I can only think of a handful of men who have really been neutralized by #metoo. As in, no work, no public appearances, no one defending them or reaching out to them. Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. The first four assaulted, harassed or otherwise mistreated hundreds, maybe thousands of women, and Spacey’s victims, AFAIK, were all boys. So it seems that to be beyond forgiveness takes either a thousand women or one boy.
I could be wrong. I’d love to be wrong, but I need someone to give me a different perspective. Just throwing this out there because SDMB is still the safest/best moderated forum I know!
I think James Franco has been pretty cancelled. Appears to be about 5 women successfully did it, but the going after minor girls seems to have been the big item. Even long time friend Seth Rogen has cut ties to him.
I’m not sure, but has James Corden been cancelled for just being an asshole often? I don’t think there has been any sexual stuff with him.
If Bob Smith who had been the purchasing director at So-and-So Industries in Toledo got outed via #metoo, lost his job, and his marriage, and is now a homeless dude begging for cash to buy malt liquor, you’d never know.
But he would have lost a lot more than did your 5 poster jerks who are still rich and powerful. Except Epstein of course.
Matt Lauer, he of the desk-mounted button that locked his office door remotely to turn the room into a rape trap, has been pretty effectively ostracized. He’s made noises about wanting his career back but nobody is biting.
So I think the OP mis-states what “cancelling” means. Most of those cases are not men who have been “cancelled” they are men who have been criminally charged with sex crimes and brought to trial. That’s not “Cancelling”, which means someone losing work and generally being considered a pariah because of accusations against them.
Additionally the prosecution of a few of those people (e.g. Epstein and Cosby) predates the metoo movement by a few years.
Agreed. I wouldn’t consider Danny Masterson being convicted on two felony counts of forcible rape and currently sitting in prison while awaiting sentencing where he faces 30 years to life to be “cancelled” either, we’ll have to wait 30 years to never to see if Hollywood will hire him upon release.
This statement in the OP is particularly disingenuous:
The OP notes in the first sentence that Spacey had victims, plural, and in the very next sentence states that all it takes to be beyond forgiveness is thousands of women (which the first four combined he freely admits ‘maybe’ were victimized) or one boy. Kevin Spacey didn’t victimize ‘one boy’, he was a serial victimizer with 16 people publicly coming forward with allegations.
No, I don’t think there would be a problem for him to get another job: not only are there a massive number of comparable jobs, but when he explains to the prospective employer: the way she flirted with me so I reciprocated and then she claimed sexual harassment…I think a lot of employers would be sympathetic. And I just don’t see the kind of public pressure as in the entertainment-type industries.
Yeah Spacey is no different to the others mentioned except his victims were the same sex as him. It was an open secret that he was an abuser for years, but operated with impunity because he was in position of power.
Yeah, for all the fear and paranoia that #metoo caused among entitled men, it seems that to actually get “cancelled”, it takes a lot more than just a single allegation.
Well, a guy having his life ruined, whether he’s been in court/behind bars or not. There are so many guys nowadays saying “I’m afraid to open my mouth! Anything I say, a woman can claim it was harassment or whatever, and I’ll be fired, shunned, my whole life ruined!” And the counter to that is, “It’s not someone making an accusation that ruins you, it’s doing the things you’re accused of.” But then I started wondering if anyone has been ruined, for whatever values of “ruined”, by only one accusation from one person. (As far as Kobe, I only ever heard about the one woman.) And it did seem as if Weinstein, et al, were tried and convicted largely because there were too many accusers to ignore or discredit them all.
Dissonance, I’m a she. And I didn’t say “maybe victimized”; I said “hundreds, maybe thousands” had been victimized. I was unsure about the numbers, not the veracity. And okay, you’re right about Spacey. I just could only think of two victims of his: the guy from Rent, and Richard Dreyfuss’ son. I hope you don’t think I’m defending him.
I think Louis would have had an easier time of it if he hadn’t suggested the women were lying, suggested that they were in it for fame, and attempted to destroy their careers. His whole schtick was being a well-meaning nice guy, and that falls apart when he’s revealed to be a grade-A piece of shit. Broke my heart, I loved that guy.
I’m aware that you were using ‘maybe’ to indicate numbers, either hundreds or ‘maybe’ thousands. I didn’t say you said, ‘maybe victimized’, I said you claimed the number was hundreds, ‘maybe thousands’ and then immediately proceeded to drop the maybe in your comparison of it taking either “a thousand women or one boy”, when neither of those numbers is correct. I don’t think you’re defending him; I think you’re making a disingenuous comparison for whatever reason or the other.
Yeah, that’s what aggravates me: the idea of someone never really being called to account, because people feel sooooo bad for him, and he becomes the victim.
I think there are two incorrect assumptions here (I base this on my experience in the business world, which is admittedly fairly narrow, and all of it in California and Oregon). One is that it is believable that a man was fired* on the basis of a she-said/he-said disagreement about sexual harassment. The companies that I have worked for were very careful and thorough in their investigations of these kinds of cases, and didn’t want to be liable for a wrongful firing suit. The second is that a new company would be easily willing to hire a person who had been fired for that reason. Having a potential sexual harasser on staff is a headache easily avoided.
On the other hand, he might be safe making up a different reason for why he left the company. In my last company, when someone called to check references, all we were allowed to say (without his permission) was “Yes, he worked from this date to that date, and his final job was thus-and-so.” We weren’t allowed to say anything about why he left.
*Not that there would have been no action at all – he might have been transferred to a different job or department, his advancement track might have a black mark on it, and so on. Or the other person might have been transferred, so they weren’t working together.