Katy Coakley
Contributing Writer
Five years of the #metoo campaign against sexual harassment, abuse and assault has led to improvements in the entertainment industry, Dominican University experts say. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
The movement went viral in 2017 when women in Hollywood began sharing online their stories of abuse at the hands of powerful men. That’s lead to several accusations being made against producer Harvey Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey and many others.
Dominican film professor Beth Bullock has been following the impact of the #metoo campaign on Hollywood.
“I think it’s probably been beneficial,” Bullock said. “It’s been a bit of a reckoning for people and probably a wakeup call for people, who thought they could get away with it.”
For the movement to make more of an impact, Bullock said women need to have more power in the film industry. “Women still don’t make up nearly half of the people making films,” she said.
Christina Perez, a women and gender studies professor, said it was important that the movement extended beyond the entertainment industry.
“There is such a great need to confront gender violence and gender misconduct,” Perez said. “So many of our spaces are not safe.”
Perez also discussed the improvements for the movement and plans for better working conditions. “It seems like certain kinds of behavior that were tolerated are no longer tolerated,” she said.
Communication professor CarrieLynn Reinhard said she thinks there has not been enough work for women, specifically in Hollywood, who have come forward to tell their stories.
“They’ve kind of been blackballed to a certain extent,” Reinhard said. “I don’t know if that’s just Hollywood’s ageism when it comes to women.”
Reinhard said that the victims of Weinstein and Spacey were brave to stand up against them. “They were all very strong for coming forward,” she said.
Student Anna V. Meyer, theater arts major, said that there is power in numbers when victims of sexual harassment and abuse speak out.
Meyer also spoke about how more people in power should be held accountable for their actions. “I like the idea of holding these people in power for their own actions,” said Meyer. “There’s a lot of things you can get away with.”
Besides the #metoo movement, the Time’s Up movement has been created to stop sexual misconduct.
Over 300 female celebrities including Natalie Portman and Reese Witherspoon created the Time’s Up movement in 2018 to raise money for victims of sexual misconduct in workplaces. In 2015, actress Ashley Judd penned an article for Variety explaining how a nameless man sexually harassed her in a hotel room. Judd claimed that the unidentified man was Weinstein in 2017. Journalist Ronan Farrow, the son of actress Mia Farrow, published a story in The New Yorker that 13 more women including actresses Asia Argento and Mira Sorvino had accused Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault.
The same year, actor Anthony Rapp accused Spacey of sexually assaulting him at a party when Rapp was 14. While Spacey has denied Rapp’s allegations, several other men have come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct. Spacey was found not guilty in Rapp’s case and Weinstein is currently on trial in Los Angeles for abuse accusations including rape.
