What Clarence Thomas can teach Hollywood – Latest News
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas just lately argued that fashionable progressivism has deserted the rules of equal natural rights within the Declaration of Independence in favor of a politics of state-managed grievance.
Hollywood proves his level: Grievance turns into victimhood, and victimhood turns into a substitute for energy.
Since Harvey Weinstein grew to become Hollywood’s sacrificial villain in 2017, the industry has largely handled girls’s inequality as a story of hurt — one thing to show, handle, monetize, and symbolically restore.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas just lately argued that fashionable progressivism has deserted the rules of equal natural rights within the Declaration of Independence in favor of a politics of state-managed grievance. AP
But #MeToo’s central message — you’re a sufferer, and I’m a sufferer, too — has completed little to advance the equality of girls’s voices and views in movie and tv manufacturing.
Hollywood has an unhealthy obsession with victimization. And it goes back to 1991, when Professor Anita Hill’s testimony towards then-Judge Clarence Thomas made sexual harassment the dominant national framework for understanding girls’s office inequality.
Awareness surged, together with in Hollywood, and sexual harassment insurance policies adopted.
But jobs didn’t.
Women administrators had briefly gained ground within the late Nineteen Eighties and early Nineties, after six girls administrators, “The Original Six,” pushed for legal motion by means of the Directors Guild of America, serving to drive the industry towards change. The share of feminine administrators rose from 0.5% to 16% in ten years.
Then, within the wake of Anita Hill’s 1991 sexual-harassment testimony towards Clarence Thomas, the numbers started to fall again, and stayed low for practically 20 years.
Hollywood has an unhealthy obsession with victimization. And it goes back to 1991, when Professor Anita Hill’s testimony towards then-Judge Clarence Thomas made sexual harassment the dominant national framework for understanding girls’s office inequality. FilmMagic
By 2012 and 2013, after I started bringing the problem of discrimination towards girls administrators to the eye of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), girls nonetheless directed solely about 13 p.c of episodic TV and roughly 4 p.c of studio function movies.
Why? Because victimhood doesn’t change hiring. And Hollywood runs on who will get the subsequent job.
The industry’s system of casual networks, insider hiring, and concentrated gatekeeping doesn’t reply to ethical stress. It responds to accountability.
That is why the true breakthrough got here in 2015, when the exclusion of girls administrators was handled not as a cultural drawback, however as a civil rights challenge tied to employment law. That 12 months, the ACLU referred to as on the EEOC to launch an industry-wide investigation into systemic discrimination towards girls administrators.
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Once legal stress entered the image, hiring shifted. Amidst federal industrywide settlements beginning in 2017, feminine director numbers rose again, reaching historic highs by 2019.
But after Weinstein and #MeToo, Hollywood went back to what it is aware of best: managing the narrative. Once again, sexual harassment and victimhood grew to become the body.
The drawback just isn’t that harassment doesn’t matter. It issues profoundly.
The drawback is that harassment grew to become the dominant story whereas employment discrimination — the construction that produces the ability imbalance within the first place — disappeared from view.
To carry it full circle, Steven Spielberg’s longtime producing associate, Kathleen Kennedy, helped usher in Anita Hill to guide the newly created Hollywood Commission, an industry-led effort to deal with misconduct because the industry moved away from federal enforcement. Getty Images for AIS Lumiere Awards
To carry it full circle, Steven Spielberg’s longtime producing associate, Kathleen Kennedy, helped usher in Anita Hill to guide the newly created Hollywood Commission, an industry-led effort to deal with misconduct because the industry moved away from federal enforcement.
The Commission was shaped in December 2017, simply months after #MeToo, based by Kennedy and leisure lawyer Nina Shaw, supported by main leisure entities, and chaired by Hill.
At the identical time got here Time’s Up, the Inclusion Rider, and industry-friendly statistics machinery such because the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative — all serving to show the world Hollywood had modified its methods.
Panels. Pledges. Studies. Headlines.
And as soon as again, the main focus shifted away from hiring and enforcement, and back to awareness, testimony, and symbolic restore.
The end result? The numbers have now fallen but again.
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Even USC Annenberg’s newest report, after years of statistics typically cited to recommend that Hollywood might police itself, discovered that girls directed solely 8.1% of the highest 100 box-office movies in 2025, down from 13.4% in 2024 — the weakest displaying since 2018.
This just isn’t difficult. When inequality is handled as an employment drawback, tied to jobs and enforceable rights, girls advance.
When it’s handled as a victimhood drawback — one thing to be mentioned, managed, and symbolically addressed — the system absorbs the stress and retains functioning because it all the time has.
That is the victimhood lure embedded in fashionable progressivism. That is the purpose Thomas is urgent.
Sexual harassment and abuse within the office are the end result of energy imbalances rooted in employment and financial injustice.
Not the opposite means round.
The victimhood ethos provides recognition with out energy. And in Hollywood, energy means one factor: Who will get employed to inform the story.
And who tells the tales helps rule the world.
Until that modifications, nothing else will.
Maria Giese is an American movie director, screenwriter, and longtime advocate for equity for ladies administrators in Hollywood. She writes on Substack at The Vault.
