February 4, 2022

"The same worlds where abuse was likely to have been taken seriously and codified during the rise of Me Too—cloistered, rivalrous, impossibly competitive, liberal-leaning zones like television networks, academia, and Democratic politics..."

"... are now the worlds in which the accusations are most easily weaponized by power players seeking an advantage. Zucker may be the most recent example, but he’s certainly not alone....  It is only by dint of the world taking sexual misconduct so seriously that it has become something to be cynically exploited, ironically enough. The Zucker affair is starkly similar to this month’s scandal at the University of Michigan. It was another situation where an affair—between the university’s president, Mark Schlissel, and an employee—was consensual, but the power dynamic made it against policy... [T]he people who actually seem most likely to turn Me Too into a targeted weapon are those who already have power, or are actively seeking it. 'It’s like the ending of Reservoir Dogs,' one TV executive said of the Zucker/Cuomo situation to Vanity Fair’s Pompeo, citing a movie that was distributed by Harvey Weinstein. Everyone leaving one another splayed out, riddled with millions of dollars’ worth of lawsuit settlements and exit payments."

From "Did Jeff Zucker and Chris Cuomo Make Me Too a Weapon in Their Power Struggle? The former CNN executive’s workplace romance sure doesn’t seem like the real reason he’s resigning" by Noreen Malone (Slate). 

Doesn't that seem as though she's saying that, in retrospect, the Me Too movement was a mistake, that instead of elevating the subordinated, it's made the powerful more intensely and chaotically powerful?

Isn't that what feminist theory would predict — that the patriarchy will endlessly reinforce the patriarchy? To expect anything else is naive feminism. For sophisticated feminism, it's vindication.

40 comments:

gahrie said...

Isn't patriarchy just a social construct?

Balfegor said...

It is only by dint of the world taking sexual misconduct so seriously that it has become something to be cynically exploited, ironically enough.

Yes, but this isn't really a "me too" thing in this case. It's a common or garden scandal. There's periods where this sort of thing hasn't mattered much in America, e.g. in the 1960s (Kennedy) or 1990s (Clinton -- where Republicans misjudged public opinion to their cost) and periods where it has, e.g. the 1980s (Gary Hart). The particular problem of senior executives exercising improper influence over their affair partners' careers is a newer development, but that's not unique to the "me too" era either -- it's been viewed as a type of conflict of interest and corporate governance problem for at least the past ten or twenty years, and maybe longer. And any time you have an exposed weak point like an illicit affair, of course your rivals are going think about exploiting it.

Lawrence Person said...

Revolutionaries always seem to be quite shocked when the revolution turns on them.

Kevin said...

To expect anything else is naive feminism. For sophisticated feminism, it's vindication.

No true Scotswomyn.

Temujin said...

I remember when I used to love 'Reservoir Dogs'. It seems to preposterous to me now.

Anyway, my belief is that this relationship Zucker had years ago was only now used as a weapon because they did not want to admit out loud that they are cleaning house. And they are cleaning house because that piece of crap network is tanking like the Cleveland Browns. Baby Cuomo is gone. Zucker, who engineered the entire disaster, is finally gone. Don Lemon would be gone but for his two key check marks (gay, black). But they'll move him to another time, then let him loose a few months later.

CNN is toast unless they can completely re-engineer themselves. They have zero respect and aside from some upper level, degreed, white suburbanites, everyone else thinks of CNN as a clown show. I mean...who is going to turn on Brian Stelter or Jim Acosta to hear anything about any topic?

Jefferson's Revenge said...

Reading that article made me feel like a 12 year old girl talking to her friend on the phone about who is dating whom in class. Who the heck are these people?

Ice Nine said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ice Nine said...

>And yet, if you look at the evidence, the people who actually seem most likely to turn Me Too into a targeted weapon are those who already have power,<

There's no *turning* MeToo into a weapon going on now - it was that from almost the get-go. And that weapon was not wielded by the powerful but rather by gold diggers churning up 20 year-old consensual relationships.

Yancey Ward said...

Laughing my ass off.

Her lament is that the weapon is targeting other leftists.

MadisonMan said...

And it hasn't touched Trump, not really, and that's who #MeToo was designed for, after all. A Classic Case of a Doomsday weapon coming back to destroy its creators and advocates.

wendybar said...

It was all fun and games until it bounced back to YOU and YOURS.

rcocean said...

If Cuomo took down Zucker, then good for him. I wonder how many other Weinsteins and Matt Lauer's are out there, being *protected* because no one dislikes them enough to talk. Or is too afraid.

robother said...

Except for the part where Zucker and Cuomo losing their golden parachutes is even remotely like oozing blood on a concrete floor.... Like everything else, tragedy has been down-graded.

Today, Lady Macbeth would be the feminist victim, complaining how she spent the best years of her life on that loser, and now has only liver spots to show for it: "Out, out damned spot!"

Achilles said...

#meToo was about power for liberals not justice for victims.

All the people that started #metoo were a bunch of douchebags that voted for Joe Biden knowing he was a rapist.

gilbar said...

in retrospect, the Me Too movement was a mistake,

clearly it misfired. The POUND ME TOO movement was supposed to take down republicans, not democrats

Michael K said...

Feminism gradually turned into transgenderism and destroyed itself.

Christopher B said...

What Temujin said, writ large.

Talking about the real incompetency would be disastrous to the narrative. Stuart Smalley wasn't kicked out of the Senate over making a lewd gesture. He was a hack who had been installed via blatant vote fraud who was gonna lose the next election. Cuomo didn't get kicked because of his Roamin' hands but because an examination of his COVID response would reveal preventable deaths that weren't in any way minimized by the NPI he ordered. Zucker's gone because he got high on his own outrage supply.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

Temujin said...

Anyway, my belief is that this relationship Zucker had years ago was only now used as a weapon because they did not want to admit out loud that they are cleaning house.

The handwriting was on the wall when Chris Wallace left Fox to go to CNN. They are going to try and rebrand it as a serious news outlet and Zucker would have been a detriment to that.

The usual suspects are up in arms about it. But that always happens when you change CEOs, the people who've been sort of sliding along get really nervous.

Joe Smith said...

Thumbs up for the use of 'dint' if nothing else : )

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

Doesn't that seem as though she's saying that, in retrospect, the Me Too movement was a mistake, that instead of elevating the subordinated, it's made the powerful more intensely and chaotically powerful?

She's saying that, but not for the reason you think. It's because it's been turned and used against one of the "Cool Kids". No one planned for that to happen.

n.n said...

#MeToo ended when feminists received what they perceived to be friendly fire. Separately, the example of Kamala Harris undermined the integrity of a movement where feminists expected to to abort the baby, cannibalize her profitable parts, sequester her carbon pollutants, and have her, too.

Mike Sylwester said...

What did Zucker and Cuomo say about the accusations against Kavanaugh?

That consideration shapes my opinion about the recent accusations against Zucker and Cuomo.

wild chicken said...

Wasn't Me Too supposed to take out Trump? I thought that's where it was going.

Did they ever get anything on him?

Greg The Class Traitor said...

"The same worlds where abuse was likely to have been taken seriously and codified during the rise of Me Too—cloistered, rivalrous, impossibly competitive, liberal-leaning zones like television networks, academia, and Democratic politics..."

No, it's the worlds where the abuse was actually serious, and never taken seriously, that are now most at risk from "Me Too".

The fact that they're all places controlled by the Left tells us how little the Left ever believed the feminist BS they tried to force on teh rest of us.

What's missing from this is any claim that the charges are actually false.

On the Right side, we've pointed out when the charges were "she said, he said", esp. when there was no contemporaneous evidence that the charges were true.

But on the Left, what they're compiling about is that true charges are being leveled against "the wrong people".

If you're going to pass a sex harassment law that saws that relationships across a "power differential" are always eligible for a harassment claim when it's someone you don't like, then they're still sexual harassment, and still grounds for termination, when they involve someone you do like.

All she's bitching about is that the hypocrisy is being brushed away, and the rule of law is starting to happen.

What a scum bag

Kathryn51 said...

From my ivory tower, I don't give a f**k about the various sex lives and highschool girl revenge narrative.

The Cuomo brothers called Janice Dean "that Weather Bitch" and apparently collaborated on how to attack her behind the scenes and promote the Guv brother's handling of Covid vis-a-vis Trump. It was politics all the way up and down the entertainment chain. And apparently Zucker and Gollust were part of it.

Did any of these "high-minded journalists" at CNN call out colleague Chris, Zucker or Gollust using their platform to promote a politician? Of course not.

When theZucker news broke, there was some twitter chatter amongst certain female FNC hosts that wondered what "AC" was thinking - Allison Camarota, a former FOX babe who apparently has made a living of trashing her former female (and male) colleagues. Karma is such a bitch.

#MeToo was originally a grifter's paradise but like every grifting movement, they eventually eat their own.

narciso said...

no miss gussock, was the enabler of fredo and deathstalker's coverup of a murder scene, in the state's nursing homes

Lurker21 said...

How long before somebody puts Cuomo's and Zucker's faces on a clip of Michael Madsen's "Stuck in the Middle With You" torture scene.

Cuomo v. Zucker was a great real-life illustration of Mutual Assured Destruction and deterrence.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

I was just reading about Keisha Lance Bottoms, ex-Mayor of Atlanta, in New York magazine. The writer, Zak Cheney-Rice, is very sympathetic to BLM and "defund the police," and seems to think Bottoms gave in too readily to demands to re-fund and support the police. Atlanta is supposed to be different from Chicago and Detroit: blacks are (even) more in control, there are lots of successful blacks in the city, including business owners. Cheney-Rice suggests that blacks are supported by the Establishment, still to some extent white, on the condition that they are allowed to address race but not class. There are still a lot of poor people, disproportionately black. An apparent agenda of blacks getting ahead can cover the reality of the poor not getting ahead. Bottoms was mystified when the street protests hit Atlanta, and she kept hoping the violence was more antifa than BLM.

tim in vermont said...

What actually stinks is the close connection the relationship shows, between CNN and the Cuomo administration, and running cover for the man who killed tens of thousands of seniors in order to advance partisan Democrat politics.

Fred Drinkwater said...

Back in the days when I had principles, I would caution my leftist acquaintances to beware of their favorite policies lest they fall into the hands of their ideological opponents.
Nowadays I just point and laugh.

Geoff Matthews said...

Hey, it's good for the lawyers.

Rosalyn C. said...

Yes I agree. The big boys in power haven’t changed and when it comes down to a war they’ll use any weapon available. The women they love and the #me too movement are supporting actors in the drama of the patriarchy.

robother said...

I note that the adventuress who uses her sexuality to advance her own power, status, and wealth is always written out of these feminist morality tales. Naive and sophisticated feminists have that common.

To their whiny "#MeToo," the adventuress instinctively responds, "Go Lust!"

sean said...

"[P]atriarchy . . . endlessly reinforc[ing] patriarchy" sounds more like CRT than feminism. To be more precise, it sounds more like Derrick Bell than Catharine MacKinnon.

Scott M said...

'It’s like the ending of Reservoir Dogs,' one TV executive said of the Zucker/Cuomo situation to Vanity Fair’s Pompeo, citing a movie that was distributed by Harvey Weinstein.

The analogy of everyone losing stands, but I fail to see how citing the movie's distributor, a film with an entirely male cast, has any bearing on the overall point of the article.

Christopher B said...

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...
The handwriting was on the wall when Chris Wallace left Fox to go to CNN. They are going to try and rebrand it as a serious news outlet and Zucker would have been a detriment to that.


I don't think so. Mike Wallace's son went to CNN+, the streaming service that has yet to launch, not the CNN on-air broadcast team.

My bet, CNN+ isn't going anywhere, and neither is Chris Wallace.

rcocean said...

Yes, METOO was originally pushed to destroy Trump. Remember "Pussygate" that was supposed to destroy him. Mitch and Mittens both demanded Trump withdraw in Oct 2016 because of it.

Then came Stormy Daniels, the oddball in the Mahanttan Department Store, and some women who complained that trump has "kisssed without permission" 20 years ago. And now they were really, really, angry about it.

While METOO was annoying and hypocritical when applied to Trump, its had good results. Al Franken no longer a senator from the Clown State. Weinstein gone. Matt Lauer exposed. Epstein dead, and Maxwell on trial, Charlie Rose and Garrison Keillor shown be complete freaks. You wonder if Dave Letterman would've been forced into retirement if he'd stayed on.

Jupiter said...

"For sophisticated feminism, it's vindication."

Oh, there are sophisticated feminists now? How can you tell? The color of their lipstick?

Sebastian said...

"Isn't that what feminist theory would predict — that the patriarchy will endlessly reinforce the patriarchy?"

Any power struggle exploiting male weakness = patriarchy?

"For sophisticated feminism, it's vindication."

Sophisticated feminism that couldn't be bothered to resist #MeToo.

narciso said...

more like hamlet, where everyone dies,