This past week, the 75th annual Golden Globes took place in California. The show ran for three hours, reached an audience of 19 million, and featured Seth Meyers as its host. Beyond the talk of complimentary champagne, the Stranger Things cast, and Oprah Winfrey’s lifetime achievement award, there was a deeper conversation happening.
While watching the award show, you probably noticed the sea of black gowns and suits flooding the red carpet. Many celebrities chose to wear black in support for the Time’s Up legal defence coalition and their #MeToo movement. #MeToo was coined by civil rights activist Tarana Burke. The movement later picked up when actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women to share their experience of sexual harassment or assault on Twitter using the hashtag. The purpose of this hashtag was to create awareness, empathy, and connect women.
From this, the Time’s Up movement took off, starting with a letter of solidarity written by Latina farmworkers, who stand with the men and women in Hollywood who have come forward with their experiences of sexual harassment and assault. The letter of solidarity has now gained over 700,000 signatures, and the Time’s Up legal defence coalition has raised almost $17 million to provide subsidized legal support to people who have experienced sexual harassment, assault or abuse.
Already this movement has been quite successful, but it did not end there. This movement extended into the Golden Globes with the help of eight A-list actresses who attended this event accompanied by activists in a range of fields. Along with the political plus-one concept, Time’s Up also organized a demonstration that entailed celebrities wearing all black outfits and Time’s Up enamel pins to show solidarity with survivors of sexual harassment and abuse.
As you can see, #MeToo has come a long way from a Twitter hashtag, but with any widespread political ideology, it is difficult to see if a celebrity’s actions truly align with their morality. It is not difficult to speak up for a cause when a vast majority of people will be supporting you. Therefore, wearing black on the red carpet this past week was actually easier than choosing not to. In fact, many of the celebrities who chose not to wear black were questioned about their choices, ridiculed, and even trolled online. Yet not every celebrity wearing black was questioned about their commitment to the cause.
Celebrities’ legitimacy for the cause is called into question again when we look at their past career choices. Many of these actors in black attire have chosen to work with alleged abusers in Hollywood, such as director Woody Allen, who was publicly accused of molestation by his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow. Many stars who have worked with him have not and refuse to comment on the situation, but continue to support his productions.
Even if these celebrities honestly believed Woody Allen was innocent, shouldn’t they make that opinion vocal, rather than ignore the accusation all together?
It’s hypocrisy if celebrities like Emma Stone and Justin Timberlake continue to wear black and support Time’s Up when they stay silent on actual cases of alleged abuse happening in their circles and inadvertently continue to keep supposedly dangerous men in the industry. I believe that silence is more dangerous than anything on these matters.
So, if celebrities truly want to promote awareness about sexual abuse in the industry, they should air out their dirty laundry first by publicly coming clean about mistakenly supporting men who face sexual violence allegations.
