The Weinstein effect

Based on all this, should we ban any comment about the attractiveness or sexiness of anyone, male or female , on this forum? Because it’s creepy?

I genuinely can't remember the last time I heard anyone say the words "nice ass" in real life. Years will pass between hearing the phrase in conversation. It could well knock you off-kilter.

This is what gets me with a lot of the 'why didn't you just tell them where to shove it' type comments. Putting aside being taken aback, scared or just confused, most times you're in a situation where actually it's detrimental to you to respond. I've worked in a call centre and similarly had creepy callers. But we were so bound by the 'rules of calls' we had to sit there and take it and report it after...for what good that did. 

Similarly with a lot of this workplace stuff there's the attitude of somehow women are breaking the rules by speaking out against it. 

And as for 'nice ass/arse' (depending on your vernacular) I've never had it in a work/actual acquaintance sense but that's one of the frequent cat-calls I get (especially while out running, where obviously I look so freaking sexy) Closely followed by 'Smile Love' 

In Britain, the stage and screen are workplaces where, if women unionised and went on strike, theatres etc. would grind to a halt. No actresses, no play.

I was surprised Mark Rylance received so little criticism a few years ago - as an adult male he didn't have the excuse of historical authenticity either. I think those doing it now would have to do so under a minority/gay umbrella.

And if they'd all walked away from Max Stafford-Clark it would be very embarrassing for the theatres involved and the newspapers would have scented a story. As it was, his behaviour was known enough to be the subject of satire in the Buddha of Suburbia. A tutor who was tackled by the Women's Group when I was at uni - no more one-to-one tutorials for him - was rumoured to be the model for the predatory tutor in The History Man. I do wonder if politics had something to do with it - not wanting to give a gift to the Daily Mail. The SWP silenced women by saying if they complained they'd give a gift to their political enemies, but then, they are a weird political cult.

As satisfying as I'm sure it was, it only worked as a deterrent if he knew it was the consequence of his behaviour. Did he?

Chances of it making a difference to his future behaviour sound pretty slim.

How does change come about? How has change ever come about, particularly for women? By sitting around waiting for someone else to do it, for some white knight on a shining charger to help a damsel in distress? No, it has come about by the marginalised, particularly women, standing up for themselves, fighting for their rights, even if it meant - for the Suffragists - prison, even as far as death.

Bloody hell, even a film like Carry on Girls shows a woman who is being sexually harassed fighting back and humiliating her groper - if the message had even percolated down to Carry On writers in the early 70s - there's your cultural change! - why was it still being regarded as something you should just put up with at a Left/liberal, supposedly progressive institution like the Royal Court in the 1990s?

I can see why a 16 year old fashion model from Eastern Europe, alone in a strange country, a family back home to support, with her work permit dependent upon agreeing to a pervy photographers demands keeping quiet and acquiescing. I can see why a Hollywood starlet might keep schtum - afraid presumably that Weinstein's lawyers would rip you and your family to shreds. I am astonished that a 20something Oxford graduate, already well known for a bold one-woman show called Sex, should be so passive that when a dirty old man makes lewd comments she sits there apparently as shocked as a Victorian schoolmarm. If you had been through Oxford in that period, you were in a minority, regarded by some as there for their recreation, and learned to deal with a lot of s-t from men. Academically, it was a very tough, one to one environment - people would leave tutorials in tears. Student newspapers were as personally vicious as any tabloid, and you had to grow up fast. It was also a highly politicised, activist environment, especially for women and gay groups. And 20-something is when you can afford to be revolutionary - you don't have dependent children, a mortgage, ageing parents to care for. If you are in a Leftist environment, all the better - your peer group know how they are meant to be behaving and those who cross lines could be called out. Dons who behaved inappropriately were being dealt with by university women's groups by the 80s. That's the environment these Royal Court women came from. Not nursery school.

I've experienced life-changing sexual assault, and numerous incidents of harassment, groping, sexual bullying, obscene catcalling and the rest. I learned to fight back in my mid-teens. I have responded to attacks, sometimes directly, physically - a punch to the teenager in a shop who jabbed his fingers up my crotch, a discreet crush to a man who groped me at a wedding, a hot drink in the face to one of the creepy stalker students who, I discovered - by setting fire to someone's credit card to make him talk (effective!) - had placed a bet with two friends that one of them would f me by the end of term. On other occasions - one of the sexual assaults - I contacted numerous friends on Facebook, told them what happened - I didn't know the man, but he was one of their friends - and explained why I would no longer be socialising with them (had my Mum not just had a cancer op, I'd have gone to the police). When we got obscene phone calls, we let off a ship fog horn down the phone - they never called back. I have also stood my ground or intervened when I've heard racial insults on public transport - e.g. on a train to Kew, where a middle-class busker started calling passengers 'mean jews' for not giving him cash. And when I stood up, and called him out on it, not one other passenger said or did anything, not one, for 15 minutes. They all stared at their feet. Ditto when I tried to tackle a woman with a pushchair who was forcing a very old woman out of her seat on a London bus. Everyone just sat in silence. It's pathetic and it's why such things keep happening.

Yes, there are times it's impossible - when you are outnumbered walking home after midnight, or a gang of men shout about what they want to do to you out of a passing car when you're on a lonely road. I wouldn't do it on a night bus. Friends have been hospitalized for standing their ground, one in a racial attack, one a homophobic one - I've met them in the aftermath, seen the blood, once opened the door to one with his front teeth in his hand - but that's in the street, not in a restaurant dining with a theatre director!!!

Of course the blame lies with men, but I am shocked and p-ssed off that so many intelligent women sat there in silence and took it. It's embarrassing. That it should take two decades into the 21stc and an American newspaper sting with a wired-up model to burst this open. It makes us look just what generations of men have claimed we are - "the weaker sex". 

You can tell I watched Punk Britannia last night. The angry, take no cr-p, DIY ethic.


Right, that's enough dwelling on the past for today. Happy thoughts from now on. 

The audience were in the Wigmore Hall, not a studio, and there was much applause and laughter at Michael Gove's comment.

Some of the complaints against Max SC related to when he was directing a “new adaptation” at the RSC. What would that have been ? Some fairly lurid stories used to come out of the RSC in the 1990s, no way of knowing at my distance whether they were true.