Jenny Agutter's comments about MeToo are victim-blaming at its most extreme – but we shouldn't attack her for them

We must remember that when women blame women, it's usually coming from a place of fear

Jenny Agutter said that in the States, you'd only go to a private meeting with someone as a woman if you 'found them very attractive' (Getty)

Jenny Agutter, best known for playing Sister Julienne in Call the Midwife, has made some controversial comments about the #MeToo movement this week. Speaking to the Radio Times, she said that she can’t “fully understand” why actresses who have made sexual abuse allegations would have agreed to meeting with male industry figures on their own in the first place.

She explained: “In the States, there were occasions when you might be asked to go to a private screening or someone’s place and you just didn’t do it – unless you found the person very attractive, in which case you did do it.

“But if they’re not really attractive, there’s nothing to be gained from it, because it’s obvious what you’re indicating by going.”

I’ve heard a lot of crackpot theories about which behaviours constitute consent – a smile, a kiss, accepting a drink at a bar, wearing lacy knickers – but this one really takes the biscuit. Now, according to Agutter, solo attendance at a meeting is all it takes. If you’re a woman, and you show up on your own, you must be up for having sex.

Clearly, this is beyond ludicrous – a bafflingly dated and seriously dangerous idea. It implies that any woman who takes her safety seriously should go around with a chaperone. It’s not the kind of thing that Agutter’s dramatic counterpart, Sister Julienne, would be saying back in the 1950s, and it certainly feels against the grain in a post-MeToo world.

Put simply, the suggestion that if a woman didn’t want to be sexually assaulted then she shouldn’t have attended private meetings with a man is victim-blaming at its most extreme.

It always feels surreal when a women who, statistically speaking, is likely to have experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault herself says something so regressive.

But, we must remember that, when women blame other women for the abuse that they’ve received, it’s often coming from a place of fear. Agutter’s perverse comments may seem malicious, but they actually reveal the extent to which she, and much of her generation, has been adversely affected by the patriarchy.

Unfortunately, we all have the capacity to victim-blame – and we sometimes do it subconsciously. Our instinct is often to identify what the victim did “wrong”, not because we genuinely want to think that they “had it coming”, but because we’re desperate to avoid their fate. I can’t be the only person who, when reading a news story about murder, rape or assault, starts searching for determining factors that might have been in the victim’s control. Were they alone? Was it late at night? What were they wearing?

This isn’t a rational process: it’s an instinctive one. We’re self-preserving creatures, and it’s our evolutionary bent to remember any details that might protect us. But this natural instinct is at odds with rational thought. Just because we might, in our dark, shameful, and most terrified moments, take comfort from the fact that the victim of a terrible crime was doing something that we ourselves would avoid, these thoughts should not be articulated or indulged.

Instead, they should be challenged. I have to constantly reframe the instinctive victim-blaming that goes on in my own head, not just because it’s an unkind and irrational impulse, but because I limit my own horizons by entertaining such thoughts. If we start changing our attitude, dressing a certain way or living cautiously because we believe we’ve identified a link between certain behaviours and sexual assault, then progress will come to a standstill and our futures will be curtailed by fear.

Jenny Agutter is part of a generation that didn’t have a strong counter narrative to their own victim-blaming instincts. But times are changing and, hopefully, generations that never knew a pre-MeToo world will be immune from the problematic, patriarchal thought processes that so many of us have internalised.