This thread is for all the gross hard work we all still have to do, together, to make the world a less disgusting place for women.
(I searched and couldn’t find an existing #metoo thread. Forgive me.)
While pulling an all-nighter drafting its second season in 2016, she took a break to meet up with a friend at a bar; Coel’s drink was spiked, and she was sexually assaulted by two men. She found herself returning to consciousness at the Fremantle Media production office, where she’d been working, her phone smashed, and finished the episode in what she would later learn was a drug-induced fugue state. Over the next 24 hours, she slowly began to piece together that the image of a man in her head with a pink shirt and flaring nostrils wasn’t something plucked from the ether but a memory of the night before.
I dunno. This just hit me. This is a oral history/bio piece on a successful auteur and her vault into fame from the crowd of undistinguished theater nerds who have a story to tell.
And it’s just an accepted piece of her story. Like, “oh, yeah, and here’s where she gets sexually assaulted and turns that into grist for the mill of her art.” And I don’t mean to throw any shade at the journo here, they’re just doing their job and it’s a chapter in her story.
Of course it is.
Maybe five years ago I started listening to the women around me in my life and my internet life about this shit, about the whole second layer of perception they have developed to keep around themselves at all times. The young, attractive coworker who straight-up laughed in my face on the subject of getting drunk at industry get-togethers – yeah, no, she can’t do that because holy shit of course not and it’s almost insulting how all the young gents try to make sure she’s never thirsty. The laced-down PR pro who sat, stony-faced, as a young woman explored herself on stage in West Hollywood after a company dinner and hey, let’s all go have a good time together, it’s all relationship building amirite?
It’s not all roses. There are Twitter mobs, and (oooh so scary!) misandry and whatever, but could we all maybe come together and work toward a society where women can be judged on the content of their character and not the contents of their midsections? That’d be great.
e: I finally skimmed/read to the end of the piece. Dear lord do I hate entertainment journamalismism. But the point stands.