__________________________________
#MeTude
By Stephanie Kemp
#MeTude
By Stephanie Kemp
There is a massive disparity between how I move through the world and how I feel when I sit down to write.
In the world I own my balls. On the page (usually, or at least too often), I can’t find them or just sort of strap em on or stick em in there, hoping no one will notice that they look look a little wonky or out of place.
This is bullshit (and lessening), however it is also interesting (I am quite sure that “interesting” will not prove to be the right word). As I actually sit to type words and thoughts that have floated in and around my brain for the 28 years that I’ve lived and worked in film, it occurs to me how much I fucking hate the term “strap on my balls.”
Here are some other thoughts that come to mind:
Down with the Patriarchy!
Why isn’t the word “vagina” a feminine word in French?
(This will have to be tackled in a separate essay).
How come I have never been able to bring myself to hashtag MeToo?
_________________
#MeTude
(An examination, not an investigation).
This is not, will not and cannot be a cop out...
October 5, 2017 - The Ritz Hotel, Paris
I am living for 5 days, wildly above my pay grade courtesy of my stepmom, in celebration of my 50th birthday. We are about to go out for dinner and she is reading the New York Times, sitting catlike in a chaise lounge hoping I don’t pull a fast one and try to put on jeans for dinner (again).
“Well, well, well. Harvey, Harvey, Harvey,” she says, refocusing on the paper now that I have put on black pants. “Take a look at this, Honey. I’m sorry your father isn’t here to see this. He was so upset when you moved to Hollywood. Those pants look beautiful. Should we go downstairs and have a glass of wine before dinner?”
She goes into the bathroom to finish getting ready and I sit awkwardly in a desk chair from Versailles already pulling at the itchy pants, trying to understand what I’m actually, finally, reading:
“Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades”
I am frozen. Shocked. Incredulous. Incapacitated. Relieved. Terrified, even though I have never met Harvey Weinstein, thank god.
Is this really going to happen now?
_________________
I moved to Los Angeles in 1994 to work in film. In my twenty five plus years here, I have been “grabbed by the pussy,” had tongues (3) shoved down my throat, been nabbed in a cab before jumping in motion, chased around a table, touched under a table, surprised in a bathroom stall and had a night when I couldn’t sleep in my own apartment, because someone was sure I loved him, I just hadn’t “realized it yet.”
So why, as I write this, four years after that trip to Paris and Harvey take down, have I never been able to “#MeToo”?
This is a reckoning way beyond overdue.
But I have never been able to open that box. Can’t let all that shit come toppling down and take me down with it. I spent too much time and fury and money and energy and rage (and hurt) on dealing with it when it happened. Verbally and/or physically, often with a little therapy thrown in after the fact.
I was a kid who grew up on Hollywood Hits. Misses. History. I rode my bike almost every Saturday to the Maple 3 to watch independent films, foreign films, docs, tearjerkers, festival films, anything, everything, always. I read books on filmmaking, the early studio days, the evolution of the technologies. I went to the Baldwin Library and read the trades (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Backstage West, with a dash of People). I knew everything about the movies and this included what happened on the casting couch and behind closed doors with studio execs.
I expected it.
I was ready.
I couldn’t/wouldn’t/won’t let it eat, steal or define me.
It didn’t. (Did it)?
This is a loaded question and still a tenuous and fluid cocked gun at the temple situation.
_________________
I drank too much wine at dinner that night in Paris. I had a willing partner in my stepmom, who couldn’t stop talking about old Harvey. It was like a game to her - a cocktail party conversation. She couldn’t wait to read about it in the next issue of Vanity Fair. A part of me could hear myself answer her questions, as I weighed in from what I was trying to keep as a safe distance:
“No. I’ve never met him.”
“I think they have 2 kids.”
“Yes, she does make beautiful clothes.”
“Saving Private Ryan should’ve won.”
In my head I was already flailing, trying to put the lid back on the box. Trying to plan an escape from all that would be roaring down the river.
Don’t get me wrong - I was over the moon that the fucker was finally getting his fat ass fried.
“Yes, there was always talk.”
But my mind took me pretty quickly away from my former pussy grabbers and under the table touchers and toward the good men I’d worked with and for - those men who would go down with the real perps because they had an office or set relationship that they truly thought was reciprocal, consensual, wanted. I thought about how messy even the good kinds of love/like/lust can be. A part of me was already mourning the loss of this kind of mess. A part of me realized that I was always thinking of these good men, even and especially when the fucker men were doing their fuckery bad things.
I thought about my husband (who I met on a film set and shoved away the first time he tried to kiss me - we were friends at the beginning), who had just gotten to direct television for the first time. I was heartbroken and fairly certain that it would also be his last.
For now.
For now.
_________________
The other thing that kept me (keeps me) from joining #MeToo, is that it, for me, (look at all my qualifiers) would take up too much space in my identity. It would get too much real estate. It would negate the work I’d done to process everything in the past and would try to reframe it (incorrectly) in my present.
Wouldn’t it?
How could it not?
Or worse - it would give me the chance to reframe it, which I didn’t want to do.
There have been so many times when I almost pulled the trigger:
#MeToo
#MeToo
#MeToo
But there has also been the very rare instance where women I know, like (or don’t) and/or love, have taken this option. They had an opportunity to reframe a story and put it back out there. A story that I’d heard (or seen) in real time that didn’t match this new retelling.
A story that gave them a different ending, and a different ending (or narrative) to a man who would no longer have a voice in the revision.
Let me be clear:
This.
Is.
A.
Good.
Thing.
Thank.
God.
Men.
Can’t.
Do.
This.
Anymore.
I think of my daughters. All of our daughters. This will not be part of their lives.
Right?
Promise?
Please, goddammit?
Please?
But we (or at least I - more qualifiers) need to acknowledge that innocent people also shed blood in a reckoning.
There. I found it. That is what I am bumping on. The part of the correction that will be compromised by elements of an overcorrection until we get it right.
But in order to get it right, we have to keep looking at it, turning it around in our hands and heads. Seeing it.
All of it.
From every side.
Honestly.
Case by case (even though no-one can or should deny the overwhelmingly prevalent narrative).
Fuck.
ers.
But we have to keep trying until we get it right and know that it will be hard and messy and ongoing and healing and divisive. We have to be open to the idea that the heroes and villains will - on occasion- be miscast (even if typecasting is typecasting for a reason).
I will never be able to keep the lid on this box.
_________________
And with that, I am back at the Ritz, excited to get out of my black pants and go to bed after dinner. I don’t yet know that I will sleepwalk my way to a solid slumber on the bathroom floor and that my stepmom will sleep talk to my dad every night of this trip. He has been gone for almost ten years and she still misses him madly. (I will return to my bathroom bedroom each night after she falls asleep to give the three of us space. I miss him too, but can’t let him anywhere near this internal and incessant conversation).
I do know that I will put on my jeans first thing each morning, go outside for a sunrise (adjacent) walk in a part of town that I belong in, buy some chestnuts from a street vendor and practice my French.
I will also weep for the choices I have made (or were made for me) and the things I have let go of, no matter the reason, no matter the cost.
It’s going to be a strange trip.
But I am grateful.
Ready.
...And still (also) thinking of the good men.
#MeTude
______________________________
In the world I own my balls. On the page (usually, or at least too often), I can’t find them or just sort of strap em on or stick em in there, hoping no one will notice that they look look a little wonky or out of place.
This is bullshit (and lessening), however it is also interesting (I am quite sure that “interesting” will not prove to be the right word). As I actually sit to type words and thoughts that have floated in and around my brain for the 28 years that I’ve lived and worked in film, it occurs to me how much I fucking hate the term “strap on my balls.”
Here are some other thoughts that come to mind:
Down with the Patriarchy!
Why isn’t the word “vagina” a feminine word in French?
(This will have to be tackled in a separate essay).
How come I have never been able to bring myself to hashtag MeToo?
_________________
#MeTude
(An examination, not an investigation).
This is not, will not and cannot be a cop out...
October 5, 2017 - The Ritz Hotel, Paris
I am living for 5 days, wildly above my pay grade courtesy of my stepmom, in celebration of my 50th birthday. We are about to go out for dinner and she is reading the New York Times, sitting catlike in a chaise lounge hoping I don’t pull a fast one and try to put on jeans for dinner (again).
“Well, well, well. Harvey, Harvey, Harvey,” she says, refocusing on the paper now that I have put on black pants. “Take a look at this, Honey. I’m sorry your father isn’t here to see this. He was so upset when you moved to Hollywood. Those pants look beautiful. Should we go downstairs and have a glass of wine before dinner?”
She goes into the bathroom to finish getting ready and I sit awkwardly in a desk chair from Versailles already pulling at the itchy pants, trying to understand what I’m actually, finally, reading:
“Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades”
I am frozen. Shocked. Incredulous. Incapacitated. Relieved. Terrified, even though I have never met Harvey Weinstein, thank god.
Is this really going to happen now?
_________________
I moved to Los Angeles in 1994 to work in film. In my twenty five plus years here, I have been “grabbed by the pussy,” had tongues (3) shoved down my throat, been nabbed in a cab before jumping in motion, chased around a table, touched under a table, surprised in a bathroom stall and had a night when I couldn’t sleep in my own apartment, because someone was sure I loved him, I just hadn’t “realized it yet.”
So why, as I write this, four years after that trip to Paris and Harvey take down, have I never been able to “#MeToo”?
This is a reckoning way beyond overdue.
But I have never been able to open that box. Can’t let all that shit come toppling down and take me down with it. I spent too much time and fury and money and energy and rage (and hurt) on dealing with it when it happened. Verbally and/or physically, often with a little therapy thrown in after the fact.
I was a kid who grew up on Hollywood Hits. Misses. History. I rode my bike almost every Saturday to the Maple 3 to watch independent films, foreign films, docs, tearjerkers, festival films, anything, everything, always. I read books on filmmaking, the early studio days, the evolution of the technologies. I went to the Baldwin Library and read the trades (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Backstage West, with a dash of People). I knew everything about the movies and this included what happened on the casting couch and behind closed doors with studio execs.
I expected it.
I was ready.
I couldn’t/wouldn’t/won’t let it eat, steal or define me.
It didn’t. (Did it)?
This is a loaded question and still a tenuous and fluid cocked gun at the temple situation.
_________________
I drank too much wine at dinner that night in Paris. I had a willing partner in my stepmom, who couldn’t stop talking about old Harvey. It was like a game to her - a cocktail party conversation. She couldn’t wait to read about it in the next issue of Vanity Fair. A part of me could hear myself answer her questions, as I weighed in from what I was trying to keep as a safe distance:
“No. I’ve never met him.”
“I think they have 2 kids.”
“Yes, she does make beautiful clothes.”
“Saving Private Ryan should’ve won.”
In my head I was already flailing, trying to put the lid back on the box. Trying to plan an escape from all that would be roaring down the river.
Don’t get me wrong - I was over the moon that the fucker was finally getting his fat ass fried.
“Yes, there was always talk.”
But my mind took me pretty quickly away from my former pussy grabbers and under the table touchers and toward the good men I’d worked with and for - those men who would go down with the real perps because they had an office or set relationship that they truly thought was reciprocal, consensual, wanted. I thought about how messy even the good kinds of love/like/lust can be. A part of me was already mourning the loss of this kind of mess. A part of me realized that I was always thinking of these good men, even and especially when the fucker men were doing their fuckery bad things.
I thought about my husband (who I met on a film set and shoved away the first time he tried to kiss me - we were friends at the beginning), who had just gotten to direct television for the first time. I was heartbroken and fairly certain that it would also be his last.
For now.
For now.
_________________
The other thing that kept me (keeps me) from joining #MeToo, is that it, for me, (look at all my qualifiers) would take up too much space in my identity. It would get too much real estate. It would negate the work I’d done to process everything in the past and would try to reframe it (incorrectly) in my present.
Wouldn’t it?
How could it not?
Or worse - it would give me the chance to reframe it, which I didn’t want to do.
There have been so many times when I almost pulled the trigger:
#MeToo
#MeToo
#MeToo
But there has also been the very rare instance where women I know, like (or don’t) and/or love, have taken this option. They had an opportunity to reframe a story and put it back out there. A story that I’d heard (or seen) in real time that didn’t match this new retelling.
A story that gave them a different ending, and a different ending (or narrative) to a man who would no longer have a voice in the revision.
Let me be clear:
This.
Is.
A.
Good.
Thing.
Thank.
God.
Men.
Can’t.
Do.
This.
Anymore.
I think of my daughters. All of our daughters. This will not be part of their lives.
Right?
Promise?
Please, goddammit?
Please?
But we (or at least I - more qualifiers) need to acknowledge that innocent people also shed blood in a reckoning.
There. I found it. That is what I am bumping on. The part of the correction that will be compromised by elements of an overcorrection until we get it right.
But in order to get it right, we have to keep looking at it, turning it around in our hands and heads. Seeing it.
All of it.
From every side.
Honestly.
Case by case (even though no-one can or should deny the overwhelmingly prevalent narrative).
Fuck.
ers.
But we have to keep trying until we get it right and know that it will be hard and messy and ongoing and healing and divisive. We have to be open to the idea that the heroes and villains will - on occasion- be miscast (even if typecasting is typecasting for a reason).
I will never be able to keep the lid on this box.
_________________
And with that, I am back at the Ritz, excited to get out of my black pants and go to bed after dinner. I don’t yet know that I will sleepwalk my way to a solid slumber on the bathroom floor and that my stepmom will sleep talk to my dad every night of this trip. He has been gone for almost ten years and she still misses him madly. (I will return to my bathroom bedroom each night after she falls asleep to give the three of us space. I miss him too, but can’t let him anywhere near this internal and incessant conversation).
I do know that I will put on my jeans first thing each morning, go outside for a sunrise (adjacent) walk in a part of town that I belong in, buy some chestnuts from a street vendor and practice my French.
I will also weep for the choices I have made (or were made for me) and the things I have let go of, no matter the reason, no matter the cost.
It’s going to be a strange trip.
But I am grateful.
Ready.
...And still (also) thinking of the good men.
#MeTude
______________________________
