Angela Lansbury: Sexual harassment and rape is a woman's fault when she's too attractive

Oh, Angela…

Some of the biggest, most hateful misogynists are women, sadly.

Obligatory:

https://global.discourse-cdn.com/boingboing/optimized/3X/9/0/90fd70f6a5d9d12756b748f8c2f0c2faba947d82_1_690x499.jpg

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Such a shame, considering how progressive her father and grandfather were.

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Best bet is to play it safe all the time. Actually, to really play it safe, why don’t we mandate it by law? We could even come up with special standardized outfits that would cover all the bases:

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Horse apples. All societies have intricate systems of etiquette. And those have changed over time. Furthermore, traditional societal structures aren’t always female-friendly, despite the veneer. Just sayin’

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That is sort of the point right?

My spouse and I remind our 17 yr old daughter to make good choices. We generally do not tell her how to dress beyond “stay within the rules/codes of where you are” (i.e. the school has a dress code policy for example…follow it.) To the OP’s point…no I do not suggest my daughter jumps into the ocean filled with sharks; however, the issue is sharks are sitting in puddles, wading pools, hot tubs, backyard pools, lakes, rivers, streams, etc etc etc. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a shark it seems.

Is it wise for any woman to walk down the street in skimpy lingerie as it may attract negative attention…sure…but no one is doing that. These are woman walking down the street in every day clothing, working in an office building, on the floor of the senate, going to the gym and they are getting that negative attention. It isn’t their fault for existing that some asshat cannot control their own thoughts and actions.

I’ve seen plenty of women walk by me I thought were attractive, they do not care in the slightest to know my thoughts, and I felt no need to share those thoughts with them. We went on our merry way, never interacting in any way and not knowing of one another’s existence beyond being two people passing each other on the street. It isn’t that difficult to be a decent person.

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"women’s outfits and attractiveness do not affect rape. If you think that only women who look like movie stars get raped then you don’t live in the real world.

All you who love to use the “well I still lock my door” metaphor when it comes to policing how women dress, I will say, yes you do lock your door, but even if you don’t lock your door if someone comes into your home and steals all your stuff it is still a robbery. A crime has still be committed and you still have a right to get justice. The police don’t say “well you didn’t lock your door so you were basically inviting everyone to come in and take your PS4 and Roku TV.

Also, actresses have to be attractive, more so than men. An unattractive male actor can still win awards and even be a sex symbol if he is talented enough. Actresses get taken seriously if they are willing to make themselves unattractive to “prove” that they can really act and we aren’t just being stunned by their hair and prettiness. When actresses don’t wear makeup it is treated like a huge deal and something to gasp over."

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your added image puts it better than my statement OFC.

Again…even if I have a thought about her exposed body…it doesn’t mean she cares what it is, nor should be forced to hear it.

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I’m having a little trouble with this syllogism. Help me out here.

  • Attractive women bear some of the responsibility when they are harassed.
  • Lansbury says she has never been harassed.
  • ???
  • Profit!
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Gospel Law™ has a nice, marketable ring to it, don’t you think? Of course the marrying age girls, up to, say, about 16 should not be covered up, for obvious reasons.

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We have to own up to the fact that women, since time immemorial, have gone out of their way to make themselves attractive.

Um, no. I discovered long ago that we women dress to impress other women. Men don’t give a shit about our make-up and clothes.

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Men in general care less. They still perk up around nice looking people.

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"We must sometimes take blame, women."

Yeah, like did you hear that Angela Landsbury was promoting a dangerous myth that men sexually abuse women because of the way women dress? Sometimes women do share some of the blame.

Honestly I usually find the “they are from a different generation” argument to be a pointless one. It doesn’t change what a person did or said. It feels a little more compelling to me, here, though. Reading her whole comment, it seems like she’s promoting an idea that would have been progressive at a time in her life (women have to avoid tempting men, but they shouldn’t have to). I’m having trouble being angry at a 92-year-old woman who lived through mid-century Hollywood (or mid-century anything). She was never raped, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t stomach abuse every day (things that she may not think of as abuse but that we’d call abuse now).

I guess I’m sad that she thinks what she thinks, but I’m not angry at her for thinking what she thinks. And I still want Canadian Netflix to get Murder, She Wrote again.

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A point my wife still does not believe. No, i don’t have an opinion about which outfit you look slightly better in, to me you just look like you.

@Heraclito I always wondered how her character made friends as they all kept getting murdered. Maybe they kept getting raped too, and this went uninvestigated?

Apology She Wrote.

Bless her little heart. She thinks we men are incapable of making choices. To that I say, fuck you and your bullshit statements that insult every person on the planet… but in the nicest way of course.

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This is insulting to everyone. Basically it’s saying men lack agency and can’t control themselves and then blames women for being victims. JFC.

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When George H.W. Bush was accused of grabbing a woman’s butt my first thought was “this is really a generational thing”, I think adult males just did that a lot when I was a kid and earlier (I guess they thought it was funny, and I wonder if it worked as some kind of “pick up line” back then too? Maybe we should ask our older relatives.)

I think Lansbury is more evidence of that generational shift. I’m disappointed but not really surprised.

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Angela Lansbury stars in “Blame Her, She Wrote“

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Yup. Was going to reply with this point. I know a shocking number of people who’ve been raped or assaulted. The primary factor in sexual assault is opportunity: someone is vulnerable. I lean towards this idea that dressing sexy is much more an excuse that’s trotted out when someone is caught as a way of getting off the hook than it is an actual motivator in some way. But our society is misogynistic enough that a lot of people find it easier to swallow.

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Yeah, I mean groping, copping feels, ass grabbing, pinching… there is a lot of touching involved.

Bad jokes aside I think the whole premise of Lansbury’s argument and the comparison to sharks is weak. Men don’t rape, harrass, assault etc. just because a woman is dressed a certain way. Women could dress in sweaters and jogging pants and they’d still get assaulted. The problem, as ever, is that men don’t understand consent and they feel entitled to sex.

We of course can choose whether or not to go into a shark tank, but nobody can really choose not to be a part of the real world. So much of the sexual violence happens where people’s dress wouldn’t make a difference - in the workplace, family gatherings, in the context of romantic relationships and so forth.

So maybe - let’s say - there are situations where a woman’s dress might make a difference. How does one know where to draw the line - i.e. this is too provocative and it might get me assaulted by some man that can’t control himself? That is such a subjective standard to delineate, and it just reinforces the system where men don’t have to take any responsibility. How much protective equipment is necessary when entering said shark tank? Also, you talk about conduct - well, what conduct exactly? We’ll regulate women’s dress and actions, but men are another beast of course. I fail to see how this line of thinking doesn’t take western society back to the Victorian Era, and it doesn’t solve the issue of women being assaulted.

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You’d think, but I once expressed the opinion here that I generally prefer the look of a gal without makeup. I was told I probably had never seen any of my SO’s without makeup on, that it just wasn’t so.

But it’s true. I don’t care all that much day-in-day-out about the outfits (although if pressed I can summon objective opinions), and indeed I do prefer how my SO looks first thing in the morning with no makeup.

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