Hollywood was your ambition... and so it was required, also, to be your cesspool

Just a reminder that there are other ways men can predate upon women. That man who had genteel manners with you and accorded you every respect, but who voted for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton... ostensibly over policies, but one couldn't help but wonder, given the ample vile thinking directed towards Hillary, and also perhaps because the Sanders movement noticeably eschewed talk of the empowerment of women for talk on a suffering mass of pictured as virtuous for their being so deprived and for having taken on the suffering for so long without complaint, if it was because somehow mostly out of hate of empowered, strong, professional women -- yes, that person unconsciously knows that revenge can be delivered while keeping your hands clean and yourself, in a sense, totally out of the loop as to motive. (This, btw, was Hillary's own sense of the movement. Also Gloria Steinem's. Also Salon blogger Amanda Marcotte's.)

This should be what we'll see, I suspect. For this is not an age which responds well to further encouraging people to reach their full heights. I suspect a Hollywood (and Washington) under fierce strictures... something akin to what happens later on in Dave Eggers' "The Circle"). On the surface, amaze-balls great in providing support for women (and, as we'll see, children) in the future so that they never have to experience the same. But at the same time I suspect the idea of "professionalization" itself, the idea of thorough self-empowerment, regardless of gender, will become suspect as a selfish endeavour in an age where we need to obliterate our desire to be distinct and rather allow that that is one of the things we need to sacrifice, this ambition, this desire to become totally self-realized, as we agree to commit more to what the country needs as a whole. (The former desire will be seen as linked to a country that was, ostensibly, left to rot while individuals thought only on themselves and on their own kids.) The exploitation will stop, but human reach that you once could have accomplished for yourself had it never occurred to you, will socially be withdrawn, as we come to regard people who carry themselves in a fully self-individuated manner as belonging to an now rejected age of selfish, individual, "me me" empowerment. The praise will be descended upon people who are, rather, mostly interchangeable with one another -- members of a social type, a social role, that has one looking beyond them to the great nation they keep afloat through their hard work, their self-sacrifice, their activity. We'll stop becoming adults for remaining perpetual children. It's the only way to garner social approval.

Over the next few years, Hollywood will slowly come to be regarded as a "cesspool" which empowered the most vile people imaginable. Anti-semitism will rise, and be seen as justified by multitudes who never suspected the possibility in them. The idea of Hollywood as a place where you might become an empowered star -- if you could only escape the many pitfalls -- will lapse to a sense of it as a place that created a self-righteous grotesquerie who lauded themselves over good everyday citizens, while themselves taking delight in being completely wanton and free of all controls. A culture -- Hollywood; Washington -- that possessed the great virtue of being almost universally Democratic in politics; that possessed the great virtue of loudly showcasing the most essential thing about progressivism -- that it takes delight in showcasing and developing your true inner stardom rather than deigning it a sin that must be covered up -- will be inverted to an example of the most depraved.

There will be no language to oppose it. For the (overt) antifeminism, the pedophilia, will be gone; become impossible. (Subtle antifeminism and subtle hatred of children will be ample, in that it'll be a culture that will willfully ignore individual unique development as a pretension belonging to a now-disproven, retrograde age.) The only redress for the individual trying to sort out how an age that has become so "respectful" became also so barren. That would involve a kind of psychological analysis that has been started but is near impossible to recover, as its alphabet components are now alien to us, which'd explore how so fearful we are of growth, so "Calvinistic" we remain, that at some point in ongoing postwar social growth the only way it could continue was to make it have it necessarily accompanied by lapsing many multitudes into a maw of abandonment and use. Past about the mid 1970s, the only way to have further avenues for growth to express itself, was to offer it a 99 percent vs. the 1 percent culture, a culture of accomplishing professionals but also of loads of the forgotten, abused and ignored. After the growth enabled by this society itself becomes intolerable, there is no recourse. Then it's time for complete submission to a unit beyond one -- the mother nation -- whom all pronounce themselves as having guiltily forgotten in pursuit of selfish ambitions, and you have an end of a age. Rebirth, a period where no one is required to carry the society's sense that for good things to happen some allotted group must carry in themselves demonstrated proof of the costs of ambition, gets enabled immediately after the purge; after a generation, all that it might have accomplished, gets lost... historically, at least, as subsequent generations feel more talents that never really let themselves loose, and not therefore worth remembering, unless -- like the "Greatest Generation" -- for their bearing pain and loss without complaint.