Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Crossword: 9:33
Google Searches: 0

Sub-10:00 is pretty decent for a Wednesday.

Q; How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That's not funny.

Dave Chappelle's two specials recently released on Netflix are quite good, but he doesn't pull punches. Arguments about "inappropriate" jokes never really resonate with me. All jokes are, by definition, inappropriate. A punchline is usually an unexpected outcome, i.e. an inappropriate one. But there's this one. It's about one of Louis CK's accusers, who said her dream of being a comedian was deferred because of Louis's misconduct. Chappelle joked that her dream must not have been that strong. Would Martin Luther King have abandoned his dream if Louis CK had jerked off in front of him?

Pause for laughter...

The acceleration of #metoo surprised me. There's always jokes about the casting couch, or how Megan Fox got her role on Transformers, but outside people never lent it much weight. I saw this before, when it was Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill in 1991. That was supposed to be the thing that brought sexual harassment into the open, and it had that kind of effect. Many companies vowed changes, held sensitivity seminars, and so on. Apparently, Hollywood wasn't paying attention. Then, it was mostly about sexist jokes and comments, a "hostile work environment." Now it's full-on sexual assault? Talk about hostile. This is far beyond a "boy's club" mentality. I have to imagine that most of the accused men right now weren't always predators. But naturally, in a city where success is even more about who you know than it is elsewhere, power dynamics are stronger than ever. If everyone around you with power is acting one way, you start to think that's the way you ought to act when you have the power? Maybe.

But you have to take a step back, too. Yeah, there are a lot of revelations coming out right now, but this is what, ~20 people in an industry that employs thousands of others with similar power who aren't doing this? The vast majority of priests aren't pedophiles either. But wow, it sure felt bad to be a man in 2017.

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