Addressing sexual aggression and power in contemporary society also means questioning what the feminist movement has really been about. A big fat hairy man. A Boss-Beast. An Animal-God. King Kong? No, more like the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth of Hollywood. Or perhaps, as the MeToo movement implies, the Male Beast at the center of the labyrinth of patriarchal culture.
The taleβnot a myth! One lovely girl after another must sacrifice herself to a repellent, all-powerful Ruler, although a few among the bevy of beauties find ways to evade his advances, standing up to him with righteous passion or threatening him with the wrath of real or fictive knights-errant.
From the beginning, the stories of MeToo were horrificβand riveting. Blond, slim, willful Emma conquered and was conquered by the noble Mr. Knightley onscreen, but in real life, Paltrow went to a hotel-suite business meeting, at which the ignoble Weinstein allegedly suggested they move to the bedroom for massages. Then, in episode after episode recounted in The New York Times, The New Yorker, online, and on TV, victims alleged that he did more, much more, to others, demanding or forcing oral sex, raping them, exhibitionistically walking around naked while masturbating, and threatening them with career catastrophe if they were uncooperative.
We devoured these stories of assault and revenge like the audiences of Greek plays fixating on Olympian turmoil. When one celebrity Weinstein terrified another Paltrow , the deific victim invoked vengeance upon him from yet another celebrity her then boyfriend, Brad Pitt.
But for a long time, as a range of famous women have attested, the fat hairy beast went unpunished, ruling the hills and dales of Miramaxβand indeed Hollywood and Manhattan and sometimes even Londonβwith an iron fist and a perpetual erection. Paltrow led the list in an entrepreneurial charcoal gray suit, as if she had metamorphosed from, say, Ariadne to Athena.
