"The question at the trial was: What did Weinstein do? But its subtext is an argument about female ambition: What should a woman want?"

Writes Dana Goodyear in "Harvey Weinstein, the Monster of #MeToo/If Weinstein is acquitted in L.A., it will be tempting to conclude that #MeToo is over. But, even if he is convicted, some may reach the same conclusion" (The New Yorker).

The jury has been deliberating for 3 days so far. Today is Day 4, so the prospect of acquittal is real.

Many of Weinstein’s accusers are women who sought access to an industry over which Weinstein held sway, and who continued to strive for it in spite of his alleged abuse. They still wanted the job, the chance....

Two of the witnesses... like many other Weinstein accusers, kept in touch with him afterward...

When the defense told [one witness] that no one had forced her to go to Weinstein’s hotel room on a subsequent occasion, when she had set up a business meeting between Weinstein and a male friend of hers, she parried, “My ego forced me to.”...

[Natassia] Malthe, a frank and salty witness—Weinstein, she said, was a “fat fuck”—suggested that, having already been raped, she “wanted to make the best of this situation... He has you by the fucking throat, knowing that, if you don’t comply, that your career is down the drain, knowing that this thing you’ve worked on for months . . . and that’s not right.”...

If Malthe’s and other similar accounts are true, this is Weinstein at his most diabolical: violating women and then dangling phantom go-nowhere gigs to create an elaborate fiction of an exchange for some future defense, or perhaps to better defend his own conscience from misgivings and moral pangs....

Will a jury find that a woman’s desire to work undermines her account of being sexually violated in the process? Will it believe that these women, participating in a criminal case, are gleefully jumping on what [defense lawyer Alan Jackson] called the “2017 dogpile”? Arguing that Jane Doe No. 3 and Siebel Newsom both engaged in consensual relationships with Weinstein for their own benefit (“He benefitted, and she benefitted”),  Jackson said that after 2017 they were “desperate to relabel their relationships with Harvey Weinstein.”

Siebel Newsom, he said, “cannot square in her mind the idea that she’s a successful, well-educated, well-bred, refined woman who had consensual sex with Harvey Weinstein in exchange for opportunity and access.”

It was “transactional sex,” he said, and Siebel Newsom had buyer’s remorse. But, he said, “regret is far from rape. You don’t get to rewrite your own history, no matter who you’re married to.”

ADDED: Let's look at that question I put in the post title: "What should a woman want?"

Weinstein's lawyers weren't questioning women's ambition. They were acknowledging and crediting women's ambition. As I read those quotes from the defense's closing argument, they were characterizing the women as individuals with full agency, choosing to pay with sex to get what they wanted.

That is, there was consent. Obviously, that doesn't mean a business should be run like that. But in the trial, it is only proffered as a defense to the criminal charge of rape, not as a reason to think transactional sex is not a problem.

But it's easy to condemn rape, and very hard to get into the complex problem of transactional sex. But in the good old days of radical feminism, we did get into that problem. Once you are there, you will be critiquing all the relationships you want to feel warm and romantic about — including the marriage of Siebel and Gavin... and your own marriage. 

AND: What would a rule against transactional sex look like? The only permissible sex would be sex for sex — an equal exchange. Both (or all) parties want the sex precisely because they want the sex and nothing else. That's a high ideal. You might want to try to adhere to it as a matter of personal ethics, but I can't believe you'd want it as a legally enforceable standard of conduct. I'll bet you wouldn't even accept it socially as a basis for judging other people.