Diddums
Terry Gilliam doesn’t like this strange new fad for saying men shouldn’t rape women.
The Time Bandits director and Monty Python cast member, who first described himself as a black lesbian in interviews last year, made his latest comments to the Independent while promoting his film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, released later this month.
Gilliam said he was “tired, as a white male, of being blamed for everything that is wrong with the world”.
But he’s not, is he. He’s not blamed for everything that is wrong with the world. The fact that some men – far too many men – rape women does not mean or imply that Terry Gilliam does so, nor that Terry Gilliam is the source of everything that is wrong with the world.
On to the #MeToo movement, he said: “I want people to take responsibility and not just constantly point a finger at somebody else, saying, ‘You’ve ruined my life.’”
That’s just fucking stupid, or lazy. Pointing out structural problems is taking responsibility. What exactly does he expect women to do, just ignore the occasional rape and keep smiling for the cameras?
He continued: “#MeToo is a witch-hunt. I really feel there were a lot of people, decent people, or mildly irritating people, who were getting hammered. That’s wrong. I don’t like mob mentality.”
So…the systematic abuse and coercion of women in Hollywood and elsewhere is just trivia, but the effort to put a stop to it is a witch hunt?
Easy to say, I guess, if it’s never been your problem.
Of [Harvey] Weinstein’s alleged victims, he said: “These were ambitious adults … There are many victims in Harvey’s life, and I feel sympathy for them, but then, Hollywood is full of very ambitious people who are adults and they make choices.”
Uh huh. It’s really the women who should be facing trial for raping Harvey Weinstein, amirite?
As a white male, all that’s being asked is to share your rights and give up some unearned privileges to the betterment of social justice and equality. That this seems so onerous is a pretty good indicator of why it’s long overdue.
You know, I hear a lot of people saying that the women knew what they would be expected to do when they went to Hollywood; there may be some truth to that, but that’s not the point. The point is, they may have made their way in spite of horrible expectations, gritted their teeth and shut their mouths because it was the only way to succeed, but that doesn’t exactly constitute consent. Just as a woman with a gun to her head doesn’t consent to give sex to her rapist…she goes along because there is something she wants (in that case, to be allowed to live to tomorrow).
What we should be asking is not did these women accept these terms for their success, but instead we should ask why should they have to? Terry Gilliam is an ambitious adult; he did not have to subject himself to Weinstein’s sexual expectations to get ahead in the world. Men can succeed by being talented, by being charming, by educating themselves in a given field, by showing up, by getting the job done and doing it right…women have to do all that PLUS. Plus smile. Plus wear pointy high heels that ruin their feet. Plus keep their hair done just so. Plus wear make up. Plus take off their clothes. Plus give blow jobs. Plus…the list goes on and on.
The fact that so few men are able to understand that floors me. Among my male friends and acquaintances, I count only two that seem to get it fully. All of the others sooner or later add that “but…” “But they knew what they were doing”. “But they were adults.” “But it isn’t the absolute very worst thing that could ever happen.” “But it’s just…” ad nauseum.
Terry Gilliam complains that he is tired of being blamed for things that are wrong, then goes on to demonstrate that he is, in fact, one of the problems. He is part of rape culture.
Yeah, bloody hard being a white straight male of a certain vintage and being asked to be nice to women and not think of them as our playthings and simply receptacles for whatever we’d like to try stuffing into them.
Actually, it’s not hard at all. All you need to do is be a decent human who applies the golden rule.
Come ON Terry, surely you can Man UP. :-)
And not only why should women have to lie down for Weinstein but why should there be so few parts for women in the first place and not only that but why do so many men have such a hard time seeing women as people at all? Why do so many men find one (1) woman to be a perfectly adequate number for every movie except the ones that have zero (0)?
Speaking of which, I did a column for The Freethinker on that last week.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thefreethinker/2019/12/op-ed-why-we-get-the-movies-we-get/
I wonder if male actors, being ambitious adults as well, were pressured into sexual activities by Weinstein? Weird that they weren’t.
The Pythons were notorious back in the day for their poor treatment of the few women who were involved in any aspect of making the show. They didn’t get any better from there.
#5, in reference to that column: I was having a discussion with a young male friend of mine. I had written a play about middle-aged women who write their own play because they are tired of there being no middle-aged women in plays (and there aren’t; I’m doing a research project on it – short of Martha in Virginia Woolf and Amanda in Glass Menagerie, there are few middle aged women, and you might guess from the two I cited that they are never presented positively…unless they are a nanny or maid, when they do get to be kind-hearted).
I happened to say something during this discussion about how people just don’t realize (or believe) that middle-aged women have rich, active, and interesting lives. He said something to the effect of “yeah, they really don’t, do they?” When I followed up, he wasn’t commenting to agree that people don’t get this, but he was agreeing that middle-aged women don’t have rich, active, and interesting lives. He can’t see the middle-aged women around him, I guess, because most of us are leading very rich, active, and interesting lives. More so than his life, in fact.
(p.s. Is there any way to get back to the time when we didn’t have to fill in our information every single time we post?)
One of my top movies of all time is “Ordinary People.” IIRC, it may have been Robert Redford’s directorial debut. Mary Tyler Moore’s character raised unanswerable questions about what a mother is supposed to do after the death of a child.