The Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby has hit out at the “incredibly irritating” phenomenon of “good men talking about bad men” in her opening speech at the Women in Entertainment gala, presented by the Hollywood Reporter on Thursday.

In the speech, which tapped into the #MeToo moment and went viral overnight, Gadsby cited the male hosts and guests of US late shows who “monologue their hot take on misogyny”, to draw a line in the sand about which men are good and which are bad – a line that invariably benefits them.

‘I broke the contract’: how Hannah Gadsby's trauma transformed comedy Read more

“I’m sick of turning my television on at the end of the day to find anywhere up to 12 ‘Jimmys’ giving me their hot take. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with the Jimmys. And the Davids, and the other Jimmys,” she said, referring to the Jameses Cordon, Fallon and Kimmel, and David Letterman.

“Good guys, great guys; some of my best friends are Jimmy. But the last thing I need right now, in this moment in history, is having to listen to men monologue about misogyny, and how other men should just stop being creepy … Rejecting the humanity of a woman is not creepiness. It is misogyny.”

She said the Jimmys tended to split “bad men” into two groups: “The Weinstein/Bill Cosby types who are so utterly horrible that they might as well be different species to the Jimmys. And then there are the FoJs: the Friends of Jimmy.

“These are apparently good men who simply misread the rules – garden-variety consent dyslexics. They have the rulebook but they just skimmed it. ‘Oh, that’s a semi-colon? My bad, I thought it meant anal.’”

Gadsby, who on Wednesday won an Australian Aacta award for her Netflix sensation Nanette, said when men who perceived themselves as “good” were able to draw a line between “good” and “bad”, they were then able to move it.

“Men will draw a different line for every occasion,” she said. “They have a line for the locker room; a line for when their wives, mothers, daughters and sisters are watching; another line for when they’re drunk and fratting; another line for nondisclosure; a line for friends; and a line for foes.”

The result, she said, was “a world full of ‘good’ men who do very bad things and still believe in their heart of hearts that they are good men because they have not crossed the line, because they move the line for their own good.

“Women should be in control of that line, no question.”

Gadsby ended the speech with a forceful nod towards intersectionality. “Now take everything I have said up unto this point, and replace ‘man’ with ‘white person’ … [and] with ‘straight’ or ‘cis’ or ‘able-bodied’ or ‘neurotypical’ … Every single one of us has an enormous responsibility to be very, very careful about the lines we draw.”

Lena Dunham is a hugely original writer. Who cares if she’s a good person? | Martha Gill Read more

The Los Angeles galacelebrated the publication of the Hollywood Reporter’s annual Women in Entertainment: Power 100 issue. Monica Lewinsky, Kesha and Lupita Nyong’o also spoke at the event, which honoured the Crazy Rich Asians producer Nina Jacobson and the actor and producer Viola Davis, the magazine’s cover star.

The issue was guest edited by Lena Dunham, who wrote an open letter apologising again for initially defending the Girls writer Murray Miller last year after the actor Aurora Perrineau accused him of sexual assault.

“I made a terrible mistake,” she wrote. “I did something inexcusable … There are few acts I could ever regret more in this life.”

She continued: “It’s painful to realize that, while I thought I was self-aware, I had actually internalized the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what, baby it no matter what.”

Dunham, the subject of a far-ranging profile in New York Magazine last month, detailed further instances of assault she had suffered at the hands of unnamed men in the industry.

“I didn’t want to tell anyone about the 70-year-old Hollywood luminary who was so angry that I rebuffed his kiss that he made me do 30 takes of the word ‘hello’ ... I didn’t want anyone to know about the pseudo boyfriend who tied me up with my special-occasion stockings and forced himself inside me anally,” she wrote. “I didn’t want people to know which male writers and stars had raged at me.”

Dunham appeared at the gala on Thursday, sharing a stage with Perrineau’s mother, Brittany Perrineau.

“I learned the ways in which my own heart and mind had been colonised by patriarchy and the ways my own ignorance operated, even as a survivor of multiple sexual assaults,” she said.

In response, Brittany Perrineau said her and her daughter “feel your love and receive your heartfelt apology”.