A rant about the misconceptions about HS.

What is really apparent with this whole situation is the misconceptions about sexual harassment. Many people online have this antiquated notion, that sexual harassment is limited to your sleazy boss grabbing your ass or asking for a handjob in the mailroom. While asking for sexual favours and making unsolicited sexual advances are very overt examples of sexual harassment, there are many nuances to SH that seems to escape the Baldoni fans. Work place harassment is about leveraging power structures to create an inhospitable and humiliating work environment, the demeans and demoralises the target of the harassment - sexual harassment is then a type of harassment with explicit or implicit sexual overtones. Justin Baldoni and Jamey Heath have talked in multiple episodes of their podcast (yes I actually suffered through watching them) about "good men" who sometimes "do bad things" or "oversteps boundaries", which goes to show, that both men don't have a good grasp on the complexities of sexual harassment, sexual violence, and consent. When the only direction Baldoni offers Lively in a scene is that "they are lost in their own world" and then proceeds to instigate intimacy between their two characters, he robs Lively of her agency and ability to consent. When he indulges in conversations about intimacy with his current or previous partners, or his own past with porn addiction, he fails to realise, that she doesn't have the ability to outright refuse the conversations, because he is her boss. When he walks into her trailer while she is in a vulnerable position, i.e. breastfeeding, he is also (perhaps without realising it) taking advantage of the fact, that as her director he needs access to her, why it is once again incredibly hard for her to refuse him. These are all quite obvious examples of sexual harassment, but because Baldoni is not some monster lurking in the shadows, so many people refuse to acknowledge it. The truth is, that Baldoni could be a fun, jovial, nice guy on most days, but still cross Lively's and/or other castmates' boundaries enough times, that he did create a demoralising work environment. I hope and believe that Lively will win this case, and then hopefully this will lead to more people gaining an understanding of what SH really is.

Sorry for the rant.