Second-wave feminism had a slogan: the personal is political. When our personal choices create market incentives to overlook the harm being done to other people, whether we’re talking sexual abuse in Hollywood or human rights abuses in Apple factories, there is an ethical imperative for all of us to examine our role, our culpability, in any reckoning that occurs.

Right now, that reckoning is finally hitting the entertainment industry. Easy, escapist media consumption is a minefield for anyone even remotely ‘woke’ these days — which is probably good, on some level, for all that it’s exhausting. Most of the dangerous, predatory men in entertainment have been open secrets for a long time, and not just Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. Joss Whedon was considered a feminist darling when I was in my mid-to-late teens, but even before Buffy was off the air, he had the first rumblings of scandal due to his poor treatment of Angel’s female lead, Charisma Carpenter. #MeToo is bringing the reckoning for a lot of these men, but still not all. Googling ‘MALE ACTOR’ and ‘domestic abuse’ at this point probably turns up nearly as many hits as ‘FEMALE ACTOR’ and ‘nude’.

As we start talking about more and more of these incidents, and calling these men to account for their behavior, I find myself wondering who is next. Is it going to be someone who the world has always kind of known about for a while, but ignored? Someone who always vibed a bit off? Or someone new and shocking? As #MeToo continues to gain steam (as it ought to), I find that I’m mentally curating a #NotYou list; a list of famous men who I would be genuinely shocked and disappointed to find out were creeps. It’s depressingly short.

To whit–

• Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson
• Lin-Manuel Miranda
• Neil Gaiman
• Chrises Evans & Hemsworth
• Nick Offerman
• Patrick Stewart

Now, bear in mind, this is just my list, informed by my media preferences. It doesn’t include outspoken feminists like Terry Crews, and it can’t include guys who we’ve known have beaten their wives, like Sean Bean. Roald Dahl might have been pro-vaccination, but he was still apparently a big old racist, sigh. It’s also not a complete list of ‘dudes I would be surprised and dismayed to hear suck’, which includes Ryan Reynolds, who seems woke, or Colin Firth. It’s personal, I suppose, and soft, informed by those storytellers who have come to mean a lot to me, who I don’t want to be disappointed by. I suspect that many of us are secretly nurturing a similar list, especially as we grapple with the questions raised by women’s voices finally being believed.

Sexual harassment is rampant in any field you care (or really don’t care) to pick for the same reason that we have incels: men have, for a very long time now, been taught that they have a right to women’s flesh. That success, or however we choose to define it, comes with not only recognition, but ‘getting the girl’. It’s a cliche that’s been internalised to such a disgusting degree that there are, honest to God, actual adults in the world discussing whether ‘sexual redistribution’ might solve the problem of entitled white men going on killing sprees.

Like, can you not? Please?

As a feminist with a deep interest in arts & culture, I struggle with the sexual politics of what I consume a lot, and wonder just how far the Marxist notion of “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” applies to entertainment. I caved on my Johnny Depp boycott recently to watch Murder on the Orient Express but still completely intend to give The Crimes of Grindelwald a wide berth for not only his presence but the queerbaiting of the story and the terrible racial politics of the American wizarding world, so is it a matter of degree? Is there a critical mass of dodgy that must be reached to render entertainment ruined rather than just tainted? Jeffrey Tambor’s presence stood out like a sore thumb in Death of Stalin but I hadn’t known he was in it before we got tickets, so is ignorance a defence? Am I a hypocrite for even considering evaluation on a case-by-case basis?

Maybe we need to be hard-line, pull out all the receipts and let the chips fall where they may. Maybe it’s time that we consider that much of what we’ve considered escapist fluff is built on hurting people and hold ourselves as accountable as well. But if we do that, how do we go about reclaiming our stories? Can we rescue Buffy from Whedon’s sweaty grip, love Wonder Woman in spite of Gal Gadot’s Zionist beliefs, or divorce Black Widow from Scarlett Johansson’s Zionist bullshit and Woody Allen apologia? Are Ned Stark, Magneto, Sirius Black and other beloved characters irrevocably tainted by the fact that they’re all played by men who have abused women? Or is the art separated from the player?