From The Straits Times    |

Actress Vanessa Ann Vanderstraaten, 29, has been in show business for eight years and there is one meeting with a producer she would rather forget.

“He began making remarks that made me very uncomfortable. He said I should do anything I had to do in order to succeed as an actress,” says the artist, who has been seen in local television shows such as Spouse For House and who had a recurring role in Netflix’s Marco Polo (2014).

“He asked me what I would do for a part in a big movie and I told him I would not sleep with someone for it. He asked me, ‘Why not?'”

The meetings began innocently, with others present. But over time, “it was one-on-one meetings at one in the morning”, she says.

When the producer began pestering her sexually, she was glad she had brought along her boyfriend, who was waiting outside.

She did not talk about the incident until much later. “I was embarrassed. I thought, ‘Oh god, how could I have been so stupid?'” she says. She had thought of herself as a savvy person and was angry at herself for being in a vulnerable place for the sake of a job offer.

 

 

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Host Anita Kapoor, 46, relates incidents such as the time when a technician on set talked openly about her breasts and lifted her skirt when changing batteries on a microphone she was using. She made a complaint, but it was “hushed up”.

Most of the time, everyone is mindful of boundaries, but such incidents can occur nonetheless, says Kapoor, who has hosted shows on Discovery, TLC and Channel NewsAsia, among others.

 

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Host and model Sara Ann Krishnamoorthy, who is known professionally as Sara Ann K, talks about a deeply unsettling encounter when she was 22 and new to modelling.

A photographer coerced her into taking off her top during a shoot and used physical force to do so.

“I had worked with him on a shoot, so I knew him,” says the 38-year-old. In a blog post written years after the incident, she says her mind was “a complete blank” because of the violence of his speech – he berated her for being “unprofessional” in refusing to show her breasts.

She kept her pain a secret until recently because she feared being labelled an attention-seeker.

“When people think you are an attention-seeker, they call your credibility into question,” she says.

Photo: 123rf

Model Vivien Ong-Patenaude, 25, confirms that she and other models can be under intense pressure to reveal more of their bodies than they are comfortable with doing.

The Singapore-born winner of the 2010 The New Paper New Face modelling competition says the psychological pressure on models who refuse to strip is especially intense in Europe, and she speaks about a time in Paris when a photographer bullied her into removing her top.

She was 19 at the time and there were other women in the room, such as hairstylists and make-up artists, who gave her no support.

 

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Ms Ong-Patenaude, who has been based in New York since 2013, says that in Singapore, the worst form of humiliation she has encountered happens during catwalk shows. “Backstage, everyone is expected to change by the racks. They don’t separate the male and female models.”

That disregard for a model’s right to privacy and to say “no” is rampant in the fashion business because those in power keep the models feeling insecure and disposable. “This behaviour is so normalised. They have a way of making you feel that you cannot do your job well,” she says.

This article was first published by The Straits Times

 

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