Soon after Harvey Weinstein was first outed as a sexual predator, I created a document titled “Creeps” in which I tried to list every man who had sexually harassed or assaulted me. It’s a companion to the running inventory that I keep in my head of the male filmmakers, in Hollywood and out, whose work degrades or disdains women. This is another kind of cinematic canon, one that includes directors I loathe and those I otherwise sometimes admire, however reluctantly. I imagine that a lot of women who love movies even when the movies don’t love us back have their own such lists.

One fallacy about criticism is that it can be practiced objectively, as if we could see and write about movies from some sort of out-of-body experience. As if it were possible for me to watch a movie in which women are abused for no apparent reason — without even a pretense of narrative rationale — and view this exploitation as simply another formal attribute, like the cinematography, soundtrack or superb camerawork. I’ve watched a lot of movies with really excellent camerawork from male directors who treat women onscreen like garbage. And then there’s the peculiar and ugly case of Louis C.K., whose forthcoming movie, “I Love You, Daddy,” was recently yanked by its distributor.

Louis C.K. is of course only the latest powerful man to be accused of what is politely called sexual misconduct, in his case masturbating in front of appalled women. On Friday, he admitted in a statement that “these stories are true,” closing with a pledge that I hope is widely heeded: “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.” I don’t feel bad for him or mourn a career that may be over. He’s rich and can crawl into a cushy hole, where he should follow his own advice and listen, namely to women who have been silenced by men who are free to say — and do — what they want.

This freedom is at the center of “I Love You, Daddy,” which now serves as the last will and testament for at least Louis C.K.’s career to date. I first saw the movie in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. As a catalog of male pathology, it made me laugh, at times uncomfortably, but part of its power was that it also seemed confessional. The history of cinema is also a history of the exploitation of women, and here was a male director seemingly grappling with this. As I wrote then: “Cinema has long served as a vehicle for male onanism, a space in which male fantasies about sexual power over women are expressed on screen and enacted behind the camera.”