There is a moment in Rosemary’s Baby when the drugged Rosemary, in a semi-conscious dream state, is being carried through the hidden door connecting two apartments and suddenly thinks “This is no dream, this is really happening!”
That’s how I felt when the story about Eric Schneiderman broke early this week, and even more when I read the New Yorker article. The timing of the story seemed too convenient, but this was Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow, two serious journalists. It was impossible to discount these women — their stories are harrowing. Donald Trump knew about this back during the Trump University case since someone contacted Cohen after speaking to a woman making claims of abuse. The case settled just after the election, and this now becomes suspect. Trump compared Schneiderman to Elliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner back in 2013, saying he’d be gone soon too. But obviously he held onto the knowledge, perhaps using it to get a settlement when he did. Information is only valuable to Trump, I think, if he can use it to make or save money. In Rosemary’s Baby, the husband not only sells his soul to the devil for success, he sells his wife.
What the hell is the matter with these men?
Changing Attitudes
I was once explaining the psychological concept of sublimation to a friend, who asked if there was such a thing as a sublimated sociopath. I said yes, politicians and business tycoons. To get very far as either, you need a certain amount of sociopathy, though full-blown sociopaths are not often the most successful in any field. But this seemed to explain a lot of the sexual promiscuity and objectified, shallow relationships with women shown by many of our most successful men. I would now add abuse to that — I’m of the generation that took a certain amount of abuse as just the way things are, and these thoughts are from decades ago. Sublimation is a high-level defense and not available to less developed personalities; Donald Trump, for example, uses much lower-level defense mechanisms, such as projection and denial. Also, he was never all that successful, which would show stronger pathology than someone like Eric Schneiderman — or Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or the Kennedy brothers, just to name a few.
What is happening now is not that the men are changing, but that we are changing enough that we can collectively say, no, you cannot continue to hold your power after such behavior.
All of which has set me thinking about how attitudes change.
Mona Eltahawy wrote an article on making the patriarchy uncomfortable, using Michelle Wolf’s speech at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner as a starting point, and focusing on the discomfort shown afterwards at Wolf’s free use of curse words, and her refusal to be nice. The word discomfort reminded me of the whine of many who voted for Trump about having to worry about hurting people’s feelings and be “politically correct.” Add to that the rash of recent incidents where a white person feels “uncomfortable” seeing a person of color, and calls the police. I think that’s the same discomfort so many felt when Barack Obama became president — they were “uncomfortable” with a black man in the White House, and even more so when he mentioned his race. No one was louder about this than Trump.
Sadly, a certain portion of this country (and other countries) dug in and only became more open in their hates and fears. They feel uncomfortable with anything that shows them a reality in which they are not the center.
Changing attitudes cannot happen without serious discomfort. In fact, those who study attitude change began with studying its most coercive forms, such as mind control. I first read about it for a social psychology course, in Robert Jay Lifton’s Coercive Persuasion, which analyses mind control techniques in Korean War prison camps. I know this brings up the nightmare situations of Room 101 in 1984 or the end of A Clockwork Orange, but it also can explain how change takes place in therapy. The first stage of attitude change is called unfreezing, in which a person become so disoriented as to lose all sense of her beliefs and identity. This is followed by a period of relearning through a strong relationship, peer group, and propaganda; and then refreezing the new attitudes.
From news about men planning their “comebacks,” it seems the loss of their jobs has done nothing to change their attitudes.
For change we must comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That our current government is doing the opposite is a reaction against change that is happening now, and that has happened over the past half century.
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International News
Attitudes are hard to change about violence against women in Peru.
www.nytimes.com/…
An Irish woman with terminal cancer is suing because PAP smears from Ireland were outsourced to the US resulting in many false negative results. 162 women later diagnosed with cancer were never told about the earlier false negative. 17 of those have died.
www.irishtimes.com/…
In Sudan, a 19-year-old woman who was forced into marriage at 16, and whose family conspired to return her to her husband after she had run away, was sentenced to death for killing him after he raped her.
www.theguardian.com/…
Operation Hope is running a squat for homeless women and families in Sao Paolo, Brazil where violence against women is not tolerated, and where there are opportunities for work, cultural events, and most of all, safety. The squat began as a response to a serious housing shortage which especially affected women.
www.bbc.com/…
There Oughta Be a Law
Kansas responded to learning that it was one of 33 states where it was legal for police to have consensual sex (if such a thing were possible) with women in custody, by passing a law making it illegal. Let’s hope the other 32 states follow their lead.
www.msn.com/…
What’s Left
Researchers Alison Hirst of Anglia Ruskin University and Christina Schwabenland of the University of Bedfordshire studied the process of a local government moving its 1,100 employees from a series of traditional offices to one big open office over the course of three years in the U.K. The new office had all the markings of a typical open plan office–glass everywhere, identical desks for everyone, and collaborative group spaces–and was designed with the intention of breaking down hierarchies and encouraging employees to engage with each other more. As the researchers wrote in their paper, which was published in published in Gender, Work and Organization, “it was designed to enchant rather than control overtly, and to encourage movement rather than fixity.”
They found that women felt watched and judged all the time, and many changed the way they dressed or wore more make-up as a result. The researchers found themselves doing the same thing.
www.fastcodesign.com/…
The “one book” method of muting the voices (and influencing the reputations) of women writers. To be fair, I think this is also done with some men writers. Thank goodness for Project Guttenberg.
lithub.com/…
I call Mother’s Day a Hallmark holiday, but it’s there and for many of us it’s not easy.
www.psychologytoday.com/…
Bill McKibben reviews Andrea Barnet’s new biography of four women who changed the way we see the world — Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters.
www.thenation.com/...
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As always, thanks go to the WoW team for their links and discussion. This week’s contributors include Tara, mettle fatigue, elenacarlena, Crimson Quillfeather, and Besame. And thanks to Meteor Blades for pointing me to the McKibben review.
Sunday, May 13, 2018 · 1:32:03 AM +00:00
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ramara
From a comment by allergywoman, an action item for residents of Illinois.
So, M-Day’s coming up and I dread it because I miss my mom so much. I will say, however, I would love to be able to honor her by having the ERA ratified. The Illinois House in its Human Services Committee is having a hearing on our bill, SJRCA4, on Wednesday at 8 am Central. If you could share this link to the witness slip so any sane voices you know in Illinois could be heard, I’d appreciate it. I remember growing up playing in office buildings while my parents phonebanked to get the ERA passed the first time. Let’s make it happen this time! Witness Slip for the ERA