Now that Harvey Weinstein has been outed as a serial sexual predator who for decades used his position as both a powerful movie producer and head of a major Hollywood studio to coerce dozens of women to have sexual relations with him, one hopes that the irony of this isn’t lost on the rest of the country.
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Weinstein, you see, fashions himself as a champion of women’s rights, a male feminist who hosted big-money fundraisers for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and donated gobs of cash to Democrats who he counted on to advance his liberal, “female-first” politics.
Included in The New York Times’ blockbuster expose was this ironic tidbit:
In 2015, the year Ms. O’Connor wrote her memo [outlining Weinstein’s behavior], his company distributed “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about campus sexual assault. A longtime Democratic donor, he hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in his Manhattan home last year. He employed Malia Obama, the oldest daughter of former President Barack Obama, as an intern this year, and recently helped endow a faculty chair at Rutgers University in Gloria Steinem’s name. During the Sundance Film Festival in January, when Park City, Utah, held its version of nationwide women’s marches, Mr. Weinstein joined the parade.
Weinstein’s shameful behavior was hardly a secret in Hollywood, but now the world knows what a hypocrite he has always been.
And he’s hardly alone. Film director Joss Whedon has been one of Hollywood’s most vocal liberals, routinely taking to social media to stand up for feminism. In fact, he even received an Equality Now Award for it.
In August, though, his ex-wife revealed that Whedon used his supposed feminism as a sort of shield for the multiple affairs he had during their marriage—especially when he ran the television show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and used his position of power to get actresses into bed with him.
Whedon’s ex-wife, Kai Cole, wrote:
He deceived me for 15 years, so he could have everything he wanted. I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.
There were times in our relationship that I was uncomfortable with the attention Joss paid other women. He always had a lot of female friends, but he told me it was because his mother raised him as a feminist, so he just liked women better. He said he admired and respected females, he didn’t lust after them.
Only he did. All the time. And all the while, he was using his supposed feminism to cover for his abhorrent behavior.
Just as shamefully hypocritical is the State Street Corporation, a banking institution in New York City that erected the famous “Fearless Girl” statue standing opposite the iconic Wall Street bull. The Fearless Girl became a shining beacon of feminism in the cutthroat, male-dominated world of finance, but it turns out that the only thing that girl needed to fear was her treatment by the State Street Corporation.
On Thursday, it agreed to pay $5 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged it paid hundreds of female employees far less than men.
According to Bloomberg News, "the Labor Department alleged that women in senior leadership positions at Boston-based State Street received lower base salaries, bonus pay and total compensation since at least December 2010."
That’s right: At the same time State Street was basking in the glow of its feminist statue, it was systematically (and illegally) paying women less than men.
It’s ironic, too, that the Democratic Party has ingrained feminism in its platform...yet was perfectly fine with Bill Clinton—who was credibly accused of rape and routinely used his positions of power to manipulate younger women into sleeping with him—as the nation’s first “First Gentleman.” That title alone is ironic when conferred on Clinton.
Similarly, former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner (the now-estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin) was just last week sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for sending sexually explicit text messages to a 15 year-old girl.
Part of his defense was (seriously) that he was simultaneously carrying on extra-marital relationships and sexual conversations with 19 other women, so he didn’t have an unnatural interest in underage girls.
How very feminist of him.
Strangely enough, though, Weiner is far from the only elected Democrat to get into legal trouble over alleged child sex crimes. No fewer than five Democratic mayors have been accused, charged, convicted, or sentenced in the past year alone.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray resigned last month after five men claimed that Murray molested them when they were boys. Rick Nelson, the mayor of Stillwater, New York, resigned last month after he was arrested on child pornography charges. Also last month, Dale Kenyon, the former mayor of Clayton, New York was indicted for allegedly repeatedly sexually abusing a teenager over the course of several years.
In April, former Hubbard, Ohio mayor Richard Keenan was sentenced to life in prison for raping a 4 year-old girl. In January, Christopher Wright, the Democratic mayor of Dawson, Georgia, pleaded no contest to raping a 12 year-old girl.
As sickening as these crimes are, one can’t use them to paint an entire party as hypocritical on women’s issues...unless, of course, that same party lionized Ted Kennedy for decades after he literally left a woman to die so that he wouldn’t get busted for drunk driving. And, of course, that same party trivialized Bill Clinton’s perjury and shameless preying on less-powerful women by claiming for years that “It’s just sex. Who cares if he lied about it?”
Today, every Democrat cares about that sort of power dynamic being exploited. Well, at least they claim to.