emotionally abused in person so frequently that I didn't know if I'd be able to avoid hitting someone. Knowing what can happen to people in jail, I thought that I probably wouldn't survive jail if I were arrested and convicted. I thought that if I did have to spend time in jail, at least I could write about what it was like and perhaps contribute to a public discussion about jail reform.
I'm talking about that because it seems to me that there is a socioeconomic issue at stake in how the entertainment industry approaches the public exposure of the industry's culture. I have said for years that the industry has a lot of criminality. A much larger percentage of people from that industry commit and/or glamorize crime than people from other industries. The industry hasn't taken responsibility for its portrayals of sex, violence, sexual violence, and other human behaviors, despite years of warnings from sociologists, psychologists, doctors, and other people concerned about the effect that the industry has on public perceptions of acceptable behavior.
I'm sure that there are a lot of people who are in jail, some of them for years or for life, because they were negatively influenced by extreme behavior that writers, actors, directors and other people who are part of the entertainment industry thought it was fun to portray in movies, television shows, music, video games (which are GRAPHIC), and whatever else the industry feels like doing.
I can't, and don't want to, dictate how the industry and people who have known Mr. Weinstein's good side have to talk to him or about him; nobody really has that right. Everyone has the right to take the time to think about what he or she wants to say.
I'm saying again that the entertainment industry needs EDUCATIONAL REQUIREMENTS. Women, and positive social progress, have advanced in industries that have educational requirements, while the entertainment industry has mentally imploded until even its smartest people are not all that smart.
The joke isn't over, but fewer people are laughing.
Comments
Post a Comment