#metoo

Thursday

Taki

Why Simone de Beauvoir is my kind of woman

From our UK edition

New York   A strange thing happened to me here in the Bagel last week. Having read the recent review of a biography of Susan Sontag in these here pages, my plan was to compare her with another feminist, Simone de Beauvoir (I have just finished an opus about Beauvoir, Paris and the Left Bank après la guerre). My money was on Simone, an extremely promiscuous and beautiful woman who was the first to raise the feminine flag against men’s oppression of the fairer sex. Beauvoir’s Second Sex, published in 1949, made her lots and lots of enemies, but it also established her as the number one female icon of the time. Her argument was that men confined women to the role of the other while they remained the subject. When the book came out, there was hell to pay.

Thursday

Mary Killen

The men I’ve groped (including Boris)

From our UK edition

Charlotte Edwardes reports that Boris put his hand on her leg during lunch 20 years ago. Full disclosure, I put my hand on Boris’s leg 20 years ago during lunch. It wasn’t that I was making a pass at him. I just wanted to hold his attention while I was telling him something I wanted him to listen to. Now I am worrying. What if Boris and/or a cohort of other males come forward? ‘Mary assaulted me in a historic sex abuse incident. #SheToo.’ These are topsy-turvy times. Anything could happen and now I think about it, I’m sure I have been putting my hands on legs and generally assaulting men for years — absentmindedly. But the past was a foreign country. They did things differently there.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Dave Chappelle plumbs new depths of tastelessness in his new Netflix special

'You Can Definitely Skip Dave Chappelle's New Netflix Special,' says VICE. And if that's not recommendation enough, here's one from me: Sticks & Stones is the most, offensive, foul-mouthed, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic comedy set you're likely to see on TV this year. Chappelle, I must confess, was new to me. Yes, I know, I know, all you American readers: he's a comedy institution, ranked no. 9 in Rolling Stone's '50 Best Stand Up Comics of All Time' with numerous awards and a career going right back to his 1993 movie debut in Mel Brooks's Robin Hood: Men In Tights. But when you're English and you get to a certain age, you find yourself taking a certain perverse pride in not knowing anything whatsoever about icons who are really huge in the US.

dave chappelle

Tuesday

Cockburn

Mark Halperin and the art of the #MeToo U-turn

So, you’ve been accused of sexual misconduct. You’re officially hashtag canceled, laying low, plotting your return to glory. How do you pull off the comeback? Do you try and slip back in unnoticed like The New York Times‘s Glenn Thrush? Do you go on a literal apology tour around the country like comedian Aziz Ansari, performing a routine about how much you’ve learned from your experience? Neither of those approaches was good enough for Mark Halperin. For the former NBC News correspondent, who was accused of, among other things, rubbing his clothed erect penis on some young female staffers and propositioning others, the smartest way back has a few stages. First, issue a general apology, while denying a couple of the allegations, and don’t direct one at the women involved.

mark halperin

Wednesday

Jesse Longman

Aziz Ansari: Right here and wrong now

Aziz Ansari premiered his hour-long Netflix apology special in a barely audible voice from a crouching position in the corner of a dark stage in Brooklyn. His mostly white audience was rapt and reverential through each moment of silent reflection and public embrace. For past crimes, he forgives himself, he forgives his audience for not forgiving him earlier, and he forgives all those who know not what they did — crying ‘Nazi!' in crowded theaters, promoting fake news, finding good people on both sides.We are chastened. We are redeemed. Our prodigal son has returned to us a prophet and yea, unto us his message is clear: 'Children, we are all assholes in different cultural contexts. Love each other. Now is all we have.

aziz ansari

Sunday

Dominic Green

Jeffrey Epstein is a pervert for our times

Why do dogs lick their own genitals? Because they can. And wouldn’t it be great to be able to do whatever you like? Only those at the very top and bottom of society have the license to live like that. Our culture lionizes them even after the grubby final reel. They’re the Gatsbys, the Scarfaces — but also the Jeffrey Epsteins. The rich are different, like F. Scott Fitzgerald said. The degree of difference may vary, but the ways of difference don’t change much. The degree of difference between the very rich and the merely affluent is wider now than at any time since the Gilded Age — and wider than it was in 1925 when Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, his groveling tribute to those who differ by having more money than sense. But the ways of difference remain much the same.

jeffrey epstein

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Sex pests and patriarchs

From our UK edition

Bitter Wheat, David Mamet’s latest play, features a loathsome Hollywood hotshot, Barney Fein, who offers to turn an actress into a superstar provided she lets him rape her. The show’s gruesome storyline has flashes of bitter comedy. Fein boasts that the Writers Guild of America would ‘drink a beaker of my mucus’ if he forced them to. Although this is the ultimate #MeToo play it can’t prevent itself from taking a masculine point of view. Fein’s assistant, Sondra (Doon Mackichan), conveniently vanishes at the right moment and leaves the starlet at the monster’s mercy. But was Sondra complicit? We aren’t told. And we learn nothing about her attitude to her boss.

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

The case for locking Joe Biden in a cupboard

Most candidates for the Democratic nomination are struggling to be noticed in a crowded field. Elizabeth Warren details policy proposals. Bernie Sanders rails against the establishment. Beto O’Rourke stands on tables and flails his arms.Joe Biden, on the other hand, has not had to do a lot to garner attention. The career politician and former vice president has a big enough and successful enough brand that he was guaranteed to be the favorite merely by existing. American liberals love to soak in a warm bath of nostalgia for the innocent, pre-Trump Obama era, and if they cannot have Barack back, Joe is the next best thing.

joe biden

Monday

Dominic Green

Did American outlets refuse to publish the MLK sex transcripts?

It’s #MeToo time for Martin Luther King — despite, historian David J. Garrow alleges, the efforts of senior staff at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the LA Times and the Guardian. In this week’s Green Room podcast, Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, alleges that these outlets chose not to publish his discovery of transcripts from the FBI’s taped surveillance of Martin Luther King. Instead, Garrow’s research was published this week in Britain’s Standpoint magazine. https://audioboom.

mlk #metoo

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

At Harvard, you’re guilty until proven innocent

‘In 55 years of association with Harvard, I can’t remember a worse violation of academic freedom than this one. And Harvard has had a few,’ Alan Dershowitz tells me in this week’s Censored in the City podcast. https://audioboom.com/posts/7260600-is-there-still-academic-freedom-at-harvard Activists on the left have been working hard to change definitions and distort values for some time. We shouldn't be surprised that they’ve started succeeding. At first it was simple. One word at a time, like how you define the meaning of safety or assault. Then it became about bigger ideas. The left, who once championed free speech and academic freedom, began distorting how we should think about and advocate for those values.

harvey weinstein guilty harvard

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Jacob Wohl’s latest hoax shows the issue with ‘believe all victims’

There’s a few fundamental problems with the idea of ‘believe all women,’ or more broadly, ‘believe all victims.’ The first is that our entire justice system is built upon the opposite idea, that people are in fact innocent until proven otherwise. The second is that as our definition of sexual assault keeps changing by the minute, it’s possible for two people to experience the same encounter in radically different ways, with one person believing they just had entirely consensual sex, and the other believing they were assaulted. The third, and most important: there are bad people in this world. And bad people lie.

jacob wohl

Thursday

Virginia Ironside

Not him, too

From our UK edition

Over a drink recently I sat next to a man who announced, barely before he’d taken his first sip, that he was a feminist. ‘Like you,’ he added ingratiatingly. Like me?!? Poor sap. Did he imagine that this creepy statement would actually endear me to him? That I admired his courageous stand and was prepared to hang on his every word? Not a bit of it. From that moment, I despised him. Firstly, I’m no feminist and never have been. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, I’m an equal-but-differentist, or would be if such a thing existed. And I have no desire to get my own back on women’s oppressors, if indeed, today, in western society, they are oppressors. I’ve never experienced them as such.

Friday

Julie Bindel

Camille Paglia vs the trans-Taliban

Camille Paglia has joined the ever-growing list of women in the metaphorical stocks being pelted with accusations of transphobia. A number of blue-fringed students at her university are demanding she be fired for her statements criticizing some women who bring charges of sexual assault, and because of her comments about transgender people. ‘I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows’, she said in 2017. Why are they bringing this up now, you may ask? Why ever not? I am still hounded and bullied by the cabal for a comment piece I wrote in 2004.

camille paglia

Wednesday

Heather Mac Donald

Joe Biden and the deranged policing of personal space

Conservative pundits and Republican politicians are joining the Democratic outcry against former vice president Joe Biden, accusing him of inappropriately touching females. They are making a serious mistake. Conferring legitimacy on this latest and craziest flare-up of #MeToo hysteria will further weaponize females to take out any man of their choosing, based simply on their feelings. More consequentially, it will make society impossibly fraught and brittle, intolerant of the ordinary messiness of human interactions and unaccepting of generational differences. The crusade against Biden began last week when a left-wing Democratic operative and social justice advocate accused Biden of having inappropriately kissed her in 2014.

joe biden personal space

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Would the Democrats rather win in 2020, or eat themselves alive?

Do Democrats want to win the 2020 election? Do they understand why they lost in 2016? I’m increasingly unsure. It seems like every time a relatively reasonable candidate or undeclared candidate gets a little buzz, the Democratic base tries to derail any possible momentum. It happened with Amy Klobuchar who is apparently a hardworking hard-ass. So what? I want a president who is tough enough to run the country. Being nice isn’t a qualification for the job. Neither is being in tune with the most recent sensitivities of the tribe of the politically correct. Throughout his many years in public service, we’ve all seen the myriad photos and videos: Joe Biden is touchy. Very touchy. Sometimes bizarrely so.

biden 2020

Saturday

Freddy Gray

What’s the matter with Joe Biden?

I once worked with an attractive woman who had a strange encounter with Joe Biden. As a young reporter on Capitol Hill, she got stuck in a melee of reporters shouting questions at the senator. Biden saw her plight and invited her to join him as he marched into an elevator. My former colleague was delighted: here was a rare interview opportunity. As soon as the elevator doors closed, though, Biden took out a Snickers bar and inserted the whole thing into his mouth. He then masticated heavily throughout the ascent and walked off without a word. That’s Joe Biden, the man who could well be the next president of the United States. He’s a weird dude. He may be even weirder than Donald Trump. Lots of politicians are gaffe-prone: for many, their lack of smoothness is winning.

joe biden biden’s

Thursday

Norman Lebrecht

Out of tune with the times

From our UK edition

A few years ago, I hooked up with a BBC team in Berlin to record a programme with Daniel Barenboim. We were shown in to his spartan offices at the Staatsoper and, without preliminaries, I conducted an interview with him across a low table for 45 minutes. When our time was up, Barenboim rose and left. I am not even sure if we shook hands. Knowing him from previous encounters, I was not particularly bothered. What did shock me was the sight of my BBC colleagues, their faces white with stress, their limbs rendered catatonic. No one creates tension in a room like Daniel Barenboim. Last month, seven musicians in his Staatsoper orchestra complained of a threatening atmosphere at work and added charges of bullying which, in post-#MeToo times, have to be taken very seriously.

Wednesday

Natasha Green

What happened to Gilbert Grape?

Young Amber Heard met elderly Johnny Depp on the set of The Rum Diary (2011), a Hunter S. Thompson adaptation about a man trying to save his soul. Like the Depp-Heard marriage, the movie had a weak narrative, too much drinking, and generally poorly reviews. It lasted a lot longer than it should have done, too. Heard filed for divorce in May 2016, but you wouldn’t know it. Three years on, the marriage remains click-worthy. Days after filing, Heard accused Depp of being verbally and physically abusive throughout their relationship. Depp denied the allegations, and has now asked for $50 million in damages.

johnny depp amber heard

Friday

David Cox

The diversity agenda is killing cinema

From our UK edition

The film world is atoning for its crimes against diversity. On screen, strong women are supplanting Disney princesses. Superheroes, once uniformly white and male, are turning multicultural. Gay intrigue is edging out heterosexual romance. Away from the camera, bankable stars force studios to employ minority personnel by adding 'inclusion riders' to their contracts. Film-makers must repent ancient mis-speaks, beg forgiveness and denounce peers accused of transgressions. Abuse allegations against Woody Allen may be unproven, but actors who have taken his shilling disown him and donate their tarnished earnings to #TimesUp. Unsurprisingly, the current awards season reflects these rectifications. Of the eight nominations for best picture Oscar, six boast diversity credentials.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 21 February 2019

From our UK edition

Gstaad   It’s party time here. From the richest billionaires down to those impoverished souls with only a few million to their name, the joint is jumpin’. Last week one tycoon converted his mega chalet into a nightclub and the music boomed away all night. Everyone who attended turned into Beethoven after one hour, which improved the situation in a way. People talk such rubbish nowadays that it was a relief to point at one’s ears and shake one’s head. I did not last long. I’ve been deaf ever since. My son came home at 5 a.m. Next week we’ve got an Italian countess’s blast from the past. I hope we’ll be doing the shimmy and the black bottom and the charleston, but I doubt it.