Monday, October 26, 2020

Double Standards at the New Yorker Magazine

 Frontline workers have been risking their lives for eight solid months now.  Over two hundred twenty thousand Americans are dead, while millions more are facing longterm heart and lung damage as they recover.  Hundreds of thousands of businesses have closed, millions of people are out of work, and whole sectors of our economy may never come back. Kids have been stuck in the house for months on end, trying to cobble together some semblance of a normal adolescence. And the numbers are moving in the wrong direction across this country, even as we see Republicans getting ready to rip the social safety net out from under Americans on January 20.  Add in four years of Trump-branded chaos and a long overdue racial reckoning, and it's no wonder Americans are stressed out.

The very luckiest people are working from home, spending all day on Skype, Slack, Webex and Zoom calls.  If you continue to have a paycheck and job security while the world is falling apart around you, and you don't have to risk your health and safety for it, then you won. Particularly if you don't have young children at home sucking up every waking moment of your time.  Which is a long way of saying, resign already, Jeffrey Toobin.

By now you've already died of cringe reading about the legal commentator accidentally masturbating on camera during a meeting with his New Yorker co-workers.  Except for the fact  the masturbation wasn't accidental. Apparently Toobin took advantage of a breakout session to get in a little "me time." But he failed to turn the camera off, and in fact seems to have inadvertently angled it toward his crotch in an attempt to get a better look at whatever inspired him to take out his penis and rub one out during work hours.

"I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers," Toobin told Vice, which broke the story.  So it would it have been okay to jerk off during a work meeting if he'd remembered to turn the camera off first?  Would we be having this conversation if Toobin had been in his office at Conde Nast and forgot to shut the door while cranking one out during his morning coffee break?

Toobin is a 60-year-old married man and yet he (apparently) cannot postpone his orgasm for one single minute. Yes, turning off the camera would have made it better-- but essentially he's just a jerk who  deserves to be fired.

So all the dudes tapping out hot takes on not destroying a man's life for one, little innocent mistake can cut that shit out right now. (And, not for nothing, Toobin's been known to be a disgusting perv for quite some time.)

Anti-fascism scholar Talia Lavin was fired from the New Yorker for tweeting (and almost immediately deleting) a mistaken comment about an ICE agent's tattoo, so spare us all the tears for a grown man jerking it on camera. 

 

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