There are other situations—Teen Vogue, for instance—where I think the world greatly overreacts, but this doesn't strike me as one of those cases.
What's interesting in this episode is how the culture has shifted. The exact same style that once delighted the counterculture, which at the time was what progressives all identified with, is now a transgression that gets you banned from progressive circles, which have since become elite circles culturally, with growing political power as well. All of this is a tectonic cultural shift, and it's fascinating!
There's a very interesting intermediate case at the midpoint between Hunter S. Thompson and this guy: that is the similarly gonzo The eXile which was produced by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi during their time in Russia in the 90s. The worst passages from that publication—which were far more misogynistic than anything this guy wrote—were dredged up a few years ago, with the intention of denouncing the authors as part of MeToo. In the end, nothing much came of it, partly because one of the women being written about came forward to say that those passages were satirical and that she had always been treated well by the authors. But I think the more important difference between that case and this is that the culture has shifted significantly in the intervening 3 or 4 years. If this incident were happening now, I bet the outcome would be different. The very same gunpowder that made counterculture heroes of Thompson and his ilk, and which the eXile guys got away with by a hair, now blows up in your face, and at much smaller doses too.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who...
It's not fiction. It's an autobiography. These are his personal opinions and feelings.
To who? Eastern European woman. How is this sexist?
> known misogynist
Men find women physically attractive.
I would be interested to know what films, books, comedians you actually find permissible for yourself to enjoy.
If you take offense to what is written here, I really don’t see how most of the media available today can be suitable. Do you ever ask yourself if you are being consistent in your standards?
Right, because women are all still all housewives and don't need to worry about bills or having jobs and the bosses they might have.
> What actions did he take against
How have you missed the whole "wrote book expressing lots of misogyny" bit?
How do you know he's a misogynist? You read a small, absolutely marginal excerpt from a book that is clearly written in a literary style. In it, he draws a comparison between a particular woman, who is praised for her talent and resourcefulness, and "most Bay Area women", who are definitely not all women, in the Bay Area and much less in general. "Most Americans" is not a judgement on human beings, "most American men" is not a judgement on all men, so why should "most Bay Area women" be a judgement on all women? And this is even assuming that that remark corresponds to some deep conviction, which is a silly assumption given the style and the context.
Here's my favorite review from Goodreads 2016:
"Pretentious, pseudo-intellectual misogynist pontificates about his theories on tech business, society, and capitalism while sneering at every other human with Olympian contempt and making unacceptable sexist comments about women for about 500 pages."
"When she was in her teens, her father decided to move the family to the United States, where they suffered a financial reversal she was unwilling to talk about. Suddenly not among the moneyed class, she hustled herself through the redbrick boondocks of the University of Vermont. Citibank internship led to a Deutsche Bank job, and after a few years she was an equity derivatives trader at Deutsche, holding her own against the toff sharks of the City of London.
She had wild green eyes, with unnatural red spots in her irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough, and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.
Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.
British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work- be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast in someone's back- required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the backing horse of her bloodline. Which is why I was less nervous than I should have been on a random Saturday in July..."
So it's a passage in a (novel? Definitely a literary piece anyway) where, in order to better sing the praise of one particular woman, she is compared to another common type in the same environment. All clearly point of view of a narrator (who might or might not be the author). If these are the parameters, we should throw in the bin almost all literature, from men and women alike.