Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

Rejecting the humanity of a woman is not creepiness. It is misogyny.

From the Guardian’s reporting on the Women in Entertainment gala, presented by the Hollywood Reporter on Thursday. Hannah Gadsby had some things to say in her opening speech … you can read the complete transcript at Vulture.

“I’m sick of turning my television on at the end of the day to find anywhere up to 12 ‘Jimmys’ giving me their hot take. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with the Jimmys. And the Davids, and the other Jimmys,” she said, referring to the Jameses Cordon, Fallon and Kimmel, and David Letterman.

“Good guys, great guys; some of my best friends are Jimmy. But the last thing I need right now, in this moment in history, is having to listen to men monologue about misogyny, and how other men should just stop being creepy … Rejecting the humanity of a woman is not creepiness. It is misogyny.”

She said the Jimmys tended to split “bad men” into two groups: “The Weinstein/Bill Cosby types who are so utterly horrible that they might as well be different species to the Jimmys. And then there are the FoJs: the Friends of Jimmy.

“These are apparently good men who simply misread the rules – garden-variety consent dyslexics. They have the rulebook but they just skimmed it. ‘Oh, that’s a semi-colon? My bad, I thought it meant anal.’”

[W]hen men who perceived themselves as “good” were able to draw a line between “good” and “bad”, they were then able to move it.

“Men will draw a different line for every occasion,” she said. “They have a line for the locker room; a line for when their wives, mothers, daughters and sisters are watching; another line for when they’re drunk and fratting; another line for nondisclosure; a line for friends; and a line for foes.”

The result, she said, was “a world full of ‘good’ men who do very bad things and still believe in their heart of hearts that they are good men because they have not crossed the line, because they move the line for their own good.

“Women should be in control of that line, no question.”

Gadsby ended the speech with a forceful nod towards intersectionality. “Now take everything I have said up unto this point, and replace ‘man’ with ‘white person’ … [and] with ‘straight’ or ‘cis’ or ‘able-bodied’ or ‘neurotypical’ … Every single one of us has an enormous responsibility to be very, very careful about the lines we draw.”