Minnie Driver stepped up her condemnation of men trying to mansplain sexual misconduct by judging them on a sliding scale of abhorrence, telling The Guardian, “If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of f—ing trouble.”
Driver was referring to an ABC News interview with Damon on Friday in which he seemed to downplay Louis C.K. “pleasuring himself” in front of women by saying, “I don’t imagine he’s going to do those things again. You know what I mean? I imagine the price that he’s paid at this point is so beyond anything.”
Driver, who dated Damon and starred with him in “Good Will Hunting” in 1997, initially responded on Twitter the same day, writing, “…you don’t get to tell women that because some guy only showed them their penis their pain isnt as great as a woman who was raped.”
On Saturday, she expanded her anger, telling the Guardian, “I’ve realized that most men, good men, the men that I love, there is a cut-off. They simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level. I honestly think that until we get on the same page, you can’t tell a woman about their abuse. A man cannot do that. No one can. It is so individual and so personal, it’s galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not.”
Damon’s comments in defense of Louis C.K. hit a particular nerve with Driver. “I don’t understand why Matt would defend Louis CK,” she said. “It seems to me that he thinks that because he didn’t rape somebody — so far as we know — that what he did do wasn’t as bad.”
“That’s a problem,” she continued. “If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of f—ing trouble. We need good intelligent men to say this is all bad across the board, condemn it all and start again.”
Driver’s beef is that men shouldn’t be given the power to explain or decode the kind of abuse to which women are subjected.
“How about: it’s all f—ing wrong and it’s all bad, and until you start seeing it under one umbrella it’s not your job to compartmentalize or judge what is worse and what is not,” she said. “Let women do the speaking up right now. The time right now is for men just to listen and not have an opinion about it for once.”