Hannah Gadsby of Nanette fame in her opening speech at Women in Entertainment Gala spoke about why should women instead of men get to draw lines between good and bad men.
Talking about men who crave for attention, the Australian comedian said, "I am sick of turning my television on at the end of the day to find up to 12 Jimmys give me their hot take on misogyny."
Referring to the Jameses Cordon, Fallon and Kimmel, she said it is ‘incredibly irritating’ that good men take it upon themselves to talk about bad men. Talking about misogyny in length they refer to bad men as ‘creepy’. Hannah disagrees with that.
"You know what is creepy? Spiders are, because we don’t know how they move. But how can reducing the humanity of a woman or treating her as an object creepy? It isn’t creepiness but blatant misogyny. Further expanding on what the ‘good men’ do," she said.
"My problem is that, according to the ‘Jimmys,’ … There’s the [Harvey] Weinstein/Bill Cosby types who are so utterly horrible that they might as well be different species to the Jimmys."
However, the problem with men drawing their own lines is that it keeps moving based on their wish. Because the invisible line is drawn on sand and they tend to draw different lines for different occasions.
As she so clearly points out, "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; another line for nondisclosure; a line for friends and a line for foes"
So in the end, the world ends up being filled with good men who just ‘end up doing bad things’ and believe they are good and that is a dangerous assumption to have.
Hence it becomes important for the women to draw those lines, to keep the ‘good men’ and ‘bad men’ in check.
Hannah doesn’t just stop with that. She wants us to replace men with white and men with heterosexual, cis men able-bodied people.
What do we do? We don’t let people at the top of power dynamics draw lines on behalf of everyone. The oppressed, be it the socially, economically or politically, should take control of ‘drawing the line’.
In her previous show, Nanette had spoken about her desire to quit comedy. So people attending the Gala presented by Hollywood reporter were in for a huge surprise when Hannah appeared on stage with her usual package of quick wit, quips and sarcasm.