The actor has committed the worst sin known to modernity: discrimination. Not against anyone of different race, mental and physical faculties, sex, religion or amorous proclivities – God forbid.
Had he been guilty of that, he’d be dangling off the metaphorical gallows even as we speak. As it is, he’s merely having his wrists beaten to raw meat with a metaphorical ruler. For Mr Damon discriminated between crude flirtation and rape.
Speaking on the current sex abuse hysteria in the time-honoured idiom of his profession, Mr Damon dared to aver that “there are a whole shitload of guys – the preponderance of men I’ve worked with – who don’t do this kind of thing.”
What, not every man is a latent abuser and rapist? Call this nuanced thinking, Matt? I call it a slap in the face of modernity. And modernity can slap back, with interest.
He should have left it at that, but no. Damon pressed on, wearing his nuanced thinking on his sleeve, just above his wrist to be slapped: “I do believe that there’s a spectrum of behaviour, right? And we’re going to have to figure – you know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation.”
A difference, Matt? Are you discriminating again? Patting the ‘butt’ of an actress whose nude shots and videos adorn thousands of onanistic websites is no different from raping a 9-year-old girl, especially if the perpetrator then marries her?… Sorry, now I’m the one indulging in discrimination, of a worse, religious kind.
It fell upon the actresses Minnie Driver (Matt’s ex) and Alyssa Milano to wield the aforementioned ruler.
Thus Minnie: “Good God, Matt, seriously? You don’t get to be hierarchical with abuse. And you don’t get to tell women that because some guy only showed them their penis their pain isn’t as great as a woman who was raped.”
Let’s see. According to the modern ethos, ventriloquist to Minnie’s dummy, a woman flashed on a bus suffers as much pain as one viciously raped in a dark alley. What if it’s gang rape, Minnie? Accompanied by severe beating? Still no hierarchical discrimination allowed?
Miss Milano added her own contribution to the art of English prose: “Dear Matt Damon, it’s the micro that makes the macro. We are in a ‘culture of outrage’ because the magnitude of rage is, in fact, overtly outrageous. And it is righteous. We are not outraged because someone grabbed our asses in a picture. We are outraged because we were made to feel this was normal. We are outraged because we have been gaslighted. We are outraged because we were silenced for so long.”
I don’t know what ‘gaslighted’ means, but then English is only my second language. For Miss Milano it’s her first, and she uses it with native mastery.
She’s outraged because, according to the culture of outrage, one is supposed to be equally outraged at all outrageous things, regardless of the degree of outrageousness. Therefore having her ‘ass’ outrageously grabbed in a picture (presumably off-screen) is as much of an outrage as the outrage of outrageously raping a 9-year-old girl. Equality rules in outrage, as it does in everything else.
It goes without saying that nothing Minnie or Alyssa does on screen is any cause for outrage whatsoever. If Minnie and Alyssa star in soft-porn scenes, that’s not outrageous at all. (I could provide the links, but won’t: do your own search, you pervert.)
Now ‘asses’ have been fondled, and sex exchanged for roles or credits, since Hollywood came into existence more than a century ago. Anybody who has ever been involved in show business, even as tangentially as my own stint in advertising, knows that there’s hardly a Hollywood actress who hasn’t slept her way to her present status. (‘Hardly’ doesn’t mean they all did it, I hasten to disclaim for fear of lawsuits.)
And everybody in Hollywood has felt “it was normal” until a few months ago. For example, stuck in the middle of a difficult, never-ending shoot on location, Marilyn Monroe famously asked her agent: “Who do I have to f*** to get off this picture?” Doing that to get on rather than off was the norm.
That sort of thing has always been sleazy and sordid, so why have actresses and their bien pensant fans been silent for so long? Why this sudden outburst of outrageously outraged rage?
Simple. It’s the rattling bandwagon of modernity, inviting everyone to jump on. Once the wheels have been set in motion, the modern lot turn into a herd, which is their natural tendency anyway.
They hear the clarion call of modernity in every tonal detail and respond with soldierly obedience. This time the call is accompanied with enticing words: “Now you can! You no longer have to pay PR flacks to do your publicity! You can get it for free – by jumping on that bandwagon! As long as you’re in tune with modernity, you’ll sweep all before you! No one will dare resist!”
The ladies somersaulting on that vehicle don’t even care how ridiculous they sound, even if it’s considerably more so than Minnie and Alyssa, which takes some doing.
One starlet, for example, claimed that Harvey Weinstein raped her against her own coat rack – after which she continued to have consensual sex with him for 10 years. Another said that Dustin Hoffman abused her by public fondling, after which she went up to his room and had sex with him for $20.
Such little incongruities don’t seem to upset anyone. And if yet another psychotic idiocy does bother someone like Matt Damon, off with his head.