Matt Damon draws rebukes for comments on #MeToo movement

New York Times

Actor Matt Damon waded into the national conversation about sexual assault in an interview with ABC News on Thursday, observing that men are being lumped into “one big bucket” when in reality there is a “spectrum of behavior.”

“You know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?” he told Peter Travers of ABC. “Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?”

Those comments were met with anger and frustration online, where many women, including actress Alyssa Milano, rejected attempts to categorize various forms of sexual misconduct.

“They all hurt,” Ms. Milano wrote on Twitter on Friday. “And they are all connected to a patriarchy intertwined with normalized, accepted — even welcomed — misogyny.”

Other critiques soon followed — with some women speaking up in Mr. Damon’s defense — but the tenor of the conversation was the same: frustration, anger and exasperation.

That groundswell of testimony that has empowered women to speak publicly about sexual harassment and abuse is posing challenges about how best to have a national conversation about a subject that previously lingered in the shadows.

“The #MeToo movement has exposed that we don’t have a shared, fully developed, robust way of talking about everyday violence — especially sexual violence in the lives of women,” Leigh Gilmore, a visiting professor in women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and author of “Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives,” said in a phone interview on Sunday. “We just don’t have a ready vocabulary for it.”

Mr. Damon said the #MeToo movement had been eye-opening for him.

“I think one of the surprising things for me has been the extent to which my female friends, as, I think, of all the ones I’ve talked to in the last year since all this stuff started happening — I can’t think of any of them who don’t have a story at some point in their life,” he said in the interview. “And most of them have more than one.”

He’s not alone in that sentiment. The volume of revelations about sexual harassment and assault has been overwhelming at times.

“It’s the same world, but the coordinates feel really different,” Ms. Gilmore said. “In this moment, everything feels upside down.”

In the wide-ranging 16minute interview, Mr. Damon discussed Harvey Weinstein (”Nobody who made movies for him knew”), confidential settlements (”The day of the confidentiality agreements is over”) and raising four daughters in the era of #MeToo (”You just have to raise children with, like, self-esteem, because you’re not going to be there to make all of their decisions for them”).

But it was his comment about the current “culture of outrage and injury” that inflamed passions online.

“None of us came here perfect,” he said. “What’s the point of us being here other than to improve?”

Ms. Milano responded: “We are in a ‘culture of outrage’ because the magnitude of rage is, in fact, overtly outrageous. And it is righteous.”