The Disgusting And Scary New (Humor-Free) Normal
Edelstein, in the bit below, is David Edelstein, whom I know slightly. Disgustingly, he was brought down for a joke that didn't sit well with the feminists.

Laura Kipnis lays it out in The Guardian:

Hooray for our side: another privileged old white guy chopped down, career in tatters. Hear us roar! Speak truth to power! In this case the malfeasant was film critic David Edelstein, who made a stupid, quickly deleted, misfired "joke" on his private Facebook page, regarding the death of Last Tango in Paris director Bernardo Bertolucci. Posted Edelstein: "Even grief is better with butter," accompanied by a still of Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando from the film - yes, the infamous and now controversial anal rape scene.

Edelstein had been doing movie reviews for the last 16 years on the National Public Radio syndicated show Fresh Air, hosted by the much revered Terry Gross. He's also the chief film critic for New York magazine and appears on the CBS Sunday Morning show. He's what you might call "an influencer", and his 2,091 Facebook friends include many well-known feminists. One of them apparently took a screenshot of the post and circulated it or, as another of his Facebook friends put it, "narced to the universe". (Disclosure: I'm among those friends, though have taken no screenshots.)

...Actress Martha Plimpton, herself an occasional NPR host (on the New York affiliate WNYC) and in receipt of the screenshot, quickly tweeted it to her 196,000 followers along with the demand: "Fire him. Immediately." Which happened the next day: Fresh Air and NPR announced that they were cutting ties with Edelstein because the post had been "offensive and unacceptable, especially given Maria Schneider's experience during the filming of Last Tango in Paris."

More:

In a 2006 interview Schneider said that the filming of the scene had left her feeling humiliated and "a little raped". The rape itself was in the script, but the butter wasn't; Bertolucci and Brando had manipulated her by springing it on her to get a more spontaneous performance, or that was their line. (There seems to have been confusion in the social media response to Edelstein's firing about whether Schneider was actually raped; she wasn't.) The butter reappears in a later scene where Schneider's character Jeanne uses it to anally penetrate Brando's character. Jeanne also tricks him into getting an electric shock and later shoots him. At the time the film was regarded as a masterpiece; Bertolucci and Brando were both nominated for Academy Awards.

I knew Marlon Brando, and though we rarely talked about movies, I would put big money on the butter thing being entirely his idea. (He was highly creative and a big prankster.)

Kipnis also lays out the new state of things -- new rules "regarding conditions of employment and inadvertent offense-causing":

As I read it, the first unstated rule would be that there's nothing inadvertent about inadvertent offense: jokes and flubs will be treated as diagnostic instruments, like those personality tests sometimes administered to prospective employees, and revelatory of the true character of the flubber. Corollary: a clear soul will be required to remain employed.

The second unstated rule is that causing offense is a permanent mark against you, however apologetic you might be. One flub and you're out. An unthinking social media post will outweigh a 16-year track record. Corollary: there's no "off the clock" - it's company time all the time.

A third unstated rule is that men need to prove and re-prove that they understand rape is bad, and take it seriously, not unlike signing a loyalty oath to demonstrate you're not a communist. Failure to keep re-proving it implicates you in crimes against women. Edelstein was clearly insensitive about rape - well, not rape per se, but Schneider's account of feeling a little raped. He said he was unaware of Schneider's interview, but that was either not believed or didn't matter. Corollary: men are not to be believed, they will say anything.

Does anyone else notice that there's a difference between being female-empowering and simply yanking away power and positions from men, on the slimmest account?

Kipnis feels similarly:

Maybe it's time to stop hiding behind the "speak truth to power" mantra, when women have power aplenty - we can wreck a guy's career with a tweet! Let's stop assigning all the aggression in the world to men, and own ours, rather than masking it behind a scrim of trauma or sexual ethics. If you're going to bring a colleague down for a deleted social media post, or fire a longtime employee for a flub, I say own it. If we're retaliating against millennia of male power one film critic at a time, let's at least be honest about the enterprise.