When I first started reading about the numerous allegations piling up against Harvey Weinstein, I didn’t understand at first how this could
be going on for over twenty years and no one had come forward
before now. That so many women could have such similar experiences with one of
the most powerful men in Hollywood and yet it continued to happen. If there were
to be no legal repercussions, why at the very least did older women not warn
younger women to not go into those hotel rooms, not to be alone with this
sexual predator? Why was he allowed to get away with it for so long?
Initially, I resisted the #metoo hashtag circulating on Facebook. Why was it that women had to stand in solidarity in our victimhood?
Why are we so obsessed with the woman as victim narrative? I don’t see myself
as a victim, and I don’t want to be made to wear that badge because we live in
a sexist, patriarchal world. Of course I empathized with the women who had been
victimized, but I resisted what felt to me like a celebration of our presumed
weakness. I couldn’t imagine being in a room with a powerful man who could make
or break my career crossing all the boundaries that lay between us until I felt
I had to make a choice between my ambition and my soul.
And then I remembered that actually I had been in a room
like this one. A year ago. And I didn’t know how to process it until I started
reading these women’s stories. I actually didn’t really understand how to think
about what had happened to me until I read in The Atlantic Brit Marling on Harvey Weinstein and the Economics of Consent. I didn’t realize my situation at the time because I had simply
accepted it as the status quo. And that’s my really horrifying realization in
all of this. Not that Harvey Weinstein is a sexual predator, because frankly
and unfortunately, I’m not surprised. But that I have been in a room similar to
the one these women describe, and I didn’t even realize it.
A year ago, I was hired to adapt a novel into a screenplay
by an older female producer. She let me know before offering me the job that
she had sent the book to several more well-known and established screenwriters,
one of whom was a female writer/director I greatly admired. Lucky for me, those other writers passed. This producer fancied herself a
sort of mentor and liked the idea of giving a young woman writer with potential a shot, and I was grateful for the opportunity. I had only ever had one
of my feature scripts—a co-write—optioned, and never anything produced except
for short films I made myself. This was a very important project for her and
she had a reputable director interested. To make myself more appealing while
trying to get the job, I lowballed a figure because I knew part of my appeal
was being a writer without a quote.
I was paid half up front and was to get the other half upon
delivery, but when I ran out of money and needed to pay my rent, I asked the
producer if I could get the rest of it now. It wasn’t a lot of money and I knew
the guy funding the film was loaded. She said yes, but that her financier wanted
to meet me, so I could go pick up the check in person at his office.
As I headed into the financier’s office building, a man
passed me in the hall and looked me up and down, smiling as he checked me out.
I continued into the building and was led into a conference room by the pleasant
young woman working the front desk. A few minutes later, the financier entered
the room. It was the guy who had checked me out in the hall. We shook hands and
I sat down. He was talkative and energetic. He asked me questions and then talked
over my answers. He seemed to want to tell me about himself, to show off his
philanthropic work, and I responded attentively like a good student, nodding
and smiling and making all the right noises. He asked if I liked the book—he
hadn’t read it. I said I thought it would make a good movie. I wasn’t really
sure what this meeting was about but apparently he just wanted to put a face to
the person to whom he was writing the checks.
He asked about my other work. I told him about my blog, this
blog. I told him the title. His face lit up. He suddenly seemed very interested
in what I had to say. He asked what made me so comfortable writing about sex. I
told him about the shameless way I was raised by a feminist mother. I told him
the foundational story of my childhood, that my mom bought me a vibrator when I was twelve. This isn’t privileged information—literally everyone who knows me
knows this. And it’s not a story designed to titillate. I sometimes tell it to
relative strangers in business meetings because I feel it cuts through a lot of
small talk and gets to the heart of something that helps people understand who
I am as a person and an artist.
He leaned in, a glint in his eye. He asked if I knew how he
and my producer had met. I said no. He dialed her number on the conference room
telephone in the middle of the table and said, “Hey, tell her how we met.” She
giggled and said, “Oh god.” She hung up and he told me they had met at a sex
party. Neither of them knew it was a sex party, of course, and they ended up
chatting in the kitchen while everyone else got it on in the living room. He
watched me intently as he told this story. I laughed politely and smiled a lot,
and still wondered what this meeting was about. Was I going through some kind
of test before I was going to get my check? He seemed electrified by the fact
that we were now talking about sex, and I suddenly felt like maybe we were
headed in the wrong direction. I could feel myself getting hot under my
cashmere sweater, an ill-advised choice on what I had assumed would be a chilly
fall day and had turned instead into a stifling LA one. But I didn’t want to
take it off, embarrassed about the possibility of sweat stains.
I wasn't sure why I felt uncomfortable. Maybe because
the stakes felt higher than usual. I had been hired by this woman I respected to
write a script after it had been passed on by much more established writers.
She had made it clear she was taking a chance on me, and here I was talking
about sex with her financier. Somehow I knew there was something about this
that wasn't totally above board. But hadn’t he pushed the conversation in this
direction? He had probed into my other work and gotten fixated on the subject
of sex. It suddenly seemed I had unwittingly tapped into an area where I maybe
shouldn’t have gone with this particular guy, and now I didn’t know how to get us
back to higher ground.
I guess inspired by my mention of being raised in a
shameless household, he started telling me about how he had coached his “gorgeous”
seventeen year old daughter that she should play with a guy’s balls when they had sex. I didn’t know what to say to that so I stupidly said, “Oh really, I
don’t think I’ve ever done that.”
“I’ll show you if I’m ever lucky enough to have sex with
you,” he said.
I just stared at him. I felt my face turning red. I started
to think back in the conversation to see if I had provoked this comment. Had I
said something that might make him feel like us having sex was a possibility?
And even if he thought it was, why would he say this out loud in a supposed business
meeting with someone he didn’t know? Had I incited this by talking about my
sex-positive childhood? Had I said too much? Probably, I usually did. Or was it just the way this guy talked? He stared at me
inquisitively, gauging my response. Perhaps testing how far he could go. This
was my opportunity to shut the door, to say, “Please don’t say that.” I didn’t.
I was just so surprised; I didn’t know what to say.
Later, when I recounted the story of this meeting to my mom
and a couple friends, I left out this part. I told them that I’d found the
meeting refreshing. I was charmed by the attention of this rich and powerful
older man. I was excited by what I saw as a potential business opportunity. He
seemed interested in the Slutty Feminist—maybe he wanted to invest in her?
The meeting ended with him asking me what would make me
happy. I waved the check in the air and said, “This helps!” He then said he
wanted to take me out for a sushi lunch so we could get to know each other
better. I said great. Free sushi lunch with a rich financier who likes slutty
feminists and might want to invest in my brand sounded good to me!
We went to lunch and it felt like a date. We ate expensive
sushi and he told me about how he loved his wife, she was a great mother, but she
had a low sex drive and he had a high sex drive and he said they had kind of a
don’t ask-don’t tell policy. He also said that the one time he’d taken
advantage of this policy and fucked someone else, the girl ended up
blackmailing him, and his wife was furious at him for putting their family at
risk. I wonder now if there was a part of this story he wasn't telling me, and if perhaps it wasn’t that she had blackmailed him,
but that he’d gotten sued and settled. Now I’m curious about the girl’s side of
the story.
He told me about the time he and his buddies went to Vietnam
where he met the most beautiful young girl he’d ever seen and his friend was
making out with her when his other friend broke the news that this beautiful young
girl was actually a beautiful young boy.
“I would’ve had sex with her. She was stunning,” he said, grinning.
He told me he wouldn’t make the first move on me, that I
would have to initiate if I wanted “anything to happen”. I stared at him. The
words I should have said stuck in my throat. I tried to think of how I might
switch gears into talking about business, but my brand was my business, right?
And my brand was the Slutty Feminist, wasn’t it? And the Slutty Feminist was just talking about the subject of her work at lunch with a rich businessman so it was all above board,
yes?
“That will never happen,” is something I never said.
Instead, I told him about the stand up gig I had coming up and he asked what he
had to do to get a private show. I laughed and said, “That’ll cost ya!”
He said he wanted to make our lunches a monthly engagement.
I said okay. I called my mom after lunch, excited that I might be forming some
kind of ambiguous relationship with someone who liked investing in the arts,
someone who might want to invest in me. I left out the part about tickling
balls and beautiful Vietnamese boys. I left out the part about how, deep in my
gut, I felt unsettled.
When I think about the women who went up into Harvey Weinstein’s hotel rooms and drank champagne and allowed themselves to be
massaged, I get it. I get why some women stood there while Harvey jerked off in
front of them. When I’m honest with myself, I can see exactly how that could've happened.
Because they wanted something—a role, a paycheck, a career—and here was the most thanked person at the Oscars after God, and on some level you might assume that someone so rich and powerful was right, no matter what he did to you.
As Brit Marling says in her wonderful piece on Harvey: “The
things that happen in hotel rooms and board rooms all over the world (and in
every industry) between women seeking employment or trying to keep employment
and men holding the power to grant it or take it away exist in a gray zone
where words like “consent” cannot fully capture the complexity of the
encounter. Because consent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum
of power to give it.”
Looking back on this lunch and the meeting that preceded it,
I’m embarrassed about how I acted. I feel ashamed that I didn’t set a boundary
for myself, that I allowed this guy to believe there was a chance of sex with
me if it meant I might get some career or financial boost out of it. I feel
like an idiot because on some deep level I knew exactly what was happening. I
knew this guy wasn't interested in my work, he just wanted to fuck me. I knew that and yet it felt good to feel
some illusion of power in the situation, when in actual fact, he had all the
power. Because as a young, broke, attractive woman in this world, sometimes it
seems the only real power we have access to is the ability to make powerful men
want to fuck us.
Which is why it adds insult to injury to tell the end of
this story. I finished the script and felt really good about it. I think it was
the best script I’d written up to that point. I’d poured my heart and soul into
it. It was personal yet true to the original story. I knew it was good. I
handed it in and waited. And waited. For two weeks, I heard nothing. Finally, the
producer called.
“Something has come to my attention that I feel very
uncomfortable about and it’s the reason I haven’t called you sooner,” she said
ominously. She then accused me of “pursuing a relationship” with the financier,
and said she felt betrayed. I was confused.
“He asked me to lunch,” I said. We had one lunch. These
lunches happen all over LA every second of every day. LA is built on these
getting to know you lunches.
She said she could have picked nine other writers, but she
chose me, and I should have been impeccable. She told me she felt like throwing
the whole project in the trash. She said this was a huge fuck up, she didn’t know if
she could trust me. She made it sound like I had seduced and fucked her
husband. I didn’t understand what was going on. I started to cry. She kept
going. She said what I had done downgraded my efforts from an “A to a C.”
“You’re not a teenager, you’re a grown woman,” she yelled. I
sobbed. I felt so ashamed. I didn’t even know why, but on some level I felt she
was right. I had failed at my responsibility: to draw a clear boundary with a
horny man who couldn’t help himself. I deserved this. I pleaded, told her I had
made a mistake.
“A huge mistake,” she corrected.
As I cried, she yelled. She said I had used the relationship
for my own gains, hoping to get something out of it when I should have been on
best behavior and grateful to her for giving a chance to an untested writer. I
tried to convince her I was trustworthy and honest, that I hadn’t meant any
harm. I’d never had to argue for my trustworthiness before; it’s not something
that had ever been questioned. I felt like an imposter even saying the words. I
felt blindsided by the attack and completely unprepared to defend myself.
In retrospect, I might have asked, “What exactly did I do
wrong? What could I have done differently?” Drawn a clearer boundary, okay. But
the man writing my checks (aka paying my bills) asked me to lunch. Was I
supposed to tell him to fuck off? How do you draw a boundary with someone who
within fifteen minutes of meeting you says, “If I’m ever lucky enough to have
sex with you…”? I had actually practiced what I would say at our next lunch,
the boundary I planned to draw—albeit belatedly. My plan to get us back on track, back to what I wanted out of this. That second lunch would never happen.
I never heard from the financier again after the producer’s call. I wondered if
she’d berated him as forcefully as she’d berated me. Somehow, I doubt it.
When the producer was done yelling, she pivoted to what a
good job I’d done on the script. She said the director had some notes, but they
both thought it was a very strong first take. I sniffled, trying to pull myself
together and shift gears. I grabbed a pen and paper so I could take down a
couple of her initial thoughts.
“We both think you’re a strong candidate to continue working
on the script.” I thanked her and we hung up. Then I went and stood in the
shower and shook like a leaf. I felt like I’d been assaulted.
I didn't continue working on the script. The project was shelved. I never received any feedback on my months of work, never got a chance to talk to the director. I was relieved to put the episode behind me, but I also felt used. I felt this was my punishment for being a little slut.
I think about the women who stood by silently—the older
women, the potential mentors—who knew what Harvey was up to but were too afraid
to speak up, afraid of losing their jobs, of jeopardizing their own tenuous
position in the pecking order. I do feel for those women. Who knows what kind
of awful shit they had to put up with to get to where they are. That’s just
being a woman in this business, sweetie. Grow a thicker skin, don’t be so
sensitive. What they’re really saying is, turn off your empathy. Turn off your
compassion. Turn off your nurturing instinct. Turn off your innately feminine
qualities in order to survive in this male-dominated space. No. That’s not what
we need. We don’t need more hardened, macho people in this industry. What we
desperately need is more empathy, more compassion, more nurturing, more feminine
energy. That is what will make this industry stronger. Those women who looked
the other way, I feel for them, they too are victims of a patriarchal system,
but they are also complicit.
As women, we are really good at twisting ourselves into
pretzels, constantly adjusting to fit into a world that wasn’t built for us. These
circumstances have made us extremely adaptable, which is a wonderful quality.
We know how to do that. Now it’s time to change the culture of Hollywood, politics, the tech industry, the world. It's time to design a world that fits us. So that our daughters and
granddaughters don’t have to post #metoo on Facebook.
