The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

One of the few people in the entertainment industry to slightly buck the precise contours of the digging was the actress Mayim Bialik. In October 2017 when ‘MeToo’ broke she received a certain amount of backlash for an opinion piece in The New York Times in which she talked frankly about the industry she had first entered as (in her words) ‘a prominent-nosed, awkward, geeky, Jewish 11-year-old’. She described how she had ‘always had an uncomfortable relationship with being employed in an industry that profits from the objectification of women’. And she described how she had made ‘conservative’ choices as a young actress, and that guided by her first-generation American parents, she was always careful around people in the industry. This, along with her religious observance, meant that she was the sort of person who – as she explained – was unusual among women in Hollywood.