Don’t Stare. Don’t Blink.

Imagine having a company policy about how long you’re allowed to look at someone.  Just think about that.  Maybe you have a few guys here or there that like to stare when that coworker of yours comes in wearing a skirt that’s a size too small for her.  Or maybe you have those socially awkward men with have intense gazes who never break eye-contact when they’re speaking.  Or maybe you have employees that actually look at people when they start talking.  Well, I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted!  Welcome to #metoo!

Yes, this is a real article. No, it’s not hyperbole or fake news or a spoof.  If you’re working on a Netflix production, and you’re a male, you’d better watch that wandering gaze of yours.

“Senior staff went to a harassment meeting to learn what is and isn’t appropriate. Looking at anyone longer than five seconds is considered creepy.”

This is the sort of thing you’d cull from an Onion article.  We’ve had spoofs-that-became-reality before, but when the reality is regulations handed down from corporate about how long you’re allowed to look at another human being, it’s time to turn in any pretenses of civility.  The company will monitor your intentions—and how will they do that?  It’s simple really; just start timing every interaction you have with relation to how long you’re looking at someone.  That seems to make sense.  It makes you wonder if they’ll drag in consultants with stopwatches when they find that the sexual harassment reports, rather than declining, actually increases because of this.

It’s important to remember that #metoo—like just about every movement referred to by a hashtag—began without evidence and purely on the basis of accusations.  Some of them were legitimate accusations that ended up being substantiated, and others weren’t.  As the months have dragged on, it’s gone from a weapon used to attack Hollywood culture and turned into another means of SJW attack.

It’s obvious how this is going to unfold.  Netflix hasn’t simply acknowledged the #metoo movement, it’s embraced it.  Are women are complaining that men look at them while they’re on set?  Probably not, actually—at least not in any capacity that resembles legitimate sexual harassment claims.  But who cares, maybe a few feminists in corporate decided to inflict their misery on the rest of their employees.  So today, it’s a company-wide moratorium on six-second gazes.  Like any good HR department, I can only assume that they’ve cracked down on jokes, compliments, and nicknames, so timing interactions is ne next sensible move.

But the atmosphere at Netflix will get worse.  Men will simply stop looking at women altogether.  You think that one socially-stunted guy on set is creepy for staring at your legs?  Try holding conversations with every man at work when they’re constantly looking somewhere else and refuse to even look at you.  Then we can look forward to company-wide mandates on the minimum amount of time needed for visual contact.  Look at me when I’m talking to you!  But not too long!  Five seconds ends when I tell you it ends!

It’s almost comical in how pathetic this all comes across.  For a hundred years, feminism has attempted to position itself as a viable alternative the stay-at-home mother—itself a strawman which didn’t even apply to the middle class women that the suffragette movement originally targeted.  But if it wasn’t obvious before, it should be now: this has nothing to do with helping women.  Feminism is about destroying social cohesion by putting into mandate the sort of self-importance, petulance, and inflexibility that toddlers display.  All it takes is a few bad apples raised by crummy parents to end up in positions of power and the next thing you know, jealousy and vice are the metrics by which to gauge employee productivity.  It’s a form of political control, and it always has been.

And the thing is that it isn’t even a matter of conspiracy.  A regulation like Netflix’s is so idiotic that it could only have been implemented by the kind of scatterbrained moron who’s too stupid to take part in a conspiracy.  It’s the result of thinking that produces articles like this: pure thoughtlessness crystalized into its most apparent autistic form.

To be fair to the #metoo movement, I have heard from insiders in Hollywood that the place simply isn’t like the rest of the country.  LA really seems to be a cesspool of sexual licentiousness, selfishness, and idolatry.  When your entire studio system is run according to sexual misbehavior and the commodification of the human body, it’s not a surprise that some of these actresses would start drinking the feminist Kool-Aid.  Their mistake is to inflict their hatred upon the rest of us.  LA is not like the rest of the country.  Normal men do not behave like the Harvey Weinsteins and Kevin Spaceys of LA.  Normal bosses don’t have casting couches.  Normal people are raised by parents that loved them and grow up to be as good as they can be.  What normal people don’t do is become actors or journalists.

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