Excusing Rape in the Name of Art

The most striking thing about the Harvey Weinstein revelations is the complete, almost syndicated, nature of the imputed wrongdoing. Seamlessness characterizes all successful cover-ups, but this one appears particularly sinister because narcissistic illusion was the participants’ stock-in-trade. It was also their Achilles heel.

According to reports, gorgeous, soigné women who affected tough, powerful personas on and off stage were, behind the scenes, belittled and overwhelmed by this monstrous overlord. Those who thwarted his advances were bought off. Others who weren’t bought off were silenced by collusive media. Still others were consigned to anonymity, abandoned to their own confusion. And still more others succumbed to a blended state of normalcy and moral unease, accepting professional favors and working with the man who had degraded them, probably wondering: Did that happen? It seems no accident that the film head married a fashion designer. With Weinstein able to force actresses on his payroll to wear his wife’s designs on the red carpet, he could burn his alpha-male brand onto the bodies of an even larger harem.

Everyone, underlings no less than, it is rumored, his own board of directors, were pimping for him, which must have been the point. I use “pimping” both in a corporate and sexual sense. Reportedly, Weinstein had a provision in his contract obligating him to pay for any consequences from his predations. I mean, what went down when private investors came a-courting? Was Weinstein listed as a potential liability? How did they cap the risk? By number of serial episodes per fiscal quarter? By the percentage of victims algorithmically projected to resist? Did the company take out Key-Man Insurance on Weinstein for the eventuality that is now upon them? I’m speaking tongue-in-cheek, but that’s how routinized the coordinated efforts to sate the man’s very specific aquatic/phobic/exhibitionist appetites appear to have been.

And that’s just the company! Beyond the company was a whole glamor industry of enablers. The next thing I wouldn’t be surprised to hear is that Obama was secretly writing a screenplay while in office. But of course in reality he was composing his Title IX “Dear Colleague” letter stripping male college students of their due-process rights because they were all, everybody knew, would-be rapists. Meanwhile he was welcoming Weinstein into the bosom of his family.


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