#MeToo and celebrity convictions: How the society of the spectacle solves its sex scandals

Comment published on New York Times online blog in response to editorial in yesterday's paper, "Bill Cosby Sentencing: Decision Day Begins":

One of the most interesting features of the continuing #MeToo wave of scandals is the way it focuses attention on our culture of celebrities and powerful individuals. And on anxieties concerning the privileges we expect people to be able to earn. Many of these celebrity men may have been seduced by their entitlement, in an ultraliberal culture where forms of enforcement and lawlessness both can be extreme.

Our media culture provides a mechanism for a public discourse that both contextualizes and substitutes for a more properly political one by basing it upon uses of criminal law, and the fact that somehow many people think they are above it. (Poor criminals are mostly rather "below" it).

Celebrities in the arts and other enterprises are exposed. And they are presumed to have virtue. So it means something to show that some do not. This is done through a mechanism that is also at the root of the media-celebrity culture: the exemplary case. Media discourse on crime is exemplary be definition, the point of the crime story being to focus attention on a threat to public order that authorities can solve. But if they cannot?

Everyone agrees that these sex abuse claims all turn on structures of relationships that are deeper than fame or any particular social privilege.

The media framework has worked well in calling attention to these problems by examining exemplary cases. We should also reflect on the limits of the paradigm. And ask what else is needed.