What We Lose When We Give Awards to Men Like Casey Affleck 

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White men in entertainment can get away with anything. That one, soul-deadening lesson has been drilled into women\'s heads recently. We saw reality TV star Donald Trump caught, on tape, sexually harassing a female colleague and giggling about "grabbing [women] by the pussy"—and we saw America elect him president a few weeks later. We found out that Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando had assaulted actress Maria Schneider on film to create a rape scene in

—and we also found out that, prior to her death, Schneider had been talking about this for years. We saw the image rehabilitation of Mel Gibson, who was similarly caught on tape telling his ex-girlfriend that "you look like a fucking pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n—— it will be your fault," shortly before threatening to kill her and rape her himself. At the Academy Awards, the 61-year-old Gibson sat in the front row, racking up awards for

and merrily chortling along at jokes about O.J. Simpson. And Casey Affleck took home the prize for Best Actor.

Affleck, for those who are unaware, stands accused of sexually terrorizing female colleagues on the set of his 2010 mockumentary

; this allegedly included everything from referring to women as "cows" to insisting that one employee, Amanda White, share his hotel room, then deluging her with abusive text messages when she refused. Another woman, Magdalene Gorka, says she woke up in a private hotel room to find Affleck "curled up next to her in the bed wearing only his underwear and a T-shirt," according to her complaint. When Gorka managed to get Affleck out of her room, he allegedly rallied crew members to harass and bully her until she quit the project.

Keeping great male "artists" around while they endanger their female coworkers isn\'t only unjust, it actively lowers the numbers of great female artists.

Affleck\'s Best Actor win isn\'t the most upsetting item on this list; for one thing, an Oscar doesn\'t come with nuclear launch codes. But it is grim confirmation of an all-too-common pattern. An Oscar provides an invaluable career boost; Affleck will probably get more roles, better roles, and more name recognition as the result of the award. As he becomes increasingly successful, he will become increasingly untouchable; meaning, if the allegations are true, that the women he\'s victimized will have less and less chance to be heard. That\'s not just damaging to the individuals involved here, but to all women who find themselves victimized by powerful men.

Those predictions may seem bleak, but they\'re drawn from a long history of institutional approval of the artistic production of troubled men. Just look at Roman Polanski. No one doubts that Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl—he admitted to it not only in his guilty plea, but also in an infamous interview in which he called her his "victim"—but no one in the Academy seemed to believe it should pose much of an obstacle to his filmmaking career. When he won the Oscar for Best Director for his 2003 film

, the announcement of the award was met with a standing ovation, including from (say it ain\'t so) Meryl Streep. A beaming Harrison Ford accepted the award for Polanski, who could not attend the ceremony, due to, you know, being a convicted child rapist.

Polanski is not an exception. Recall Cate Blanchett in 2014, awkwardly framing her Best Actress win for Woody Allen\'s

as a victory for women ("those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the center are niche experiences, they\'re not") and praising his script—despite the fact that Allen\'s adult daughter, Dylan Farrow, had just published an open letter in

, repeating her 1992 allegation that Allen had raped her when she was as young as 7. Farrow specifically cited the fact that "actors praised [Allen] at awards shows" as a source of extreme trauma.

There are other, less infamous cases—Eminem, whose early musical career consisted mainly of emotionally abusing and threatening his wife, Kim Mathers, and who has heavily implied his abuse was more than just verbal, won an Oscar for romanticizing his own artistic genius in

; allegations of domestic violence trail everyone from nominees Michael Fassbender and Johnny Depp to two-time Best Actor winner Sean Penn; again, Mel Gibson was nominated for Best Director last night—but the pattern holds.

White men who do unspeakable things to women are never kicked out of the Academy\'s fold; we continually insist on separating "art from artist." And Affleck\'s winning Best Actor, in the very year the allegations against him emerged, seemingly shows that not only has the Academy learned nothing from the blow-ups around Allen or Polanski—they\'re not even paying attention to the conversation.

Separating "art from artist" would be a noble sentiment if we regularly applied it to anyone other than white men. But we do not. Setting aside for a moment the different ways we assess women, this same pattern of forgiveness and selective blindness is suspiciously absent when it comes to black male artists: When director Nate Parker\'s history of sexual assault was revealed last year, his much-anticipated

flopped, and Parker himself went from a golden boy to an outcast pretty much overnight. Similarly, Mel Gibson was able to laugh comfortably at those O.J. jokes because O.J. Simpson is still in prison and in disgrace, excluded forever from the fame he and Gibson once shared.

The standard objection to excluding men like Affleck, Polanski, or Gibson from the entertainment industry is that it\'s "philistine"; excluding any great artist means we get less art, and anyway, penalties should be dealt out by courts, not bosses. Yet as Affleck becomes more successful, he becomes more of a financial asset to the people he works with—meaning they\'re more inclined to protect him and less inclined to give his accusers a fair hearing, because dealing justly with the accusations will endanger the bottom line. If the allegations are true, more and more women will be forced to work with Affleck despite the danger he poses to their physical safety and mental health, even as it becomes more and more risky to report any harassment. In the end, many of those women will do what White and Gorka did—they\'ll quit, either the project or the filmmaking industry altogether. Keeping great male "artists" around while they endanger their female coworkers isn\'t only unjust, it actively lowers the number of great female artists by creating a workplace in which women are primarily valued for their ability to accommodate and ingratiate themselves to sexist men, and not for their actual talents.

The problem with Affleck or Gibson or Polanski or Allen winning awards isn\'t just that it\'s unfair. It\'s that someone else could be getting them. Someone else could be standing on that stage—maybe even holding that Best Director trophy, which, to date, only one woman has ever done. By endlessly forgiving and validating abusive men, we tell women that the abuse they suffer is less important than some white guy\'s right to get his point of view across. We lose those women\'s stories, and their art, because we\'ve told them they don\'t count.

This piece has been updated to correct an error introduced in editing.

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