After being one of six women who came forward with sexual misconduct allegations against director Brett Ratner, Olivia Munn has penned an essay for EW that calls for a 'zero-tolerance policy' for sexual assault.
She opened her piece by criticising Woody Allen as well as speaking of her own experience and how it reflects that “abusers don’t usually get in trouble unless the victim is broken first, because the violating act alone is not damaging enough to spark society’s outrage. It’s a marathon towards self-destruction in order to gain credibility and a vicious circle of victim-blaming.”
Munn argues that it is an "abuse-of-power issue" rather than specifically "a women's issue", continuing “until we eradicate the diseased roots of our infrastructure and make foundational, systemic changes, nothing will change.”
Her piece hopefully states “we can use this moment to create a lasting shift” and insists that there should be “a zero-tolerance policy with actionable consequences for sexual assault and any other forms of abuse.”
She also argued that pay inequality perpetuates the problem, asserting that “heads of studios, bosses, and CEOs should enforce equal pay because continuing to pay us less perpetuates a bias that women are inferior. This trains boys at a young age not to recognize when girls are refusing their advances and grooms young girls to believe they can’t or shouldn’t fight back.
“So when a 14-year-old girl is on a date and tells her boyfriend she doesn’t want to have sex but he pushes her to do it anyway, there is an inherent feeling that he’s allowed to do what he wants because he’s worth more. It’s not a conscious thought, rather it is the collective unconscious of the world that has been encoded in all humans for centuries.”
You can read the article in full here.
