Our nation is about to be transformed, thanks to the #MeToo movement. I am not speaking about a cessation of sexual predation in the workplace. If that were the only consequence of #MeToo, the movement would clearly be a force for good. Unfortunately, its effects are going to be more sweeping and destructive. #MeToo is going to unleash a new torrent of gender and race quotas throughout the economy and culture, on the theory that all disparities in employment and institutional representation are due to harassment and bias. The resulting distortions of decision-making will be largely invisible; we will usually not know of the superior candidates for a job who were passed over in the drive for gender parity. But the net consequence will be a loss of American competitiveness and scientific achievement.
Pressures for so-called diversity, defined reductively by gonads and melanin, are of course nothing new. Since the 1990s, every mainstream institution has lived in terror of three lethal words: “all white male,” an epithet capable of producing paroxysms of self-abasement. Silicon Valley start-ups and science labs quake before the charge of being all or mostly male; their varied ethnic demographics earn them no protection from the diversity racket. The New York Times recently criticized the board of fashion giant H&M for being “entirely white.” We can therefore infer that there are females on the H&M board, or else the Times would have let loose with the bigger gun: “all white male.” When both categories of alleged privilege—white and male—overlap, an activist is in the diversity sweet spot, his power over an institution at its zenith.
But however pervasive the diversity imperative was before, the #MeToo movement is going to make the previous three decades look like a golden age of meritocracy. No mainstream institution will hire, promote, or compensate without an exquisite calculation of gender and race ratios. Males in general, and white males in particular, will have to clear a very high bar in order to justify further deferring that halcyon moment of gender equity.
Hollywood and the media are already showing the #MeToo effect. At this year’s Oscar awards lunch, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, John Bailey, prefaced his remarks by noting that he was a “75-year-old white man.” Bailey was trying to get out ahead of the curve, since if he hadn’t pointed out this shameful status, feminist crusaders in the press and the industry would have done so for him. Witness actress Natalie Portman’s sneer in presenting the best director prize at the 2018 Golden Globe awards: “And here are the all-male nominees.” Such shallow bean counting is now going to become the automatic response to any perceived lack of “diversity” in entertainment.
Naturally, Bailey announced reparations for the Academy’s predominantly white male profile: henceforth it would “balance gender, race, ethnicity, and religion” in all its activities and would double its female and minority members by 2020. Needless to say, this was not enough. Outside the lunch, the National Hispanic Media Coalition protested the lack of proportional ethnic representation in Oscar nominations and acting roles.
CBS is considering only females to fill the anchor slot at Face the Nation, to catch up with The Today Show, which now has two female anchors. The Recording Academy, which oversees the Grammys, has promised to overcome the “unconscious biases that impede female advancement” in the music industry, after bean-counting complaints from The Wall Street Journal’s pop music critic and female music executives.
The prospect of left-wing entertainment moguls having to sacrifice their box office judgment to identity politics is an unalloyed pleasure, and of little consequence to society at large. But quota-izing will hardly be limited to Hollywood.
Major publishing houses are analyzing their author lists by gender and race and making publishing decisions accordingly. What books get reviewed and who reviews them will increasingly be determined according to gender and race. There are likely no major newspapers that are not tallying reporter and op-ed bylines, as well as the topics they cover, by gender and race. In 2005, professional feminist Susan Estrich preposterously accused Michael Kinsley, then running the Los Angeles Times editorial pages, of excluding female writers. Naturally, Estrich ignored the fact that males are disproportionately interested in public affairs, as demonstrated by lopsided sex ratios among op-ed submissions and letters to the editor. Eighty-seven percent of contributors to Wikipedia are male. There are no allegedly sexist gatekeepers at Wikipedia screening out females; contributions are anonymous and open to all. But males are more oriented towards highly fact-based realms.
Now, however, sterile bean-counting exercises such as Estrich’s have gone in-house. In response to the #MeToo movement, The New York Times created a “gender editor” who presides over a “gender initiative” to infuse questions of gender throughout all the Times’ coverage. A recent front-page product of this #MeToo initiative covered the earth-shattering problem facing NFL cheerleaders: to wit, they have a dress code and are forbidden from fraternizing with the players. Despite these allegedly patriarchal conditions, females are still lining up to be hired, to the puzzlement of the Times.
Publisher Meredith Corp. has come in for the usual criticism after buying the floundering Time, Inc. late last year. “They’re basically all middle-aged white males from the Midwest,” grumbled a Time staffer, who, you would think, would be in no position to complain. Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is offering leadership training exclusively to females to try to meet its short-term goal of 40 percent female executives.
Corporate boardrooms, executive suites, and management structures are going to be scoured for gender and race imbalances. Diversity trainers are already sensing a windfall from #MeToo. Gender, diversity, and inclusion were the dominant themes at this January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The conference was chaired exclusively by women. Windows were emblazoned with slogans like “Diversity is good for business” and “Gender equality is a social and economic issue.” CEOs shared their techniques for achieving gender equity. It’s actually quite simple: pay managers based on their record of hiring and promoting females and minorities, as Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta explained. Never mind the fact that by introducing irrelevant criteria such as race and gender into an evaluation process, you will inevitably end up with less qualified employees.
“Never let a crisis go to waste.” This is mere quest for power, using recent sexual abuse revelations (by mostly liberals) as the excuse.
when one becomes a man-vagina do they receive a vagina hat as a symbol of membership.so how different is a snowflake male form a man-vagina?? remember when black activists posing as students took over Cornell university with shotguns and rifles?? probably not! so when does the violence begin for this movement? guns always follow. imagine, in a world of diversity, assimilated individuals, all male, will be castrated at age 10.so how dose the radicalized terrorist ex-pres who is gayer than hell continues to exist in the muslin world??