Why should Greta Gerwig have to apologise for working with Woody Allen?

There’s a longstanding tradition of blaming women when we should be talking about men’s actions: we also meet it when feminists who want to abolish the sex trade are called 'whorephobes' and held culpable for violence against women in prostitution

Aaron Sorkin took a much more controversial line, but Gerwig's pronouncements received much more attention and criticism (Getty Images for National Board of Review)

There was something very different about this year’s Golden Globes. Before the night, the decision by attendees to wear black in support of the #MeToo movement risked appearing trite or superficial: does it really matter what Hollywood wears when we’re talking about a culture of sexual harassment and assault that’s enable men to crush women at every level of society and in every industry? In the event, it mattered quite a lot.

Seeing women shrugging off their appointed role of being on display (as plenty of people pointed out, wearing black was no issue for the men, since that’s what they always wear) in order to make a collective statement wasn’t just an impressive visual; it was the platform for a shift in attitude too. Natalie Portman’s sideswipe at the “all-male nominees” for best director as she supposed to be honouring them; Oprah’s masterful, moving speech. Feminine deference is out. Feminism has taken the stage.

But not everything is going to change at once. Some habits are hard to break. And so, in the fallout from #MeToo, we’ve seen that a movement intended to push scrutiny onto men’s actions has over and over again slipped into being a vehicle for criticising women. Which is what Greta Gerwig (whose film Lady Bird was nominated for four Golden Globes and won two) was responding to in a subsequent New York Times interview, when she made her statement about working with Woody Allen.

“If I had known then what I know now, I would not have acted in the film,” she said (Gerwig acted in Allen’s 2012 film To Rome With Love, slotting seamlessly into the director’s parade of attractive women holding interchangeable positions around men). “I have not worked for him again, and I will not work for him again. Dylan Farrow’s two different pieces made me realise that I increased another woman’s pain, and I was heartbroken by that realisation. I grew up on his movies, and they have informed me as an artist, and I cannot change that fact now, but I can make different decisions moving forward.”

Gerwig’s statement is admirable; it’s entirely bizarre that the pressure fell on her to make the disavowal. Aaron Sorkin, who was in the same interview, had a much more ambivalent response to the question of alleged abusers’ future career prospects, saying: “I don’t like seeing anyone get disappeared.” If Gerwig had taken such a line, it’s hard to imagine the extent of the outrage she’d have elicited. Women are still expected to perform perfection in every regard – physical and political – while men fly under the radar. (Sorkin’s wish for Spacey to earn redemption hasn’t attracted the same notice as Gerwig’s disavowal of Allen.)

Consider the fact that the response to Oprah’s speech rapidly descended into furious denunciations of her as a presidential candidate when she isn’t even running, and it’s clear that even in the midst of #MeToo women are having to walk an impossibly narrow line. (Don’t give a bad speech! But also don’t give a speech that’s too good, or we’ll have to imagine you doing something we’d disagree with, and criticise you for that!)

Consider all the times that #MeToo’s moving finger of justice has settled on a woman. The attacks on Meryl Streep (instrumentalised by a right-wing guerrilla artist in the “She Knew” poster campaign”, which insinuated that Streep was complicit in Harvey Weinstein’s abuse; there’s no evidence for this). The persistent efforts to make Hillary Clinton carry the can for her husband’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

There’s a longstanding tradition of blaming women when we should be talking about men’s actions: we meet it when feminists who want to abolish the sex trade are called “whorephobes” and held culpable for violence against women in prostitution that’s actually committed by violent men; we meet it in the old “nagging and shagging” defence that men used in court to claim that if they’d killed a woman, it was because she was asking for it; we meet it when reports about men murdering their wives and partners ask “What drove him to it?” rather than confront his own responsibility for his actions. Cherchez la femme.

I’ve got no complaints about a world where Allen can’t make his films again. The grimness of his vision – old men chasing hot, young (far too young) women who only exist to be chased – has been obvious for ages. Gerwig’s right to want no part of that, and now she has power as a creator in her own right, she can refuse it. But it’s hardly her fault that she’s been part of it: for decades, the entertainment industry and the film-consuming public have accepted Allen as the pinnacle of his art, because he was a man writing about masculinity and men are what matters. Making women apologise for a culture we didn’t invent doesn’t get us any closer to freedom.