SPEECH Bubble

Bari Weiss peers into Hollywood’s soul as she puts cultural controversies on the stage By Emily Jane Fox

- Emily Jane Fox

THE LINE OUTSIDE the old ’20s Gothic theater slinked around the corner off Broadway. Not that off Broadway. Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles, at the newly redone Ace Hotel, which, on this night in mid-September, sold out all 1,600 seats. No big musician was performing inside. No television show or movie was premiering (there weren’t any in LA, or anywhere, at the time).

The crowds were filing in to watch four women debate whether the sexual revolution has failed. The event, styled as an old-fashioned boxing match— “CLASH OF THE FEMALE TITANS,” the program read. “FIGHT 7pm”—was put on and moderated by Bari Weiss and her new media company, the Free Press, the first in a series of such events. The prompt was to be answered by the panel—made up of the singer and Elon Musk ex Grimes and ex-Muslim podcaster Sarah Haider on one side and one half of Red Scare Anna Khachiyan and author Louise Perry on the other— but the very fact that four accomplished women were selling out an evening hosted by a lesbian new media titan (and the fact that, well, how could you even really argue in the affirmative?) meant it was answered before it started. But the question wasn’t the draw.