It’s great to be a male in 2018 — if you’re a glutton for punishment. There’s no doubt that some men deserve every bit of disapprobation they are receiving. But most #MeToo activists and feminists don’t bother to differentiate between the vast majority of men who are “good,” and the limited number of men who are “bad.”
Case in point: The “#MeToo Fashion Show” held during Fashion Week in New York City. Let’s just say, Victoria’s Secret it wasn’t.
“A fashion show inspired by the #MeToo social media campaign aimed at exposing sexual misconduct across the United States opened on Friday in New York with models sporting angel wings handcuffed to men in pig masks,” according to Reuters. “Dressed in a floor-length black and white gown with leather trim and wings at her shoulders, Cheyenne Jacobs, 22, stopped at the end of the runway to declare herself a survivor of sexual abuse, giving the audience a brief account of being sexually assaulted in high school and raped in college.”
“I would like to take this moment as a stand of my healing, how far I’ve grown and also to say that this is not only a movement, not just stories, but we’re real people who have gone through real things,” Jacobs told Reuters.
“I don’t think this fashion show is going to change things overnight, but if it can be a step further then I guess I’ve done my part. A woman who has been empowered is a woman who is unstoppable,” brainchild Myriam Chalek told Reuters.
“To the pace of trendy music, women from several walks of life, some smiling and others more serious, first strutted down a runway to display their designer clothes, then reappeared handcuffed to male models wearing pink pig masks,” Reuters explained. “Among them was Alicia Kozakiewicz, 29, who was abducted in 2002 near her home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by a man who contacted her online, a case that made international headlines as one of the first such kidnappings of the internet age.”
No woman should have to go through what those and other women have been forced to endure at the hands of men. These were crimes committed against innocents and the perpetrators should be put in jail.
If #MeToo was all about putting men who commit crimes of sexual abuse against women away, no one would be asking questions about it. But putting anonymous men in pig masks and handcuffing them to women who were victims of criminal sexual abuse creates a representative portrayal of all men, not just criminals.
It also lumps men who exhibit behavior that is impolite, unwanted, and loutish, but not criminal, in with men who commit serious crimes. If this isn’t the intent of the activists, it certainly has that effect.
Bill Maher warns of a police state for sex:
Sitting beside Maher, Weiss acknowledged that the #MeToo movement is “long overdue.” But, she added, “The hard left is basically saying it’s OK if a few innocent men go down with the ship if that’s what it takes to bring down the patriarchy. They hate zero tolerance on the right when it comes to drug policy but they love zero tolerance when it comes to sexual misconduct.”
Talk about an argument tailor-made for Bill Maher.
The host expressed the concern that the lesson men are learning from the movement is to “just shut up.” Because when they do speak out, as someone with ostensibly good intentions like Matt Damon has done, they are accused of saying the “wrong” thing. “When you’re wrong even when you say the right thing, then I feel like a husband,” Maher said to groans and a smattering of applause.
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With “the first #MeToo Valentine’s Day” coming up this week, Maher asked, “Who knows what to write in the card?” Then, he added, “You can make anything 100 percent safe. A police state, they always say, is the safest place to live. But you’re in a police state. We don’t want to do that with love.”
The #MeToo movement appears to have been taken over by Stalinists and Puritans — a dangerous combination, indeed. Maher isn’t too out of bounds worrying about a police state for men if the trends continue.
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