I have a number of things to say about the post-Weinstein era. This is the first piece.
People who are surprised by all of the #metoo’ing have been ignoring an increasingly obvious fact: somewhere along the way —by my guess, the late ‘90s or early 2000s— men began to cross a line. A line that had somehow survived 10,000 years of male cultural domination, if only by becoming an invisible part of the apparatus of control. Without a thought, we boldly went where no men had gone before.
We wrecked women’s sexual shame.
I mark the start of it with *Girls Gone Wild*, although an argument can be made that *The Real World* and other proto-reality-tv stuff might have set it off. We started conditioning girls to see how intimate, uncontrolled exposure in front of large audiences can be as exciting as it is terrifying.
From there, the process worked its way through the Paris Hilton and Kim K. tapes, and into a newly, dramatically more extreme porn business that was suddenly open to more women than ever, as both creators and consumers. Acts that were once seen as fundamentally degrading became… not so much *less* degrading, as much as *differently* so. Women figured out en masse that the pursuit of debasement and pain can be a bit like art, and a lot like an extreme sport, only one where you can’t trust your teammates for fuck-all. And it could be profitable, too.
Finally, the process brought itself home with revenge porn. That’s when men showed every woman alive that it didn’t matter if she sent us the photos we demanded, if she fucked us the nasty way we liked, if she remembered not to provoke us when we were drunk, if she adamantly insisted to the ER nurse that the bruises were from a slip in the shower, nor if she forgave all the drug money we “borrowed”… it was all for nothing. Even when she ultimately compromised everything she had just to get us to leave her the hell alone, we would still share pictures of her semen-soaked face and cunt for our sleazy little buddies to post and mock online. We had one of history’s great lopsided bargains tilted in mankind’s favor —we won’t tell everyone what you’re willing to do as long as you’re willing to do it— and *we couldn’t be bothered to stick to the fucking deal*.
I’d say the last stage really kicked in around The Fappening. It makes sense that the dominos would start to fall first in Hollywood; once we stripped women like Jennifer Lawrence of their privacy and dignity in front of hundreds of millions of people, after making it abundantly clear that no matter what their standing in life they would always be targets, and after turning public humiliation into something that looked survivable, well… why would they ever again put up with a man’s shit? What would be the point? We took away everything they had to lose.
This generation of men has truly been special. We accidentally made the world a better place by being the biggest assholes we could possibly be.