Hannah Gadsby on the problem with "good men" talking about "bad men"

Hannah Gadsby on the problem with “good men” talking about “bad men”

Hannah Gadsby
Not content with her stand up show, Nanette, becoming Netflix’s breakout hit of 2018, stealing the show at the Emmy’s or having her portrait taken by Annie Leibovitz for a Vanity Fair profile, Hannah Gadsby is not done with the mic drops.

She has delivered another powerful, provocative and perceptive address in Hollywood putting “good men” on notice.

Within hours of delivering the opening remarks at The Hollywood Reporter’s 2018 Women in Entertainment gala overnight her riposte zeroing in on the problem with  “good men” talking about “bad men” had gone viral.

“I want to speak about the very big problem I have with the good men, especially the good men who take it upon themselves to talk about the bad men. I find good men talking about bad men incredibly irritating, and this is something the good men are doing a lot of at the moment. Not this moment, not this minute, because the good men don’t have to wake up early for their opportunity to monologue their hot take on misogyny.”

“But the last thing I need right now in this moment in history is to have to listen to men monologue about misogyny and how other men should stop being ‘creepy’, as if that’s the problem.

“Men are not creepy. Do you know what’s creepy? Spiders, because we don’t know how they move. Rejecting the humanity of a woman is not creepiness. It is misogyny.”

She continued:

“My issue is that when good men talk about bad men, they always ignore the line in the sand. We need to talk about how men will draw a different line for every different occasion.

“The line in the sand that is inevitably drawn whenever a good man talks about bad men. ‘I am a good man, here is the line, there are all the bad men.’”

“They have a line for the locker room. A line for when their wives, mothers, daughters and sisters are watching. Another line for when they’re drunk… a line for friends and a line for foes. You know why we need to talk about this line between good men and bad men? Because it’s only good men who get to draw that line.

And guess what? All men believe they are good.”

This is why, she said, the world is filled with “good men who do very bad things and still believe in their heart of hearts that they are good men”.

The crowd broke into applause when Gadsby stated what ought to be obvious that “women should be in control of that line. No question.”

Watch her full speech here.

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