Jezebel Founder Takes On Charlie Sheen, as Backlash Brews

Whether it's the Adonis DNA or tiger-blood, the media can’t get enough of Charlie Sheen and more than a million people are hooked on his every tweet.

But a growing list of critics that includes the founder of Gawker’s feminist blog Jezebel, ordinary Americans and even pagans say Sheen is not the warlock he claims to be. And he shouldn’t get a pass for his past behavior and attitudes toward women either, they say.

In a scathing New York Times op-ed, Jezebel's Anna Holmes argued Friday that lost amid Team Sheen cheerleading over New Yorker cartoon captions and other Internet memes is a continuing acceptance that the actor has “earned the right to indulge” in objectifying and abusing women.

Long before “Two and a Half Men” was canceled, Holmes noted Sheen made headlines for: accidentally shooting his former fiancée in the arm; having a restraining order filed against him by ex-wife Denise Richards; pleading guilty to holding a knife to the throat of soon-to-be ex-wife Brooke Mueller; and trashing a New York hotel as a porn star cowered in the bathroom.

Holmes criticized CNN’s Piers Morgan as being the latest in a string of media personalities to have failed to press Sheen on his history of domestic violence. She picked on Morgan for having told Sheen he was “entitled to behave however the hell you like as long as you don’t scare the horses and the children.”

Other TV commentators have used words like “sluts,” “gold diggers" and “whores” to refer to Sheen's latest two live-in girlfriends, leading Holmes to argue the broader American culture is culpable in projecting “contempt for women who are assumed to be trading on their sexuality.”

But maybe it's all just in the media. While networks and entertainment news sites -- including this one -- continue to cover Charlie Sheen’s bizarre reality show, The Washington Post suggests ordinary Americans are starting to tire of his antics.

Seventy-one percent of 1,000 Americans polled by Rasmussen Reports now say they have an “unfavorable impression” of the actor, according to the Post.

After Sheen’s “GMA” appearance, 60 percent of those polled by HCD said he seemed “mentally ill,” the paper reported.

Whether certifiably insane or crazy genius, the actor set a Guinness World Record for the splitseconds it took to collect a million followers on Twitter on the power of his Sheen-isms.

He's been able to draw a crowd, but it's far from clear that Charlie's is "winning."

Selected Reading: Washington Post, EW, NYT
 

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