As far as Louis CK goes, most people seem to talk about the masturbation, very few talk about the problem with
asking to begin with in a work-related situation, or the outright censoring of the women in the aftermath. For my purposes here, I'm focusing on the latter and how it exacerbated the situation at large.
Just so we're all on the same page, let me list, here, the names of the accusers, and the associated cut-n-pasted blurb from the original NY Times article. These four points will be followed by a link to Louis CK's letter of apology. The reason why I'm posting this content before making my case is that it seems very few people have actually read the article and letter, and are instead embracing a legion of erroneous click-bait headliners and assuming that those are the things Louis "admitted to" in his letter of apology.
1. Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov
"As soon as they sat down in his room, still wrapped in their winter jackets and hats, Louis C.K. asked if he could take out his penis, the women said.They thought it was a joke and laughed it off. “And then he really did it,” Ms. Goodman said in an interview with The New York Times. “He proceeded to take all of his clothes off, and get completely naked, and started masturbating.”
MASTURBATED WITH CONSENT
2. Abby Schachner
"In 2003, Abby Schachner called Louis C.K. to invite him to one of her shows, and during the phone conversation, she said, she could hear him masturbating as they spoke".
MASTURBATED WHILE ON PHONE
3. Rebecca Corry
said that while she was appearing with Louis C.K. on a television pilot in 2005, he asked if he could masturbate in front of her. She declined.
DID NOT MASTURBATE.
4. Anonymous source
"In the late ’90s, she was working in production at “The Chris Rock Show” when Louis C.K., a writer and producer there, repeatedly asked her to watch him masturbate, she said. She was in her early 20s and went along with his request, but later questioned his behavior".
MASTURBATED WITH CONSENT
Louis CK's letter of apology:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/a...statement.html
The first line from his letter states:
I want to address the stories told to The New York Times by five women named Abby, Rebecca, Dana, Julia -- who felt able to name themselves and one who did not.
It does not state "I want to address all the click-bait headliners..."
Regarding Dana and Julia, I would like everyone to please listen to this very brief (one minute and fourty-nine seconds) podcast snippet of Bonnie MacFarlane talking about her and Dana and Julia back in the days just following the hotel masturbation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XoHLdL3_WU
Many people will use this to defend Louis CK. I'm not suggesting that Louis CK doesn't deserve to be defended, I'm not suggesting he does; I am merely suggesting the focus of the viewer will be on the sensational, not on what's important, which is the precise same problem that people have had with the NY Times article.
To wit: the one thing that Louis CK did that could be construed as sexual harassment in the workplace was
asking if he could masturbate.
• He masturbated WITH consent on the set of the Chris Rock show.
• He was denied consent and did NOT masturbate on the pilot of a television show.
In both cases, he asked for consent, which is something he shouldn't have done in the first place. No, I'm not saying he should have masturbated without asking, as that is considered a crime -- I'm saying that the act of asking was contextually inappropriate out of the gate.
Over time the leading line of this overarching story has twisted, via a kind of click-bait spawned telephone game, into "Louis CK admitted to masturbating without consent". This is 100% false, and you can simply go back and read the article and letter for yourselves to confirm that. Yet most major media outlets are regurgitating this idea, most recently Rolling Stone. If he had done such a thing he would be in far more trouble than he is. My point in mentioning this isn't to defend Louis CK, it's to ask a simple question:
Why can't we take the fact that he asked to BEGIN with seriously enough to avoid devolving into click-bait falsities? Why do we need to make it worse than it was in order to have a conversation about it?
The comedians who knew Louis CK had masturbated in front of Dana and Julia were pressured to not use that as material for their sets. In the video above, Bonnie says that she and Dana and Julia all thought it was funny, but the thing that wasn't funny was they weren't allowed to express it in their acts. So over time, they're thinking to themselves "what the hell is going on... it wasn't that big a deal, why can't I talk about it...?" This act of censorship through the subtle fear of being blacklisted is a real thing, very real, and it happens all the time. While people are busy worrying that Dana and Julia were "victims of Louis CK's hotel-room masturbation", they are completely (and absurdly, I'll add) overlooking the far more grievous and traumatic reality that their acts were compromised via pressure from the community.
The reason I want to start a dialog on this subject of censoring, is I think that this is a massively discouraging and debilitating situation for any young, not-quite-famous comedian to have to go through, particularly back in the early 2000's when it was still a man's game--where the community around you is literally pressuring you to alter your act in order to protect someone who masturbated in a hotel room... the fact that it was just kind of silly, and that they all had a laugh about it, makes it ever the more insidious, because, given how complicated this all is, how do you address it in a fashion that captures the underlying implications? How do they talk about it with clarity?
This is all to say that I think the focus needs to switch off of the actual act of masturbating -- given that he never did it without consent -- and onto the aftermath. The aftermath being a community that did not want to give these women a voice, and in fact altered that voice.
This is what Bonnie MacFarlane is sharing with the world--the act of shushing was insidiously more grievous than the act being shushed. I hope we can listen to what she is saying and not get caught up in "oh, they were all laughing about it, therefore Louis did nothing wrong". Don't mistake her easy going attitude for not taking it seriously. For people embracing false click-bait narratives that Louis CK masturbated without consent or blocked the exit, take comfort: just because she says the aftermath was worse, doesn't mean the original intentions of Louis CK are suddenly innocuous--whatever you think they were. It means we aren't taking the aftermath
seriously enough. That's an important distinction.
I don't think it's enough to hold Louis accountable for asking for permission to masturbate in a work place (I think his letter was a good start, would be nice if he could talk about it at greater length in the context of an interview, and I have faith that he will, though some will argue the question of whether he should have a voice on the subject going forward--which is fine, as long as they aren't the same people complaining about him not discussing it during his warm-up sets at Carolines and the Comedy Cellar), I think we need to take this a step further and look into why and how these women were censored.
The system that allowed/allows for these things to happen has been getting a free pass. The questions I have are, did Dave Becky get off too easy? How much of this pressure was coming from Louis CK, and how much was coming from people around him? What was the nature of the pressure that these women received to alter their acts? What was it that scared them into compromising--if not fear of being blacklisted? Isn't this something that warrants looking into?