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That is a standard that nobody meets. People regularly favor others based on aspects that aren't strictly job relevant.
Besides, what if the director was using it as a tie-breaker between two equally competent actresses?
This conflates "Not being a hive mind ceaselessly optimizing for profit" with "making a multi-million dollar decision with your dick" which seems like a pretty lossy equivalence ("yeah he killed 15 men, but come on -- everyone commits some kind of crime").
The claim is "If a person who is given money to make a movie uses some of that money to have sex and make the movie worse, this is worse than hiring a prostitute with his own money". Do you disagree with that claim?
"It's just a tie breaker" has been said about affirmative action in software engineering for decades and it's always struck me how only somebody who has never actually done software engineering could believe it -- go ask some startup founders if they've ever had to choose between two equally good candidates. Maybe this philosophy is sensible for other kinds of work (e.g. low-skill jobs, or jobs where interview question give you no signal about employee quality), but not software engineering.
I'm inclined to believe that actors are at least less fungible as software engineers -- it seems like a no-brainer that casting can (and does) make or break a movie.
I don't disagree, but the vast majority of people handed money to make movies have insufficient leverage to get laid off it, unless they used the money to hire hookers instead.
Established actors? Maybe. But someone no name blonde 8/10 trying to make it in the big leagues is functionally interchangeable with any other. The more unique you get, the less you need to get a leg up by spreading them.
Even then, the casting couch is still wrong. It is akin to bribery, no different to a hiring manager being offered $10k for himself personally by candidate A to choose himself for the job over "equally good" candidate B. We should be against it for the same reason we are against bribery. In fact just like how we are against situations which even give the impression that bribery could be going on (Caesar's wife and all that), we should be against situtations which even give the impression this form of prostitution could be going on (by e.g. always mandating two people present at these interviews etc.)
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