Hannah Gadsby on the Convenient and 'Incredibly Irritating' Way 'Good Men' Talk About 'Bad Men'

Hannah Gadsby, Australian comedian behind the delightful, subversive and incredibly frank Netflix special Nanette, opened the Hollywood Reporter’s 2018 Women in Entertainment gala Wednesday morning with a powerful speech dismissing the convenient way “good men”—late night television hosts, A-list dude comedians with seemingly impenetrable careers, whom she calls “Jimmys”—speak about “bad men”—and how “the line in the sand” shifts when these “bad men” are the real-life friends of the “good men.”

She begins by saying she’s “sick of turning my television on at the end of the day to find anywhere up to 12 Jimmys giving me their hot take…. 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 just stop being ‘creepy,’ as if that’s the problem.” She continues:

“‘If only these bad men just knew how not to be creepy!’ Is that 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. So why can’t men monologue about these issues? Well they can, and they do. My problem is that according to the Jimmys, there’s only two types of bad men. There’s the Weinstein/Bill Cosby types who are so utterly horrible that they might as well be different species to the Jimmys. And then there are the FOJs: the Friends of Jimmy. These are apparently good men who misread the rules—garden-variety consent dyslexics. They have the rule book, but they just skimmed it.”

She zeroes in on “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,’” and argues that men uses this line to their benefit, but don’t acknowledge it:

“We need to talk about how men will draw a different line for every different occasion. 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 and fratting; another line for nondisclosure; 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. We need to talk about this because guess what happens when only good men get to draw that line? This world—a world full of good men who do very bad things and still believe in their heart of hearts that they are good men because they have not crossed the line, because they move the line for their own good. Women should be in control of that line, no question.”