Cate Blanchett and Taika Waititi on the set of ‘Thor: Ragnarok’
She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.
from Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
This is one of the funniest, constantly-misused quotes I see around on the internet, as most people I see sharing it seem to think it’s either from a romance or about, at the closest to the truth, a femme fatale, while actually it’s something the men in the room think about War herself, who’s traveling around the world creating wars until the Apocalypse shows up, and they all realize at once that while they’re attracted to her, they’re mostly terrified by her, and it’s both hilarious because she’s a Horseman of the Apocalypse and this great metaphor for war and how men and war correspondents are thrilled by war when it’s at a distance but never up close, and I’m so into it.
When you go to your job or a professional meeting, I’ll bet you don’t expect your boss to strip naked, masturbate in front of you, or ask you to engage in sexual acts with him or others in order to continue your career trajectory. You would know immediately that this is a crime and he is a predator. Harvey Weinstein would do just that to young, impressionable, relatively powerless young women he worked with and told them “This is how the biz works, honey”. The same way a pedophile priest would say “This is what God wants us to do” to a child. The same way a domestic abuser would say “This is what you get for talking to other men” to his battered girlfriend.
The bombshell of the Weinstein case is not that we’re finding out that a big Hollywood producer is a sleezy predator who preys on women with less power than him, coercing sex from them in return for keeping their careers fertile. We already knew that. We already accepted that. We already made a cliche out of that. The bombshell is that we are seeing it now for what it is: a crime that should result in punishment, in loss of power, in damage to reputation, and justice for victims. This is a wake-up call to an industry where sexual harassment and abuse has become a price to pay if you want to achieve your professional goals. This is us saying: Times are changing. All you predators better fucking run, because you could be next.
So I’m not exactly feelin’ a reason for us to try throwin’ lead at each other. I care about my people. I don’t want to just march them into the line of fire because I want play “my dick is bigger than yours.” It is. We both know it. But I’m also comfortable enough to accept the fact if it wasn’t.
ofdreamsanddragons 