tim's experiment

Usually when an international story about human behaviour appears we are treated, sooner or later, to a local version. So far though, the current fashion for complaining about the sins of Harvey Weinstein and other male pigs has not prompted any Hong Kong victims of harassment or worse to come out and tell their stories.

We can safely exclude the possibility that this is because there is nothing to tell.

Hong Kong had a world-class film industry, and it had a world-class casting couch habit as well. If anything, it seems, the situation was and is worse here, because standards of behaviour are lower.

Mr Weinsten may be a man with whom no woman is safe, but at least he is not a gangster. The Hong Kong film business has long been a popular money-laundering machine for people with what newspapers in countries with English-style libel laws call a colourful background.

As a result female actors are expected to be athletic and sociable not only with the producer but with his sundry friends and financiers as well. This toxic culture only occasionally surfaces in public. It is occasionally alluded to in print in a rather indirect way if a young actor commits suicide.

Otherwise we get the occasional accident. There was the case of the well-known TV personality whose method of expanding his social circle was to promise potential bed partners an audition. This only came to light because one of these partners, possibly suspecting that the glittering career did not beckon as advertised, had an accomplice emerge from the wardrobe with a camera in the middle of the proceedings.

The upshot of this was that she and the camera person were charged with blackmail. The star of the show was allowed complete anonymity by the court..

Then there was a case which involved dangerous driving. The driver, who was running a TV station at the time, had been celebrating an agreement to buy advertising. The buyer appeared in court with an implausible tale of how much they had not been drinking and explained the deal, which included the interesting provision that the casting of all the female parts in the show to be sponsored should be done by him. Why a young millionaire with no relevant experience was given this job was not explained.

Then there was the time Mark Thatcher, son of the famous Margaret, came to Hong Kong as the guest of some of the less puritanical parts of the financial industry. They were looking for a reputable international face and he was looking, I suppose, for some money.

However this story, which was mainly about business, took an interesting turn. One of the less puritanical parts had a showbiz connection and Mr T spent an evening with a quite beautiful young actress who was, I suppose, on their books. We tracked them through dinner and disco. What happened after that remained unknown. Clearly the situation was rife with possible misunderstandings.

Readers who have been around for a while may also recall the case of a magazine which printed on its front cover a picture, heavily pixillated, which was allegedly of an actress who had been kidnapped and beaten up a few years before. This led to noisy protests from showbiz people at the publication of the picture. The prevalence of kidnappings and beatings in their industry, on the other hand, apparently did not call for comment.

We must not, I suppose, suggest that the entertainment business is the only one with this problem. Factories and other work establishments employing large numbers of women present obvious opportunities for abuse of power.

So, I fear, do educational establishments. There are two schools of thought in local universities. One holds that students are adults and if they want to socialize or sleep with profs that is their decision. The other holds that this is a dangerously asymmetrical situation full of dire possibilities and should be avoided.

Personally I prefer the second view. But that is easy for me, because by the time I got into the business I was a happily married man old enough to be the average student’s father. Those who take a more conventional approach to academic work face a long period in which they are neither purely a student nor completely a professor. This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, of which the danger of romantic misunderstandings is only one.

Well we shall see. I suspect it will only take one example to unleash a flood of stories. But Hong Kong is not as kind to whistleblowers of all kinds as … say, the US. I am not sure, if I had a daughter who was considering being that one example, whether I would encourage this, or not.

Let us hope, at least, that we shall not see much of that weasel word “inappropriate”. Good behaviour and bad behavior we all understand. “Inappropriate” sounds like an etiquette problem, like using the wrong fork for your fish or wearing a hat in church.

Most of the behaviour which people are complaining about is not impolite; it’s criminal. Forcing people to have sex with you is rape. Grabbing their private parts is indecent assault. Grabbing other parts is assault.

I realize that there are marginal cases where two people may have different views of the situation. Indeed the import of an action depends on its context. I had a lady colleague of considerable beauty on a Hong Kong newspaper who was often patted by the editor. There was nothing explicitly erotic about it. He patted her shoulder. She didn’t like it, didn’t complain, and eventually left. Clearly this would now be regarded as objectionable

On the other hand I had a colleague in a local university who occasionally patted me. This was also on the shoulder and I did not take it as an erotic invitation. I was a bit disconcerted the first time – do I look like a dog? Apparently this lady regarded me as a large and potentially fierce animal.

But then some writers maintain that this is the world women live in; they permanently share their space with larger, stronger and potentially fierce animals called men. Soothing massage is a survival skill.

This brings us to another delicate area, which is the question of consent. The Economist opened its discussion of Mr Weinstein’s alleged crimes with this quote: “I spent a great deal of time on my knees,” Marilyn Monroe once said of how she became a film star. “If you didn’t go along, there were 25 girls who would.”

You have to wonder what was going through the minds of all these young things who turned up for an evening “interview” in Mr Weinstein’s hotel room. After all this is not a promising venue. Generations of Hong Kong reporters have been told, by me, never to agree to an interview in a hotel room. Temptation lurks if you are alone in a small room with a bed and a person of the opposite sex, or in these liberated days with a person of the same sex if that is your preference.

There was an amusing piece in the Guardian the other day by a lady who accepted the Weinstein invitation but turned up with a chaperone. The “interviewer” was angry and the “interview” extremely short.

Mr Weinstein’s proclivities were in fact well known. I have a friend in Hong Kong who, in his prime, was notorious for his, shall we say, hearty sexual appetite. I once asked him if this bothered him. On the contrary, he said, he treasured it because it meant that if a lady accepted an invitation to his flat she knew what was likely to happen later. She might refuse his advances but she would not be shocked by the approach.

I do not suggest that we should blame the victims in any way. But I do wonder if some of the people who now claim to have been shocked by Mr Weinstein’s actions were, at the time, willing to pay an unsavoury price to further their careers. They shouldn’t have been asked for it, of course, but Ms Monroe was surely not the first, or the last, to feel that this was the way the business worked.

The times are now a-changing in Hollywood. Are they changing here?