Comedian Tig Notaro, interviewed in the NYTimes, had this to say about the possiblity of disgraced men of influence returning to their various jobs: “If a janitor was so great at cleaning the building but also tended to masturbate in front of people, would the people at that building be like, “yes, he masturbated, but I’ve never seen anyone clean so thoroughly, and I was just wondering when he’s going to get his job back, he so good at it.” No it would be “that’s not acceptable.” It’s fame and power that people are blinded by.” (NYT 5/19)
Exactly so Tig, but you have it backwards. In fact, there were no janitors who were outed by the women of MeToo or TimesUp and there’s a simple reason for that. Women were looking for the men who had the fame , power or money – the important thing Tig omitted from her list. In fact, women who hung around these men, sometimes for years, were not blinded by their desire for a piece of one or all of these commodities – they were willfully motivated to preserve their proximity no matter what . We are talking mostly about professional women in publishing, movies, t.v. entertainment – not battered wives with a handful of kids and no marketable skills. The two women who claimed that Eric Schneiderman beat them, choked them, degraded them and made perverse sexual demands, voluntarily kept coming back to the Attorney-General, unwilling to let go of whatever gratification they derived from being in his aura. The women who sat and watched Louis C.K masturbate were voluntarily in his apartment, not out on the sidewalk as passers-by. The young men who purportedly succumbed to James Levine were in his orbit hoping to further their careers as were most of the accusers of Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, James Levine etc.
