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Rosamund Urwin: If Matt Damon really cares about women he’ll listen to us

Matt Damon: 'there's a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation': Getty Images
Matt Damon: 'there's a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation': Getty Images

Men often say they don’t understand women. But here’s a group I don’t understand: men who scour the post-Weinstein landscape and think, “I know what the world needs right now — my ill-informed opinions on sexual assault”. And yet the idiots keep coming — armchair experts; sex-pest apologists; even some of the sex pests themselves. No wonder so many women pray that God grant them the self-confidence of mediocre men.

The latest “how to get scrubbed off the Christmas card list of feminist friends guide” comes from Matt Damon. In an interview with ABC News, the actor — who clearly hasn’t learned from that time he talked over the African-American film producer Effie Brown to teach her about diversity — said that sexual misconduct was “a spectrum of behaviour”, and that we shouldn’t “conflate” groping with rape.

Already knee-deep in mud, he kept digging. Recalling reading Louis CK’s statement in which the comedian admitted masturbating in front of women but couldn’t quite stomach the word “sorry”, Damon says: “I just remember thinking, ‘Well... we can work with that,’ you know what I mean?”

Yeah, Matt, we know what we mean. You mean that you still think men get to be the moral arbiters, the ones who determine that the exploitative onanist is redeemable, but maybe not the rapist. On your “spectrum” the former probably seems minor — no matter how humiliated the victims were — because he didn’t touch them. That is, one imagines, how Louis CK assuaged his conscience too. But all this behaviour is entwined. It’s never just a hand on the thigh. It’s the way women are supposed to laugh off that hand, the way we are made to feel complicit in our own abuse so that we are the ones ashamed to tell the story, the ones who fear the world’s reaction when we stop keeping a slimeball’s secret. But sure, Matt, there are degrees of this stuff — like the fires in hell have degrees of heat.

So much nonsense has been spouted by men on this that Damon wouldn’t even make the top 10. The doozy has been the desperation from certain male commentators — who usually attack the “narrative of female grievance” — to turn their sex into victims. Women will destroy flirting! Pity these poor men losing their jobs! It’s a sexual inquisition!

Guys, if you think that’s what flirting is, you’re doing it wrong. Really wrong. And as for the careers in tatters, that is a self-inflicted wound. Where was the concern for women prevented from advancing by sexual harassment? We are learning now how Weinstein damaged actresses’ careers: Mira Sorvino, Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek...

There’s a group even worse than the apologists, though: the sleazes feigning remorse. You don’t deserve a pat on the head for acknowledging your guilt; you have to change first. Deeds not words. Retweeting praise on the same day you confess to being “part of the problem” doesn’t seem like contrition (side-eye Morgan Spurlock).

And why, if this is truly a brave new post-Weinstein world, does the labour of rehabilitating men keep falling on women?

Rather than opening their mouths, here’s a suggestion for all these men. Open your ears and hear women speak.

The strangest thing about Dark is that no one wants to leave

Netflix's gripping new drama Dark is like if Stranger Things met Isaac Asimov, had a Scandi noir makeover and then moved to Germany. It tells the story of four similar-looking families of similar ages over three generations; I doubt any TV show has ever sparked more frantic Googling by viewers to determine who is related to whom.

Dark is set in Winden, a town where in-breeding appears to have dented the collective IQ. When they explore the caves where a child has vanished, everyone — whether police officer or awkward adolescent — goes alone. A 17-year-old ignores the “don’t talk to strangers” memo and jumps into a car with a pretend priest.

The greatest sign of their idiocy, though, is their failure to get the hell out of Winden, a horror-movie cliché of a town. This is despite Winden life being limited. Residents seem to have only three career options — police officer, teacher, nuclear power plant worker — and no choice but to marry someone they met as a teenager and who is probably the only person in the four families they’re not related to. Then there’s the high death rates. The Australian soap Home and Away once invented a toxic waste dump to explain why so many 20-somethings kept dying of cancer, yet implausibly nobody left Summer Bay for neighbouring Yabbie Creek. Life expectancy seems even lower in Winden and yet they stay. So here’s a piece of advice: when bodies are piling up, a flock of sheep is found dead with burst eardrums and birds are crashing from the sky, move.