TV

‘The Weekly’ Took On Workplace Sexual Harassment With A Savage PSA

"I don't know why a man would want to show a colleague his penis. It's not like it's the new iPhone."

by Tom Clift  21 December 2017
The Weekly Sexual Harassment PSA

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Last night the team at The Weekly dusted off their cameras for their annual year in review show. And what a year it has been.

Not to labour the point too much, but 2017 has been a shocker. Over the course of an hour, Charlie Pickering and his colleagues went month-by-month through this flaming turd tornado of a year, from Trump’s inauguration to the citizenship saga to the absurd debate surrounding marriage equality. Yassmin Abdel-Magied stopped by for an especially brutal edition of ‘Hard Chat’, while Briggs served up a history lesson on Australia’s controversial colonial monuments.

Oh, and they also introduced a new segment featuring the country’s most mercurial MP:

But of all the horrifying shit we’ve hauled ourselves through since January 1, special mention needs to be given to the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the rise of the #MeToo movement. Discussions around sexual harassment and abuse have exploded in the last few months — and as a sketch starring Kitty Flanagan drives home, they’re discussions that are long overdue.

“Harvey Weinstein’s excuse was that the ’60s and ’70s were a different era,” Flanagan tells Pickering in introducing the PSA-style clip. “Apparently not, though, because what we’re starting to realise is that for women in the workplace, not that much has changed at all.”

The sketch sees Flanagan experiencing various instances of gender discrimination and harassment in the workplace from the 1960s through to today. And yeah, it’s… fairly grim.

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We also get to see a present-day Flanagan trying to navigate the workplace with a penis of her own, as she attempts to figure out why men are so obsessed with the damn things. But at the end of the day she’s left scratching her head.

“I can’t solve anything, because I don’t understand the problem,” she tells Pickering. “I don’t know why a man would want to show a colleague his penis. It’s not like it’s the new iPhone. ‘Oh, look at all the features on my iCock 8’.”

“Why don’t you fix it?” she adds pointedly. “You’re the one with the dick.”

You can watch the full sketch below.