Celeb (and Celeb SO's) Sexual Harassment Thread

[Philip J. Fry]

[Grouchy]

He also wrote Crash, let's not forget that.

[MadMan]

He also wrote Crash, let's not forget that.

I still have not seen it.

[Grouchy]

Well, someone finally said it.

[Peng]

I read through and literally lol'ed at:

The letter says that the “victims” of the “Me Too” movement have been “men who are sanctioned in their work, pushed to resign, etc., when their only wrongdoing was to touch a knee, try to steal a kiss, speak about intimate things during a professional dinner or send messages that are sexually loaded to a woman who wasn’t attracted to them.”

I mean, even if I shared along this line of thoughts, I still would have worded them out to the world, in a formal letter, with something at least a little more...persuasive than this for sure.

[Dukefrukem]

Michael Douglass now.

[number8]

Shout out to sexually free women who still want to hunt men for offending.

I'm sad for Deneuve that she had to work in an era when these options were binary.

[Ezee E]

Michael Douglass now.

Pre Zeta-Jones is no surprise at all.

[Grouchy]

Love how we're not supposed to doubt the holy word of a woman claiming abuse, but if a woman has an uncomfortable or different opinion it's because she doesn't know better or she's an antique from a bygone era.

[number8]

I'm going by her words. Also not criticizing her. Just sad that that's how she looks at things.

[Spinal]

Love how we're not supposed to doubt the holy word of a woman claiming abuse, but if a woman has an uncomfortable or different opinion it's because she doesn't know better or she's an antique from a bygone era.

Also note the casual ageism in the fact that a letter signed by 100 people is being attributed solely to a 74-year old actress so that she can be dismissed as out of touch. I just read the statement as them saying improper advances are bad, but self-appointed Twitter morality police are worse. Have you ever met a French woman? This should not be surprising.

[Ivan Drago]

I also love how we're supposed to blacklist Justin Timberlake, Blake Lively and everyone that's worked with Woody Allen in recent years even though they stand against the sexual assault he's had a history of. What if they're just acting in his movies for a paycheck?

[number8]

I just read the statement as them saying improper advances are bad, but self-appointed Twitter morality police are worse.

Yeah, this is what I recoil at. The former is 100% worse. The latter is much easier to ignore.

[Wryan]

Maybe the implication is that Twitter morality police are the new vigilante groups, or could become them with time. I await an ox-bow incident.

[Wryan]

If I've sounded touchy about all of this in the past, it's because I've personally been assaulted, twice actually--once a little more "harmless" because I was pretty drunk and don't recall really any of it, tho some of my friends who saw some groping go down among party guests recall it with slight giggles, so that's charming. The other time was more stark, as the other person was the one who was drunk and incapable of taking no for an answer. She was a friend of a friend while we were gathered together for homecoming at our college. We were sleeping in the same room, me on a couch, her on an air mattress perpendicular to me. She got real grabby real fast and was too out of it to understand my physical reactions meant I wasn't interested, tho I also froze up totally and didn't really know what to do or how to handle it. I eventually rolled over into a ball enough to keep everything out of her reach and luckily it more or less stopped there; we both dozed off in time. I left very quickly the next morning, barely saying goodbye to any of my friends and ignoring talk of breakfast, atypical for me. I've never said anything to my friends about it and mostly just silently hope I never have to run into her again at a friend gathering. But there's something else that hovers over me: the possibility that she remembered things differently enough to accuse me of assaulting her, given the details. My friends have known me far longer, and there's a large part of me that knows with certainty that they would not doubt me or my version of the events, but...there's also a part of me that's filled with dread about the possibility, no matter how small, of losing friends I love and care about. It was just me and her in that room, so we're the only ones who have any evidence, and that's just our word alone. Sometimes I get into moods where I obsessively imagine entire soap opera-like narratives about what might happen. It's very uncomfortable, yet I've never felt like I wanted to tell my friends about what happened. It's even more confusing because that night was the first time I met this friend-of-friend and was even sort of attracted to her at first. I know she had a lot to drink that night, and while I don't consider that an excuse, it's hard not to give her some slack about it or...something. I don't know.

[number8]

Isn't it odd that a theoretically public place can be easier to open up to than close friends? Thanks for sharing.

[Grouchy]

The part I find myself in most agreement with in the open letter is when she talks about "puritanical" views. I've often found myself surprised at the puritanical way some of you view sex and what constitutes an appropriate relationship even in fictional tales.

Also, being a lecherous person might not be the most wonderful personality trait but it's not illegal. All sorts of behavior are being conflated in this phenomenon, and I'd say less than half of them are actually breaking laws or even doing any sort of real damage.

I don't know, I just think that social progress should be about making people more and not less free. In the case of Weinstein and people who abused their power to hurt lives and careers, it's awesome that he finally got his comeuppance by being ostracized from the business, which is what he was doing to the women who said no to him and his financial agreements. That's justice. But all this "famous person blah blah blah once stared at my ass" is for the birds and only hurts the cases where something actually happened.

[Lazlo]

The part I find myself in most agreement with in the open letter is when she talks about "puritanical" views. I've often found myself surprised at the puritanical way some of you view sex and what constitutes an appropriate relationship even in fictional tales.

Also, being a lecherous person might not be the most wonderful personality trait but it's not illegal. All sorts of behavior are being conflated in this phenomenon, and I'd say less than half of them are actually breaking laws or even doing any sort of real damage.

You don't think it's up to the victims to asses whether there's been damage done, no matter how harmless it may seem to you?

[number8]

I play this close to the vest (or maybe not, I honestly don't have a very good grip on how much I share here over the years) but a significant portion of my close IRL friends are strippers, sex workers, sex educators, nightlife event producers, and people active in the kink community like me. Through them, I also come in contact with their acquaintances in the same profession regularly. They are, not coincidentally in my mind, the most vocal people I personally know when it comes to believing victims, practicing hardline consent, rejecting unwanted sexual advances, and calling out improper behaviors. I recognize that in their case they kind of have to to stay safe and this is an anecdotal thing so it may not be universally applicable, but theirs are attitudes that have colored my adult life, and given said influences, I find it very hard to follow the line of thinking that being against sexual inappropriateness makes one more prude than the average person.

A convincing argument I read just yesterday on why it should be okay for women to be suspicious and rude to men who try to approach and act nice to them in the streets was posted by a cam girl. I struggle to see her as puritanical, and by extension I struggle to see this issue as having anything to do with sexual liberation.

[Dukefrukem]

I learned a lot from that post.

[number8]

This made me realize that there's really two eras of Creepy Woody Allen that often get conflated. There's the "Woody Allen is a pervy old man who cheated on his girlfriend with her adopted daughter" era, which has always inspired more ridicule than outrage, and then there's the "Woody Allen is an alleged rapist" era that we are in now. I do forget sometimes that the late phase is relatively recent. It really only began after Dylan Farrow's open letter, which came out in 2014.

When i read Gerwig's response, my initial thought was, "Hold up, but who doesn't know about Woody Allen's deal?" But really, yeah, To Rome With Love was pre-Dylan Farrow's story becoming public, back when the worst that most people thought of him was in a Weirdo Uncle kind of way. It is different when it's an escalation rather than a shocking reveal.

[Skitch]

I didn't know about the alleged rapist thing. What went on there? I guess I'm still stuck in the WA is a pervy old man era.

[baby doll]

Well, the accusations of molestation were already in the public domain in 1992, and Mia Farrow wrote a book detailing Allen's disturbing behaviour with Dylan leading up to the alleged molestation a few years after that. Dylan Farrow's op-ed piece put the allegations back in the public eye but--like Cosby's mid-2000s rape settlement--they weren't a secret. Gerwig's decision to publicly snub Allen (who's never been convicted of anything, incidentally) is basically a PR move: When it was good for her career to be in a Woody Allen movie, she took the job; now that it's not good for her image to be associated with Allen, she's saying she won't work for him again. I don't blame her for that (nobody has to be in a Woody Allen movie if they don't want to be); I just don't think we should have any illusions about her motivations.

[Ezee E]

I didn't know about the alleged rapist thing. What went on there? I guess I'm still stuck in the WA is a pervy old man era.

He is a pervy old man, but probably worse than you think.

This whole time, I figured the whole Mia Farrow thing was like Louis CK type of behavior.

[baby doll]

Also, I've read two articles in the last couple days claiming Catherine Deneuve is best known for playing the title character in Belle de jour--not for her role in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg or as the face of Chanel no. 5--which is transparently a rhetorical move to discredit her views (which I think are looney, by the way) by associating her exclusively with a film in which she plays a sex worker.