The American actor David Schwimmer has produced a series of short films about sexual harassment and they’re receiving a lot of praise. The shorts feature a number of well-known actors – Emmy Rossum, Cynthia Nixon, Schwimmer himself among them – acting out the degrading scenarios familiar to too many women.
A female patient is subjected to the ministrations of a sleazy doctor. A young female artist finds herself in conversation not only with a famous actor, but also – and without her invitation – his penis. A model is bullied to sexually humiliate herself for a photographer, and a room full of people fail to intervene. It’s a campaign to raise awareness, and it’s been hashtagged #ThatsHarassment.
The six films are well made and provocative and certainly a helpful audiovisual aid for women frustrated by the inability of the men in their lives to comprehend what it means to be depersonalised by so many – and so often, and so casually – on the basis of your gender.
Schwimmer has discussed the process of making the films as one that forced him “into the mindset of what it must be like ... [to be] objectified your entire life ... constantly told that you aren’t worth the same as men, basically, and that your body comes first, or what you look like comes first”.
The authenticity of the films that is striking such a nerve is not because Schwimmer – kindly fellow that he is – is some kind of intuitive, empathetic genius entirely woke to the female experience. It’s because the creator of the project and director of the films is a Sigal Avin, an Israeli-American artist who was herself the young woman who found herself harassed by a famous-actor-and-penis when she was starting out as a playwright two decades ago. She made the original versions of the films in Israel, based on real-life stories. To enhance the reach of her project, she approached her friend Schwimmer to helm an American version.
It’s a good thing that Schwimmer’s done to assist the broadcast of Avin’s message. But it’s so hard as a feminist to shake a conviction based on so much accumulated evidence that these films have received the positive reception they have because their identification with Schwimmer lends masculine validity to their analysis. I’m reminded of the infamous headline in the Onion, “Man Finally Put in Charge of Struggling Feminist Movement”, that summarises this cruel phenomenon.
Because women, of course, make films, and write books, and create visual art and – God help them – write Guardian columns about sexual harassment, about sexual violence, domestic abuse, sexism, misogyny and rape all the time. The response for doing so rarely has an impact beyond the artist’s immediate community, as Sigal Avin can perhaps attest. And that’s when the story of women’s experience provokes a positive reaction.
The negative reaction is the kind of froth-mouthed woman-hating rubbish that appears below the line of countless female-written columns, the strange YouTube fad of the feminist-targeted misogynist hate-video, or the viral humiliation of women who dare to engage discussion of gendered depersonalisation on their own artistic terms.
I get that there is great willingness among the male children of the feminist revolution to ally themselves to the cause of gender justice and fairness. I’m not ungrateful to have comrades in this fight. And I understand it must be confusing for the boys from Sydney Boys High School who thought it an act of public kindness to lend their solidarity to feminism on International Women’s Day to find themselves forcefully denied of praise by feminist Clementine Ford at the same time they were subjected to homophobic bullying by anti-feminist Mark Latham.
In Schwimmer’s case, said the optimist, it’s entirely possible that an effort to serve Avin’s mission and broaden her platform has been denied recognition by a cultural infrastructure so wedded to patriarchy it can’t fathom there might actually be men who just want to support women, not take ownership of them, or their campaigns or their work.
Those asking why a male doctor may indeed harass a patient, a photographer humiliate a model or a famous actor slap his dick on the table in a meeting with a young playwright, please understand that the context that denies women recognition of our right to agency in these sexualised scenarios is the same one willing to erase women’s authority within the campaign for our own liberation.
As a feminist with a media profile, I find myself again and again in public fora asked to explain just what feminism is. I can recommend a reading list – for starters, if you haven’t yet read The Handmaid’s Tale, now is certainly the time. But for those requiring an onset framework for analysis, here’s a summary of greater brevity than even a short film: feminism is a movement demanding that women be understood as subjects in their own life stories, rather than as mere objects within someone else’s.