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Post by Deleted on Oct 21, 2017 16:05:45 GMT
I know what you mean Snciole I've spent time questioning myself- either about things that happened to me, or things that happened to others that I either 'let slide' (in my own case) or felt it wasn't my place/appropriate to say anything in the case of 'hearing things'. I'm still certain I never had anything 'concrete' either, on anyone. But I also could have talked to other people, raised my concerned somehow, etc. And it's sad and frustrating. Because again, look who is feeling guilty, feeling they could have done more. Not the people doing these things but people all around. Women, mostly, once again. And likewise, I'm going over all the things I've just dismissed or put up with over the years. From all the random, inappropriate comments and touching on nights out in my teens, to workplace comments I was too scared to raise. I just really hope that from now on, and particularly younger generations start speaking up (and being supported) on even the most minor of offences, so we start erasing the idea it's somehow acceptable.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 21, 2017 19:42:16 GMT
Years ago a young woman confided in me that MSC was harassing her. He had propositioned her and would not take “no” for an answer. I advised her to report him (who she would have reported him to God only knows. Everyone knew about him and indulged his behaviour, treating it as a joke). She told me that she didn’t want to report him because she was hoping to have a career as a director. I did not feel it was my place to report him when she didn’t want to. I also remember meeting another older woman and broaching the subject with her. She knew all about his antics and, unlike others, didn’t think it was a joke but took it seriously, although nothing was done about it. I should also add that there are scores of (mostly) actresses who went with him consensually. In the ‘80s it was the main topic of conversation. Also, he turns up thinly veiled in Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia. I should also add that MSC did more than most other directors to champion female playwrights.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 21, 2017 19:50:01 GMT
Just read the Rebellato piece. It is excellent - especially the discussion about MSC knowing exactly what he was doing when he made his lewd comments.
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Post by Phantom of London on Oct 22, 2017 21:12:08 GMT
Ironically looking at past shows at the Menier Chocolate Factory, when they first oped they did a show called:
What We Did to Weinstein by Ryan Craig.
I bet they won't revive that anytime soon!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 24, 2017 4:44:40 GMT
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Post by crowblack on Oct 26, 2017 9:48:42 GMT
I was watching The End of the F-ing World last night (brilliant so far) and looked up the actors afterwards, and was rather surprised to read this, in the Ham & High from a few years ago: "By autumn, he was one of the youngest names included in Tatler’s Little Black Book – a list of the most eligible men and women in town that many boys his age would pay to be in." Sorry, what? Is this the 18th century? Teenage actors (as Alex Lawther then was, around 17 and playing younger roles) being added, not to a list of acting talent but of f-kability?
Btw, it'll be interesting to se if Radio 5 finally drop their cringeworthy 'snog, marry, avoid' piece from their Sunday political programme this week.
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Xanderl
Member
Not always very high value in terms of ticket yield or donations
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Post by Xanderl on Oct 26, 2017 13:25:55 GMT
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Post by Jan on Oct 26, 2017 15:50:56 GMT
Not really surprising MSC championed women playwrights is it, given they were more likely to write parts for actresses.
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Post by crowblack on Oct 26, 2017 22:18:19 GMT
Still, though, if I was sitting down to dinner with a potential employer and his opening words were "nice ass", I'd slap his face and leave. Maybe that's why I'm skint.
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Post by foxa on Oct 27, 2017 6:57:07 GMT
Maybe. Unless there is physical contact or direct insults, sometimes it is hard to react quickly - often because it's too baffling or unexpected. Example: at university one of my professors said to me (in front of about five other students) 'You have an overbite, but I don't suppose it will affect your kissing much.' Did I storm out, etc.? No. I stood there thinking, 'I have an overbite? My parents should get a refund from our orthodontist. Why are we talking about kissing in the middle of a seminar? How bad would an overbite have to be to affect kissing? Could I accidentally gnaw through someone's lips?') And while those thoughts were going through my head, I just stood there, doubtless looking ridiculous.
So on 'Nice ass' - I could imagine an actor thinking: is it important for this role to have a nice ass? Is he testing me to see how I react? Is this a joke? Maybe he's quoting a line from a play? At least he didn't say 'fat ass'...etc.
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Post by kathryn on Oct 27, 2017 16:14:37 GMT
Yup. I remember one time I was working at the job centre and calling people to remind them they had an appointment the next day. One guy responded to 'Hello Mr whatever, I am calling from JobCentrePlus to remind you that you have an appointment with x advisor tomorrow at y time. If you do not attend your benefit may be sanctioned' by saying I had a very sexy voice. I didn't even manage to process what he said, it was so out of left-field, I genuinely couldn't arrange the sounds into words. I said 'I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that' twice, and he repeated it twice, before the penny dropped and I realised.
And I couldn't hang up on him, or tell him off for being a creep, I had to close off the call by repeating his appointment time and saying goodbye. He was chuckling as he hung up - he'd obviously done it to make me uncomfortable, and he knew he had succeeded.
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Post by BurlyBeaR on Oct 27, 2017 16:39:45 GMT
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?
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Post by Deleted on Oct 27, 2017 16:46:06 GMT
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? That would obviously be ridiculous.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 27, 2017 16:49:32 GMT
So on 'Nice ass' - I could imagine an actor thinking: is it important for this role to have a nice ass? Is he testing me to see how I react? Is this a joke? Maybe he's quoting a line from a play? At least he didn't say 'fat ass'...etc. 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.
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Post by The Matthew on Oct 27, 2017 17:55:38 GMT
And I couldn't hang up on him, or tell him off for being a creep, I had to close off the call by repeating his appointment time and saying goodbye. There's no chance I'll ever run my own company, but if I did there would be a rule that no member of staff has to take crap from any member of the public who was clearly relying on "You don't dare fight back because I can get you fired". The principle would be "If you think being a customer means you can abuse staff then we don't want you as a customer". I rather like this story.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 27, 2017 18:04:38 GMT
Yup. I remember one time I was working at the job centre and calling people to remind them they had an appointment the next day. One guy responded to 'Hello Mr whatever, I am calling from JobCentrePlus to remind you that you have an appointment with x advisor tomorrow at y time. If you do not attend your benefit may be sanctioned' by saying I had a very sexy voice. I didn't even manage to process what he said, it was so out of left-field, I genuinely couldn't arrange the sounds into words. I said 'I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that' twice, and he repeated it twice, before the penny dropped and I realised. And I couldn't hang up on him, or tell him off for being a creep, I had to close off the call by repeating his appointment time and saying goodbye. He was chuckling as he hung up - he'd obviously done it to make me uncomfortable, and he knew he had succeeded. 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'
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Post by kathryn on Oct 27, 2017 20:27:31 GMT
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? No, this is not about banning things. It's about recognising how impossible it is for individuals to deal with inappropriately sexual comments or behaviour in work situations and not blaming them for not having the perfect come-back or strategy to hand. When the context is so damn inappropriate it actually takes time to process that it *is* what happened, and to work out how to react. And that is what is being exploited - the men who do this know full well that the women they do it to are not going to know how to react, will hesitate to cause a scene, don't want to be accused of lacking a sense of humour or be seen as difficult or over-sensitive. And, well, it's all very well to say women shouldn't put up with it, should walk away from jobs/from the men with the power to advance careers, but if they did there would be far fewer women working than there already are - and nothing would ever get changed, because no-one would be in a powerful enough position to have their voice heard.
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Post by crowblack on Oct 27, 2017 21:15:23 GMT
but if they did there would be far fewer women working than there already are 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.
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Post by kathryn on Oct 27, 2017 21:21:55 GMT
We're not just talking about actresses here. There's few enough female playwrites produced as it is, if they'd all walked away from Max Stafford-Clark when he was a creep there would be even fewer.
And all-male productions are still A Thing - there were no professional actresses at all until about 1660, the whole canon of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is performable without them.
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Post by crowblack on Oct 27, 2017 21:43:02 GMT
And all-male productions are still A Thing 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.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 28, 2017 6:21:27 GMT
I haven't been harassed at work, but then I work in a very female-dominated industry. Things like that are more likely to make a difference than what you wear. The company I've temped for for 10 years has about an even gender balance, I'd say. I've never felt that my gender has caused any sort of bias at work & I've never heard any rumours of anyone else having problems with sexual harrassment or suchlike, so I guess I'm fortunate it's a decent company from that point of view. Your post made me think about my experience in offices: in general it often seems to me that the marginalisation of women In some workplaces is so normalised that nobody notices. It was quite shocking to me that in the last place I worked a couple of men were self appointed bosses who ruled the roost and everyone allowed them to do so - even the actual boss. I would not have minded if they were as good as they thought they were, but they weren’t. They would talk over everyone, dismiss other people’s ideas. Those women who did not go along with this and asserted their equality were ostracised (even by the other women). It was quite an eye opener
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Post by kathryn on Oct 28, 2017 8:07:12 GMT
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. One advantage of the travel industry, is that female staff didn't have to "take it." Years ago, we had a customer who reduced one of the women to tears on the phone. A quick phone call or two sorted the problem. The man was, to his amazement, strip-searched at both the start and end of both outbound and inbound flights. Very stressful, particularly after having to sit in the back row near the toilets and with young children on both sides, both ways... 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?
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Post by kathryn on Oct 28, 2017 8:22:25 GMT
And all-male productions are still A Thing 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. You say these things with such confidence! I severely doubt your conclusions, because it's 2017 and this stuff is only just coming to light, and then only because famous people were involved. Max Stafford-Clark is not a celebrity (only those in the know recognised him in The Buddha in Suburbia - that went right over most people's heads) and neither were any of the women he harassed at the time he did it. The newspapers? Come off it - The Daily Mail still thinks that women with careers are a danger to society! The tabloids are the worst victim-blamers around, still, in 20-bloody-17, and were considerably worse in the 80s and 90s. These fantasies of 'if only they'd come forward!' are so infuriating because they entirely deny the lived experience of women there at the time, and suggest they are somehow to blame for letting it continue. The truth is you need wholesale cultural change before people are listened to on this subject, and the reason why so many people are coming forward right now is that there seems to be potential to create that. Individuals can't change a culture alone - you need critical mass for that.
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Post by kathryn on Oct 28, 2017 8:26:24 GMT
From the PDR (post departure report) he was no better to the ground team, and his complaint letter seemed to suggest he thought it was them who did it due to that. So he made a link, sort of. Actually, they acted on our report, but upped the anti when he treated them the same way. Chances of it making a difference to his future behaviour sound pretty slim.
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Post by lynette on Oct 28, 2017 9:15:04 GMT
I’m sorry but I adore the story of the bloke who was strip searched! Bet when he told his pals they winked at each other.
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Post by crowblack on Oct 28, 2017 10:06:38 GMT
The truth is you need wholesale cultural change before people are listened to 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!!!
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Post by kathryn on Oct 28, 2017 10:16:39 GMT
www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/weighing-the-costs-of-speaking-out-about-harvey-weinstein/ampThis is a very good piece. Wholesale cultural change happens when we stop responding to these accounts by saying 'if only they'd said something before!', 'they should have just walked out!', 'are we not allowed to compliment people any more?', and all the rest of the bullsh*t that has been said right here in this thread, and make bloody well sure that we place the blame where it truly lies - with the men behaving in these ways and the people in power who did nothing about it, not with their victims. It starts right here, with US.
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Post by crowblack on Oct 28, 2017 10:23:13 GMT
place the blame where it truly lies 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".
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Post by crowblack on Oct 28, 2017 10:27:10 GMT
Oh, and thank you for calling my account of what has happened to me "bullsh*t".
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Post by crowblack on Oct 28, 2017 10:40:32 GMT
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.
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