It is gratuitous, since I wasn't abused by any of them. But as any women who has pandered to any older man's ego in the nubile days of her career (most of us) might intuit, there is an unseemly sense of "booyah!" when the karma bus makes a welcome stop. I am aware I shouldn't enjoy it this much.
Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, now Harvey Weinstein. Conservative or liberal, they are a certain sort of doughy jowled power player who thought they ruled the world and were owed massages and whatever they wanted from sycophants because they were wrinkly and rich. So it feels satisfying to say guess what, smug douches, times they are a changin'. Sort of.
Some commentators say this latest revelation is a sign our consciousness has been raised, and we can have a public conversation where women feel they can speak their truth. But I'm not so sure we've got there yet.
Because in reality the repercussions have been mixed: Cosby is set to go to trial again next year, Ailes and O'Reilly lost powerful jobs but walked away with millions, not to mention Donald Trump being elected president after he boasted on an Access Hollywood tape "you can do anything".
Weinstein well knows the way the game is played and it seems he hopes to get away by acting out his part in the usual hand-wringing repentance script. Even if taking a close reading of his mea culpa statement: If he really is penitent, the tone is all wrong.
On one hand he blames coming of age in the 60s and confesses to being a dinosaur. But at the same time he accuses the Times of reckless reporting and says he plans to sue the paper for US$50 million ($70.5m). I guess old intimidation tactics die hard.
Maybe we are not making quite as much progress dismantling the patriarchy as we might think. We're not so "woke" as we might hope in 2017, what New York magazine calls the Year of the Sociopathic Baby-Man.
I can't help noticing that all these men seem to have been perennial sexual hazards for decades but most of them (with the exception of Trump) only seem to face any kind of consequences when they are already weakened, their power waning and their careers on the way out. (Ailes was 76 when he was ousted from Fox News, O'Reilly 68, Bill Cosby is 80 and Weinstein is 66.) No one seemed to feel able to confront them publicly at the height of their power.
Hollywood and the establishment, especially Silicon Valley, still thrives on a power imbalance, and fetishises the image of the male genius.
Alongside the stories of sexual harassment, Weinstein was revealed to be an equal opportunities bully, intimidating male underlings, getting a male writer in a headlock at a launch function, berating the husband of a film director. So this is not just toxic masculinity. It is abuse of power, pure and simple.
"Toxic masculinity implies that masculinity is the core problem here, and suggests that a tiny bit of masculinity might also be a tiny bit poisonous. Using the word masculinity suggests that all men have a toxic core," Heather Havrilesky writes in New York magazine.
Abuse through imposition of your will on someone who has no ability to resist or defend themselves from you is an exertion of power on the powerless.
So before we celebrate prematurely the death of sexist dinosaurs, I feel obliged to sadly note Trump's administration just made it harder for women to get contraceptives and put out an edict which will allow religious charities or schools that receive government funding to free an unmarried employee who becomes pregnant or an employee who marries a same-sex partner.
The more it changes ...
