Rebecca Traister
Why the Harvey Weinstein Sexual-Harassment Allegations Didn’t Come Out Until Now
I have been having conversations about Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment for more than seventeen years.
The conversations started when I was a young editorial assistant at Talk, the magazine he financed, in 1999; back then it was with young people, friends—women and men—who worked for him, at Miramax, and told tales of hotel rooms, nudity, suggestion, and coercion and then of whispered payoffs, former assistants who seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth. Reading the story published on Thursday in the New York Times about claims against Weinstein, I was pole-axed by the familiarity of the recollection of Karen Katz, a friend and colleague of one of the young Miramax employees who was propositioned by Weinstein, who said, “We were so young at the time … We did not understand how wrong it was or how Laura should deal with it.”
In my midtwenties, I became a reporter and fact checker at the New York Observer, and part of my beat was covering the film business in New York. The night before the 2000 election, I was working on a story—perhaps my first seriously reported story—about O, the violent reimagining of Othello that Miramax’s Dimension division was then sitting on, perhaps out of deference to the cringey clean-media message of the Al Gore–Joe Lieberman campaign, which Weinstein was publicly supporting; already there was talk of Weinstein’s ambitions in Democratic politics. After Weinstein failed to respond to my calls for comment, I was sent, on Election Eve 2000, to cover a book party he was hosting, along with my colleague Andrew Goldman. Weinstein didn’t like my question about O, there was an altercation; though the recording has alas been lost to time, I recall that he called me a cunt and declared that he was glad he was the “fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town.” When my colleague Andrew (who was also then my boyfriend) intervened, first calming him down and then trying to extract an apology, Weinstein went nuclear, pushing Andrew down a set of steps inside the Tribeca Grand—knocking him over with such force that his tape recorder hit a woman, who suffered long-term injury—and dragging Andrew, in a headlock, onto Sixth Avenue.
Such was the power of Harvey Weinstein in 2000 that despite the dozens of camera flashes that went off on that sidewalk that night, capturing the sight of an enormously famous film executive trying to pound in the head of a young newspaper reporter, I have never once seen a photo. Back then, Harvey could spin—or suppress—anything; there were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters or for his magazine.
After that incident, which was reported as a case of an aggressive reporter barging into a party she wasn’t invited to and asking impertinent questions, I began to hear from lots of other people, now other reporters, who were working, often for years, to nail down the story of Harvey’s sexual abuses, and thought that I, as someone who’d been a firsthand witness to his verbal and physical ones, could help.
I couldn’t, except by passing on whatever I’d heard, helping to make sense of timelines and rumored accounts. I never really thought of trying to write the story myself. Back then, I didn’t write about feminism; there wasn’t a lot of journalism about feminism. All the stories people were trying to write about Harvey were film stories: profiles, exposés of his loutish behavior perhaps, examinations of the outsize ways he exercised his considerable influence, the manner in which his reputation so closely mirrored that of his monstrous but legendary forebears—the Louis B. Mayers of old Hollywood.
His behavior toward women was obviously understood to be a bad thing—this was a decade after Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas had helped the country to understand that sexual harassment was not just a quirk of the modern workplace but a professional and economic crime committed against women as a class. But the story felt fuzzier, harder to tell about Harvey: the notion of the “casting couch” still had an almost romantic reverberation, and those who had encountered Weinstein often spoke of the conviction that they would never be believed.
But another reason that I never considered trying to report the story myself, even, truly, in the years after I did start writing about gender and power as my beat, was because it felt impossible. Sisyphean. I remembered what it was like to have the full force of Harvey Weinstein—back then a mountainous man—screaming vulgarities at me, his spit hitting my face. I had watched him haul my friend into the street and try to hurt him. That kind of force, that kind of power? I could not have won against that.
And indeed, no one could, for a really, really long time. The best reporters out there tried, for years, perhaps most memorably David Carr, for this magazine. But Weinstein didn’t just exert physical power. He also employed legal and professional and economic power. He supposedly had every employee sign elaborate, binding nondisclosure agreements. He gave jobs to people who might otherwise work to bring him down and gave gobs of money to other powerful people, who knows how much, but perhaps just enough to keep them from listening to ugly rumors that might circulate among young people, among less powerful people. For decades, the reporters who tried to tell the story of Harvey Weinstein butted up against the same wall of sheer force and immovable power that was leveraged against those ambitious actors, the vulnerable assistants, the executives whose careers, salaries, and reputations were in his hands.
The accounts in the remarkable New York Times piece offer evidence of the ways in which power imbalance is so key to sexual assault, and in the case of Weinstein, to the ability to keep it from coming to light for so very long. The stories of hotel-room meetings, requests for massages, professional interactions undertaken naked—they all speak of the abusive thrill gained not from sex but from the imposition of your will on someone who has no ability to resist or defend themselves from you, an exertion of power on the powerless.
Something has changed. Sources have gone on the record. It’s worth it to wonder why. Perhaps because of shifts in how we understand these kinds of abuses. Recent years have seen scores of women, finding strength and some kind of power in numbers, come forward and tell their stories about Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump. In all of those cases, as in this case, the history of allegations has been an almost wholly open secret, sometimes even having been reported in major outlets, and yet somehow ignored, allowed to pass, unconsidered.
But now our consciousness has been raised. And while repercussions have been mixed—Cosby is set to go to trial again in April; Ailes and O’Reilly lost powerful jobs but walked away with millions; Donald Trump was elected president—it is in part the fact that we have had a public conversation that has helped those for whom telling their stories seemed impossible for so long suddenly feel that speaking out might be within their reach.
That is surely one part of the story. But I don’t think it’s the whole story. I think there is more. I saw Harvey Weinstein earlier this year, at a Planned Parenthood celebration. I was struck by the fact that he was there—as the Times details, he has remained a donor to and supporter of liberal organizations, women’s-rights organizations, and Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whose daughter recently worked as his intern. But I was also struck by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail, and, when I caught sight of him in May, he appeared to be walking with a cane. He has also lost power in the movie industry, is no longer the titan of independent film, the indie mogul who could make or break an actor’s Oscar chances.
He clearly hasn’t stopped working to protect himself. The attorney Lisa Bloom, whose business has recently been the representation of women lodging harassment and assault claims against powerful men, is a member of his legal team. I cannot imagine it coincidental that this spring he bought the rights to make her book about Trayvon Martin into a miniseries. (His legal team also includes David Boies and Charles Harder, the lawyer who successfully sued Gawker on behalf of Hulk Hogan. Anita Dunn, who worked in the Obama White House, reportedly gave Weinstein pro bono PR advice in recent weeks; Weinstein has also, supposedly, reached out to the Clintons’ crisis PR honcho Lanny Davis.) It seems important that this story was reported nonetheless, and I suspect coming weeks will include more stories about Weinstein that have been bottled up for decades.
But it’s hard not to consider the circumstances, the years, the risks, and the work put in by so many to convince so many others to be able to come forward, and the fact that perhaps only a weakening of Weinstein’s grip permitted his expensive self-crafted armor to finally be pierced.
Your Reckoning. And Mine.
The anger window is open. For decades, centuries, it was closed: Something bad happened to you, you shoved it down, you maybe told someone but probably didn’t get much satisfaction—emotional or practical—from the confession. Maybe you even got blowback. No one really cared, and certainly no one was going to do anything about it.
But for the past six weeks, since reports of one movie producer’s serial predation blew a Harvey-size hole in the news cycle, there is suddenly space, air, for women to talk. To yell, in fact. To make dangerous lists and call reporters and text with their friends about everything that’s been suppressed.
This is not feminism as we’ve known it in its contemporary rebirth—packaged into think pieces or nonprofits or Eve Ensler plays or Beyoncé VMA performances. That stuff has its place and is necessary in its own way. This is different. This is seventies-style, organic, mass, radical rage, exploding in unpredictable directions. It is loud, thanks to the human megaphone that is social media and the “whisper networks” that are now less about speaking sotto voce than about frantically typed texts and all-caps group chats.
Really powerful white men are losing jobs—that never happens. Women (and some men) are breaking their silence and telling painful and intimate stories to reporters, who in turn are putting them on the front pages of major newspapers.
It’s wild and not entirely fun. Because the stories are awful, yes. And because the conditions that created this perfect storm of female rage—the suffocating ubiquity of harassment and abuse; the election of a multiply accused predator who now controls the courts and the agencies that are supposed to protect us from criminal and discriminatory acts—are so grim.
But it’s also harrowing because it’s confusing; because the wrath may be fierce, but it is not uncomplicated. In the shock of the house lights having been suddenly brought up—of being forced to stare at the ugly scaffolding on which so much of our professional lives has been built—we’ve had scant chance to parse what exactly is inflaming us and who. It’s our tormentors, obviously, but sometimes also our friends, our mentors, ourselves.
Since the reports of Weinstein’s malevolence began to gush, I’ve received somewhere between five and twenty e-mails every day from women wanting to tell me their experiences: of being groped or leered at or rubbed up against in their workplaces. They tell me about all kinds of men—actors and publishers; judges and philanthropists; store managers and social-justice advocates; my own colleagues, past and present—who’ve hurt them or someone they know. It happened yesterday or two years ago or twenty. Few can speak on the record, but they all want to recount how the events changed their lives, shaped their careers; some wish to confess their guilt for not reporting the behavior and thus endangering those who came after them. There are also women who do want to go on the record, women who’ve summoned armies of brave colleagues ready to finally out their repellent bosses. To many of them I must say that their guy isn’t well known enough, that the stories are now so plentiful that offenders must meet a certain bar of notoriety or power or villainy before they’re considered newsworthy.
This is part of what makes me, and them, angry: this replication of hierarchies—hierarchies of harm and privilege—even now. “It’s a ‘seeing the matrix’ moment,” says one woman whom I didn’t know personally before last week, some of whose deepest secrets and sharpest fears and most animating furies I’m now privy to. “It’s an absolutely bizarre thing to go through, and it’s fucking exhausting and horrible, and I hate it. And I’m glad. I’m so glad we’re doing it. And I’m in hell.”
Part of the challenge, for me, has been in my exchanges with men—the friends and colleagues self-aware enough to be uneasy, to know they’re on a list somewhere or imagine that they might be. They text and call, not quite saying why, but leaving no doubt: They once cheated with a colleague; they once made a pass they suspect was wrong; they aren’t sure if they got consent that one time. Are they condemned? What is the nature and severity of their crime? The anxiety of this—how to speak to guys who seek feminist absolution but whom I suspect to be compromised—is real. Some of my friends have no patience for men’s sudden penchant for introspection, but I’m a sucker; I feel for them. When they reach out, my impulse is to comfort. But reason—and a determination not to placate, not now—drives me to be direct, colder than usual: Yes, this is a problem. In fact, it’s your problem. Seek to address it.
Then there are the men who are looking at the world with fresh eyes, who are startled by the unseemly parade of sexual molesters and manipulators—the cascading allegations against Louis C.K., the conservative former judge and Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, and so many more. These men have begun to understand my journalistic beat for the first time: They didn’t know it was this bad. They didn’t see how systemic, architectural, it was—how they were part of it even if they didn’t paw anyone, didn’t rape anyone. This faction includes my husband, a criminal-defense attorney who’s definitely not ignorant of the pervasiveness of sexual assault yet reads the endless stream of reports with furrowed brow. “Who does this?” he asks. “Who does this?” Then one night, with genuine feeling: “How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?”
At elementary-school drop-off, a friend who’s a theater director tells me he’s been sorting through his own memories. “There’s this one woman, and I did ask her out, but only after she’d auditioned and hadn’t gotten the part. I wrote her, like I write to all actors who I don’t cast, to explain why. And then in that e-mail, I asked if she wanted to go to a Holocaust puppet show with me. She said yes, and we went out a few times. This was probably 2004. Do you think that was bad?”
I laugh, put my hand on his arm, and tell him no, it doesn’t sound bad, but in fact I don’t know: Maybe it was bad or maybe it was human and they really liked each other. We are turning over incidents that don’t fall into the categories that have been established—a spectrum that runs from Weinstein-level brutality to non-rapey but creepy massages to lurid-but-risible pickup lines—and wondering whether or how any of it relates to actual desire for another person.
Still, I’m half-frustrated by men who can’t differentiate between harmless flirtation and harassment, because I believe that most women can. The other half of me is glad that these guys are doing this accounting, reflecting on the instances in which they wielded power. Maybe some didn’t realize at the time that they were putting the objects of their attention at a disadvantage, but I must acknowledge that some, even my friends, surely did.
Women, of course, are doing our own accounting, attempting to classify moments from our pasts to gauge how they fit into the larger picture. Sure, he DM-ed me late at night asking me what my sexual fantasies were, but he didn’t masturbate against my leg and then threaten to kill me, as James Toback allegedly did; he didn’t hire ex–Mossad agents to dig up dirt about my exes and my sex life, like Weinstein did. Okay, but why can’t we stop thinking about it? Why does it feel so closely related?
Which, again, isn’t to suggest that we don’t know the differences. We are not dumb. We knew, when we looked at the Shitty Media Men list circulated in October—an anonymously compiled Google document of unattributed and varied claims about some seventy-eight men in our business—that there were legal distinctions, and moral ones. There are the cheating dogs who proposition us, the artless boy-men who make fumbling passes over work lunches, the bosses who touch us against our will, the men who retaliate professionally if we dare reject them.
And yet the rage that many of us are feeling doesn’t necessarily correspond with the severity of the trespass: Lots of us are on some level as incensed about the guy who looked down our shirt at a company retreat as we are about Weinstein, even if we can acknowledge that there’s something nuts about that, a weird overreaction. Part of it is the decades we’ve spent being pressured to underreact, our objections to the small stuff (and also to the big stuff!) bantered away, ignored, or attributed to our own lily-livered inability to cut it in the real world. Resentments accrete, mature into rage.
“I stuffed all my harassment memories in an emotional trash compactor because there are just so many,” says my friend Amina Sow. “Now the trash compactor is broken, and everything is coming up.” Sow said that among the things she’s recalled over the past few weeks are an old boss in Washington “who definitely jerked off in the office and would make sure to let me see the porn on his computer. He has a bigger job now. And the man who pinned me to the wall in the copy room and told me I should be grateful he’s paying attention to me because I’m a fat pig. I reported both those incidents, by the way, and nothing happened.”
And that’s before we get to the real mind-fuck: the recognition of how we’ve participated in this system.
Starting when she was twenty-eight, Deanna Zandt, an artist and activist, had a secret, consensual relationship with a boss in his midfifties who was a widely known sexual harasser of her coworkers. “It sounds so fucking stupid now,” says forty-two-year-old Zandt, unspooling the mix of fear, self-doubt, and self-interest that kept her in the relationship. “I didn’t know how to get away from him, because if he were just a complete douchebag, I wouldn’t be with someone like that. But he was also very charming and publicly very feminist, and he introduced me to people and did all these other things that were supportive.” At the same time, “he was this known abuser, and I even defended him: ‘Oh, he’s just an old stoner hippie; he doesn’t mean anything by it.’ So I participated—and I saw other women get targeted by him.”
Because I used to work at The New Republic, though not with Leon Wieseltier, who recently lost his post at a new magazine after the exposure of his decades as a harasser, I’ve heard from many friends and former colleagues who are pained about the situation. “He was, really, my champion,” one woman told me. “All these things about him are true, but it is simultaneously true that if you were on his good side, you felt special—protected, cared for, like he believed in you and wanted you to succeed.” In a profession where far too few women find that kind of support from powerful men, Wieseltier’s mentorship felt like a prize.
But many of even his most conflicted former admirers admit that the stories about him—reportedly thanking women for wearing short skirts, kissing colleagues against their will, threatening to tell the rest of the company he was fucking a subordinate if she displeased him—have convinced them that sacking Wieseltier was the correct choice. They’re sad for him, for his family, but he should not be in charge of women. It has left some of them reexamining how they excused his conduct, worked around it: how they were, in the parlance of Michelle Cottle, who wrote with nuance about Wieseltier, “game girls,” and thus reaped the professional rewards. “I got so much from him intellectually and emotionally, but I wonder if part of it was because I was game,” says one woman, “and what’s the cost of that?”
Other women who played along with their bosses expressed a degree of shame, as well as pride. “Men have their fraternities and golf games to get ahead. Why shouldn’t I have used the advantage of my sexuality to my benefit? God, what else was I supposed to do?” says one woman in her early fifties. Her attitude suggests something of a generational divide. On one side are women who came of age before Anita Hill’s groundbreaking testimony against Clarence Thomas, who were perhaps raised to assume they’d encounter harassment and resolved to tough it out. To this contingent, younger women’s complaints can sound hand-wringingly excessive: What did those girls expect? What they expected was the world they’d been assured had arrived: a postfeminist one, in which they were something close to equal, in which their career paths were no longer supposed to be determined by big, swinging dicks—real ones.
Then there are those who were never directly targeted, perhaps for reasons relating to aesthetic preferences or perhaps because they resisted. Several women have spoken to me with curiosity and concern about these colleagues, more than a few left to wither on the professional vine: What ever happened to them? Were their careers, their ambitions, irreparably damaged?
One woman, discussing a print journalist who harassed her in her early twenties, tells of an inverse dynamic: “Other female writers weren’t getting harassed, as far as we knew, which meant that they were the serious writers. We were silly little girls, not deserving of being thought of as real journalists if we were singled out for this treatment.” The slow-drip degradation, she says, led her to quit the profession. “He didn’t grope me, and he didn’t succeed in fucking me. But the way it made me feel—these insidious sexual advances you barely understand at that age, plus the constant professional undermining—it felt like you were never going to win, like you had no value.”
The reason that handsy colleagues exist on the same plane as violent predators is that the harm done to women doesn’t end with the original offense. It’s also how we’re evaluated based on our reactions to it. Do we smile or remain stone-faced, reciprocate or retreat, ignore or complain? What becomes of us hangs on what we choose.
Considering all of these angles, it’s easy to conclude that this moment actually isn’t radical enough because it’s limited to sexual grievances. One sixty-year-old friend, who is single and in a precarious professional situation, says, “I’m burning with rage watching some assholes pose as good guys just because they never put their hands on a colleague’s thigh, when I know for a fact they’ve run capable women out of workplaces in deeply gendered ways. I’m very frustrated, because I’m not in a position right now to spill some beans.”
When I thought about my #metoo moments, I first recalled the restaurant manager who instructed me to keep my blouse unbuttoned as I served pizzas with fried eggs on top, about the manager at Bruegger’s Bagels who’d rub his dick against my ass as he passed me setting out the cream cheeses in the morning. I’ve never had a job in which there wasn’t a resident harasser, but in my postcollege life, I believed I’d stayed out of his crosshairs.
Perhaps, in the story I’ve told myself, it was because I was never wowed by powerful men, sensing on some visceral level that they were mostly full of shit. I gravitated toward female mentors instead. But even given my wariness of Important Men, as a young woman I could never truly believe that members of the opposite sex could be as cartoonishly grotesque as they sometimes were.
I once heard that a choking person reflexively leaves the room, embarrassed for others to see her gasping for breath. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s how I’ve dealt with harassment. One time on the subway, the man next to me wound his hand under my thigh and between my legs, as I sat there debating whether or not to stand up or scream because I didn’t want to embarrass him on a full train. That’s why, when an important writer took me to coffee, offering to help me find a new job, and asked if I’d ever fantasized about fucking a married man, I simply laughed maniacally, as if he’d just made a joke about a sixty-five-year-old man who suggests to a twenty-five-year-old woman that she fuck him during a professional coffee.
At one of my early and formative workplaces, there was a textbook harasser: a high-on-the-food-chain, late-night direct-messager, a guy who stuck his hand down the dress of a colleague at a Christmas party, who propositioned and sometimes slept with female subordinates, who could be vindictive if turned down, and who’d undertake elaborate, misogynistic pranks, including sending provocative e-mails under another staffer’s name. One of the preyed-upon women was older than I: talented, glamorous, and definitely not game. She recently recalled to me how she’d initially believed that she could ride it out but instead was undone by her bewilderment and humiliation at being played for a fool, for a girl. She quit after about a year at the company. I remember watching her treatment, appalled, almost disbelieving that something this outrageous could happen; yet I also remember not wanting to get too close to her, as if her status as quarry was catching. I also remember hearing company honchos say that they were well aware that we had a “walking lawsuit” in our midst. Even then, it struck me that the concern was for the potential tarring of the institution, not for the women who were suffering within it.
That harasser didn’t sexually pursue me, but he did endeavor to undermine me. When I began dating a slightly older colleague, my direct supervisor (a married man on whom I had a fierce and never-requited crush, in part because it was safe; he was a model mentor) pulled me aside and confided that some other people at the office—i.e., the Harasser—were spreading rumors about how all of my work ideas were being fed to me by my boyfriend. In short, I was trying to sleep my way to the top.
Just a few years ago, I was working at another job. A new boss had been installed and wanted to hire the Harasser from my old workplace; I told him I would not work in the same office as that man. I was on maternity leave; he promised that the hire was only temporary, that the Harasser would be gone by the time I returned. And he was. But soon after I got back, the office’s youngest women began to come to me confessing that in the few months the Harasser had been in place, he’d creeped them out and sent them off-color, middle-of-the-night DMs. I had made my stand on my own behalf—I would not work with that man!—but had failed to protect my less powerful colleagues.
So, no, I was never serially sexually harassed. But the stink got on me anyway. I was implicated. We all are, our professional contributions weighed on scales of fuckability and willingness to go along, to be good sports, to not be humorless scolds or office gorgons; our achievements chalked up to male affiliation—the boyfriend who supposedly supplies you with ideas or the manager who took you under his wing because he wanted to get inside your pants. We can rebuff the harasser; we can choose not to fuck the boss. But in a world where men hold inordinate power, we’re still in bed with the guy.
There is another realm of anger here, arising from our knowledge that even the long-delayed chance to tell these repugnant truths is built on several kinds of privilege. As others have observed, it matters that the most public complaints so far have come from relatively affluent white women in elite professions, women who’ve worked closely enough with powerful white men to be available for harassment. Racism and class discrimination determine whose stories get picked up and which women are readily believed.
That reality fogs some of the satisfaction we feel in watching monstrous men lose their influence; we know that it’s a drop in a bottomless bucket. “Maybe we can get another two horrible people to have to step down or say they’re sorry,” one Democratic lawmaker told me, “but that helps only 20 people, and it’s 20 million who need things to change. Plus, you’re a farmworker? A lady who cleans offices? You’re a prostitute or an immigrant? You’re not going to tell your story.”
My sister-in-law has taught sexual-harassment prevention at a national retail chain for nine years, and she notes that not only do media and entertainment figures “have a bigger rooftop to shout from,” but many are freelancers, independent professionals with multiple employment options. The question she gets more than any other, she says, is: “ ‘What’s going to happen to me if I speak up? Because at my last job, nothing happened and I got kind of punished.’ Even if I tell them this place is different and they should feel safe in lodging complaints, I don’t think they believe me.”
Heather McLaughlin, a sociology professor at Oklahoma State University, recently described in an interview with Marketplace radio her study showing that about half of women in their late twenties who’ve experienced harassment start looking for a new job within two years of the incident. For those who’ve endured more serious harassment, the figure is around 80 percent—and many opt to leave their chosen professions altogether: to start over, often in less male-dominated fields, which of course tend to be lower-paying. Ina Howard-Parker, a former book publicist who told me she was harassed at several progressive publishing houses, did just that. “I ended up deciding I’d rather work at Trader Joe’s, where at least there’s an HR department and rules of engagement at work.” She now renovates houses in rural Pennsylvania.
Perhaps most galling, the current conflagration has laid bare a pattern of hiring, rewarding, and protecting men even after their transgressions have become known. That is the history, even the recent history, of America. As John Oliver has noted, the actor Casey Affleck—accused by two women of sexual harassment during filming (charges he denies)—will be giving out the Best Actress statue at the next Oscars. Bill Cosby received lifetime-achievement awards even after many of his alleged sexual assaults were made public. Reports suggest that members of the SEIU had formally complained about Fight for 15 architect and top labor organizer Scott Courtney for ages, but only now has he been ousted, along with a coterie of coworkers who covered for him.
In late October, as I wrote columns and tweeted about this wave of stories, I discovered that a male colleague had been hired here at New York despite documented claims of sexual harassment in a prior job. I’m angry not just because New York saw fit to bring him on. It’s also the impossibility of the situation now: Should the guy (who doesn’t supervise anyone) be let go, even though no one at New York has complained about him? Mostly I’m mad that he was chosen, at all, over at least two talented women who also were in the running.
The progressive journalist Matt Taibbi recently published a lengthy apology/explanation in which he despaired that the public reappraisal of the work that established him (in particular, a book about Russia that he now says is satirical and includes accounts of pushing women under the table for blow jobs, of telling them to lighten up when they object to such high jinks) is coinciding with the publication of his book about the death of Eric Garner. It’s the kind of important book that he’s been working toward writing for thirty years, he laments. Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of all the women who’ve wanted to be writers for thirty years, who’ve yearned to make the world a better place by telling stories of injustice, but who haven’t had the opportunity in part because so much journalistic space is occupied by men like Taibbi: dudes who in some measure gained their professional footholds by objectifying women—and not just in big, bad Russia. Take the piece Taibbi wrote in 2009 about athletes’ wives. “The problem with the Smoking-Hot Skank as a permanent life choice,” he opined, “is that she eventually gets bored and starts calling up reporters to share her Important Political Opinions.” Taibbi may feel demoralized because the hilarious misogynistic stylings of his youth are now interfering with his grown-up career, but lots of women never even got their careers off the ground because the men in their fields saw them as Smoking-Hot Skanks whose claim to having a thought in their heads was no more than a punch line.
Men have not succeeded in spite of their noxious behavior or disregard for women; in many instances, they’ve succeeded because of it. They’ve been patted on the back and winked along—their retro-machismo hailed as funny or edgy—at the same places that are now dramatically jettisoning them. “The incredible hypocrisy of the boards, employers, institutions, publicists, brothers, friends who have been protecting powerful men/harassers/rapists for years and are now suddenly dropping them,” says one of my colleagues at New York, livid and depressed. “What changed? Certainly not their beliefs about the behavior, right? Only their self-interest. On the one hand, I’m so happy they’re finally being called out and facing consequences, but there’s something so craven and superficially moralizing about the piling on by the selfsame people who were the snickerers and protectors.”
Another woman, who works in politics, grimly observes, “Sure, good liberal thinkers will go to their sexual-harassment seminars and do all the things they should be doing. But ultimately, this is a cover-your-ass moment, not a change-the-rules moment.”
As cries of alarm for the ladies pour from the mouths of men we know through experience or plausible rumor to be culprits themselves, it’s easy to feel jaded and apprehensive: One day, my friends and I learn that a man who’s been bemoaning the prevalence of harassment also stuck his hand up a colleague’s skirt when he was her boss. “It feels like Allison Williams with the keys in Get Out,” says my friend Irin Carmon. “Trust no one.”
And yet, we are still the protectors on some level. Despite the talk of witch hunts and the satisfaction of finally seeing a few men penalized in any way whatsoever for their wrongdoing, most women I know feel torn about both the vague prospect and the observed reality of these men losing their jobs. We think of their feelings and their families, fret that the disclosure of their misdeeds might cost them future employment or even provoke them to harm themselves. But this is something else we’re now being compelled to notice: how we’re still conditioned to worry for the men, but somehow to not afford the same compassion for women—their families, their feelings, their future prospects—even in a reckoning that is supposed to be about them, about us.
The truth is, the risk of exposure that makes us feel anxious about the well-being of our male friends and colleagues—the risk of being named and never recovering—is one of the only things that could ever force change. Because without real, genuine penalties on the line, without generations of men fearing that if they abuse their power, if they treat women like shit, they’ll be out of jobs, shamed, their families devastated—without that actual, electric, dangerous possibility: Nothing. Will. Change. Companies will simply start investing more in sexual-harassment insurance (a real thing!) and make payouts a line item in the budget, and we’ll go back to talking about how men are just men.
Women I’ve spoken to already predict, drily, that even the men suffering the harshest consequences will be rehabilitated soon enough: that eighteen months from now, some ambitious New York Times editor will assign Leon Wieseltier an essay on identity politics, pitching it as counterintuitive, knowing it will get zillions of clicks; someone a decade from now will ask an eighty-two-year-old James Toback to direct an artsy realist movie about sexual assault, and it will be admired by some prominent person as trenchant and gutsy.
That’s because this world is stacked in favor of men, yes, in a way that is so widely understood as to be boring, invisible, just life. But more deeply, this will happen because we can see in men—even in the bad ones—talent. We manage to look past their flaws and sexual violations to what value they bring to the world. It is the direct opposite, in many ways, of how we view women, whose successes can still be blithely attributed to the fact that the boss wanted to fuck them.
I struggled a lot internally about whether to name the Harasser at my former job. I decided not to, largely because I understand something about how things have turned out. In a rare outcome, I—along with some of the women he pestered—now have more power than he does. He is, as far as I know, short on work, not in charge of any young women. And so I decided, in consultation with former colleagues, not to identify him.
But here’s a crucial reason he behaved so brazenly and badly for so long: He did not consider that the women he was torturing, much less the young woman who was mutely and nervously watching his performance (that would be me), might one day have greater power than he did. He didn’t consider this because in a basic way, he did not think of us as his equals.
That makes me angry, too.
Letting all this out is undeniably exciting. Its power, to some extent, comes from the fact that it is almost terrifyingly out of control. Anything is possible, good or bad. And yes, there is satisfaction that for a month or so, it’s like we’ve been living in the last ten minutes of an M. Night Shyamalan movie where the big twist is that women have been telling the truth all along.
Yet you can feel the backlash brewing. All it will take is one particularly lame allegation—and given the increasing depravity of the charges, the milder stuff looks lamer and lamer, no matter how awful the experience—to turn the tide from deep umbrage on behalf of women to pity for the poor, bullied men. Or one false accusation could do it. One man unfairly fired over a misinterpreted bump in the elevator could transform all of us women into the marauding aggressors, the men our hapless victims.
MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, himself once having been returned to power after a plagiarism scandal, has mourned publicly for the injury done to his friend and former colleague Mark Halperin, who got canned after being accused of pushing his penis against younger female subordinates: “He deserves to have what he did deplored,” Barnicle declared. “But does he deserve to die? How many times can you kill a guy?”
A powerful white man losing a job is a death, and don’t be surprised if women wind up punished for the spate of killings.
Many men will absorb the lessons of late 2017 to be not about the threat they’ve posed to women but about the threat that women pose to them. So there will be more—perhaps unconscious—hesitancy about hiring women, less eagerness to invite them to lunch or send them on work trips with men; men will be warier of mentoring women.
The only real solution may be one that is hardest to envision: equality. As Kristen Gwynne, who has worked for and with multiple harassers, says, “What bothers me is that this moment, as good as it is, prompts the question: What are women getting out of it? I lost time. It affected my self-esteem and my ability to produce work. So even if the people who did target me were punished, I still feel like I deserve some sort of compensation. I don’t want them to release a public apology—I want them to send me a check. I wish we could storm the offices of these men, kick them out, and change the locks. We should demand something different of men that’s not just them going to rehab. Put women in power.”
At the risk of sounding Pollyannaish, I felt a glimmer of hope on that front after the recent election. For the first time in twelve long, hard months, it seemed that women might be on the verge of substantially increasing their political numbers. As the results rolled in, a story line emerged: Women’s anger—at Trump and their own powerlessness—had been turned into electoral participation. A trans woman had prevailed over a white male lawmaker who authored a bathroom bill; a white man who insulted the Women’s March back in January lost at the polls to a woman of color who was incensed at his show of disrespect. This wasn’t just about retribution; it was about replacement.
I got a text from an old friend, a woman who’d worked on the Clinton campaign, who’d been there next to me on that shell-shocked night a year earlier. She said she was crying watching the latest results come in. “Maybe we’re the backlash,” she wrote.
This Moment Isn’t (Just) About Sex. It’s Really About Work
It would be easy—a hard kind of easy—to understand the painful news happening all around us to be about sexual assault. After all, for weeks now, each day has brought fresh, lurid tales. And if our typically prurient American interests have led us to focus on the carnal nitty-gritty, the degree of sexual harm sustained, the vital questions of consent, that’s fair enough; there has been, we are really absorbing for the first time, a hell of a lot of sexual damage done.
But in the midst of our great national calculus, in which we are determining what punishments fit which sexual crimes, it’s possible that we’re missing the bigger picture altogether: that this is not, at its heart, about sex at all—or at least not wholly. What it’s really about is work and women’s equality in the workplace and, more broadly, about the rot at the core of our power structures that makes it harder for women to do work because the whole thing is tipped toward men.
Sexual assault is one symptom of that imbalance, but it is not the only one. The can-opener here—the sharp point that pierced the aluminum that had sealed all this glop in—was indeed a story about a man, Harvey Weinstein, who committed professional harm that was also terrible sexual violence. And yes, many of the stories that have poured forth since—from James Toback’s unsolicited ejaculations, to the playwright Israel Horovitz’s alleged forced encounters with much younger women—have turned on nonconsensual contact, violent physical and sexual threat, the stuff of sex crimes. But even those tales—the ones about rape and assault—have been told by accusers who first interacted with these men in hopes of finding professional opportunity, who were looking not for flirtation or dates but for work. And they have reported—they have taken care to clearly lay out—the impact of the sexual violence not just on their emotional well-being, not just on their bodies, but on their careers, on their place in the public sphere.
Masha Gessen has written for The New Yorker with perspicacity in past weeks about how this moment risks becoming a sex panic, that one of the perils at hand—as we try to parse how butt groping or unsolicited kissing can exist on the same scale as violent rape—is a reversion to attitudes about women as sexually infantilized victims. Her concerns are valid, pressing. Yet I fear that the category collapse that makes Gessen anxious is being misunderstood in part because we are making a crucial category error. Because the thing that unites these varied revelations isn’t necessarily sexual harm but professional harm and power abuse. These infractions and abuses are related, sometimes they are combined. But their impact, the reasons that they are sharing conversational and journalistic space during this reckoning, need to be clarified. We must regularly remind everyone paying attention that sexual harassment is a crime not simply on the grounds that it is a sexual violation but because it is a form of discrimination.
The term “sexual harassment” was used for the first time in public in 1975 by feminist scholar Lin Farley, when she testified at a hearing on women in the workplace before the New York City Human Rights Commission. Farley, who was teaching a class on women and work at Cornell University, coined the term after hearing about Carmita Wood. Wood was an administrative assistant at Cornell and quit her job after years of having been rubbed up against, groped, and kissed against her will by her boss. In 1977, an appeals court upheld decisions defining sexual harassment as sex discrimination, barred by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld this view in 1986, when it ruled in favor of Mechelle Vinson, the assistant bank manager who was assaulted and raped by her boss in the bank’s vaults and basements more than fifty times. Justice William Rehnquist wrote in the unanimous decision, “Without question, when a supervisor sexually harasses a subordinate because of the subordinate’s sex, the supervisor discriminates on the basis of sex.”
In other words, sexual harassment may entail behaviors that on their own would be criminal—assault or rape—but the legal definition of its harm is about the systemic disadvantaging of a gender in the public and professional sphere. And those structural disadvantages do not begin or end with the actual physical incursions—the groping, kissing, the rubbing up against. In fact, the gender inequity that creates the need for civil-rights protections is what has permitted so many of these trespasses to have occurred so frequently and for so long; gender inequity is what explains why women are vulnerable to harassment before they are even harassed; it explains why it’s difficult for them to come forward with stories after they have been harassed, why they are often ignored when they do; it clarifies why so many women work with or maintain relationships with harassers and why their reactions to those harassers become key to how they themselves will be evaluated, professionally. Gender inequity is cyclical, all-encompassing.
We got to where we are because men, specifically white men, have been afforded a disproportionate share of power. That leaves women dependent on those men—for economic security, for work, for approval, for any share of power they might aspire to. Many of the women who have told their stories have explained that they did not do so before because they feared for their jobs. When women did complain, many were told that putting up with these behaviors was just part of working for the powerful men in question—“That’s just Charlie being Charlie”; “That’s just Harvey being Harvey.” Remaining in the good graces of these men, because they were the bosses, the hosts, the rainmakers, the legislators, was the only way to preserve employment, and not just their own: Whole offices, often populated by female subordinates, are dependent on the steady power of the male bosses. When a prominent alleged abuser loses his job, he’s not the only one whose salary stops; it often means that his employees, many of them women, also lose their paychecks, which are smaller to begin with. When men hold the most politically powerful posts, people who are less powerful than they are depend on them for advocacy and representation; complaints that imperil these leaders immediately imperil entire political parties and ideological agendas on both the left and right.
What’s more, to cross powerful men is to jeopardize not just an individual job in an individual office; it’s to risk far broader professional harm within whole professions where men hold sway, to cut yourself off from future opportunity. Lauren Greene, an ambitious congressional staffer who accused her former boss, the Republican congressman Blake Farenthold, of sexual harassment after he reportedly told another aide of his wet dreams about Greene and commented on her nipples, says that her complaints against her boss left her blackballed from politics, the profession she wanted to succeed in. She now works part time as an assistant to a home builder in North Carolina, babysitting on the side to make extra money.
These are the economics of sexual harassment but also, simply, of sexism.
It’s worth considering why those Harvey allegations caught the public’s attention where little else had. As hard as it is to stir concern over women’s sexual autonomy, we do have a long history of wanting to protect (some) women’s virtue. It is also true that we still rile ourselves up more about a woman’s sexual violability than we do about her professional autonomy or rights to public and economic equality. Or at least we rile ourselves up if the woman in question is white and well-off: Two decades of settlements and accusations against the singer R. Kelly, who is alleged to have serially assaulted young black women, have fallen on deaf ears. (It is also worth noting that the professions that remain still unexamined in this reckoning are those populated by poorer women, disproportionately by women of color.)
One of the reasons that the story about former New York public-radio personality John Hockenberry was so arresting was because it made clear that there was a web of ill treatment, a connection between his comparatively mild but still discomfiting come-ons to colleagues and his ugly treatment of his cohosts. To one of them, Farai Chideya, he reportedly said, “You shouldn’t stay here just as a ‘diversity hire’ ”; another, Celeste Headlee, complained of how he’d interrupt and sabotage her on air. This man literally broadcast, on air, his disdain for the women—notably women of color—who were his professional peers. Headlee said she was told that her poor performance was to blame for Hockenberry’s bullying behavior; she, like the two women who preceded her, eventually lost her post as cohost, while Hockenberry retained his position. All of that was public record. But none of it would have made it to print last week had there not also been an accusation of sexual impropriety.
We need to understand that the sexual harm is not always at the heart of a gendered power imbalance and is not always about the sexualized act itself. The case of New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush, who is accused of making unwanted advances outside of his workplace, against colleagues he did not directly supervise, would seem to give fodder to those worried about a sex panic: It raises the concern that bad passes, made between adults at a bar, might get condemned as sexual harassment in a way that assumes the women in question to be incapable of full sexual participation. But the damaging part of the story written in Vox about Thrush, by Laura McGann, one of his former colleagues at Politico, was, to my eye, not about the unwanted kissing, though that did sound bad. The worse part was McGann’s recollection of how Thrush had later characterized their encounter to colleagues, making it sound as though she had pursued him and he had rejected her, as opposed to her view, which was the opposite. (Thrush denies that he disparaged McGann to colleagues.)
The damage wasn’t exactly sexual in nature, at least not sexual in the physical sense; it was in how the woman in question might be viewed by her colleagues, based on the account of a man who was allegedly mispresenting the encounter. In this story, even Thrush’s allegedly retouched tale isn’t crime or sexual trespass; it’s gossip. And surely women in offices are as likely to participate in hookup gossip as their male colleagues. But here’s where double standards come into play: When men’s sexual appetites are regarded as healthy, a sign of confidence and appeal, and women’s sexual appetites are understood very often as trashy or desperate, all gossip is not equal. A man telling a story about how a female colleague came on to him and he put a stop to it has the potential to do damage to the woman’s professional standing—rendering her as needy, undesirable, and showing professional bad judgment—while bolstering the man’s, by framing him as responsible, mature, professional, and ultimately desirable to the opposite sex.
None of this is to say that Thrush should face consequences commensurate with, say Charlie Rose or Harvey Weinstein. In fact, the focus on the repercussions to prominent men—the professional and reputational damage done to them—takes the revelations of this moment further away from the reputational and professional prices paid by generations of women. While understanding that the threat of actual repercussion is crucial to getting men to stop behaving this way, I also find myself almost wishing that we could have a moratorium on firings and resignations, in exchange for the full stories, from every woman, about the ways in which she feels she has been harassed and discriminated against, and not only sexually.
Buried in one of the reports on Matt Lauer is a detail from a woman who recalls him speaking about how unattractive her cold sore was. Farai Chideya has recalled how John Hockenberry urged her to lose weight while she was his cohost. These are not sexual traumas. But they show how women are evaluated aesthetically by men whose evaluations matter more than women’s work, in contexts that have nothing to do with aesthetics.
My frustrations hit an early high point when I read the apology from Louis C.K. in the wake of a story about how he masturbated in front of women. Several of them told the New York Times that after they had spoken openly about their experiences with him, they had heard that his powerful manager was furious with them. They decided to take themselves out of the running for any projects involving that manager. “The power I had over these women is that they admired me,” Louis C.K. said in his statement. “I learned yesterday the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves and cautious around other men who would never have put them in that position.” No, you dope, I yelled in my head. The power you had over those women was professional. What you should have learned how your actions damaged their careers. The harm done to women simply doesn’t begin or end in the hotel room with the famous comic masturbating in front of them. It shades everything about what women choose to do—or not do—afterward; it has an impact on those who weren’t even in the room.
What makes women vulnerable is not their carnal violability but rather the way that their worth has been understood as fundamentally erotic, ornamental; that they have not been taken seriously as equals; that they have been treated as some ancillary reward that comes with the kinds of power men are taught to reach for and are valued for achieving. How to make clear that the trauma of the smaller trespasses—the boob grabs and unwanted kisses or come-ons from bosses—is not necessarily even about the sexualized act in question; so many of us learned to maneuver around hands-y men without sustaining lasting emotional damage when we were fourteen. Rather, it’s about the cruel reminder that these are still the terms on which we are valued by our colleagues, our bosses, sometimes our competitors, the men we tricked ourselves into thinking might see us as smart, formidable colleagues or rivals, not as the kinds of objects they can just grab and grope and degrade without consequence. It’s not that we’re horrified like some Victorian damsel; it’s that we’re horrified like a woman in 2017 who briefly believed she was equal to her male peers but has just been reminded that she is not, who has suddenly had her comparative powerlessness revealed to her. “I was hunting for a job,” said one of the women who accused Charlie Rose of assault. “And he was hunting for me.”
A woman who is harassed, or who is in a workplace where other women are, might feel vividly the full weight of the system that’s not set up with her in mind and see with clarity how much more difficult her professional path will be at every turn, how success might not be on her terms but on terms set by powerful men. She might feel shame or embarrassment that worms its way into her head, affects her confidence. She will likely spend time and energy focusing on how to maneuver around the harasser, time and energy that might otherwise be spent on her own advancement. Some women decide to play along; maybe their careers will benefit from it or maybe they will suffer, but they may long wonder whether their success or failure was determined not by their own talents or even by a lucky break but rather by how they responded to a man. This is especially difficult for very young women, those with fewer economic or social resources, who lack professional networks and professional stability; it’s these women who are most likely to be targeted. The whole thing might begin to feel overwhelmingly difficult, hopeless, perhaps not worth the fight. It can mean a sapping of ambition.
At the end of the New York Times report on Horovitz, accused by nine women of having sexually assaulted them, some of whom when they were in their teens and he was their professional mentor or employer, the reporter Jessica Bennett noted that one of Horovitz’s accusers, despite being a promising playwright, has struggled with depression and writer’s block while others left the theater altogether. “He took this thing that was such a beautiful thing,” one of the accusers told Bennett of Horovitz’s effect on the aspirations of the young women he is alleged to have molested, “and he just ruined it.” Here’s another example: In response to a story about Alex Kozinski, now a judge and formerly chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who allegedly showed female clerks pornography in his office, civil-rights attorney Alexandra Brodsky tweeted, “In law school, everyone knew, and women didn’t apply to clerk for Judge Kosinski [sic] despite his prestige and connections to the Supreme Court.”
All this while networks—sometimes, literal television networks—of male power work to build, protect, and further reinforce male power. Recall how the Fox News chief, Roger Ailes, protected Bill O’Reilly, keeping him in a multi-million-dollar berth for years after public claims of harassment surfaced; O’Reilly in turn defended Ailes when Ailes was accused of serial harassment of the women on his network; the president, Donald Trump, whose roles as birther and politician were built in part by the Fox News team, in turn defended both O’Reilly and Ailes, even as their network was providing Trump his own robust defense against harassment charges. Meanwhile, the female accusers of all these men received no such support, no such defense; instead they were called liars from public, political, and media pulpits as they were chased out of the news business, hushed up with settlement money and nondisclosure agreements, insulted by the man who is now our president as being too ugly to grope. That same man was given a free pass from Lauer at the presidential forum in which the anchor grilled Hillary Clinton about her e-mails and interrupted her repeatedly but failed to challenge Trump at all, even on outright untruths.
Little of this cycle itself directly entails sexual incursion. But it is central to understanding the story unfolding around us. Women’s access to work and to power within their workplaces is curtailed, often via the very same mechanisms that promote, protect, and forgive men, the systems that give them double, triple chances to advance and to abuse those around them, over and over again.
A few weeks ago, the CNN reporter Dylan Byers was harshly criticized for a (quickly deleted) tweet, in which he bemoaned the fact that in the purge of accused harassers and predators “never has so much talent left the industry all at once.” But the point is that the pool of men in whom we’ve been able to discern talent to begin with is pre-poisoned by sexism. These men are known to us in part because they, and the system in which they’ve risen, have cleared the field of female competition. So of course theirs are the voices and faces that reach us every morning via our televisions and radios, they are the ones we understand to be talented. Of course they’re the ones we rely on to explain the world; to be the politicians we trust—that we must depend on—to legislate on our behalf. That means that when they fall, we feel for them, even as we recoil from them, because their power has allowed them to be made known to us, admired by us. Meanwhile, the women they’re alleged to have harassed remain mostly nameless, faceless, having had so many fewer opportunities to become icons. We don’t consider all the women who—driven out, banished, self-exiled, or marginalized—might have been more talented or brilliant or comforting to us, on our airwaves or in our governing bodies, but whom we have never even gotten the chance to know.
Then of course there’s how we feel about the women who did manage to ascend within these structures. When stories about the webs that protected Harvey Weinstein or Charlie Rose get published, the women—often women who are themselves anomalies within male-dominated institutions and cultures—get the most attention: Hillary Clinton’s (rather than Bill’s) friendship with Harvey Weinstein is craven, while Nancy Pelosi’s words about John Conyers are parsed more closely than anything uttered (or not uttered) by any one of his male colleagues. Rose’s producer Yvette Vega, who didn’t address the complaints of women who’d been harassed is seen as a more sinister villain than her dick-flashing boss.
None of this is an exculpation of those women or of any of us who have, frankly, lived in the world ruled by men and tried to make our way in it. When individual women, no matter how powerful, climb to their perches through a system that was not built by or for them, then their grip on power has never wholly been their own. It’s always existed in relation to the men they must work with, protect, acquiesce to, apologize for, or depend on for support.
When a group of female Democratic senators, kicked off by Kirsten Gillibrand and followed quickly by dozens of her colleagues, urged Al Franken to resign, they made a wildly risky choice: Open challenge and rebuke to a beloved and powerful man has rarely endeared women to us. But it’s easy to imagine, as allegations against Franken trickled out, day by day, that it was Franken’s female colleagues who felt the heat. According to one Democratic aide, the frustrated conversations between some Democratic women in the Senate had gone on for a week, held sometimes, literally, in the Senate’s women’s restrooms: What should they do?
Those women surely knew that if they did not speak out against Franken, they would be tarred as self-interested hypocrites; they probably also understood that if they did speak out against him, they would be viewed as self-interested executioners. That they chose the latter path speaks volumes about the unprecedented shifts in possibility this moment seems, at least right now, to be heralding. (Startling polling released by Perry Undem the day before Franken announced he was stepping down showed that 86 percent of those surveyed said they believed that men harass women out of “desire for power and control over women,” more than because they want to date them.)
But it should also tell us about the shitty position women are so often put in: as the designated guardians, entrusted—whether as colleagues or wives—with policing men’s bad behaviors, they will get dinged for complicity if they don’t police it vigilantly enough, and risk being cast as castrating villainesses if they issue sentence. The women senators’ call for the end of Franken’s tenure may, in the end, make them feminist heroines, or it may backfire terribly, confirming them as leaders of a ravening mob and lighting the fuse for the looming backlash. But let’s not ignore the fact that on the same day that many were side-eyeing Hillary Clinton’s friendly dinners with Harvey Weinstein, in the same weeks in which many commentators have cast critical eyes back on the feminists who defended Bill Clinton, the New York Times Metro section’s Twitter account promptly asked of Kirsten Gillibrand, a woman who did rebuke a man in her own party: “Is courage or opportunism at play?”
None of this is simple; none of it is easy; it’s increasingly difficult to parse and to live through. That’s precisely because what we’re picking apart is not some single thread; it’s the knotted weave of inequity that is the very stuff of which our professional and political and social assumptions and institutions are made. Having this conversation as if it’s about sex, and not about equality, involves trauma and pain in its own ways: memories of the visceral fear, physical pain, emotional suffering of nonconsensual contact that so many of us have experienced, to one degree or another.
But even with all that pain, a focus on sex also lets us off the hook, permitting us to look away from broader horrors, whole complex systems of disempowerment and economic, professional vulnerability. Understanding the moment, and women’s reaction to it, as only about sex crimes does contribute to a comfortably regressive understanding of women as perpetually passive victims of men’s animal sexuality run amok. And while I share Masha Gessen’s fear that this moment will end with a recommitment to patrolling women’s virtue and undermining their sexual agency, I am just as worried about what we will not do—the thing that is harder and more uncomfortable and ultimately inconceivable: addressing and beginning to dismantle men’s unjustly disproportionate claim to every kind of power in the public and professional world.