And the job of these white guys in suits was to make money for the people who owned everything.
In the case of the one institutional holder that was run by a woman, the woman in question had inherited the company from her father.
This literally was the Patriarchy.
And #MeToo had made them, and their clients, a huge amount of money.
The general consensus of opinion was that Twitter, more than any other company headquartered in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, had destroyed America.
It had turned everyone into kindergarteners, it had murdered journalism, and it had almost certainly helped Donald J. Trump get elected.
In the seven years following its initial public offering in 2011 AD, Twitter had never made a dime. It lost money for twenty-seven straight quarters.
Yet when it posted its results for the fourth quarter of 2017 AD, which was the time period encompassing the Weinstein revelations and the subsequent social fallout, Twitter revealed that in the final three months of the year, the company had made $91,000,000.
It was a #MeToo miracle!
And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of men!
In the early days, it felt as if the organic uprising of women was going to be the main story. It was one of those rare moments of social openness where the rules are up for grabs.
Anything could happen.
But this was America.
#MeToo became the same story as every story in America: a nexus of how power and money played out amongst the Celebrity branch of American governance.
The revised story fixated on the three industries that were the locus of Donald J. Trump’s power: the entertainment industry, journalism, and politics.
The organic outcry was lost amidst stories of the appalling behavior of certain men with professional careers in the public sphere. These stories tended to run the gamut: they went from unfortunate comments to groping to flat-out rape.
A handful of the stories weren’t even about sexual harassment.
They were about consensual relationships with deeply unsavory people, which had been recontextualized after the #MeToo moment.
Literally every woman alive who’d engaged in the biological imperative of sex with men had undergone the routine humiliation of consensual sex with at least one deeply unsavory person.
This was the bullshit con of heterosexuality.
But most of those women, who were poor and didn’t work in media, weren’t given the opportunity to write opinion pieces for Variety about their shitty ex-boyfriends and old lovers.
Their shitty ex-boyfriends and old lovers weren’t members of the Celebrity branch of American governance.
The unspoken social undercurrent of the revised story revealed itself.
#MeToo became about the way in which encounters with men had stymied the ambitions of women who had wanted to achieve upward social mobility in the industries that were the nexus of Donald J. Trump’s power.
Which, look, by itself this was no small problem.
But it’s a very far cry from what kicked the whole thing off, which was a story about a serial rapist who actively worked to destroy people after he raped them.
All of which creates an atmosphere that makes it very fucking hard to write a book about an island of women and not have everyone think you’re allegorizing a hashtag.
The whole thing’s ruined before it even started!
And, reader, trust me, I can imagine the responses to this chapter before they’re typed by dullards into social media, and they all boil down to something like this: “Who the fuck does this guy think that he is?”
To which I reply in advance: on the topic of #MeToo, I have more innate moral authority than most people in America.
And this isn’t because of inborn privilege.
There’s a simple explanation as to why I have innate moral authority on the topic.
I’m almost certainly the only person alive who was sexually harassed in front of a crowd of 280 people by a woman who pens New York Times opinion pieces about sexual harassment, and I’m absolutely certain that I’m the only person alive who experienced this sexual harassment several years after winning a $1.2-million judgment in a lawsuit against an Internet stalker who libeled me as a rapist.
Chapter Twelve
hello from sex drenched hollywood
Smartphone saliva brought the Jaguar XJ-S to Hollywood, a neighborhood that was being victimized by the international capitalist class’s money laundering.
The money laundering took the form of cruddy new apartment buildings and ugly hotels.
Hollywood was also a neighborhood that had become a hotspot of nightclubs, places where people went to dance, get high, and challenge the received sexual wisdom of the upper middle class.
Several blocks before their arrival, the women of Fairy Land knew their final destination.
They knew this because the navigation rope had wrapped itself around its target, which was the thirteen-story Fontenoy Apartments on Whitley Avenue.
From a distance of several blocks, the women of Fairy Land could see the building glowing.
The Fontenoy was an early Los Angeles folly, from back in the 1920s AD, dressed up in nouveau-riche ornamentation and a French-Norman roof.
When they arrived on Whitley Avenue, Rose Byrne parked the Jaguar in the Fontenoy’s underground parking structure, right after Rose Byrne used magic to blast open the structure’s automatic gate.
She took a parking spot that was reserved for someone on the tenth floor.
Celia cast a spell on the car, creating a glamor that caused human beings’ eyes to malfunction.
When human beings looked at the Jaguar, they didn’t see a vintage car designed by the British.
They saw a series of orange construction cones and were surprised by neither the appearance of the cones nor the implication that a parking spot, an inert piece of concrete demarcated by lines of paint, was out of order.
Oh, they thought. Here’s something else that’s broken.
Everyone in America possessed an unconscious, and sometimes conscious, acknowledgement that their empire was in decline.
But gone were the halcyon days when one could expect the whole thing to end through an invasion of the Mongols or the Ottomans or the Huns.
Gone were the sweet moments when barbarian hordes would pull down the walls of your capital city and murder all of your cousins.
Now an empire died of a thousand tiny wounds.
Postal carriers stopped delivering mail.
Air travel became a horror.
Infrastructure went to shit.
Trains crashed.
And parking spots went out of order.
Because the women of Fairy Land were traditionalists, they didn’t ride the elevator from the basement, but rather walked out of the underground parking structure.
They emerged back on Whitley Avenue.
Several years earlier, the faceless entity that owned the Fontenoy had installed a security gate. Rose Byrne blasted it open with magic and then did the same thing with the front door, which was also locked.
In the lobby, they passed through a small room that looked like a bordello, and walked to the elevators opposite the front entrance.
Celia pressed the call button.
The doors opened.
They got into the elevator.
Ropey strands of salvia could bring Fairy Land’s women to a generalized magical destination, but it could not indicate why that destination was magical or what they should do when they got there.