Egg7

I really appreciate this article. I need to be clear: I don’t give the slightest of shits about the people involved in this legal battle. I don’t know either of them. Johnny Depp has been in some movies I like, and he usually did a good job. That’s all I got. From what I’ve seen – and to the point of this article, it hasn’t once been on purpose – neither of them are looking great.

Really, since this all got started, it just felt gross to me. There’s maybe a thoughtful analysis to be made of an abusive relationship involving public figures, but pretty much everything I’ve seen has just been meme-level content. On YouTube, I mainly watch random tech/gadget stuff, some gaming content, and metal/guitar/music content. I’ve had to inform the algorithm that I’m not interested in this trial a good dozen times. This all comes across as a weird voyeuristic spectacle. I’m not sure if this can be pinned on Tumblr banning NSFW content, but I have my own theory:

We’re a few years on from the #metoo movement, in which a whole bunch of male public figures were made accountable for being variously awful. The MRA or MRA-sympathetic supporters have likely been positively itching for a case of a woman public figure being abusive to come up, and the less reasonable of them who veer into anti-feminism are latching onto this as proof of their world-view – feminism is evil, cancel culture is everywhere, women are evil, poor nice men like Johnny are just being dragged through the mud, and the most toxic endpoint: One incident of a woman alleging abuse and either lying or being abusive herself is proof that we’ve all apparently been making way too big of a deal about guys who have been assholes, and the women accusing them are usually probably just doing it to "get attention".

Even if Johnny here is 100% pure, wonderful, angelic, and the abuse in the relationship was completely one-directional, I worry about the implications of this, and will continue to feel grossed out by the entertainment spectacle this has become.