He then targeted those blogs with a series of provocative actions, such as buying billboards promoting the movie and then vandalizing them himself, calling feminist groups to protest showings of the movie, arranging for provocative advertisements on buses, and other acts designed to go viral on social media.
It occurs to me that his relationship with these feminist groups may not have been entirely adversarial.
That is, my first inclination is to read a situation like this as: he wants people to see the movie, the feminist groups want people not to see the movie, and he slyly manipulates them into doing things that achieve what he wants and not what they want.
And maybe this should have been obvious, but—of course that’s not the only thing feminist groups want. They might also want members; newspaper coverage; a highly-visible thing to rally around and point people at. (And if someone is the sort of person who would see the movie if they heard about it, maybe the feminist groups don’t even really care if they do happen to hear about it and see it.) Perhaps “all publicity is good publicity” applies to both sides, here.
And if that’s right, then this problem seems harder to solve.
Separate from my other comment:
It occurs to me that his relationship with these feminist groups may not have been entirely adversarial.
That is, my first inclination is to read a situation like this as: he wants people to see the movie, the feminist groups want people not to see the movie, and he slyly manipulates them into doing things that achieve what he wants and not what they want.
And maybe this should have been obvious, but—of course that’s not the only thing feminist groups want. They might also want members; newspaper coverage; a highly-visible thing to rally around and point people at. (And if someone is the sort of person who would see the movie if they heard about it, maybe the feminist groups don’t even really care if they do happen to hear about it and see it.) Perhaps “all publicity is good publicity” applies to both sides, here.
And if that’s right, then this problem seems harder to solve.