It’s been a few years since the #metoo movement really got going, and since top male Hollywood figures have begun to surely quake in their boots, wondering when their past misdeeds will come for them.
Because let’s face it…most of them have skeletons in their closet.
Back in 2009, though, the culture of underage sexualization and rampant misogyny in the film industry hadn’t met cancel culture in a dark alley, and young starlets like Megan Fox were told to shut up and like it.
Evidence?
This 2009 Jimmy Kimmel interview in which Megan Fox told a story about being 15 and an extra on Bad Boys II. She wore skimpy clothes, and Michael Bay (producer) had been told since she was 15, she couldn’t be at a bar with a drink in her hand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f59bSovKiMg
His response? To put her under a waterfall, dancing and soaking wet.
The audience’s response to the story? To laugh and to clap.
Megan looked a little confused, and so she repeated the part about her being 15, adding that she had only been in the 10th grade for good measure, then said “That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.”
Kimmel replied, laughing, “Yeah, well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work — but some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist.”
The audience laughed and clapped some more while Megan looked uncomfortable, like the way the story had been received was not the way it sounded in her mind.
To our 2020 perceptions, her tale takes on a bit of a horrifying tinge, does it not? Especially when one combines it with her work on another Michael Bay franchise, Transformers.
Fox was said to have been filmed while pretending to work on one of Bay’s cars for her audition, and was later fired from the series after she called him “a nightmare to work for” and compared him to Hitler.
https://twitter.com/stinkybinky5/status/1274985533962432519
People online have been coming to Megan’s defense, and we all have to wonder whether or not her realization that Bay’s behavior, and that of men in Hollywood, was complete bullsh%t has cost her a career.
She wouldn’t be the first, but I do have hope that there won’t be many more women afraid to speak up.
Megan did issue a statement on her Instagram, thanking everyone for the support but also setting the record straight about the Transformers audition, and stating for the record that neither Bay nor Steven Spielberg had ever done anything sexually inappropriate.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CBwkEQ0lc62/
What are your thoughts? Did you think Megan Fox was just another pretty face who couldn’t keep her mouth shut?
Or did you sense all along that she was a scared kid, navigating a scarily misogynistic landscape without much support?
I hope that, going forward, we can all be more supportive of the young girls who leave for Hollywood, intent on following their dreams.
They shouldn’t have to sacrifice any real part of themselves to make them come true.
