A new spin-off from the #MeToo Movement, which brought awareness to sexual harassment allegations in the workplace, reveals once again how feminism today isn’t pro-woman or pro-justice; it’s anti-man at the core and seeks power, not equality under the law.
The “Time’s Up” campaign was created by Hollywood actresses who want to expand their fight against “systemic sexual harassment” in the entertainment industry to “blue-collar workplaces nationwide.”
Thousands of actresses and industry insiders have been meeting since the fall to promote solidarity among women and bring about change in the workforce through the following initiatives, as reported in The New York Times:
— A legal defense fund, backed by $13 million in donations, to help less privileged women — like janitors, nurses and workers at farms, factories, restaurants and hotels — protect themselves from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.
— Legislation to penalize companies that tolerate persistent harassment, and to discourage the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence victims.
— A drive to reach gender parity at studios and talent agencies that has already begun making headway.
— And a request that women walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes speak out and raise awareness by wearing black.
“Now, unlike ever before, our access to the media and to important decision makers has the potential of leading to real accountability and consequences,” the Time’s Up campaign states. “We want all survivors of sexual harassment, everywhere, to be heard, to be believed, and to know that accountability is possible.”
To every woman employed in agriculture who has had to fend off unwanted sexual advances from her boss, every housekeeper who has tried to escape an assaultive guest, every janitor trapped nightly in a building with a predatory supervisor, every waitress grabbed by a customer and expected to take it with a smile, every garment and factory worker forced to trade sexual acts for more shifts, every domestic worker or home health aide forcibly touched by a client, every immigrant woman silenced by the threat of her undocumented status being reported in retaliation for speaking up and to women in every industry who are subjected to indignities and offensive behavior that they are expected to tolerate in order to make a living: We stand with you. We support you.
Solidarity in the face of harassment is presented as the goal but — as you can see from the initiatives above — this campaign doesn’t stop at simply holding sexual abusers accountable and providing much-needed financial support to victims. Instead, it forges ahead to seek “gender parity” by putting more women into positions of power — the assumption being that if you had fewer men in leadership positions, there would be less sexual harassment. The goal, therefore, doesn’t seem to be to reform men, but to replace them and thereby remake the system into the image of woman.
The underlying presumption of the campaign, of course, is that there is systemic sexism — now dubbed lack of gender parity — in every aspect of the American society. “Unfortunately, too many centers of power — from legislatures to boardrooms to executive suites and management to academia — lack gender parity and women do not have equal decision-making authority,” the campaign states. “This systemic gender-inequality and imbalance of power fosters an environment that is ripe for abuse and harassment against women.”
Their solution: affirmative action like we’ve never seen before:
We call for a significant increase of women in positions of leadership and power across industries. In addition, we seek equal representation, opportunities, benefits and pay for all women workers, not to mention greater representation of women of color, immigrant women, and lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women, whose experiences in the workforce are often significantly worse than their white, cisgender, straight peers. The struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly.
Impenetrable monopoly? This, despite the fact that more women graduate from high school and college and earn post-graduate degrees than men. While the trend for women becoming better educated is increasing, men are stagnant or falling behind.
For the first time in history, women are the breadwinners in the household. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “Women are now the primary or co-money maker in nearly two thirds of American families and working married women bring home 44% of their family’s income.”
More women own their own businesses than ever, with the only thing standing in their way being personal choices. “Though men still outnumber women in the business world, women continue to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit. Today, 30% of all businesses are owned and operated by women, though other research has put that number closer to 40%. Between 1997 and 2014, the total number of businesses in the United States increased by 47%, but the number of women-owned firms increased by 68% — a rate 1 ½ times the national average.”
Women have as many opportunities to take higher positions as men and earn more, but because of their own choices to come and go in the workplace, they sometimes don’t, which results in not earning as much. Or, even if they get to that same position, they often don’t have the same experience as their male colleagues, resulting in a smaller salary.
Given these realities, what we have is a wage gap, not pay inequality. The former is based on free choices by women, not injustice in the workplace. Despite what the Time’s Up campaign claims, we already have equal pay for equal work in this society, which has been established by law.
“No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back,” Christina Hoff Summers writes as she obliterates several feminist myths. “The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.”
Wage gap activists say women with identical backgrounds and jobs as men still earn less. But they always fail to take into account critical variables. Activist groups like the National Organization for Women have a fallback position: that women’s education and career choices are not truly free—they are driven by powerful sexist stereotypes. In this view, women’s tendency to retreat from the workplace to raise children or to enter fields like early childhood education and psychology, rather than better paying professions like petroleum engineering, is evidence of continued social coercion. Here is the problem: American women are among the best-informed and most self-determining human beings in the world. To say that they are manipulated into their life choices by forces beyond their control is divorced from reality and demeaning, to boot.
What this boils down to is the Time’s Up campaign is repackaged feminist garbage. The only initiative that has any merit is the legal defense fund to help women dealing with sexual harassment. Many women — who are protected by established civil rights laws — never bring charges because they can’t afford the legal costs and they often don’t have a support network around them to challenge those in authority. To offer help in this regard is praiseworthy, and bleeding heart millionaires in Hollywood should focus their efforts here.
The rest of the campaign is pure BS and intersectional nonsense. Penalize companies that tolerate harassment? How will this be determined? Which government task force will infiltrate private companies to weed out which sexual harassment accusations are true or not? If we are to believe all women, as this campaign says, no man and no company would escape the witch hunt. Vengeance, not justice, would be the result.
A drive to reach gender parity in studios and talent agencies? Would this extend to other businesses as well? This seems like the logical progression. This initiative is nothing more than a demand for quotas, putting women in positions of leadership and power not because of their qualifications or because they’ve earned it, but merely because of their sex. This is a step backward for society, not forward, and is reverse sexism at its worst with men as the victims.
Finally, the initiative for women to wear black on the red carpet is mere virtue signaling by privileged entertainers. Eva Longoria says it’s a show of solidarity, not a fashion statement, but it is just more narcissism from a group of women who suffer from liberal guilt over the millions of dollars they make mostly because of their looks (and some talent among a few). The fact that this is even placed alongside a serious initiative like a legal fund reveals how this is really about ego, not heart.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member