First, from Jim Kosmicki…
It would seem to me that sexual harassment in comics would be much more prevalent at conventions and other such public gatherings. Haven't most of the major cons adopted specific guidelines on appropriate behavior, especially as cosplay has gotten more prevalent?
Yes…and here's the thing that I think about whenever I read such guidelines. The rules they give to follow at their con are all good rules…but they're also rules that you should follow everywhere, not just at a con. Here's part of one convention's statement…
Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention. Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
Shouldn't everyone be refraining from that behavior when they go to Arby's? When they play softball at the park? When they walk down any public street? What the convention is saying — and I'm not faulting them for this — is "If you're going to do these kinds of things, don't do them where people are going to complain to us about them or where we might be sued." Maybe we need one of those policies for the whole planet.
This next one is from one of those "don't use my name" people…
How do you feel about the people who knew about Louis C.K. or Cosby or any of those people and did nothing? I saw people dumping on Jon Stewart saying "He must have known his friend was doing this."
I don't know what Jon Stewart knew. The trouble is that in a lot of cases, you'd be trying to police unsourced, vague gossip. If you heard about Louis C.K.'s "Hey, Look Me Over!" activities before they became headline news, you probably heard that he did this in some unspecified place at some unspecified time with some unidentified woman. And whoever the woman was, you probably don't know if she was fine with it or if she was so horrified or if she just wants to forget about it and not have anyone mention it ever again.
Moreover, if you asked the person who told you, "How do you know this?," the answer might have been something like, "Oh, this guy I know heard it from his roommate's boy friend. He did something on the crew of some show Louis C.K. did." It's tough to do much with that kind of info, especially when it doesn't involve you directly.
Now maybe if you knew Louis C.K., you could go to him and say, "Hey, I hear these rumors…anything to them?" He'd almost certainly deny them — apparently, he did deny them to a few people — and then what are you going to do? You might have heard it happened but you probably don't know for absolutely sure that it did.
And I keep coming back to this: You don't know if the victim(s) want to make an issue of what happened or if they just want it to go away. I've known a number of women who were subjected to what we now call with great tact, "sexual impropriety." These were mostly actresses pursued by Wanna-Be Weinsteins, though one lady I knew was pursued once by a studio head and on other occasions, by two people everyone would call Comedy Legends. She wanted to make like those incidents never happened. She was horrified when I suggested that the actions of the studio head warranted a call to the police. She was dead certain that just dropping these matters would be less painful and harmful to her and she had a right to have it that way.
The good thing that is happening now is that more women are speaking up about these abuses…but not all women are. Anyone think for a moment that there aren't ladies who've kept quiet about what Cosby did to them? Or Weinstein? Or most of those folks? Most of the women who did come forward did not do so at the time. Some waited years until some scars had healed and/or they thought they might be believed. (I absolutely do not buy "Why didn't she say something at the time?" as a reason to disbelieve any of these accusations.)
So I don't know what Jon Stewart knew. Or what he could have done about it if he had known.