MeToo is over. MeToo goes on.
In less ambivalent news, one of my favourite plays of all time opens at Soulpepper
In this dispatch:
🌴The Hockey Canada Verdict
🌴The Long Play Live leaves one person unhappy
🌴A MAGA musician basks in cancellation publicity provided free of charge by (checks notes) Canada
🌴South Park trolls Trump bigly and beautifully
🌴And in the dog days of summer, Harold Pinter’s Old Times
Does the Hockey Canada verdict — and the neutral to unsympathetic to the complainant media coverage around it — confirm the end of the MeToo era? If Rosie DiManno’s piece is anything to go by, yes. The op-ed is dripping with contempt for the woman who first settled then went to court when the police reopened the case, and now gets to keep the settlement money even after the acquittal of the defendants.
Other persuasive takes circulate, though - for example, those questioning the suitability of the concept of 'consent’ as the be-all and end-all in ambiguous sexual situations. That is the bare minimum liberal basics; what if we judge a situation by something greater, for example if it leads to a long-term good for everyone involved? Or at least for women, in whose interest it is to be more selective about sexual partners? Is “Bonnie Blue” really consenting to filming herself doing it with 1000+ men for enormous amounts of money? Janice Turner could find no childhood trauma or anything of that sort when she interviewed her - but still thinks the consent talk insufficient here. Is anyone working in sex trade for bare survival really consenting? (Are middle-class educated sex workers and upper-income CamGirls like Aella genuinely consenting? It’s very hard to argue that they are not.) The cases in which individuals choose self-destruction freely and of a sane mind can break a liberal’s brain. Some of us who grew up in authoritarian, traditionalist societies surrounded by strong family and kinship ties, strict rules and shame-informed morality, if we make it through, philosophically, to liberalism, tend to be the most level-headed liberals. We have kept the urgency of the search for good life, and brought it with us into a freer society where it can stretch its wings. Liberal societies themselves, it appears, haven’t been great at producing the pluralism-informed stable selfhood that can sort its notions of good by primacy.
In other words, I don’t think that liberalism is producing the populace of the kind of mettle needed to maintain a liberal democracy.
Blah blah. The recurring debates inside my head as I go for walks need not interest you. Unlike Sean Diddy Combs fans, the Hockey Canada defendants supporters are not exactly partying. All of the men involved are on indefinite leave and HC has lost major sponsors. The time-line of the sad spectacle of sexual assault cases and professional hockey players dating back to the 2018 and involving interventions from the Trudeau Jr government at various points can be found here.
This isn’t a judgement about morality, but about criminality, said the (female) judge who acquitted the players.
The Long Play Live on MeToo
…with Phoebe Maltz Bovy went well on Tuesday, until I began to wrap up and the venue staffer present that evening signalled her displeasure - I presume at the range of opinions expressed in the preceding two hours.
First I was told “I need everyone out by 9pm”, which is not the usual way that the rental venues signal the approaching of the end of the time slot to the paying customer. OK, I thought, maybe there’s another event coming up at 9 pm, or she needs to get home very fast after the shift. Fine. The audience members who lingered on and socialized among themselves noticed my frantic removal of the folding chairs and joined in (guys, this wasn’t my intention! I usually remove chairs on my own). “Are you booked to have another one of these??” was the next thing the bartended lady asked, looking none too pleased. When I tried to remove my poster from the window, she warned me: “Careful. Don’t take down that whole thing.” Okaaay.
Phoebe later told me she had spotted her grimacing across the room while we were talking. “It is what it is”, Phoebe added, which, true. But it seems that we avoided a rebellion. As a few of us chatted outside the venue, I could see the staffer turning the lights off and then sitting down at the bar in the glow of her phone, typing. Here’s a complaint being written, going straight to the owner, I thought.
Not much happened since.