As the story grows, the scope of the ugliness continues to expand with it.
The message youth, particularly young women are being fed is that to get ahead, you have to hustle, you have to be courting the favour of influencers and you have to be prepared to do what it takes. This exists within a culture where the people in positions of power are largely men - and no small few of them like being in positions of power and the influence it gives them to get the things they want.
After all - it's by aggressively going after what they want that they got ahead, right? To the victor go the spoils and anyone who'd challenge their fun is, frankly, expendable. We live in a culture that enables this sort of behaviour.
We have a ridiculously skewed view of "leadership" that essentially translates as "of a position or brand where the rules don't apply to you and, unless you get caught doing something entirely socially unacceptable that can't be spun, you have no restrictions" so long as you produce.
That's not leadership. That's dominance, that's aggression, that's stubbornness and anti-social behaviour. It should never, never be the case that good people of whatever gender are discouraged from pursuing good career moves because of fear of predation. That's leaning in the direction of ISIL, isn't it? Fall in line and pay homage less you get beheaded or raped?
Is that the kind of culture we want? It's the one we have right now. It's why good people are languishing, our economy is perilously bereft of innovation and why the emerging mental health crisis is consuming all sectors to the fiscal and social detriment of us all.
Don't enable the entitled; empower the grassroots. That's where we're going wrong - that's where laissez-faire capitalism has always gone wrong.
It's not the people that are the problem - it's the culture, stupid.
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