There's another way to extrapolate significance from the reverberations accruing from the Harvey Weinstein scandal and it's about this: Money.
As many pundits have told us, sexual harassment is often about power and subordination and money is – as we all know – emphatically about power. As long as women are paid less than men in Hollywood they have less power.
The significance was brought home to me while in Ireland recently and I watched the repercussions from the Weinstein scandal unfold locally.
It was mostly a matter of revelations by women about sexual harassment they'd experienced while working in Irish television and radio. A meteorologist who is a familiar face on TV there said that when she first started working in her job, a male colleague asked her out on dates so persistently it became harassment. She would turn him down and he would claim, "You're leading me on" because she had once smiled at him.
A former radio reporter and pundit recalled that when she was first working on RTE Radio (RTE, like CBC, is a public- and commercial-broadcasting hybrid), a male colleague would disrobe. "There was this guy who, if you were doing an interview live on the air or if you were more likely reading a story, he would come in and sit down beside you and he would remove all of his clothing below the waist."
These stories dated from about 20 years ago. But what is happening now at RTE, like the BBC, is a scandal involving gender-pay equity. At RTE, in just one example, a female TV news presenter, it turns out, is paid "considerably less" than her male co-presenter. At the BBC it has been revealed that only one-third of its top-earning stars are women. And, across all levels at the broadcaster, men are paid 9.3-per-cent more than women. This is a livid issue over there, and rightly so.
Two years before sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood became a major issue, the hacking of e-mails from Sony Pictures divulged that many major women movie stars are paid considerably less than lesser-known male co-stars. Regrettably, the issue faded.
One shocker was that Jennifer Lawrence did not have financial parity with her male co-stars Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale in the movie American Hustle. This seems unnervingly weird, even in the crazy economics of Hollywood movie-making. In this context "star-power" seems to mean something entirely different if you're a woman.
Lawrence addressed the issue in an oddly insider-ish forum, a newsletter distributed by Lena Dunham and Girls producer Jenni Konner. But she was blunt. "When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn't get mad at Sony, I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn't want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don't need."
Lawrence also made a telling declaration, writing that women stars who try to cut a deal for more money or higher wages worry about appearing "difficult" or "spoiled."
The same Sony hack compelled Salma Hayek, Gwyneth Paltrow and Meryl Streep to speak out about the gender-pay gap in Hollywood. Patricia Arquette used her Oscar acceptance speech in 2015 to demand, "It's our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America." The speech, as did the remarks by Paltrow and Streep, drew as much scorn as praise.
Now, it is hard to get worked up about the astronomical pay scales for Hollywood movie stars. And it is true that in television, pay-parity is easier to achieve because female stars of hit shows sometimes have the heft to negotiate massive fees. Sofia Vergara of Modern Family and Kaley Cuoco of Big Bang Theory earn about $28-million (U.S.) a season, the same as Jim Parsons earns for playing Sheldon on Big Bang.
But there is a direct connection between money earned and power. Women in Hollywood who earn the equivalent of men are not in a subordinate position and at risk of exploitation. Money earned is a litmus test and represents the capacity to rebuff predatory and exploitative behaviour. As long as women are paid less in the entertainment and media worlds, those arenas are rife with undisguised, observable subordination. Predators prey on subordinates in Hollywood and in life.