But at the heart of the matter were these two stories. Until very recently, the public preferred the one that allowed Allen to continue making films, films in which relatively impotent young women were willingly relating to older, more powerful men.
Last summer and fall, while my wedding was quietly imploding, I spent the little free time I had running around the park near my Brooklyn apartment, trying, I think, to discover my own story, 5.3 miles at a time. As he ran, he listened to “You’re Wrong About”, an irreverent and sharp podcast that frequently discusses maligned women of the 80s, 90s and 2000s – Anna Nicole Smith, Tonya Harding, Janet Jackson, Monica Lewinsky, half a dozen more.
These stories are very hairy in terms of individual guilt, but in all cases, popular culture has found a way to blame the woman, often to excuse a more guilty man. Take, for example, Janet Jackson’s Nipplegate, a scandal that never touched Justin Timberlake. Or Monica Lewinsky, portrayed as a slut, as if this somehow negated the outrageous imbalance of power in Bill Clinton’s relationship with her. This is reminiscent of another lesson I learned from the media in the 80s and 90s: the only good victim is the perfect victim. Otherwise, it was probably her fault.
This particular narrative reappears in the recent documentary “Framing Britney Spears”. This film shows the media at the turn of the century eager to tell a story about a star acting inappropriately, a party girl going crazy when she should be home. “Britney: Out of Control,” read a cover for Us Weekly. Who’s control? Conveniently, the tabloid framing places Spears’ spiral on his own bare feet. This avoids impugning people with real power, magazine editors and record executives who have shaped, policed and profited from their image.
I asked Sarah Marshall, journalist and presenter of “Você é Wrong”, because popular culture likes to portray women as accomplices and deserving of contempt. “It justifies subjugating them,” she said. “If women are taken out at random because they have what we see as an alarming degree of power, even if it is not, then perhaps they are more afraid of how they exercise it.”