Joss Whedon is not just a producer of creepy nonsense, he’s a nonsense creep.
Was it obvious to others from his dialogue or not?
…it wasn’t obvious to me until I started to hear stories a few years ago about what happened to Charisma Carpenter. And then the “Cordelia gets pregnant” story arc suddenly made complete and utter sense. I haven’t been able to watch anything produced by Whedon ever since.
I never bought into Whedon’s “my work is so feminist” shtick. But his work itself never pinged my creep radar. It was kind of obvious he was fetishizing his badass female characters, but I don’t begrudge people their fantasies. It was smart and entertaining. And whatever his foibles, the stories did center women, which mattered in terms of representation.
When his ex-wife came out about his alleged abuses, I was skeptical, because her statement reminded me of my mother’s delusional mental illness. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Now that there’s corroboration, I can’t say I’m particularly surprised. But that’s only because a lot of talented people who become rich and powerful act like assholes. The thing that makes it egregious is that he did cloak himself in the pretense of feminism. He deliberately misrepresented himself. It’s gross.
Not even Dollhouse?
Al Frankin
Matt Lauer
James Franco
Aziz Ansari
Dustin Hoffman
Tavis Smiley
All to one degree or another have for years publically payed lip service to the need for Enlightened Men Of Culture to treat women with respect, dignity, and equality, while privately using their status, wealth, fame and power to turn their workplaces into a private Moonlight Bunny Ranch.
At least shit-eating, sexually predatory scumbags like Louis C.K., Ron Jeremy and Pres. Donald John Trump for the most part proudly owned their Sordid StinkFinger Shennigans, and didn’t pretend to be Feminist Allies or somesuch rot.
Also male porn actor James Deen
Is there more to Aziz Ansari than the Grace story? Because I don’t feel that incident really established Ansari as some kind of sexual predator.
He might be the “least worst” of the ones I mentioned, but “Grace”, the woman who claims he relentlessly pressured her into sexual activity after her repeated refusals (“I don’t want to feel forced because then I will hate you,”) seems to think he is a real piece of shit, and not at all like the noble Woke Warrior he so smugly pretends to be.
(in his defense, her own words make her sound like someone who doesn’t really know what she wants and is seemingly eager to play the victim, but if even only half of what she claims is the Truth, Aziz Anzari is a hypocritical, pathetic little man, a nasty nugget of maggot-infested mongoose excrement. Fuck him)
I admit I never watched that one.
I’m going to reluctantly add Chris Hardwick to the list above. Reluctantly because it shattered my heart. I loved his podcast and he was my favorite celebrity.
I think it’s important to not the setting where this occurred. It was not a workplace or any public setting. Ansari and “Grace” were on a date. It’s a setting in which one person asking the other person for sex is not unreasonable. Ansari did not threaten or force Grace for sex. And by her own admission, she did not express most of the discomfort that she was feeling. Ansari was not aware of how uncomfortable Grace was until he read about it in the newspaper. When he did, he apologized to Grace.
As for the issues you have with somebody being a “noble Woke Warrior” that’s a problem you should be working on.
Perhaps learning the difference between “Claiming you are something” vs actually “Being something” is something you should be working on.
I can’t see anyone who reads Grace’s interview still feeling that A.A. is actually living up to the “Woke” badge he proudly pins on himself.
I believe the complaint with Aziz was he was a bad date - off to the “metoo” podium he went anyways.
I was aware of that complaint. I was wondering if there had been other accusations I hadn’t heard of.
I haven’t read that article in a long time, but what I remember is she repeatedly said she wasn’t comfortable, and he was like, “oh, okay” and backed off… Until he started pressuring her again. So in his mind he was somehow processing this as “no, not this second” rather than “no” in general. She further confused things by sometimes wanting what he was doing and sometimes not wanting it. And a good portion of the reason she was not into it was that he wasn’t very good at it.
It’s gross and boorish behavior. I think many women can relate to this kind of experience, where someone they are attracted to turns out to be pushy or a terrible lover or both. And we are socialized not to make waves when we are unconfortable.
As I said at the time, this could have been avoided if one, or ideally both of them, had been educated about affirmative consent. She needed the empowerment to draw a firm boundary and he needed to learn to back the fuck off.
I believe that Aziz is a basically good guy who had a huge lack of insight into his own behavior. It is possible for someone to be enlightened in some ways but not others.
It’s hard for me to believe that Joss didn’t know he was being a giant hypocrite.
Your issues seem to be more with the movement and your ideas about what it represents than with anything Aziz Anzari did.
Nothing else, just a bad date got him on the no-no list.
"I haven’t read that article in a long time, but what I remember is she repeatedly said she wasn’t comfortable, and he was like, “oh, okay” and backed off… Until he started pressuring her again.
It’s gross and boorish behavior." (Quoting Spice_Weasel from above)
No, apparently it is simply a “Bad date”, the kind of thing that happens to every man, especially a guy who grandly lectured the men in a crowd at Madison Square Garden (back in 2015, well before his ill-fated night of Would-Be Woke Wooing) “…just ask women questions and always listen to what they have to say!”
Those awkward bad dates…
I loved him on @Midnight, and I remember being really surprised when he announced on air that the show was going to be ending about a week later. A few months later, the abuse allegation came out, and Nerdist dropped him like he was uranium, and I figured there was about to be an avalanche of other shit coming out about him. But I never heard any follow up accusations from anyone else.
Hardwick and Anzari are two examples of people that, it seems to me, got done wrong by MeToo. Except, every time there’s a rumor or a single incident about someone acting shitty, and I think, “Well, I’m not sure about this story,” it always turns out to be the tip of an objectively shitty iceberg.
No. A lot of writers cover creepy material but that doesn’t automatically make them creepy.
I’ll also wager that most people didn’t watch the entire run of the show. The first six episodes are a bit squicky but Eliza Dushku has said the network was pushing for the really worst storylines and once they got out of the way things got better.