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Louis C.K. was trending on Twitter because his Madison Square Garden concert was sold out, which some on the left are interpreting to mean that cancel culture is not real, or that it does not hurt people's careers. (link: https://archive.is/ryKrI )
What does it mean to be sufficiently canceled? I think Louis C.K. qualifies as having been sufficiently cancelled. If you look at his Wikipedia page, his sexual misconduct scandal, in 2017, killed off his TV and movie career. His filmography abruptly ends in 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_C.K._filmography
Sure he's still able to sell out, but this reflects individual preferences for his comedy, not the approval of the media establishment, in which he is still damaged goods. Comedians are sorta like contractors in the sense that they have to hustle, not depend on a platform or the backing of a major media establishment. I think this is is what gives comedians an advantage over actors in regard to cancellation, because stand-up comedy can be inexpensively distributed at scale, such as digitally online, without needing the backing of an entire studio or publishing house.
Louis CK was the biggest stand-up comedian before Chapelle came back. MSG was Louis CK's playground, with him doing sets there whenever he wished. He talks about how nervous he was about his MSG set, the amount of work that went into it and how different it felt.
For one, nothing Louis CK did was criminal. From the sounds of it, he never pulled his dick out unless the other person provided consent for it, and he was never in an explicit boss-employee relationship with women he approached. Yes, it was creepy, inept, unethical & sad. But it's amateur hour as far as showbiz goes. After Aziz, Louis CK was cancelled for the least egregious of the #metoo accusations.
Louis CK's entire persona was of a sad lonely dad in a tragic-comedy. If anything, this plays straight into it. If they/them Ezra Miller still gets to play a role model character after doing some actually criminal stuff, then CK's humble image would be expected to be resilient to accusations of being the person his comedy has portrayed him as for 30 years.
If that's the claim, then it sounds like the exception that proves the rule.
90s rappers killed people and were embraced by the institution. Now people are losing jobs over suspicions of being republican.
P.S : Just to be clear, no justifying his behavior. It was obviously degenerate. Don't idolize entertainers. IMO, his temporary banishment from institutions & public apology was appropriate punishment. It is probably fair for women actors to not want to work with him again too. It's their choice. But the global scale of bullying & still-continuing blackout are honestly a bit much.
Really? Is that true? I didn't follow the story closely at all, so I'm only inferring details. But if he didn't do anything without them saying they were okay with it, then why was he cancelled at all?
Because no one actually believes in a consent-only sexual ethic. That's mostly a lie in order to gather political support for various deviancies. The constant haranguing over what exactly is actually actually ackshually consent is indicative of the keyhole by which every other aspect of their preferred sexual ethic is smuggled in.
The easiest way to internalize this, to know it in your bones, is to go to the professional ethicists who write serious scholarly works on the topic, like Westen/Wortheimer. If you are looking for it while you read them, you can see it plain as day, and then it becomes nearly impossible to not see it anymore.
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As others have said, he was absolutely manipulating consent. It's nothing men and women haven't done since they learned to court, but American morals have settled on the stance that manipulated consent doesn't count.
The most common manipulation is moving the relationship faster than the other party is comfortable with, but not that fast that they think they have a valid reason to oppose any single step: dinner date - offer to walk her home - kiss - invite yourself in for a coffee - ask for another kiss - ask for a tour - kiss her again in the bedroom - make out in the bedroom - move to the bed - undress - go down - have penetrative sex.
That's what "yes means yes" is about: you have zero obligations to take your relationship to the next step. Placing someone into a situation where they might have other reasons to do sex-adjacent activity X other than "I want to do X" is a move that will get you cancelled if it backfires.
And backfire on Louis it did.
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My understanding is:
On around 5 known occasions between 2000-2010, he approached women in private
He asked them if he could pull his dick out and masturbate in front of them. In at least 3 cases, this is after he had invited them back to his hotel room.
Some of them were people he had indirect professional relationships with. Afaik, it was never an explicit power dynamic. (they were trying to hire him, he worked with her boyfriend, they were rising comedians in the same industry)
The women gave him some verbal form of consent. (ofc, I dunno if it was an enthusiastic "yes" or a "do whatever you want, you creep"). Louid CK claims he got consent in every situations. Some women say that they didn't say no, not that they said yes.
On one occasion he talked about something sexual with another woman on the phone who was the girlfriend of a coworker who was trying to book him for a show. In this case, she did not give explicit consent to talking about sexual stuff on phone with him. He also started masturbating but afaik, the exchange was purely over phone.
I mean, it is bad. But is it that bad ?
Louis CK should've probably taken his own advice.
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This point highlights a cultural undercurrent I've noticed since the morality of power dynamics has taken center stage in the woke transformation of culture. It's the idea that its not OK for a man with social status to actually gain any benefit from that status, at least outside of vary narrow constraints. Wealth, leadership, talent, etc are all traits that are attractive to women. But there's a growing thought that a man with those traits should not use them for e.g. sexual advantage. The intent seems to be to put constraints on the scale of sexual success of men, in a way that is never analogously applied to women.
I'm reminded of a post on one of the relationship advice subreddits where a woman told of how her fiance found out that she was very sexually promiscuous in college. Aside from just having a large number of partners, she also fucked 4 guys at once, and her fiance was questioning the future of the relationship. The response was near universal support of the woman's behavior and that it was unconscionable that any man should have a problem with one's past sexual history, regardless of how extreme. But on the flip side, a guy with some trait that makes him hyper attractive is supposed to restrain himself for the sake of other women or society or whatever. Case-in-point, all the consternation over Leonardo DiCaprio's relationship history. Another example being all the hate Nick Cannon gets for having so many kids.
I certainly understand historical taboos against sexual promiscuity as it puts serious strain on social stability. But when only one side of this dynamic is being upheld (male sexual restraint) while the other side is being completely freed from all such constraints, it points towards a deeper motivation. Namely, that the trend is towards an anti-masculine, pro-feminine moral standard. To be charitable, perhaps this pro-feminine bias isn't the intent but rather the side effect. A moral standard that is biased towards empowering the weaker party in an exchange will systematically be biased towards women in any male-female interaction. The problem is that the standard ends up removing agency from women in the process. For example, you can't say that DiCaprio or Cannon is doing something immoral unless you also say their partners have reduced agency.
I suppose the constraint was applied by biology: women have less reason to go for maximal competition because they have a limited number of potential total offspring. Men do not.
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Interestingly, this mimics another comment I just saw: the upper classes of Western countries have pivoted to be against labor and for capital.
Because men sociobiologically code as expendable labor (supply-side gender), and women as valuable capital (demand-side gender), and these conditions continue, we should expect this to persist until one of those change.
Why's it so bad now? You could say it's just a reaction to the sexual revolution, but I believe it's because the niche and social role of labor has shrunk massively since industrialization to the point some countries now consider themselves "post-industrial"; those countries also consider themselves "post-national" (immigrant and border stances- men logically care about this more than women because they're the labor gender and thus cheap replacements here threaten their position in a way they don't for women, and you can see this gender divide reflected in polling) and "post-men" (rampant inequality favoring women in what should ostensibly be equal partnerships- family courts, sex-based spoils systems, etc.).
In that light, maybe it's not that weird that current counter-culture is currently dominated by women becoming men? If "woman good", what better "fuck you exclusively-female authority figures" than "now I'm a man"?
It's also worth noting that between 1940 and 1970, the script was temporarily flipped due to the German (later American) sponsored total destruction of European industry. Which is... interesting that that's exactly what America has been doing to Europe and China now.
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I was recently at drinks with colleagues after a work event, when one of the senior directors suggested we all go to a strip club. Actually, two sr. drs were really leading the rally, I was very worried about the stability of my position, and actually wanted to work in one of those Directors' divisions.
Nobody was forced to go, but when I declined, it was public, I was alone, it was to clear disappointment / loss of esteem of people I really depended on being liked by for the sake of my career. It made me upset and uncomfortable that I was even put in that position in a supposedly professional scenario. And hell, I even chewed on just saying yes, and justifying it for 'career reasons'.
I'm mid thirties and a male. I would not have had the moral fortitude to say no in my early 20s.
I am no shrinking progressive, but Me Too was right to figure out that a binary statement of consent are not enough to classify sexual misconduct by. People defending that line looked like foolish idealistic hippy liberals.
Hot take: you should've went to the strip club and your superiors were correct in losing esteem for you and being disappointing.
Same logic applies if they asked to go duck hunting or kayaking.
No one should be that pressured to go to shitty corporate social events that they have no interest in. I don't mean to say shame on any boss who wants to do something fun with their subordinates, but the expectation that you go, even if it's something you dislike? Or doing something you might have moral reservations against, as with strip clubs or hunting? And all this to the point of potentially facing genuine consequences to your future prospects if you have the balls to refuse?
As someone who hates alcohol and everything surrounding it, I'm glad this culture is dying, because these things sound like my personal idea of hell. For god's sake, just let me do my job instead of going to a bar during my own free time, please. These events aren't about everyone having a good time, they're about the boss having a good time, and everyone else is partaking in a brown-nosing competition if they don't coincidentally happen to enjoy whatever activity is settled upon.
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"Should", what he "should" have done depends rather heavily on desired outcomes.
Personally I think he did good by showing some spine, toadying is bad for the soul.
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Of course. And I'm not making a point about the objective morality of strip clubs or whether the folks I was among did anything wrong.
My story is simply an example of where 'they said yes, what's the problem' is far to binary to be a discussion ending heuristic.
Pressure to be liked / career advancement / social belonging (and yes drinks) , etc can all mitigate a yes enough that the person doing the asking should not have brought it up and did something wrong for some spectrum of degree.
If Louis says 'can I show you my penis'...
on a date after the girl invited him up vs
in a dressing room while on the road with an upcoming comedianne who wasn't expecting any sexual advances
vs to a young saleswomen on a call who just confessed that she needs his business to hit her quota.
These are three different scenarios where acting on a no is certainly worse than on a yes... But a yes doesn't blanket make them all the same and make it ok for Louis to ask in the first place.
But surely that has to be part of the point, or else we are veering dangerously close to /r/antiwork "my boss is abusing me by threatening to fire me if I don't show up for work" territory.
I don't think so? For instance, if your boss asks you if he can give you $1000, it's still problematic. Getting financial support from a supervisor may be bad for you emotionally for various reasons, even though it's very hard to see it as morally bad. So I think there's a strong point that the argument holds regardless of the moral quality of the act in itself.
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This piece says he asked Goodman and Wolov, who then "laughed it off"; the later summary doesn't really describe what that meant. In the unnamed Chris Rock Show actress's case, she "went along with his request" but was later disgusted. In Corry's case, she declined and he stopped. Schachner's phone call is described as "definitely wasn’t encouraging it". If accurately described, where Corry's case seems like evidence he'd take explicit nos as cause to stop, at least the Schachner call does not sound like provided consent.
There are some issues separate to consent related to masturbating at the office during work hours, and where there may have been disparities of power (although I dunno that Chris Rock's writing staff had that much power over actors and actresses). Separately and most seriously, CK's then-manager Dave Becky threatened Goodman and Wolov's then-manager about potential ramifications for disclosure.
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From what I recall from the stories it was an almost childish form of 'seeking permission'. Basically he seemed to spring it fast and then, if no one immediately and vociferously objected, he...um, quickly followed through.
The image that comes to mind is an overeager kid going "umcanIkissyou" and then "but you didn't say no!".
My opinion is that it's the sort of defense ("but he asked!") that only seems acceptable when all norms except consent have been so eroded (by the sexual revolution and the same tribe now pushing #MeToo) that only the barest, hyper-literal contractionism counts.
At this point liberal feminism has so thoroughly
corruptedshaped mores that it's fighting its own twisted children.Hmm, I guess I'd feel better about that if they ever took responsibility for what they've done, and actually blamed feminism, past or present, for any bad thing that happens, as opposed to just saying "it's patriarchy". Like Scott so eloquently put in his least favorite post for people to link to:
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You could almost say that they have chosen the form of their destructor.
Or that they called up that which they could not put down.
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Louis would definitely cross the streams
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That doesn't matter either; the meta-rule is just "woman good, man bad".
An inherently sexist movement was always going to end badly, just as the racist ones do; this is why the only stable equilibrium (and what feminism originally started with) over time has been "people who can do the work good, people who can't do the work bad".
After all, the latter category already has levers they can pull to get their way; no need to give them any more than that.
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CK's crime was taking old feminism at face value: treating women as equals who are capable of consenting to sexual interactions (which is how it ought to be, IMO).
What he didn't understand, as a good liberal, is that he was guilty of original sin before doing anything, and that new feminism's model posits that women are always weak victims who are trivially easy to manipulate and should therefore, paradoxically, hold more positions of governmental and corporate power.
This is way too "boo outgroup"--you can certainly argue that this is what the model accomplishes, but simply saying so is inflammatory without evidence. Don't do this please.
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From here (that article argues that it is still a problem, even if he asked):
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Because they weren't actually okay with it.
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