Remember that time Matt Damon mansplained diversity to an African-American female producer? Well, he's back at it, and this time he's mansplaining sexual harassment and how women should feel about it, to women. Here's what he had to say in a recent interview with ABC News, as reprinted by Page Six:
“With the criminal activity, a lot of people said, ‘Everybody knew.’ That’s not true. Everybody knew what kind of guy he was — that he was tough, he was a bully … You knew he was a dog, but nobody who made movies for him knew he was raping human beings. Any human being would have put a stop to that, no matter who he was … I knew I wouldn’t want him married to anyone close to me. But that was the extent of what we knew, you know? And that wasn’t surprising to anybody. So when you hear ‘Harvey this, Harvey that’ — I mean, look at the guy. Of course he’s a womanizer.
The Harvey situation is particularly horrible because those women — when you say, ‘Hey, let’s take a meeting in a hotel room’ — we auditioned for ‘Good Will Hunting’ in a hotel room. It’s not uncommon to take a meeting in a hotel room, and this is the most powerful man in the movie business at the time … If you get a thing from your agent on the letterhead of your agency that says, ‘Go meet Harvey Weinstein … at the Peninsula hotel,’ you go to that meeting. You don’t go into that meeting thinking something bad is going to happen to you.”
...The Louis C.K. thing, I don’t know all the details. I don’t do deep dives on this, but I did see his statement, which was arresting to me. When he came out and said, ‘I did this. I did these things. These women are all telling the truth.’ And I just remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s the sign of somebody who — well, we can work with that.’ What the Hell else are you supposed to do?
The fear for me is that right now, we’re in this moment — and I hope it doesn’t stay this way — the clear signal to men and to younger people is, ‘Deny it, because if you take responsibility for what you did, your life’s going to get ruined. But if you deny it, you can be in the White House, you can be the president.’ That message is 100 percent being sent right now.
When you see Al Franken taking a picture putting his hands on that woman’s flak jacket and mugging for the camera … that is just like a terrible joke, and it’s not funny. It’s wrong, and he shouldn’t have done that. But when you talk about Harvey and what he’s accused of, there are no pictures of that. He knew he was up to no good. There’s no witnesses, there’s no pictures, there’s no braggadocio — that stuff happened secretly, because it was criminal and he knew it. So they don’t belong in the same category.
I think we’re in this watershed moment and I think it’s great and I think it’s wonderful that women are feeling empowered to tell their stories, and it’s totally necessary. I do believe that there is a spectrum of behavior … there’s a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation. Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated, without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated.”
Matt has his own little #NotMe moment:
“It’s not everybody. There are so many great men and women in the movie business, so many great people … and these rotten, horrible apples are getting weeded out right now … That’s progress. But again, when we go back to talking about our own growth and development as human beings, we have to get to a place where we’re looking at people on one end of the spectrum and saying, ‘Let’s deal with this with some reflection and dialogue and reconciliation, and let’s all grow together and move on.’ And then I think we’re making real progress.”
Thank you Matt Damon! How would our small female brains understand any of this without you mansplaining it for us?
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