#metoo

Gstaad   It’s party time here. From the richest billionaires down to those impoverished souls with only a few million to their name, the joint is jumpin’. Last week one tycoon converted his mega chalet into a nightclub and the music boomed away all night. Everyone who attended turned into Beethoven after one hour, which improved the situation in a way. People talk such rubbish nowadays that it was a relief to point at one’s ears and shake one’s head. I did not last long. I’ve been deaf ever since. My son came home at 5 a.m. Next week we’ve got an Italian countess’s blast from the past. I hope

Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be cancelled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts a school of frenzied piranhas. So journalists would be fools to sign a document voided if, in a magazine’s ‘sole judgment’, they were the subject of ‘public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals’. These are the ‘morality clauses’ arising in standard publishing contracts in the wake of #MeToo. Primarily a Hollywood weapon of the 1930s and

It’s over a year since the #MeToo scandal of sexual harassment broke. It has shaken up our culture and relationships in so many ways over the past 12 months. It isn’t going away, either, as the allegations about Sir Philip Green this week have shown. But it has now reached a point where it could either improve or severely damage the way in which serious allegations are dealt with justly. The whole movement has been extremely messy. This was inevitable, given the number of people, mostly women, who have had to put up with being ignored or belittled when they complain even about serious sexual assault, let alone more subtle

Halloween used to be easy. It was a fancy-dress party: you could wear whatever you liked. The idea was to have fun. As teens, my friends and I would dress up as ghouls, spiders or witches, with cones of black paper on our heads. When we became more mature, Halloween turned into a tarty affair. We thought this seemed authentic, somehow all-American. Our costumes became flimsier and more flammable. One girlfriend made a habit of always going dressed as ‘sexy cat’. Inevitably, somebody would dress as a zombie Princess Diana or Amy Winehouse, or another celebrity who had died unpleasantly. The more risqué the better. I was once served a

It hasn’t always been easy being a progressive-minded man who prides himself on his sensitivity to issues of race, gender, feminism and sexual exploitation — and still gets to walk on the wild side. Political principles tend to get in the way of politically incorrect passions. You like to watch porn, but as a good feminist man you know that porn exploits women. You like to take cocaine, but it exploits poor Latin American farmers and enriches corrupt drug cartels. And maybe you have a secret passion for prostitutes, but you hate the idea that you’re paying for sex with some underage Albanian who’s been trafficked for your gratification. No

‘There are two sides to every story’ is an aphorism you don’t hear often lately. Ask anyone amidst a family row: most stories have more than two sides. But in the take-no-prisoners world of #MeToo, there’s only one side. All women are victims and all women are truthful. Any man who’s had a shadow of doubt cast on his sexual behaviour since his first wet dream at 12 is deserving of permanent social and professional banishment and is forever forbidden from saying a word in his own defence. As the editor-in-chief of the respected New York Review of Books found out. Ostensibly Ian Buruma resigned, but resignation over your own

Quite a long time, five seconds, when you count it. And ever since Netflix reportedly warned its employees not to stare at a colleague for longer than that, the paradoxical effect is, inevitably, to make you stare and count. The company’s new guideline is, of course, all part of corporate America’s response to the #MeToo scandal and if the Netflix directive is anything to go by, it’s going to result in the human race dying out in the US, because no one will be able to make a pass at anyone else, ever. It’s not that the individual prohibitions are onerous or particularly unreasonable; it’s that the collective effect can

The film awards season is over and Cannes has been handed back to wealthy holiday-makers, yet the #MeToo movement shows no signs of slowing down. Morgan Freeman is the most recent addition to the ignominious list of film producers, directors and actors who have had accusations of sexual harassment made against them since #MeToo took off in October last year. Allegations against the 80 year-old Freeman, star of The Shawshank Redemption, emerged last week on the day before Harvey Weinstein handed himself into police in New York on charges of rape. The charges against Weinstein are serious; he should stand trial and, if found guilty, face a lengthy prison sentence. Yet the