STAND by this weekend for a small but significant cultural moment. On Sunday, from about 4pm Pacific Time (beddy-byes time in Scotland), the beautiful people will start arriving at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in California for the Golden Globe Awards, the first of Hollywood’s ego and industry boosting bashes.
The women guests will catwalk the red carpet and be asked about their designer dresses. Only this year the inquiry could be slightly different. To the traditional question, “Who are you wearing?” any interviewer worth their money will add, “And why black?”
Wearing black is one of the ways women in film and television will be protesting about sexual harassment in their industry following the allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein and others.  The actor Eva Longoria, one of those backing the action, explained: “For years, we’ve sold these awards shows as women, with our gowns and colours, our beautiful faces and our glamour. This time the industry can’t expect us to go up and twirl around.”
The Globes are being seen as a full dress rehearsal for the big one: a night of protest at the Oscars on March 4. Perhaps only then will it be clear whether the great Hollywood revolt of 2018 is a genuine turning point or a bit like many of the films which win prizes: just so much hype, followed by disappointment.
There is, let us face it, plenty of scope for cynicism here. Wearing black to a black tie event is hardly sans-culotte stuff. If outfits are the way to go a more pointed choice might be red cloaks and white bonnets, as in The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s horribly convincing look at life under a misogynist state of the future. In any case, there is something about actors and politics that makes audiences everywhere want to tell them to stick to the day job. What do stars living in glass and wood mansions know about the struggles of so-called “ordinary people”? And wouldn’t a more effective protest be to boycott awards ceremonies in general? 
That would certainly force the industry to take notice. All those millions in box office Oscar boosts gone with the wind. Men only red carpets. Designers wailing over no-one to plug their frocks. Audiences and advertisers shunning awards ceremonies in even greater numbers than they do at present. Why, if all that happened, studios would be rushing to put women in charge faster than you can say “Man, that was a quick comeback by Mel Gibson”.
Call it naive optimism fuelled by too much Santa, but I’m going to suspend pessimism for the moment. The Globes protest is being organised by the same women behind the “Time’s Up” campaign. It was launched this week with a full page ad in the New York Times featuring an open letter signed by 300 women, including Meryl Streep, Emma Stone (the highest paid actress of 2017) and Jennifer Lawrence. Beginning “Dear Sisters”, the letter expresses solidarity with women “in every industry who are subjected to indignities and offensive behaviour that they are expected to tolerate in order to make a living”.
Even better, the signatories recognise that securing justice and support, particularly for women in low-wage industries, is going to take money. To that end they have put £9.6m into a legal fund. If anyone doubts that total will grow it should be pointed out that one of the biggest industries in Hollywood, besides the business of making movies, is fundraising. From #MeToo, when women supported each other in speaking out, to Time’s Up, the fight against sexual harassment is the cause of the moment.
How long, however, will this moment last? How much change, if any, can women expect? It is realistic to ask, tough to answer. As with every campaign that seeks to move society forward there is pushback, sometimes with women leading it. We have had attempts to draw distinctions between forms of harassment, the better to sweep some of them back under the carpet again. We have had older women telling younger ones that a bit of good old fashioned sassiness is enough to keep sexism in check. We have even had women blaming other women for men’s bad behaviour. Enough.
One thing worth noting and celebrating is an increasing willingness on the part of women, and men, to call out some of the more obvious nonsense to happen of late. There has been much ridiculing of Channel 5, for example, for presenting its women only version of Celebrity Big Brother as a way of marking 100 years since women got the vote. Aye right. As for the decision by former  MP Ann Widdecombe and Rachel Johnson (sister of Boris) to take part, I have two words of warning: “Kez” and “Dugdale”. 
In Hollywood, the industry is torn between feeling chuffed that the top three movies of 2017 had women to the fore (Star Wars: The Last Jedi; Beauty and the Beast, and Wonder Woman), and not so chuffed that they are all fantasies, often with questionable costumes. Wonder Woman’s get-up might have been slightly less revealing of old but she was still running around in less clothing, and bigger heels, than a male superhero. 
All separate matters, all relatively small in the grand scheme of things, but all, crucially, now part of everyday debate. No single protest will ever be “the” moment when everything changes for good. This landmark year, of all years, should remind women what a long road it has already been and how many hard yards there are to come. It was only some women, those over 30 with property, who got the vote in 1918. More than half remained disenfranchised. It took another ten years for women to get the same voting rights as men. 
Every inch of progress has been fought every step of the way. Whatever happens on Sunday is not going to change this “one sprint forward, one marathon back”rate of change. But if it makes a few more folk think that this is a cause they want to support, that is a prize worth having by anyone’s reckoning.

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