in Culture Digest | 09 MAR 18

Weekend Reading List: Monetizing #MeToo

The commodified atmosphere of Time’s Up and the Male Glance: what to read this weekend

in Culture Digest | 09 MAR 18

Civilisations, 2018, film still. Courtesy: BBC

  • Revisiting Katie J.M. Baker on how pick-up artists see the world: ‘What’s blocking the pussy flow in Denmark? The country’s excellent social welfare services. Really.’
     
  • Can there truly be a reckoning for Hollywood while the entertainment industry is so busy celebrating itself? After Weinstein and #MeToo, ‘Hollywood has nimbly absorbed its critiques and converted them into inspirational messaging and digestible branding exercises, just in time for the unfurling of the red carpets’, writes Amanda Hess.
     
  • ‘The male glance is how comedies about women become chick flicks. It’s how discussions of serious movies with female protagonists consign them to the unappealing stable of ‘strong female characters.’ It’s how soap operas and reality television become synonymous with trash.’ Lili Loofbourow on the ‘male glance’ and dismissal of women’s art.
     
  • US true crime TV series Unsolved takes two formative pop cultural events – the killings of Tupac and Biggie – and explores their concealed human stories and systemic narratives.
     
  • ‘The internet made the whisper network clearly legible – and portable. But who was going to monetize it?’ Don’t miss this excellent Moira Weigel essay on #MeToo, online media and precarity.
     
  • If Time magazine once suggested that Steven Pinker ‘crystallizes an intellectual era,’ years later ‘what Pinker has actually crystallized in books like Enlightenment Now is our anti-intellectual era’, writes David Bell.
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