The vile sexualisation of Winona Ryder: “It was kind of against the law”
The dismissive argument of ‘it was acceptable in the 1980s’ has been used to justify an array of predatory and abusive behaviour during the ‘golden era’ of Hollywood, an era that was only golden for some. For many men in power at the time, you could leverage your power to avoid taking accountability for actions that would ruin the lives of other people, with sexual harassment and abuse being so normalised that people genuinely believed it to be acceptable, with many of the celebrities we know and love openly discussing their sexual fantasies and perverse pursuit of underage girls in the industry.
Young actors like Emma Watson, the Olsen twins and Lindsay Lohan were subject to a disgusting onslaught of misogynistic media attention, with people not expressing any shame as they projected their gross desires onto children, taking paparazzi photos up their skirts and releasing countdown clocks on the internet for when they would turn 18. Perhaps one of the most insidious of these cases was the treatment of Winona Ryder as a young teenager, who became the victim of a relentless tirade of predatory behaviour from Hollywood stars such as Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Mike Nesmith and Jon Cryer.
Following her debut film performance in Lucas, Ryder starred in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice when she was just 15 years old. The actor rose to fame for her portrayal of quirky characters that tended to lean towards the dark side, perfecting the art of brooding and the withering stare. However, a sudden escalation to fame has always proven to be dangerous for young women, and Ryder soon became heavily fixated on by grown men in the industry who sexualised and harassed her, with no shame in publicly doing so.
After his first meeting with Ryder, Burton described her by saying, “I had a crush on her at the time. I was 27, she was 15. It was kind of against the law”. Burton has often been portrayed as a Hollywood outsider, seen as a harmless director who prefers to live outside the box. But in this statement, Burton has proven that he is no different to any of the other Hollywood creeps and mainstream paedophiles who openly express their sexual attraction towards children.
Mike Nesmith also publicly expressed a similar feeling to Burton, sharing how he was “madly in love” with Ryder when he was 44 and she was 15, despite being married and having young children of his own at the time. The pair met during the production of Square Dance, with Nesmith saying, “I was madly in love with her… there’s a certain age at which young women blossom. They have a puppy quality about them, very fetching. She was right at that age. I couldn’t say no to her”.
Many of these men seem to justify their sexual fantasies about these young women by painting them as being victims of their ‘irresistible sex appeal’, using that to defend their infatuation as if a child even has the capability to have sexual agency, painting it is a mutual partnership flirtation.
Jim McBride, the director who worked with Ryder in 1989, described her by saying, “She’s very sexy without seeming to be somebody who has a lot of sexual experience”.
At the time, Ryder had just turned 18. Johnny Depp was also grossly besotted by Ryder, with the pair going on to date when Ryder was just 17 and Depp was 25, with the actor proposing to her just five months after they began dating. Later on, Ryder described the turmoil of this relationship, saying, “I remember my first boyfriend used to smash everything – at eighteen, everything is dramatic”, speaking of the pair’s eventual breakup after his proposal.
As much as people would love to dismiss this as an ‘old’ problem, it continues to rear its ugly head, which we can see through the treatment of many other young women in the industry, who are subjected to horrendous levels of harassment. Time and time again, Hollywood proves itself not to be this utopian place where dreams come true, instead existing as a nightmarish landscape that breeds and encourages this kind of behaviour, with little to no consequences for the men who act this way.
Instead, they are rewarded with more projects and awards, only perpetuating the idea that women’s safety and well-being in Hollywood is not a genuine or considered concern and that they will always protect men who, quite frankly, deserve to be in jail.
