Consistently Inconsistent

On New Year’s Day, a coalition of high-profile women in the entertainment industry, including America Ferrera, Reese Witherspoon and Shonda Rhimes, unveiled Time’s Up, a sweeping plan to address “the systemic inequality and injustice in the workplace that have kept underrepresented groups from reaching their full potential.”

The initiative includes a $13 million legal defense fund to help low-income women with workplace assault and harassment suits, an exhilaratingly ambitious project called 50/50 by 2020 that’s urging entertainment companies to commit to gender parity in their leadership structures in the next two years, and teams of lawyers taking smart legislative aim at targets like nondisclosure agreements. The signatories plan to wear black, which is notoriously difficult to photograph, to the Golden Globes on Sunday. They will not be your objects.

Time’s Up feels like an appropriately cinematic turn — it’s the third act and our heroine is angry. She’s finally stepping into her power. It’s beautiful to watch.

But I can’t stop coming back to that old question. Men: What exactly is it that you do here?

One pervasive feature of the post-#MeToo landscape has been distraught men apologizing for their gender, fretting about old drunken hookups and begging for guidance on what they can do to help. (Of course it took only moments to transform a mass catharsis into an emotional labor factory.) O.K., fine. You know what you could do to help? Everything.

How about Matt Damon refuses to show up to work until his female co-stars are paid as much as he is? How about Jimmy Fallon refuses to interview anyone who has been credibly accused of sexual assault or domestic violence? How about Robert Downey Jr. relentlessly points out microaggressions against female contemporaries until he develops a reputation for being “difficult” and every day on Twitter 4,000 eighth graders call him an “SJW cuck”? How about Harvey Weinstein anonymously donates $100 million to that legal defense fund and then melts into the fog as though he never existed?

How about hundreds of male movie stars spend months developing a large-scale action plan to help female farmworkers battle systemic gender inequality? How about men boycott Twitter? How about men strike for International Women’s Day? How about men take on the economic and social burdens of calling out toxic patterns of gendered socialization? How about anyone but the oppressed and John Oliver lifts a finger to change anything at all?

Sexism is a male invention. White supremacy is a white invention. Transphobia is a cisgender invention. So far, men have treated #MeToo like a bumbling dad in a detergent commercial: well-intentioned but floundering, as though they are not the experts. They have a chance to do better by Time’s Up.

It is also worth noting that the only reason I have so much raw honey is because I made a dress for a beekeeper’s daughter.

And that I need the parakeet bones to make a necklace for the woman who fixed my antique cello.

And that I got the cello as payment for juggling at a child’s birthday party.

It would be nice if you could save your shows of write-in candidate bravado for a year when trans people aren’t being openly attacked and attacks on them literally aren’t part of the Republican platform.

I mean Bernie gave Hillary his endorsement and if he’s obviously gonna vote for her and not himself or a third party I think it’s time to vote for Hillary to not wreck a bunch of people’s lives for the sake of a spiteful political gesture.