Who is popular today?

Grooming, conditioning, coercive control: nowadays we have words for fashion’s horrific treatment of young women in bygone decades. This sober expose puts the atrocities in the spotlightThere’s a scene in the 1990 movie Awakenings, about Dr Oliver Sacks’ investigations into the epidemic of sleeping sickness in which Robin Williams – who plays a character based on Sacks – muses on the evidence. “You’d think,” he says, “at a certain point all these atypical somethings would amount to a typical something.”I hear some version of that in my mind every time I see another documentary about predatory men and their abuse of (almost invariably) women and children, hidden in plain sight as they go about their life-wrecking business with impunity, often for decades. Michael Jackson, R Kelly, Jimmy Savile, various rock legends, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein are among the most recent, but the list could go on and will undoubtedly be added to in the future. Continue reading...