Vice Media Always Felt Like It Was Covering

The minute a media company announces its third or fourth TV show dedicating to denouncing sexist men, start the countdown for when their senior management will be nailed in a New York Times expose exposing gender bias and harassment in the workplace. Is it an unconscious overcompensation or an intentional misdirect? Probably a little bit of both.

Vice Media founders, Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, apologized for getting caught running a company where enough female employers past and present were willing to go on the record with the Times that the office fun would now be completely halted. Nothing says heartfelt like a memo to the staff expressing regret for not having done more to have less topless cake parties at work. According to the Times:

“The settlements and the many episodes of harassment the women described depict a top-down ethos of male entitlement at Vice, where women said they felt like just another party favor at an organization where partying often was an extension of the job.”

It sounds horrible. For the women. Though across the street you do have Jezebel, HuffPo, and Vogue where straight men are abused by means of total inability to be hired. What’s worse? Having a job where guys check out your ass or no job at all? I’ve only known one of those. I can’t commit authoritatively.

Vice’s heavy tilt toward socially progressive content and programming, capped off by a recent slate of shows dedicated to pointing out the real menace to society, men, was a sweet facade while it lasted. It’s the kind of thing you take way too far. Like giving Amanda Knox a show on the completely contrived problem of patriarchal bias against sexually active women leading to unjust female murder convictions. This is like the guy at the town hall meeting who keeps angrily bringing up wanting to kill all the pedophiles, every week, for ten years in a row. Ankle bracelet that mofo. 

Vice Media is skyrocketing in value as major investors like Disney keep dropping cash into their fundraising coffers. They did what needed to be done. Beyond the rote forced apology, they fired some senior executives, formers an HR training task force, and developed a pointless harassment board headed up by Gloria Steinem to make sure this never happens again. She’s 83, she seems like the go-getter you need to stay on top of this. Sadly, Anita Hill was already spoken for in terms of for-show harassment commissions.

We may simply have a massive problem here of non-crimes being treated as crimes where the jury is the social media audience at large. Maybe we need to step up Singapore and start executing some people to calm this shit down. Steve, the guy who runs accounting and insists his direct reports hit Happy Hour on Fridays needs a forever nap. Two to the back of the head and nobody’s telling any lady in the office again how great they must look at the beach. Half-measures are for pussies. Crude guy managers are our Dunkirk.