{"id":6210,"date":"2017-12-20T12:35:18","date_gmt":"2017-12-20T11:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6210"},"modified":"2017-12-20T12:38:44","modified_gmt":"2017-12-20T11:38:44","slug":"matt-damon-and-feminist-ire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/6210\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Damon and Feminist Ire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Damon has always come across to me as a sanctimonious arse, but I have some sympathy with him <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/blogs-trending-42410104\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"story-body__introduction\">Matt Damon has been criticised as &#8220;tone deaf&#8221; for his recent comments about sexual harassment in the entertainment industry.<\/p>\n<p>The actor and writer is facing a backlash on social media for saying people should be paying more attention to men who are not sexual predators.<\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0an interview for Business Insider\u00a0on Monday, Damon said men not involved in sexual misconduct in Hollywood are not gaining attention.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re in this watershed moment, and it&#8217;s great, but I think one thing that&#8217;s not being talked about is&#8230; the preponderance of men I&#8217;ve worked with who don&#8217;t do this kind of thing,&#8221; he said during an interview while promoting his new film Downsizing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s a pretty bone-headed choice of words but this is what happens when actors try forming their own sentences instead of reading someone else&#8217;s. Personally I reckon Matt Damon was most accurately portrayed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0372588\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Team America: World Police<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QApeYpw7KQQ\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>What I think he was trying to say was that not all men in Hollywood are engaged in sexual abuse, and his comments should be taken in the context of an environment in which certain women believe that all men, by definition, are rapists. To be fair to these certain women, by which I mean deranged feminists, I can see where they are coming from: if I&#8217;d put men&#8217;s politics and platitudes before their character and subsequently found myself surrounded by low-grade scumbags while decent men kept two postcodes away, I&#8217;d probably feel the same way too. But if women are free to declare that all men are rapists, I don&#8217;t see why Matt Damon can&#8217;t point out they aren&#8217;t. Only he would have been better getting his agent or someone to write the words on a piece of paper first.<\/p>\n<p>This, however, is spot on:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Last week in an interview with ABC News Damon said groping and rape were two different things and shouldn&#8217;t be treated the same.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?&#8221; Damon told\u00a0ABC&#8217;S &#8216;Popcorn&#8217; with Peter Travers<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated, without question, but they shouldn&#8217;t be conflated, right?&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is simply common sense, but this is the last thing feminists want injected into the debate:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Both sets of remarks drew criticism from other actresses, including from his Good Will Hunting co-star\u00a0Minnie Driver\u00a0&#8211; who said Damon was among those to be &#8220;utterly tone deaf&#8221; on the topic<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Who? Oh yes, Minnie Driver, whose career tanked after <em>Good Will Hunting<\/em> while Damon&#8217;s soared. Is she a little bitter, do you think? Perhaps she&#8217;s still over in Stanford waiting for him to show up? Meanwhile, here&#8217;s Alyssa Milano who, I think, starred as Arnie&#8217;s daughter in <em>Commando<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-conversation=\"none\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">I have been a victim of each component of the sexual assault spectrum of which you speak. They all hurt. And they are all connected to a patriarchy intertwined with normalized, accepted&#8211;even welcomed&#8211; misogyny.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Alyssa_Milano\/status\/941840946420789250?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">December 16, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>A burn from a kettle hurts. So does getting shot. That doesn&#8217;t mean we should conflate kettle-burns with shootings. Okay, I get she think&#8217;s they&#8217;re connected but:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-conversation=\"none\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">We are not outraged because someone grabbed our asses in a picture. We are outraged because we were made to feel this was normal. We are outraged because we have been gaslighted. We are outraged because we were silenced for so long.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Alyssa_Milano\/status\/941841081200607232?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">December 16, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Which might be why Damon said:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated, without question, but they shouldn&#8217;t be conflated, right?&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Actresses are not the sharpest knives in the drawer at the best of times, nor are third-wave feminists. But actresses engaged in third-wave feminism are so dim they make Matt Damon look like the smart one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Damon has always come across to me as a sanctimonious arse, but I have some sympathy with him here: Matt Damon has been criticised as &#8220;tone deaf&#8221; for his recent comments about sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. The &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/6210\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[85,79],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6210"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6210"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6213,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6210\/revisions\/6213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}