Opinion: What calls to boycott ‘The Woman King’ are really saying
What calls to boycott ‘The Woman King’ are really saying
I’m sure by now we have all read the headlines and reports and the memes and everything else about the film, “The Weinstein Company’s The Weinstein Company’s The Weinstein Company’s The Weinstein Company’sThe Weinstein Company’sThe WeinsteinCompany’sTheWeinsteinCompany’sTheWeinsteinCompany’sTheWeinsteinCompany’sTheWeinsteinCompany’sTheWeinsteinCompany’sTheWeinstein Company’sThe Weinstein Company,” starring the titular “The Weinstein Company,” the film that was supposed to be about Weinstein and his alleged victims.
Then, just about a month ahead of the release, I saw it advertised on a billboard for a movie theater in the Bay Area, which is where he was supposed to be making his home.
Well, I went to the movie and didn’t have my preconceived ideas of the supposed scandal around him changed by the reality.
The film, an adaptation of Naomi Klein’s book, was indeed all about the scandalous behavior of the powerful man, for both women and non-women victims.
You see, the problem isn’t so much a lack of accountability — that Weinstein, for one, is a very, very powerful man and has always been one — but that his behavior was not illegal and had in fact been so normal that we haven’t really seen the end to his behavior, not to say that it doesn’t need to stop.
If women can do or say that he harassed them and had sex with them without their consent or with no consequence, why shouldn’t other women be able to, or should men be able to, or men and women, or any human beings have the right not to consent to or participate in someone’s sexual or physical abuse, but be able to freely, freely do or say some other activity that doesn’t harm women and children and that doesn’t harm other people?
I don’t know why the film got made, and I don’t have much to say about it. It’s not a film that I