A few months ago, Jacqueline Bisset came out to support her goddaughter Angelina Jolie at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Bisset was close to Angelina’s mother Marcheline, and Bisset has shown her support for Angelina often over the years. I get the impression that Bisset and Jolie are genuinely very close and in frequent contact. But Bisset is still of a certain generation which… is still not prepared to talk about sexism, gender inequality or sexual harassment in any way. We’ve seen this from many actresses – especially European actresses – from the older generations. It’s especially galling in Bisset’s case because… her goddaughter Angelina was one of the first women to go on the record about Harvey Weinstein in 2017.
Actress Jacqueline Bisset admits she’s “unsympathetic” toward women who came forward during the #MeToo movement and feels that women are partially to blame for any sexual harassment.
“I understand as an idea, it’s important that men behave, but I do really think it’s important that women behave, too,” the international actress, 80, exclusively tells Page Six. “I think how you dress, what your subtext is very, very important. It’s very dangerous and not to be played with.”
The “Day for Night” star opines that perhaps women are free of any blame if “you don’t know anything about men,” but adds that she’s “very unsympathetic to these stories, these #MeToo things.” She adds, “You have to be very careful what you put out [there].”
The #MeToo movement began going viral in 2017 following the exposure of movie producer Harvey Weinstein’s myriad alleged abuse and assaults against female employees and actresses. Dozens more men in the fields of politics, media and entertainment were also brought down by the #MeToo movement including former CBS honcho Les Moonves, comedian Louis C.K., and former “Today” show anchor Matt Lauer.
Bisset suggests that as an antidote to possible harassment women “need to learn the word ‘no’ or the F-word or something and you have to do it and you can get through it without any problem.”
The actress, who says she’s never to have experienced any sexual harassment, first came to the US from the UK in 1967.“I was very determined not to have anything happen to me and I was completely devoted to that idea,” she says.
Yeah, all of what she says here is complete garbage and it’s really offensive. Abuse, harassment, assault – it’s not about what a woman is wearing or what she says and there isn’t some magical garment or word to use to save someone from being harassed, attacked or abused. Has Bisset ever asked her goddaughter about what Harvey Weinstein did to her? That conversation might be enlightening to Bisset. As I said, this seems to be a consistent generational issue too – I think the older women who lived through/survived some really awful sh-t just don’t want to acknowledge how bad it was, and they’ve absorbed so much patriarchy, they can’t imagine that younger women refuse to put up with the same sh-t.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
