Thankfully,
Harvey Weinstein’s political allies aren’t falling for his shtick of
promising to repent and to “channel [his] anger” toward Wayne LaPierre
and the NRA. Over the past two weeks, he has been ritually denounced by
practically every entertainment industry collaborator and political
beneficiary he collected over a remarkable three-decade career in
pictures and politics.
Yet Weinstein is just the latest in a long
line of men whose left-wing politics coexisted harmoniously with
retrograde attitudes about women. In his statement, Weinstein said that
he “came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior
and workplaces were different.” Many people scoffed at this explanation,
as this was precisely the time when women’s liberation brought
workplace sexism to the societal forefront. But Weinstein was right in a
way he didn’t comprehend. Ever since second-wave feminism became part
of the political left, there have been men who, ostensibly enlightened
in the realm of gender relations, are in fact deeply misogynist and
believe that their progressive street cred somehow obviates their
attitudes about women, attitudes as regressive as those held by the Mad Men-era males who ruled the earth just before the sexual revolution.
Revolutionary
movements, often preaching violence and imbued with machismo, lend
themselves easily to chauvinism. Andreas Baader, who formed an eponymous
West German terrorist organization in 1970 with feminist journalist
Ulrike Meinhof, spoke of all women as “cunts.” Like Baader, who would be
remembered solely as a criminal had he not adopted a revolutionary
political agenda to justify his gang’s murder and bombing spree, the
leaders of the Black Panther Party preached a more equitable world while
subjugating the women in their midst. The party newspaper railed against abortion
as “a victory for the oppressive ruling class who will use [abortion]
to kill off Black and other oppressed people before they are born,” and
the birth control pill as “another type of genocide that the power
structure has poured into the Black community.” It once expelled a
member for terminating a pregnancy, and according
to historian Kate Coleman, the group “punished rank-and-file females
for even minor ‘infractions’ by turning them out as prostitutes.”
In his memoir Soul on Ice, Panther “Minister of Information” Eldridge Cleaver
wrote of how he viewed rape as an “insurrectionary act.” After he
“practiced” on black women, he moved onto white ones, as “it delighted
me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his
system of values, and that I was defiling his women.” Panther Party
co-founder and “Minister of Defense” Huey Newton talked a good game when
it came to female equality, publishing a letter in the party newspaper reproving sexism (and homophobia) and declaring “we recognize the women’s right to be free.” Yet Newton authorized the beating of the woman who managed the Panther Liberation School after she reprimanded a male colleague. Oh, and he murdered a 17-year-old prostitute because she referred to him as “baby.”
“Radical Chic,”
the romanticizing of violent revolutionary leftists by genteel
bourgeois liberals, was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 to describe the
party Leonard Bernstein hosted at his Park Avenue Penthouse for the
Panthers. The phenomenon has long since been a feature of progressive
politics. Gerry Healy was a Stalinist who led Britain’s Workers
Revolutionary Party, an “anti-imperialist” groupuscule partly funded by
Muammar Qadafi and Saddam Hussein, whose more presentable patrons
included Vanessa and Corin Redgrave. According
to his former secretary, this man of the people used apartments owned
by the party in a “completely opportunist way for sexual liaisons” to
“degrade women and girl comrades and destroy their self-respect.”
Ultimately, some 26 women accused Healy of “gross sexual abuse.”
According to Vanessa Redgrave, however, “these allegations are all lies
and the women who are supposed to have made them are all liars. I don’t
care whether it’s 26, 36 or 236. They are all liars.” Believe All Women,
in other words, except those who accuse our Dear Leader.
