VERITY LUSH: Weinstein's casting couch victims should have been helped by Hollywood men

It's been quite a week or so, what with Oprah Winfrey standing up and speaking out against Harvey Weinstein.
Verity thinks Hollywood men should have spoken up about sex pest producer Harvey WeinsteinVerity thinks Hollywood men should have spoken up about sex pest producer Harvey Weinstein
Verity thinks Hollywood men should have spoken up about sex pest producer Harvey Weinstein

But what about all those male actors who also wore black to the Golden Globes, whilst wittering on about how momentous this was for women everywhere, despite having kept their own mouths firmly shut during the Weinstein’s rule?

Some of these men are Hollywood heavyweights too, not those whose careers depended on Weinstein.

What a pile of utter hypocrisy.

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I’m sure many of the men were scared of Harvey, but they weren’t asked to massage him.

However, the women in this are seen as being delicate little flowers who were too terrified to blow the whistle, but the men who kept their traps shut about what was happening under their noses, are seen as heroes, sporting black and waffling on the red carpet that this should never have happened.

So either they were scared and stayed schtum, or they didn’t care enough.

If it’s the former, then fine – but why not admit it? Either way, it comes down to the same old stereotypes of male and female, and the stereotypes of gender-based behaviour.

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Do the men not want to stand up and say that yes, Harvey reduced them to obsequious, favour-currying, jelly-legged puddles of fear, or do the men not want to admit they didn’t give a rat’s backside as long as they weren’t black-listed for jobs or ordered to snuggle with Weinstein on his casting couch?

It is hard to blow the whistle on anything. Whether you’re at school, or at home, or at work, or stood outside the concentration camp shooting fellow humans because a dictator told you to.

There are wide ends to the spectrum but they all end in by-standing.

I’d be more impressed with the men of Hollywood, and some of the high-powered women, if they just held their hands up and said yeah, it’s hard, it’s awful, we need to learn from this.

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But if humanity has never learnt from the big lessons of life, then we sure as hell won’t learn from the little.

ARM YOURSELVES WITH ANTI BAC IN FLU-CENTRAL

Most of the people I have spoken to this week have, to varying degrees, been poorly over Christmas or just after.

The fact that the kids broke up so late after such a long term, and were then thrown immediately into dawn turkey collections and entertaining friends and family, made it rather like a festive endurance test for the kids.

By the second week of the holidays many parents had succumbed to the bugs, as tends to happen the second human beings stop and relax, and several people I know were struck by flu, for which Pompey seems to be a worldwide hotspot at present.

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I am currently firing Dettox from an aerosol at will and suggest you do similar.

A CRÈME EGG THAT’S HAD A STRANGER’S MUCKY FINGERS ALL OVER IT? NO THANKS

I am a lover of white chocolate and the very concept of a white chocolate Cadbury’s Crème Egg is like heaven to me.

Disappointingly given that only a puny number have been produced, and the fact that Cadbury have made it a Wonka-Style lottery for a golden ticket, the public have apparently been out in droves opening all the eggs and scratching bits of foil off with their mucky little fingernails, in the hope of spotting a glimmer of the white stuff.

I don’t even want the prize, I just want a white Crème Egg.

But the idea of even a milk chocolate one has now lost its appeal, given that a stranger’s fingernails have probably scratched it first.