No Male Winners Mentioned #MeToo or Time’s Up in Their Golden Globes Awards Acceptance Speeches

Ewan McGregor at the Golden Globe Awards 2018 (iNews UK)

Ewan McGregor at the Golden Globe Awards 2018 (iNews UK)

At this year’s Golden Globe Awards ceremony, all eyes were on the women. The vast majority of female attendees wore black in a bid to draw awareness to the persuasive problem of sexual harassment in Hollywood and beyond. The effort was coordinated by Time’s Up, a new initiative started by 300+ Hollywood women to combat harassment for women in service-oriented jobs.

Time’s Up grew from #MeToo, the social media movement spawned in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment scandal where women hashtagged the phrase to indicate that they too had been sexually harassed.

While men in Hollywood proclaimed their support leading up to the Golden Globes, they didn’t put their money where their mouthes were: No man who accepted a Golden Globe Award at this year’s awards ceremony mentioned Time’s Up or #MeToo. This includes those men who wore Time’s Up pins in a shallow show of solidarity.

Weird, right? You’d think that if men wanted to be allies to women in the fight against sexual harassment, they’d do more than merely give what amounts to visual lip service to the cause. This contrasted with the women, who showed up and walked the walk. Many female winners of the night, including Elisabeth Moss, Laura Dern, and Nicole Kidman, mentioned the movement and that the tide was turning.

Ten men could’ve spoken in support of the movements when accepting their awards, and yet chose not to.

Hollywood Women Will Fight Harassment with New Initiative

Shonda Rhimes and Reese Witherspoon (New York Post)

Shonda Rhimes and Reese Witherspoon (New York Post)

Happy New Year! If you haven’t heard, time’s up on sexual harassment. Time’s Up is also the name of a new initiative launched by 300+ Hollywood women to combat sexual harassment on the job.

The women of Time’s Up work both in front of and behind the camera, and count actresses Reese Witherspoon and Rashida Jones and “Scandal” showrunner Shonda Rhimes as supporters.

The initiative takes a many-armed approach, including establishing a defense fund to support women who work in agriculture and service jobs, encouraging penalizing companies whose cultures persist in harassment, and pressuring Hollywood to reach gender parity. Of these three points, the latter is already making headway.

The most visible call to action so far has been encouraging women attending the upcoming Golden Globe Awards to wear black to show solidarity with the victims. (The Golden Globes will take place on January 7, 2018.)

The women behind Time’s Up published an open letter in The New York Times announcing the initiative, signed by its supporters. The initiative’s backers also took out full page ads in The New York Times and Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion.

It is absolutely wonderful to see so many women working together to combat sexual harassment, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.