Daniel Craig, Obama & More Talk Sexual Assault

It's really, really, annoyingly easy to eff up when dealing with sensitive issues like sexual assault. It's an issue that spans broad socioeconomic, historical, violent ground, after all, and rape culture remains so rampant that there is often at least one important part of the puzzle that's left out. But Joe Biden and the White House recently launched a campaign against sexual assault — and while it's not perfect, it's a refreshing take on this sort of campaign. It also includes the likes of Daniel Craig, Steve Carell, and Seth Meyers as the voices advocating for increased awareness.

One prevalent thing in many anti-sexual assault campaigns throughout history has been the troubling trend of placing the responsibility of sexual assault prevention in the hands of women. This does two big things: 1) it erases men as victims/survivors of sexual assault, and 2) it blames the victims/survivors as a byproduct of teaching them it's their job to not get assaulted in the first place.

This new campaign, called "1 is 2 many," at least starts to tackle the second half of this. "We have to stop it," Dule Hill says in the video. As Benicio Del Toro continues, "if she doesn't consent, it's rape; it's assault." "It's a crime," says Carell, "it's wrong." And as Craig says, "if I saw it happening I wouldn't blame her — I'd help her."

There are still gaps in the delivery, of course — we're still largely gendering this fight and stereotyping the face of the victim as female and the face of the assailant as male. But damn, there's just something about having a bunch of men standing firmly on the side of taking action: It's powerful. Allegiance is a powerful thing.

That these men are, for the most part, generally well-regarded, respected Hollywood men. We shouldn't need famous faces to tell us not to rape people or to pay attention when there's wrongdoing, but in our celebrity-obsessed world it can't hurt to leverage that fame and reputation to do something good.

Image: White House/Youtube