Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I found the article to be underscoring in detail the modus operandi of sexual harassment in the film industry (and workspaces in general) and adds a fair amount of interesting thoughts to my mind about the functioning of society and inherent oppression within.
My educated guess: lots of downvotes pushing it down, a fact (more cruel perhaps than ironic) consistent with the points Salma Hayek is making in her article.
You cannot downvote a submission, just comments.
Sigh. HN is so disappointing sometimes.
HN is great for a narrow set of topics and types of articles, but anything outside that set usually either doesn't do well here in the first place, or gets forced down even if it does.
It underscores that the problem in these situations for women isn’t just assault - it’s a sexualized power that has expectations.
It’s disgusting and Weinstein should be rightly vilified for what he has done; let’s not forget that he’s a symptom of a larger societal problem however.
I think if you took 10 random people, they'd give you 10 different answers.
(And the related problem of bystanders witnessing this behavior and failing to push back hard against it.)
Who's right?
To elaborate - Salma's ambition was to make the movie, she could've quit 100 times, but instead she put up with 100 cases of sexual harassment (100 being an artbirary large number here)
Harvey's ambition was to have sexual relations with every woman that needed him to do something for her, that he found attractive. He ignored everyone else's needs but his own in the process of fulfilling his ambition.
Seeing it from the angle of ambition, both people could've done things differently but didn't, because they were preoccupied with achieving their goals, more than achieving let's say... harmony in themselves and the world... Is that the larger societal problem? That our ambitions are small and selfish?
If there is no proof or evidence, the trial won't go the way you think it will.
The whole point is to see the greys.
Salma was after breaking out of the Mexican soap opera market, into Hollywood. That was her ambition and she was willing to put up with what she describes as an incredible amount of sexual harassment. Once she had reached fame, she didnt' lead this movement to help other women who are trying to do the same.
When you don't have a lot, you don't know any better - I will look the other way.
When you're already successful, you want MORE success, put up with a mountain of shit along the way - I can safely say you're very driven to accomplish very trivial things, because integrity and mental health are not chips you play with for more fame unless you're incredibly confused.
That's the subtle point that folks who want to paint the world black and white and get outraged by anyone who sees greys keep missing - Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, the list goes on and on, get to be creeps, because people are willing to put up with emotional abuse to 'make it'.
That aside, you do have a point. If people like Hayek would "just say no," and give up on their crazy ambitions this wouldn't ever happen. It's really that simple. That's what you are saying, right?
Same goes for dictators - Saddam Hussein had all the power, until the equation changed.
But a random iraqi soldier in the mid-80s can’t be blamed for having an ambition to not die.
So logically the first is right
https://www.rainn.org/sites/default/files/Out_Of_1000_Rapes%... http://www.11thprincipleconsent.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/...
That he was comfortable making that choice, that it was seen as normal or just something that happened, that women felt their careers would be in jeopardy if they spoke up, that demanding additional sex scenes at the last minute wasn’t laughed off the lot...
... these are all symptoms of the broader social normalization of his abuse of power.
This year has been a turning point for pointing out it exists and some consequences for the individuals who do it... but it’s barely scratched the surface
That's not the issue; the harm—and the article explicitly says this—wasn’t the “nudity in a movie”. I’m sure this isn't an isolated incident, either for Wienstein or more generally.
But Hayek has done a fair amount of nude work for a mainstream actress, so when she explicitly points to the source of the problem and says it's not the fact of doing nude work for a film, I wonder why your so desperate to recast it as being about nudity in film.
The point I'm trying to make, apparently too subtly, is, how many nude scenes were coerced just like Hayek describes the one in Frida in order to satisfy the lusts of the male director/producer/writer just like this? It doesn't seem far-fetched, with all the revelations of sexual harassment coming out, that it's a lot of them.
Maybe it's so many that we should simply not tolerate nudity in films. If there was some way to certify that the nude scene wasn't "forced" then it would be OK, but if we accept that this was an act of force on Weinstein's part (Salma could have chosen not to do the movie, yet we all seem to agree this was still evil on the part of Weinstein), then how could that certification ever be done?
It was in large part retaliation for Hayek not acceding to Weinstein's demands for sexual favors offscreen. If nudity were categorically prohibited or simply commercially unviable in film, and instead of a “do this scene or no movie” threat Weinstein had simply canned the film in retaliation, or demanded some distasteful (whether or not itself sexual) offscreen favor to avoid such cancellation in retaliation, it would have been just as much of an act of sexual harassment.
The problem here has nothing to.do with nudity.
The nudity isn't the harm. Being forced into it is.
> She could have said no and not made the film. Does that mean this was OK?
I think you know my answer to that, and I don't think you're making an argument in good faith. How about you just come out and say directly what you'd like to say?
Weinstein imposed a "choice". But it wasn't a real choice. It was a threat. An ultimatum. Visiting violence upon others is not OK.
I expect that you're going to take the least-charitable possible interpretation of what I've said. That seems to be your MO, reading the rest of the thread. You're angry, and I get it, but I think that your anger is misdirected.
as a Dad with daughters I am horrified by this evil. Coercion and oppression to obtain debasing sexual content makes me sick: "There was no room for negotiation. I had to say yes."
Why do people go to such great lengths, even to compromise their personal ethics, to please others peoples imagined sensibilities or expectations?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Hacker News Guidelines
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
This isn't anything groundbreaking as Harvey was already exposed, this is just another data point.