Matt Damon Draws Rebukes for Comments on the #MeToo Movement

The actor Matt Damon waded into the national conversation about sexual assault in an interview with ABC News on Thursday, observing that men are being lumped into “one big bucket” when in reality there is a “spectrum of behavior.”

“You know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?” he told Peter Travers of ABC. “Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?”

Those comments were met with anger and frustration online, where many women, including the actress Alyssa Milano, rejected attempts to categorize various forms of sexual misconduct.

“They all hurt,” Ms. Milano wrote on Twitter on Friday. “And they are all connected to a patriarchy intertwined with normalized, accepted — even welcomed — misogyny.”

Other critiques soon followed — with some women speaking up in Mr. Damon’s defense — but the tenor of the conversation was the same: frustration, anger and exasperation.

That groundswell of testimony that has empowered women to speak publicly about sexual harassment and abuse is posing challenges about how best to have a national conversation about a subject that previously lingered in the shadows.