Some recent pieces of writing have provided powerful orientation and insight around the sexual harassment scandals that have been cascading into our culture and collective consciousness ever since the New York Times Harvey Weinstein exposé helped blast the door a month ago. Roxane Gay’s “Dear Men: It’s You, Too” concisely links together the way individual responses to sexual harassment and sexual violence work to sustain a societal environment where such behavior is rampant. The essay is something of a primer on the subject: how it’s about power, not sex; the ways women justify acceptance of this behavior by men; and perhaps most strikingly, how men continue to shape the discussion about how to respond to these evils. Referring to the anonymous on-line list that circulated for a few days identifying male harassers and abusers, and to its critics, Gay remarks, “More energy was spent worrying about how men were affected than worrying about the pain women have suffered.” Indeed.
Though she’s aware of the ways women contort and accommodate themselves to widespread harassment and predation, Gay places blame for the problem squarely on men. “It’s time for men to start answering for themselves because women cannot possibly solve this problem they had no hand in creating.” As a remedy, she asks that individual men begin owning up to the harms they’ve caused women, and that men who have witnessed such acts actually talk about it. In identifying the overriding male role in this issue, and identifying some common-sense openings that will surely be resisted by the great majority of men, she gets at the paradoxical and maddening dynamics of behavior that is officially verboten but unofficially condoned. Men need to change; but how will that happen?
In an essay titled “Our National Narratives Are Still Being Shaped by Lecherous, Powerful Men,” Rebecca Traister highlights the flood of recent reports of sexual harassment in the news media, which include allegations against notables such as journalist Mark Halperin and New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier. She also importantly points out that for every story of such abuse being reported, there are dozens not making it to publication for various reasons, including the relative lack of status of the perpetrators. Traister makes the case that there is a deep and irrefutable connection between the sexual attitudes of these pundits and critics, and many others like them, and the way their institutions have covered politics and the arts. She writes:
In hearing these individual tales, we’re not only learning about individual trespasses but for the first time getting a view of the matrix in which we’ve all been living: We see that the men who have had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers are in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories [. . .] The media is breaking the news here; the media is also deeply implicated in this news and still shaping how the tale is getting told.
That final observation feels disorientingly true to me: even in this moment of massive airing of individual stories, the very way they’re being reported and framed is something that everyone should be conscious of. As a concrete example of this phenomenon, Traister zeroes in on Halperin:
They are also the men with the most power to determine what messages get sent about politicians to a country that then chooses between those politicians in elections. Mark Halperin co-authored Game Change, the soapy account of the 2008 election (excerpted in this magazine), which featured all kinds of history-making candidates who were not powerful white men. Halperin’s view of Hillary Clinton in particular was two-dimensional: Through his lens, she was a grasping and scandal-plagued woman; her exaggerated misdeeds and the intense feelings she engendered were all part of propelling his profitable narrative forward. His coverage of Trump, meanwhile, in this last campaign cycle, was notably soft, even admiring: Halperin once argued that the sexual-assault claims leveled at Trump would only help the now-president’s brand [. . .] Yet his view of the history we’ve just lived through was the one that was amplified and well compensated; there was not just the book deal but Showtime and HBO deals, too, and a regular perch on Morning Joe.
Traister judges the damage not just in the past, but actively shaping our reality through the present:
We cannot retroactively resituate the women who left jobs, who left their whole careers because the navigation of the risks, these daily diminutions and abuses, drove them out. Nor can we retroactively see the movies they would have made or the art they would have promoted, or read the news as they might have reported it.
This tsunami of stories doesn’t just reveal the way that men have grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it shows us that they did it all while building the very world in which we still have to live.
I’ve also been particularly affected by recent pieces about close encounters with Harvey Weinstein written by a pair of actors turned writer/producer/directors whom I've been a big fan of for years. As Sarah Polley recounts, hers took place when she was 19 years old — before she’d embarked on her directing career, but at a point when her acting ambitions were dialed back in part because of the sexism she’d already encountered in filmmaking. She refused Weinstein’s advances, but notes that she may well have responded differently had she seen herself as primarily an actress; in part, she was immunized by her alternate ambitions, as well as by having encountered episodes of sexism before. And as she began to direct movies, she began to grasp “how little respect” she had received as an actress; in an ironic turn of events, though, her experience directing Julie Christie in Away From Her was so positive that Polley decided to give acting another try. Unfortunately, she discovered that as an actress, her status remained a diminished one; she writes that, "One producer, when I mentioned I didn’t feel a rape scene was being handled sensitively, barked that Dakota Fanning had done a rape scene when she was 12 — 'And she’s fine!' A debatable conjecture, surely." This exchange seems like something out a grim Hollywood satire, yet it was part of Polley’s reality.
Brit Marling relates a traumatizing meeting with Weinstein that took place after she’d already co-written and starred in two movies. As she recounts, she’d headed down the writing path partly because of her dissatisfaction with the sexist power dynamics of Hollywood; she’d concluded that to shift those dynamics for herself, she’d have to be the one telling the stories. It was her success that had gained the attention of Weinstein, or so she thought. Marling concludes that she was able to walk out of the encounter — which echoes the sleazy come-on’s recounted by so many women at this point — without giving in to Weinstein’s advances because her identity as a writer meant that at a fundamental level, Weinstein could not blacklist her creative endeavors, as he’d be able to do were she only an actress. Like Polley, then, she’s acutely aware of the way her own particular circumstances protected her from making a different decision that day. But Marling digs deeper into the question of consent in such encounters, arguing that an economics perspective is key. She writes:
Weinstein was a gatekeeper who could give actresses a career that would sustain their lives and the livelihood of their families. He could also give them fame, which is one of few ways for women to gain some semblance of power and voice inside a patriarchal world. They knew it. He knew it. Weinstein could also ensure that these women would never work again if they humiliated him. That’s not just artistic or emotional exile — that’s also economic exile [. . .] [C]onsent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum of power to give it. In many cases women do not have that power because their livelihood is in jeopardy and because they are the gender that is oppressed by a daily, invisible war waged against all that is feminine — women and humans who behave or dress or think or feel or look feminine.
Like Traister, Marling zeroes in on the way that men, very much including men with actively sexist frameworks for viewing and acting in the world, structure our sense of reality. This reality informed her decision to write scripts, and it’s part of what she sees as the way out for our society — for people to begin changing the stories we tell (to borrow the title of a Sarah Polley film):
Another important step forward would be for all of us to start telling and consuming different stories. If you don’t want to be a part of a culture in which sexual abuse and harassment are rampant, don’t buy a ticket to a film that promotes it.
Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you’ve read, in the films you’ve seen, in the stories you’ve been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends. The real danger inside the present moment, then, would be for us all to separate the alleged deeds of Cosby, Ailes, O’Reilly, or Weinstein from a culture that continues to allow for dramatic imbalances of power. It’s not these bad men. Or that dirty industry. It’s this inhumane economic system of which we are all a part. As producers and as consumers. As storytellers and as listeners. As human beings. That’s a very uncomfortable truth to sit inside. But perhaps discomfort is what’s required to move in the direction of a humane world to which we would all freely give our consent.
As Marling indicts our economic system as a root cause of this pervasive and ongoing assault on women’s persons and dignity, you get a sense of why our culture may be stuck, why it’s been so repressed and schizoid on these harassment and assault issues for so long. Being able to exploit women is indeed an economic benefit to the exploiters; but conversely, to begin to truly push back against the degradation of women means to ask serious questions about the larger system that is incentivizing such exploitation. As Polley notes, “What else have we accepted that, somewhere within us, we know is deeply unacceptable? And what, now, will we do about it?” In the snowballing series of allegations since the Weinstein story exploded, it seems that women are collectively deciding that the harassment is no longer acceptable, has in fact never been acceptable.
In the Gay essay I began with, she notes that women often rationalize their abuse “because that is what we need to tell ourselves, because if we were to face how bad it really is, we might not be able to shoulder the burden for one moment longer.” But I am wondering if we are at the point where women are facing how bad it really is, but rather than collapsing under the burden they no longer want to shoulder, are throwing it off, and letting the cards fall where they might. I read somewhere that there must be a connection between Donald Trump’s evasion of sexual assault charges and subsequent election, and the absolute shitstorm that has engulfed Weinstein and so many other famous and not-so-famous figures. I’ve seen a lot of worry, expressed by both men and women, that we’re just going to go back to business as usual; but nothing on this scale of truth-telling has happened before. Who ever said that revolutions can’t take us by surprise sometimes? Trump’s election was a political earthquake that told us that the tectonic plates of our country had shifted without enough people taking notice; what we’re seeing now may be evidence that not all the tectonic shifts have been bad, and that many, many people have yet to have their say.
