The Media Meltdown of 2017 in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein disclosures is, to say the least, ironic. Why has the feminism-promoting media industry turned out to be the worst offender in abusing young women?
For example, PBS star Charlie Rose was taken down on Monday for decades of unmitigated horndoggery around his bevy of lovely young lady producers, known in the business as Charlie’s Angels.
Also on Monday The New York Times’ anti-Trump White House correspondent Glenn Thrush was suspended.
And by the time you read this, there will likely be others.
Now, it’s almost certain that some largely innocent men will be swept up in the mounting hysteria.
After all, the definition of sexual harassment as “unwanted sexual advances” is a logical morass. As I pointed out in 1992 when forecasting that the incoming Clinton administration would be rocked by a sexual-harassment scandal:
"What self-respecting woman would admit that no man had ever made an unwanted sexual advance toward her? She’d be admitting either that no man’s ever made her a sexual advance or that she’s never met a sexual advance she didn’t like."
On the other hand, most of the guys who have taken a fall so far, such as movie moguls Harvey Weinstein and Brett Ratner, have been notorious jerks.
After all, the fellows shamed so far are largely not random Republicans, as they were supposed to be. Instead, they are primarily Democratic Party made men. For example, Ratner, who got his start in showbiz procuring white girls for rap mogul Russell Simmons, hosted a 2007 fund-raiser attended by Hillary at his infamous Hilhaven swinging bachelor pad.
Granted, one reason the media have ended up exposing themselves is because their stories tend to be more interesting. In contrast, there is currently a sizable sex-abuse scandal going on at the leftist Service Employees International Union, which represents janitors and hotel maids.
You might not have heard about it yet, in part because the SEIU is a stalwart of the Democratic Party and its plan to rig American elections by importing millions of foreign ringers. For years, SEIU’s largely Jewish leadership has been selling out the economic interests of its largely Hispanic members by demanding more immigration to create more Democratic voters.
But another reason that the SEIU scandal story isn’t as sexy as the media scandals is that janitors, maids, and union staffers are unglamorous and kind of depressing. Who wants to read about them?
For years the press has been telling us that industries that hire mostly men—such as computer programming, defense, and the military—must be bad for women. No doubt, it is explained, all those horrible, evil male engineers must be teaming up to exploit the handful of female employees. After all, men and women are enemy genders. I mean, that’s what every lesbian women’s-studies professor says, and they wouldn’t have any incentive to lie, would they?
Therefore, women must be given much more in the way of affirmative-action quotas in technology companies. Similarly, the Obama administration went to war against the armed services over the purported “epidemic of rape in the military” that turned out to be only slightly more real than Haven Monahan’s fraternity-house gang rape on broken glass.
Instead, however, we see that careers where women are most abundant and most ambitious, such as television and movies, are where they are most exploited.
Why? It’s simple supply and demand.
Conversely, just as women got the vote way back in 1870 in the frontier states of Wyoming and Utah because cowboys wanted to encourage schoolmarms to migrate, women tend to be treated rather well by lonely male employees in industries where they are rare.
For example, secretaries at midcentury Lockheed Aircraft, such as my mother and her friends, tended to do quite well for themselves in acquiring husbands. After my mother was widowed when her Marine first husband was killed in combat on Iwo Jima in early 1945, she found my engineer father. They were married from 1946 until her death in 1998.
My father wasn’t a genius engineer. His career was spent figuring out how to keep the more brilliant designers’ envelope-pushing airplanes, such as the F-104, from crashing. And he was socially awkward. But he was a good man.
My mother’s best friend married another engineer, Henry Combs. They were married from 1948 until her death in 2013. Ben Rich called Henry a “genius” in his superb memoir Skunk Works about Lockheed’s legendary R&D wing that Rich led. Combs became the technical director of the Skunk Works and, according to Rich, was the chief designer of the 2,000-mph SR-71, the most awesome airplane ever built.
The founder of the Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson, America’s most famous aeronautical engineer, married a girl in the Lockheed accounting department in 1937. When she was dying in 1969, she explained to Kelly that he was too busy to take care of himself, so she had arranged for him to marry his secretary, which he did. When his second wife was dying, she in turn found a third wife for him.
But that was Kelly Johnson in the bad old days in a conservative industry. In contrast, in progressive media industries in feminist 2017, alpha males like Weinstein and Rose treat women more like Ismail the Bloodthirsty did.
The female sex has shown that their emotional responses have not yet evolved to deal well with modern visual media. Women tend to be too impressed by the men on screen and too hell-bent to get themselves on screen.
In one of Philip Roth’s lesser novels, The Dying Animal, the narrator is a 62-year-old college professor who seduces one of his undergraduate students every semester and then discards her for a new one the following semester. How does the old dog do it? He moonlights on the local PBS channel as an arts expert for a few minutes per week. This might not seem like much fame, but for a 19-year-old coed, Roth’s narrator explains, “They are helplessly drawn to celebrity, however inconsiderable mine may be.”
Likewise, in the real world, an anonymous TV anchorman explained in 2004:
"At the producing level, it’s all young women, 99 percent of whom have no chance of being on TV. They like being in TV and they like powerful men. Each host has around him lots of good-looking, unmarried women. Women are excited by power, let’s be totally clear."
Likewise, lots of women want to be on screen themselves. A female producer at CNN complained thirteen years ago:
"In the last 10 years or so, it seems there are more and more young, pretty women who are just dying to be on television—. It’s just about being on television, and they’ll do anything to get there—among those things, being treated poorly."
Of course, there is little effective solidarity among women in the media business. As a female CNN producer noted:
"There aren’t that many female executive producers. And they’re mean to those girls who are pretty and want to be on television."
There’s probably not a lot we can do about this, except to not pay so much heed to people on screen who lecture us about their superior morality.