Raping with the Stars

It’s special guest rapist month on ABC’s hit show “Raping with the Stars.” Join us for this “brand new episode” as Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein go “head-to-head” for $100,000.00 towards their “favorite” women’s shelter.

One of entertainment’s most powerful men, Harvey Weinstein, stands exposed as a serial womanizer and a brazen pervert, a fitting symbol of a corrupt Hollywood industry. In not-unrelated news, a few weeks ago pornographer Hugh Hefner died, and was widely eulogized as a cultural revolutionary, a valiant conqueror of sexual repression.

These regrettable headlines reveal the sick state of American morality.

Weinstein had been at his gross escapades for decades. He targeted dozens of women. Many acquiesced to his salacious demands, and many more to his threats to keep quiet, fearing harm to their careers.

Suddenly, everyone is appalled. Politicians who accepted millions of his dollars are acting disgusted and shocked. But Weinstein’s behavior was no secret. Everyone knew. Employees around him helped; untold numbers—including his political connections—looked the other way. His sins were condoned and nurtured within the fetid incubator that is America’s entertainment industry. He thrived within a vast system of complicity.

Pretending like Weinstein was an anomaly in Hollywood is as phony as a Styrofoam movie prop. Weinstein was abetted by a “casting-couch culture” that has pervaded his industry from its earliest days.

Nobody can be genuinely shocked at this man’s amorality. Hollywood glamorizes amorality. That this powerful producer—whose movies have made billions of dollars and garnered dozens of prestigious film awards—could commit these sexual crimes for so long highlights the nature of the people he mixed with and the product he peddled.

How can society suddenly condemn his actions, which are justifiably condemnable, yet not recognize the problem with the films that disseminate this culture far and wide? How is a secluded solicitation worse than one that is recorded and circulated? It is ridiculous to believe society can freely enjoy the latter without having to deal with the former as an ugly consequence.

Since the truths about Weinstein have emerged, others have denounced him—only to be subsequently exposed for similar sins of their own. More and more women are emerging with accusations against more and more actors and industry leaders.

One former child star insists that sexual harassment of women in Hollywood is secondary to the greater problem of sexual harassment of children. His explosive charge was backed up by the 2015 documentary “An Open Secret,” which exposed the “pedophilia epidemic” in entertainment.

These are people with enormous social influence. These are people Americans subsidize and idolize. They shape society’s attitudes, guide its standards and mores, animate its dreams.

America “is a hypocritical nation” for good reason. Hollywood culture is epically hypocritical. It masquerades as feminist and pro-women, while it treats women as sex objects—both in parlors at private parties and in the cinema reels purposefully intended to arouse lust.

It is anti-gun in the political arena but ceaselessly romanticizes gun violence on the silver screen. Its moral standards are as fake as its movie sets. Perhaps this shouldn’t shock us in an industry whose business is playacting, whose product is image.

A lot of people are getting a self-righteous charge out of condemning one movie producer right now. The Motion Picture Academy booted him and said, “The era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over.”

We’ll see. But don’t expect the product to change.

At first I didn’t realize “Raping with the Stars” was a documentary but now I know how Liane Cartman got her part on South Park.