"In case you're wondering, as I did, how my punishment for tweeting about Toobin compares to Toobin's suspension for his offense...."

"He was off air for eight months; I was off for seven. One month was the difference between punishment for jacking off at work versus commenting on the inadvisability of jacking off at work. On one hand, the people who made this call about me are gone from the network, so maybe I could let it lie. But on the other hand, many of my colleagues no doubt knew about my banning from air, but not the reasons behind it, thereby leaving the impression I must have done something tantamount to Toobining. I did not. I was told it was Jeff Zucker, now gone, who put this order in place and a deputy, also gone, who kept it there. I was also told I wasn't informed of the network's displeasure because I had just had a baby and someone in the old leadership thought I might be a 'loose cannon.' Not as loose as Toobin's.... In the #MeToo era, I have been asked to make public comment on basically every errant penis in the media, government, sports, and entertainment worlds, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else in the news, and at the expense of some amount of professional dignity. It is ironic that in shining a light on bad behavior, which is the right thing to do, you're still a woman on TV talking about penises...."

Writes Mary Katharine Ham, in "In the Age of Quiet Quitting, I Was Quiet Suspended, And I Can't Shut Up About It/On Toobin's wake, professionalism, and the lessons I thought we learned in #MeToo" (Substack).

 

"I know very well I'm in the ideological minority in many of the places I speak, and certainly in the Zucker era at CNN, that made me dispensable....  ... I've been invited back by the new guard to do the job I was prevented from doing by the old guard. Clean slate, as if nothing happened. But something did happen. I have never been great at being quiet, and it’s not in my nature to start. So, that’s where I’ve been. I determined it was impossible for me to come back without saying why I’d been gone."

 

ADDED: Let me say 2 things about the difference between Toobin and Ham's entanglement with the penis.

 

1. Though Ham only talked about the penis and Toobin exposed his erect penis — both were on camera and seen by others and Ham was choosing to speak, repeatedly, while Toobin made a terrible mistake, once.

2. Ham's joking belittled the penis, and — in a phallocracy — that is a grave offense. The penis is supposed to be immensely imposing and intimidating. In that light, Toobin's mistake served the interests of the phallocracy. He erred in carelessly and vainly brandishing his penis. But those who saw did not say, oh, that poor man, it's so embarrassing. They treated it — even in a lame display — as a very very frightening.