Careers ruined or at risk from accusations of sexual misconduct

[pbrower2a]

(01-05-2018, 09:56 PM)gabrielle Wrote:

(01-03-2018, 03:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: True. Farm workers, convenience-store clerks, and fast-food workers have been far more vulnerable. The actress who refuses the casting couch might have a chance to make a modest living teaching drama or English in public K-12 education. Or do what Kelly McGinness (spelling) did after her appearance in Top Gun (she seemed an excellent actress) did: she went to live theater in a backwater for non-political drama.

A film star who exposes a casting coach has some standing in some minds because people know about her. A bank teller? The bank will probably cast her off instead of casting off the creep who exploits her. Working people have always been far more vulnerable than such people as university professors.

.....

There is no excuse for sexual harassment. Ever -- no matter how poor and helpless a victim may be. That includes the incarcerated and otherwise-institutionalized.

Not claiming to have insider knowledge on the culture of the Hollywood film industry, but it seems to me the potential for abuse might be higher there than in corporate retail.  

There are typically established methods for retail workers to report sexual harrassment, and while workers are highly expendable, so too are middle managers.  

A studio executive like Harvey Weinstein, on the other hand, is very rich and powerful and has no one above him to answer to.  It is a highly competitive field, with only so many major studios to work for.  

Also, actors are more likely to be sexually objectified, as part of their job, than are retail workers.  Actresses frequently report being pressured into doing nude scenes, also to lose weight and constantly be attractive.  After a certain age, they lose their relevance.  Retail work is highly exploitative in other ways, of course, and for very little pay.

My knowledge of the film industry is entirely its output (feature films and TV series) and news reports or non-fiction accounts. That's how it is for most. Reliable sources tell me that the casting couch is no myth, although it could soon become a relic of a discredited past, something to be relegated to the pure and degrading sexuality of the porn biz.

I worked in retail soon after graduating from college... I had the 'wrong' degree*. That was around 1980. The climate was much more sexualized then, at least in dry-goods. The store manager was hiring people more for how they looked than for their intelligence. Well, being intelligent and working in a department store is a disconnect between mentality and the demands of the work. To be happy in that department store required a certain quality generally unwelcome in most businesses and in all genuine professions: stupidity. I might as well name a name: it was Dillard's Department Store, which has a reputation as one of the worst companies for which to work. It expects people paid near minimum-wage to be ferociously competitive against each other for sales volume.  It was that way in 1980, too. D is for Dillard's, and if you work there you will seek a D for dignity soon enough -- somewhere else. Its headquarters is in Arkansas... if I were going to work in retail in an Arkansas-based firm, it might as well be for the other one. It had real opportunities back in the 1980s. I do not know whether it so operates with respect to sexualization of female employees, as I start to get sick to my stomach as I approach any Dillard's store to this day. I left with an ulcer. Women had to keep their figures and dress as if dating. You know -- use sexuality to sell housewares. Awful!

(OK, I also had Asperger's syndrome, too, which makes one suspect in any occupation in which a constant application of cheerfulness is expected. I did fine in substitute teaching, where at the least kids have to earn my happiness). 

The store manager surrounded himself with pretty girls, and he eventually got caught playing hide-the-salami with one of them, and was fired. But he was in a car in the parking lot, which is very different from the situation for many cases of sexual harassment.

* I wish I had gotten into computer science or at least a math degree, the latter allowing me to be a high-school math teacher. The rigidity of teaching in mathematics fits Asperger's well.