Hannah Gadsby doesn’t like the way “good men” talk about “bad men.”
“I want to speak about the very big problem I have with the good men, especially the good men who take it upon themselves to talk about the bad men. I find good men talking about bad men incredibly irritating, and this is something the good men are doing a lot of at the moment,” Gadbsy, star of the Netflix stand-up special Nanette, said in her opening remarks for The Hollywood Reporter’s 2018 Women in Entertainment gala. “Not this moment, not this minute, because the good men don’t have to wake up early for their opportunity to monologue their hot take on misogyny.”
Gadsby then quipped that she was sick of seeing “12 Jimmys” on her television giving their opinion on misogyny and their insistence that men should just stop being “creepy.” For Gadbsy, that’s not the problem:
“My problem is that according to the Jimmys there’s only two types of bad men. There’s the Weinstein/Bill Cosby types who are so utterly horrible that they might as well be different species to Jimmy. And then there are the FOJs. The friends of Jimmys. These are apparently good men who misread the rules. Garden variety consent dyslexics. They have the rule book. But they just skimmed it. That a semicolon? My bad. I thought that meant ‘anal.'”
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Good men have a habit of drawing a “line in the sand” between themselves and the bad men, Gadsby said, and they draw a different line for different occasions — “a line for the locker room; a line for when their wives, mothers, daughters and sisters are watching; another line for when they’re drunk and fratting.” She ended her speech by broadening the “good men/bad men” trope to race as well.
“Now take everything I have said up to this point and replace ‘men’ with ‘white person,’ and know that if you are a white woman you have no place drawing lines in the sand between good white people and bad white people,” Gadsby stated.
Monica Lewinsky later quoted Gadsby’s Nanette in her speech when she spoke about making mistakes and becoming a more “resilient” woman. Other speakers at the the VIP event included Lena Dunham, who introduced Lewinsky, as well as Kesha and Viola Davis, the 2018 Sherry Lansing Award honoree, presented by the former CEO of Paramount Pictures and the first woman to head a Hollywood studio.
The Power 100 Women in Entertainment event presented by Lifetime is sponsored by American Airlines, Cadillac, Fiji Water, eOne, Gersh, Loyola Marymount University and SAG-AFTRA, in partnership with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles and Entertainment Industry Foundation.
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