Sexual Assault and the Culture of Hollywood

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > Sexual Assault and the Culture of Hollywood

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Vegetable posted:

The people �debunking� that Gal Gadot story are stupid as hell. Just as somebody can make a story up, somebody can also make a confession up.

Like others have said, there are unique identifiers in the story. Wait for somebody to follow up on the leads. Somebody will. Save your indignation, whichever side you�re on.

I posted in the comic movie thread about one tweet claiming to debunk the story; they linked to a Youtube video claiming that events depicted in the article suspiciously "mirrored" a scene from Gal Gadot's recent movie Keeping Up With the Joneses, implying this was all deranged fan fiction or something.

The tweet was getting more and more retweets and responses saying stuff like "U really deserve a Pulitzer Prize for this..." except, if you watched the video, it had literally nothing in common with the story from the article except that two women were talking and one was Gal Gadot. And now that Twitter account is "protected" so you can't see the tweet.

I'm not saying it's particularly suspicious, given how stupid and reactionary people often are on Twitter (I'm guessing none of the responders actually watched the video), but it's definitely all an example of how bad social media can be as a way of actually sorting through these kind of events.

Martman fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Nov 15, 2017

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 07:44

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 01:33

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

-Blackadder- posted:

Sometimes I like to look at these things with a birds eye view of humanity. It's fascinating to observe how culture functions and how groups of people define boundaries for acceptable behavior and how the culture and those boundaries evolve over time.

Spoiler: you don't have a bird's eye view of humanity.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2017 04:14

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

I wanna say that rant seems like a troll, but incels really give meaning to Poe's Law.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2018 03:39

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

When did James Gunn previously get a lot of backlash for the tweets? And when did he apologize for them?

# ¿ Jul 22, 2018 21:26

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

CelticPredator posted:

Sup dude

https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/james-gunn-guardians-of-the-galaxy?utm_term=.ntndNWxmY#.sogxykLdQ

So like, he didn't actually experience backlash did he? I'm not denying the value of that statement you've quoted, but people have been saying there was already backlash and that's what I'm asking about.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2018 22:27

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Judakel posted:

Never admit you were wrong.

I will concede that my initial question implied he had never given any kind of apology, and I didn't mean that. I just took Taintrunner's statement as an implication that the whole thing had been brought to the public's attention in the past and that Gunn had specifically responded to it. Bringing it up on his own honestly makes him look better in that article, I just don't see where the idea that he had already gotten a bunch of backlash came from.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2018 00:41

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Groovelord Neato posted:

the "backlash" now is almost entirely invented.

Yes. I was asking for clarification about Taintrunner saying Gunn had already received backlash in the past and that's part of what lead to him changing his behavior and stuff. I guess maybe he meant he received backlash in his personal life or something, I was just trying to figure out what it was based on.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2018 01:19

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

K. Waste posted:

Why would anyone choose to not go to the police? Cops are notorious for their rigorous investigation of abuses of power

He's just saying that some of the same reasoning applies to an accused not immediately going for public litigation in response. I don't think the intent was what you're implying.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2018 23:41

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Samovar posted:

How did tulip bulbs become to mean anything other than tulip bulbs during the Tulip Mania?

because... of hoteps?

# ¿ Sep 27, 2018 10:26

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

It's kind of weird because like, to claim 20,000 you have to have done some specific math in your head. 10,000 from Chamberlain isn't crazy to hear because he's basically saying "it might be 5 digits, it's that many!" To take it to 20,000 instead of just 10,000 implies a level of accounting that's just absurd once you're reaching those numbers.

But yes, it's not appropriate for this thread at all.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2019 11:16

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Step 1. Roughly add up the total time Judakel has spent probated purely for being a pissbaby
Step 2. Reexamine your decision to engage

# ¿ Oct 8, 2019 21:47

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Skwirl posted:

I think that shot is fine in context, especially with the smile, but Wonder Woman's costume alone is proof of male gaze.

whereas 300's costumes are proof of male gays

# ¿ Jul 9, 2020 22:14

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

KitConstantine posted:

The over-the-top muscular cut body is a male power fantasy not a woman's sexual fantasy. It appears homoerotic because men are the target audience for the power fantasy the spartans embody (literally).

I feel pretty weird about "males are into A, whereas females are aroused by B" arguments. What is this based on?

Further, if it's a power fantasy of men rather than a sexual one, wouldn't the relevant gaze be from the point of view of the Spartans themselves? Someone having a power fantasy wants to be a Spartan, not ogle them

EDIT: Oof sorry I kinda forgot which thread I was in, probably not the best place for this side-track

Martman fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Jul 10, 2020

# ¿ Jul 10, 2020 01:13

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Paragon8 posted:

i don't think its thats simple. there's also a pretty compelling argument that its Timoth�e Chalamet if we're talking about who women consider hot.

I think there is a compelling argument that women are humans with a large range of desires

# ¿ Jul 10, 2020 02:46

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Vagabundo posted:

Does this guy have any facial expressions other than the Dreamworks Face?

He also has the "wait, people can save my Snapchat messages? oh gently caress..." face

# ¿ Jul 24, 2020 07:55

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

If Depp really had a bunch of money manager dudes stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from him, and it's turning out Heard was fabricating insane amounts of stuff, I wonder if she was... "encouraged" by them to help discredit him? Like obviously he is a drug-addled moron and you don't need a conspiracy to explain him being taken advantage of from many angles, but also money does crazy things.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2020 10:33

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

It's also weird that he still tweets as the movie Upstream Color. It'd be like if The Passion of the Christ started going on racist twitter rants

# ¿ Jul 30, 2020 09:53

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

It seems like a really unfortunate modern issue where up-and-comers like Milana are required to engage with the "fanbase" very directly while working to build their brand and stuff. I don't mean "unfortunate" in a way of removing responsibility from the harassers, I just mean, it seems like creepy celebrity worshippers/objectifiers have never had such large-scale direct and immediate access to the targets of their mental illness.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 02:01

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Snowman_McK posted:

That is the one and that guy is permabanned now, which is...not terribly surprising.

but also, read the post that got him perma'd :stare:

# ¿ Dec 17, 2020 07:14

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

I would add that "outright raped" is an extremely loaded phrase. Not accusing you of anything, but different states have all kinds of different legal definitions of rape, and sometimes someone will be convicted of something not called "rape" even though most people would think of their act that way. And sometimes that kind of qualifying language is used to downplay the realities of all kinds of situations that do not fit someone's imagined version of rape as some precise "violent crime in a dark alley" kind of thing. So it's good to be clear about what you're asking.

I get you're speaking to legal definitions, I just wanted to be clear that sometimes the badness or magnitude of the act is not always the defining line between "rape" and something else in the eyes of the law, and many legal systems just have actively stupid and harmful definitions of sexual crimes.

Martman fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Feb 20, 2021

# ¿ Feb 20, 2021 02:45

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Yeah no worries, I really didn't mean that you were using it that way! Just kind of a heads up because I've seen that kind of language abused so much. Kinda harkens to that classic awful "legitimate rape" Todd Akin moment.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2021 03:01

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

I read Moses's piece when it was released, and at this point I think if you want to publically come out calling your sibling a liar in their accusation as he has, you can't then hide behind the "I want to remain private" excuse as he had for giving basically no further statements or appearances after that blog post. It's one thing for him to have his point of view, but in fact it is odd to claim to remember details of an alleged event from 25 years ago, when you were 14 years old, so strongly when you were not involved and would not have been involved. I would really like for him to be more open about this, but as it is I have come to strongly suspect the possibility that his (solely textual) voice is being used purely as a shield, basically directly by Allen.

And hey, he may honestly believe he remembers the events perfectly too. But he himself is claiming to have been an abused child, and even without the abuse it is genuinely insane to think his memory of events should be considered so much more reliable than Dylan's that you could close the book on that issue.

Martman fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Feb 20, 2021

# ¿ Feb 20, 2021 07:42

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Skwirl posted:

What the gently caress?

I'm not gonna say that's common or mundane or anything, but I think the reality is that a shocking number of women have experienced an insane level of terrifying situations. But yeah that's nuts.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2021 08:23

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

"your article posted:

Dr. Phil�s attorney, Lin Wood, sent us the following

Yikes! that guy really got around

# ¿ Mar 10, 2021 07:57

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Vagabundo posted:

Capturing the Friedmans did remind me a lot of the Christchurch Civic Creche case. There are some parallels, at least.

I've read about other similar cases, but reading about this it's just so painfully obvious that this dude being queer was a huge factor if not the entire reason for his conviction. I've always thought of that era of daycare moral panic as a kind of "random new thing of its time" but now I kinda wonder if that's really just the same poo poo that's always gone on and these cases finally started to get scrutiny around that time.

Martman fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Mar 14, 2021

# ¿ Mar 14, 2021 09:55

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

LionArcher posted:

Jokes about capitalism aside, literally it wouldn't matter. We're all silly apes. If it wasn't money, it's power or skill levels too. There will always be people who have an unfair advantage over others. The sooner we realize that and make sure that those who don't have power at least are treated fairly (or are not punished for not having power) then it's a lot closer to a good system. (housing the unhoused, giving people in abusive relationships a place to go that's safe). But there's literally no such thing as a perfect system, unless the whole point for us as a species to be a virus to jump start destroying the planet as we know it so it can reboot in a few hundred thousand years, in which case the system is working perfectly.

It's the same reason that the whole concept on twitter lately of women pointing out "its not safe for them to walk alone at night with head phones on, and do men understand it and how bad that is?" When I, as a dude with a ton of martial arts/bouncer training, am thinking, "nobody should walk alone at night with head phones on, that's stupid, but yes, they should not be getting catcalled/afraid all the time, yes that's very bad". There is a ton of behavior we can work to change in the culture, and that's a good thing. But you will never ever get rid of all the predators. That's silly.

Bad take, guillotine for you too

# ¿ Mar 25, 2021 07:08

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

I think to be fair, there may be another side where women have also been exposed to this stuff no matter their power/influence/whatever. At least to me, it seemed like the Weinstein stuff suggested that there's no level of success or whatever you want to call it where women were completely safe from him. And like, not that it would be much better if the system protected specifically only powerful women, but the fact that it wasn't even doing that speaks to some wild levels of misogyny.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2021 08:52

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Pirate Jet posted:

I mean, I think no level of influence was safe from Weinstein because he was literally the highest level of influence possible in Hollywood. But your point is still salient.

Yeah absolutely, you're right that basically Whedon did what he was "allowed" to get away with. I guess yeah I'm just saying it turned out that dudes in the real upper ranks were allowed to get away with everything.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2021 08:55

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

sethsez posted:

I don't see what's wrong with the app.

People recognize that it's creepy when celebrities gently caress their fans, and that power imbalances are part-and-parcel of celebrities interacting with most people, so it's not surprising they'd prefer an app where they can assume most people are on an even playing field. Being able to date without people going OH MY GOD I LOVED YOU IN MOVIE is probably a relief, and they're not taking advantage of anyone.

Unless I'm missing something about how it works?

It's putting fame front and center though. How could it become anything but "you, naive young hot girl, have a chance to date a famous man! You'd better compete with the thousands of other people who want this famous person's attention"

Not really seeing how that gets rid of the power issues.

# ¿ May 8, 2021 05:32

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

I did misunderstand the app, but it's still some 19 year old Tik Tok person who most people have never heard of getting matched with Matthew Perry. She has some number of thousands of followers on her platforms which, as far as I know is totally in the realm of numbers where people have just straight up bought follows and stuff?

My point isn't that celebrities can't date people, but that specifically limiting your pool to only "famous" people does nothing to solve the problems of differences in power or influence or whatever. I would be very surprised if Matthew Perry was particularly concerned if her fame and lifestyle were similar to his in a way that made their use of the app reasonable or whatever. He just saw a hot young woman who matched with Famous Man.

Martman fucked around with this message at 08:14 on May 8, 2021

# ¿ May 8, 2021 07:53

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

catapede posted:

Like wtf is this *sniff* poo poo. gently caress off.

I think it was just a dumb joke about the way Slavoj Zizek talks. Which, you know, people are bringing a lot of unnecessary snark and jokes and stuff to a thread that isn't really about that.

I think it is obvious that the movement has not been killed completely. It would maybe be reasonable to talk meToo being diminished or abandoned in the political sphere, which can be hugely important in many ways but doesn't determine everyone's experience.

# ¿ May 20, 2021 05:50

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

21 Muns posted:

I don't really trust the Dan Schneider stuff because his alleged status as a sexual predator is a meme in alt-right spaces like /pol/, it has been since before there was any good reason to think Weinstein-style sexual abuse is so rampant in the entertainment industry, and it's explicitly driven by antisemitism. There may be something legitimate to the allegations against Schneider, but there are so many disingenuous parties targeting him that I'm inclined to dismiss them as conspiracy theories in the absence of really solid evidence. Just for comparison's sake - this isn't like the Ansari case, where the allegations are detailed, recent, and first-person. I don't think this is going anywhere and I'm officially afraid for the future of this movement if it does. If Dan Schneider gets ousted over vague, malicious rumors and Roman Polanski is still off in France making movies, please let me get off of this train.

21 Muns posted:

Okay, I'm going to be real with y'all, this is a gimmick account and my heart really isn't in it anymore. I'm a fringey conspiracy-inclined Republican who believes in Pizzagate, and several years ago, back at the height of that whole drama, I got mad at the dismissive way Something Awful discussed it, and decided that the best way to counter that would be to pretend to be an extremely unappealing and dense skeptic (because openly stating my position would presumably just get me mocked and banned). In retrospect, this was a piss-poor plan, and even if it had been good, I put very little effort into implementing it and all I've really accomplished is making GBS threads up the forum and wasting everyone's time, including my own. I am sorry for having done this. I have often been wracked with guilt over it, as I despise lying and am simply a hypocrite here.

You have no reason to trust me or listen to me in any way, because I have been a stupid and disingenuous internet troll, but I would encourage everyone here to take a serious deep dive into the Pizzagate evidence. I see a lot of cognitive dissonance here about Epstein and Pizzagate: as it becomes more and more obvious that Epstein's existence implies an enormous child sex trafficking institution among the elite, people are struggling to reconcile this with their earlier knee-jerk view of Pizzagate. Some of the justifications are sad and desperate grasping - for example, trying to maintain that elite child sex abuse remains absurd in a stereotypically "normal" place like a pizzeria (even one at the center of many powerful people in DC), and that elites would only do such things in their gaudiest mansions, islands, private planes and so on. Others, though, are completely predicated on a failure to understand what evidence existed to support Pizzagate in the first place, or of what Pizzagate was claiming (which is reasonably forgivable, seeing as media sources at the time were, to say the very least, extremely loath to report honestly on it). It was "debunked" in the same sense that the interested parties could have "debunked" the allegations about Epstein if they so desired - claims that it was debunked all eventually trace back to the MPDC (the DC police department), who openly admit that they performed no investigation and simply rejected the premise out of hand. Frankly, the shooting at the pizzeria stunk as much as Epstein's death.

Most Pizzagate believers idiotically went on to become Q believers, despite Q's being, best I can tell, genuinely evidence-free. I was scratching my head wondering why so many people were going along with an obvious psyop like Q a long time before it actually became notable enough to get media attention. In retrospect, it's obvious why - it was designed to appeal to their hero worship of Trump and the hopes they had for his presidency. I was riding the partisan Trumper rush myself back in 2016, so I drank the Kool-Aid and tried not to think about it, but it's still very clear: Trump is himself among the elite, there is very little chance that he doesn't rape children, lots of them, probably including his daughter, and it's really obvious, because the dude's a loving creep. I am not smarter than you - the same partisan blinders in the brain that made you go along with the dominant narrative on Pizzagate also made me believe that Trump must have had good reasons for associating with Epstein.

It will not surprise me if I am perma'd for this post, and if I am it will be well-deserved, as I am a very bad poster whose presence on this forum amounts to an ill-conceived attempt to false-flag my political opposition. It's me, I'm the conspiracy, the conspiracy to make Something Awful a worse place. No more.

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

I think this was the only notable skeptic of the whole thing lol

Martman fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Jun 6, 2021

# ¿ Jun 6, 2021 07:17

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

hopefully he dies within like a month anyway

# ¿ Jun 30, 2021 22:49

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

If anything, being able to legally challenge a dude to a fight to the death because your wife says he raped her seems like the best possible use of toxic masculinity.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2021 11:02

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Snowman_McK posted:

loving hell what an rear end in a top hat. It serves as a sharp and grim reminder that it's not about sex to a predator, it's very much about power.

I've never fully understood this statement and it seems very categorical in a way that's completely unnecessary and tells lots of people how to interpret their own traumatic life situations. Are you saying the fact that he had easy access to consensual sex is proof that his rapes were not "about sex," but about power instead? Harvey Weinstein had all kinds of power, and could probably get whatever he wanted, and he just happened to enjoy using his power... for nonconsensual sex. How were his rapes not about sex?

I can understand that people have some good intention when saying this thing, but it seems simplistic at best and paints some image of a "standard" rapist that doesn't seem like it could possibly be helpful.

edit: Here's an article I found a few months ago that makes a good argument about it, sorry I'm not super equipped to take it on and I don't mean to be super rude about it

Martman fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Aug 26, 2021

# ¿ Aug 26, 2021 05:44

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

Ok. I feel like it starts from a reasonable place of "lack of access to sex is not the cause of rape" and goes too far I guess.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2021 07:25

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

It's kind of especially depressing given the popularized stories about how Brad threatened to kill Weinstein for making Gwenyth Paltrow uncomfortable

Like, as a young dude he felt able to lash out and take a stand... and then he apparently reached the point of allowing that treatment of his wife.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2021 12:27

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

It's great how when women make accusations while the person is alive and active, they're accused of trying to profit from him, ruin his career, cancel culture run amok, etc., but when they wait til the person is dead they're told "hey that's not fair, now he can't defend himself!!"

# ¿ Sep 16, 2021 08:03

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

I think Norm was a total manchild in a lot of ways. I think he was one of those people who loved to say extremely shocking stuff (especially in the 90s) like "trans people should die," and just thought it was funny to say extremely offensive like that, and spent a long time unwilling to examine the fact that that is still obviously transphobic (I've read that he later apologized for that specific one, but I am not personally aware of where to find it). From everything I've seen of him I think he would probably say that actually he obviously didn't think anyone should be killed, it's funny because it's so wrong to say, etc., i.e. all the standard old and bad defenses of ironic slurs and stuff.

I say this only to push back against the idea that his personal politics would actually line up with having been a Rush Limbaugh type. I think he was just extremely thoughtless and immature in a way that resulted in him doing racism and sexism in his comedy sometimes by not examining the meaning of his actions. I believe Rush and those types are people who the more you dug in, the more actively conscious hate you found, and I do not get that impression about Norm.

And given all this, when I finally got the chance to read the Twitter accusations I was not really surprised at all, as someone who had found Norm's actually funny stuff extremely funny for years. It's sad that he did that, and it's sad that he seemingly never matured enough to examine any of this stuff or genuinely try to fix himself or the harm he'd caused. Sometimes he would joke about sex in ways that made it pretty obvious he had some huge hangups about it. Over the last few years I had gotten the impression from some interviews that he had started to do genuine soul-searching about some of his psychological issues, possibly because of thinking about his mortality, but also in all those moments he never really mentioned women at all.

Martman fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Sep 17, 2021

# ¿ Sep 17, 2021 02:02

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 01:33

Martman: Nov 20, 2006

I went through a distinct process where I felt like there was, at some point, a possible path that Louis CK could have taken that would have led towards genuinely fixing his image, and helping make up for the things he did. By now I just think he is far past the point of having decided "hmmmm naw gently caress it. I'll just keep on truckin' and see what happens"

# ¿ Sep 17, 2021 11:05

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