The Vultures Are Wilde

I don’t spend a lot of time deliberately absorbing celebrity gossip, but some of it reaches such a fever pitch it becomes unavoidable. The insanity that accompanied the debut of Olivia Wilde’s latest directorial effort at the Venice Film Festival a couple weeks ago, which hasn’t quite settled down ahead of the release, was this year’s biggest example so far.

I get it; it’s great fun to roast celebrities, to love them and hate them in quick succession. They are beautiful and rich and often they are reported to have done shady things and who doesn’t enjoy a little schadenfreude now and again.

But not to be a killjoy nor too tediously obvious, but women get far more of all this hate than men, by about seventeen metric tons. It’s not quite compatible with the generally stated goals of diversifying film production by hiring more women directors to then gleefully bleed them for the vultures in the entertainment press. That subgroup of journalists are perhaps the least ethical—and, with so many of them being women themselves, it’s shameful how much effort they put into destroying other women.

Speaking of unethical, what Olivia Wilde did—no, because I don’t know anything about what she did, not really, and whatever it was, usually sex scandals involve more than one person and a great deal of unseen complexity. But, really, there is hardly a scandal—it’s actually a private matter spilled for the ravening hordes, and the type of situation that men are almost never called to account for (for example, where are the knives for Harry Styles?). And I don’t mean #metoo—this isn’t that, people. This is consenting adults, and it has nothing to do with the work. The misogyny at play here has a rank stench, and we shouldn't accept it.