A few days after publicly denouncing Louis C.K. as her friend in the midst of the numerous sexual-harassment allegations lodged against him — which C.K. later admitted were true — Jen Kirkman has posted a video on her Twitter page in response to the recent revelations of numerous men who have sexually harassed and assaulted women in the Hollywood industry. Specifically, Kirkman outlines her reasoning as to why she’s actually “jealous” of these powerful men who were caught doing despicable acts. “I’m gonna say something fucked up, because it’s a little fucked up. I’m actually jealous of the sick and suffering men who harass women, the ones with money,” she explained. “Because they get to go away, and they get to be left alone in silence. And they have plenty of money and they don’t have to worry. And then they get to rehabilitate themselves, maybe they get to come back in a couple of years. Everyone loves a redemption story.”
While Kirkman acknowledges that not all men “don’t deserve” some sort of future redemption, she questions what happens to the women in this scenario, such as women who “speak out” or women who “support women who speak out” or “women who speak out in a clumsy way.”
What happens to them? Does the story ever change for women? Because we’re called c–ts and bitches and whores, and all of the same words that were used centuries ago, because we bothered to break the fantasy that little boys had about their heroes and break the game that everyone agreed to, which is we get to have our heroes and you can’t take them down, and they blame us. And then there are male allies who don’t like the way we speak. They want to frame the way we speak, they want to be responsible for the fact we got to speak, and they get mad at us when we push back against them and they get mad at us when we’re fucking messy and fucking human, and they get mad at us when we have emotions and they act like that’s a bad thing. So where does it end? Does it ever get better for women?
As for Kirkman, she just hopes the “culture of women” will get a happy ending when all of these allegations begin to decline. Or as she concludes in her video: “Because we didn’t have a happy beginning, and we don’t have a happy middle. We’re in the mess right now. Just wondering.”
