Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, and Harvey Weinstein all have one thing in common: they are men who have preyed on vulnerable women. “Vulnerable women” means anyone that is in a political/professional/financial position inferior to theirs. And that covers a whole lot of women.
The latest sexual harassment scandal involves a man who also happens to have donated money to Democratic candidates. Well, guess what? Sexual assault is not a partisan political activity. Although the perpetrator’s political beliefs might color their actions, sexual assault is based in a faith, a surety, that springs from the entitlement that an accident of birth grants them. That entitlement is their gender, and the privilege that is automatically granted to all men in our culture.
Sexual assault is political. It is not partisan.
Not that you would know that from the typical talking points that have been issued by the Republican National Committee and quoted by the Daily Beast:
The committee has used the controversy to paint Democrats and members of the media as coddlers of a sexual predator. Official committee talking points, obtained by The Daily Beast, instructed surrogates to harp on leading Democrats’ financial support from Weinstein, and the hypocrisy allegedly inherent in it.
“Democrats claim to stand up for women, but what does it say if several members of the Party would rather keep their campaign cash than speak out against a man accused of sexual harassment?” read the talking points. “Democrats who have yet to do so need to make it clear they will return or donate Weinstein's tainted money.”
Yes. Really.
The party that has nominated and elected a man who has admitted to sexual assault on a widely heard tape. That party wants Democrats to wash the filth of Harvey Weinstein’s money from their coffers.
Of course, that is not really what they want.
Sexual assault is—and has always been—all about power and control. It has never been about lust—except, perhaps, the lust for power. Not all powerful men (or powerless men, for that matter) find it necessary to exercise their power through assaulting women, but enough do to keep us all in line.
And that is what it is about: controlling women through the threat of sexual assault. The threat is implicit in Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to meet with a woman without having his wife present. The threat is reinforced every time a woman walks down a street to catcalls from strangers. You are vulnerable, the threat says, to my power over you. To my right to access your body any time I want it.
According to Donald Trump, if you are a star, they let you do it. The young women Harvey Weinstein victimized did not “let” him do it. They were simply powerless to stop him, as were the women Trump assaulted. This is from Katy Tur’s book Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History, and describes Donald Trump’s behavior to her, an NBC reporter, as he arrives to be interviewed for MSNBC’s Morning Joe:
Trump arrives. Word spreads. I take a few steps toward the entrance and see Trump’s private security detail, coming in just ahead of him. Despite my desire to avoid any interaction, I walk toward the front doors and spot Trump—who shifts his path ever so slightly so he’s walking straight toward me—barreling, really.
Suddenly he is so close I can smell what he had for breakfast. And then, before I know what’s happening, his hands are on my shoulders and his lips are on my cheek. My eyes widen. My body freezes. My heart stops.
Anthony looks at me startled, like, What the hell was that? Trump lets go and saunters right onto the Morning Joe set, seemingly very proud of himself.
I’m mortified.
She is mortified, and concerned that her bosses will never take her, or her work, seriously. It was clearly a power play, an attempt to remind her that even though she is a journalist and a professional, she is still a woman and as such, still vulnerable to him.
In the rush to enhance our political polarization by keeping score of which side has more sexual predators (and to raise funds on that polarization), we have lost sight of the far more important issue: that after all of these years and all of the battles, the war remains. And it’s constant.
A Republican friend (I do have them), talking about Weinstein, was bemused at the uproar on both sides. Had Americans forgotten all about the casting couch? Why were we so surprised that it was still in existence and still being used? And he is probably right. Doubtless, some strides were made when women began taking advantage of the protections of the Civil Rights Acts, but the casting couch may have only been stored in a dark closet until the dust settled and business could resume as normal.
Today we praise the courage of the women who have come forward to report Weinstein’s behavior, assuring them that they have done the right and brave thing. For some reason, we don’t want to talk about the women who didn’t. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know how many there are. But surely, there are plenty more women who have been assaulted by this man.
Those are the women who are living with the mortifying memory of the time that they failed to get away. Failed to say no loudly enough. Failed to see the trap until enmeshed in it. Caught, knowing that blowing the whistle or telling anyone would see their careers and lives destroyed. In Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker report on Weinstein, he relates the experience of a temporary employee of Weinstein’s company, Emily Nestor, who was invited to see the revenge Weinstein could extract.
“Textbook sexual harassment” was how Nestor described Weinstein’s behavior to me. “It’s a pretty clear case of sexual harassment when your superior, the C.E.O., asks one of their inferiors, a temp, to have sex with them, essentially in exchange for mentorship.” She recalled refusing his advances at least a dozen times. “ ‘No’ did not mean ‘no’ to him,” she said. “I was very aware of how inappropriate it was. But I felt trapped.”
Throughout the breakfast, she said, Weinstein interrupted their conversation to yell into his cell phone, enraged over a spat that Amy Adams, a star in the Weinstein movie “Big Eyes,” was having in the press. Afterward, Weinstein told Nestor to keep an eye on the news cycle, which he promised would be spun in his favor. Later in the day, there were indeed negative news items about his opponents, and Weinstein stopped by Nestor’s desk to be sure that she’d seen them.
By that point, Nestor recalled, “I was very afraid of him. And I knew how well connected he was. And how if I pissed him off then I could never have a career in that industry.” Still, she told the friend who referred her to the job about the incident, and he alerted the company’s office of human resources, which contacted her. (The friend did not respond to a request for comment.) Nestor had a conversation with company officials about the matter but didn’t pursue it further: the officials said that Weinstein would be informed of anything she told them, a practice not uncommon in smaller businesses. Several former Weinstein employees told me that the company’s human-resources department was utterly ineffective; one female executive described it as “a place where you went to when you didn’t want anything to get done. That was common knowledge across the board. Because everything funnelled back to Harvey.” She described the department’s typical response to allegations of misconduct as “This is his company. If you don’t like it, you can leave.” [Emphasis added]
How many of his accusers has Donald Trump threatened to sue or to defame? The women who do not come forward have genuine, valid reasons for not doing so. Shame probably leads the list, with fear for their future a close second. It is not easy to admit that you were played for a fool, or that you were too insecure or too frightened to resist. We should be careful when we praise those who did come forward that we don’t further batter the women who did not. They are not to blame. They are not responsible for the other women that Weinstein assaulted: Weinstein is. As is Trump. And Ailes, O’Reilly, and Cosby.
The fact that the women who did come forward faced such huge obstacles is on us as a society. It is on our media, which refuses to examine its own role is suppressing the news and enabling the behavior. It is on those of us who accept sexual harassment as the price of admission—as how business is done and so facilitate it. And not just in Hollywood or New York, or Washington, DC, but all across America. In small towns and large cities, sexual harassment remains a problem that holds women back, professionally and financially. It is still happening.
Under the Trump Administration, we have witnessed an explosion of xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. The GOP is very carefully making human rights a partisan issue and endangering the well-being of all Americans who are not straight white males (and even some of them are endangered—especially if they are our allies). The evil in human nature seems to have been unleashed and encouraged to flourish so that a complicit Congress can quietly pass legislation that will transfer even more wealth to the favored few. All so that the most corrupt president in our history can dismantle the achievements of hard-working, dedicated public servants simply because they bear the name of a black man he hates.
Amidst all of this, it is important to remember that Trump is not real crazy about women, either. Nor is his vice president. Scandals such as the Weinstein one serve their vision, not ours. As Sebastian Gorka tweeted:
How far are we from legislation that will be designed to “protect” women from sexual harassment by barring them from certain meetings and professions? It seems rather outlandish—until you remember that almost every piece of state legislation that limits abortion access has done so in the name of “protecting” women.