Sunlight soap
To the surprise of no one, Harvey Weinstein wasn’t the only hotshot guy preying on women.
Following The New York Times and The New Yorker’s revelations about the film executive and alleged serial sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein, Lockhart Steele of Vox Media, the screenwriter James Toback, the critic Leon Wieseltier, and, on Thursday, Mark Halperin of MSNBC have found themselves outed and, in some cases, fired for alleged past behavior. Preceding Weinstein were reports about alleged harassment at Tinder and Uber, and the alleged predatory behavior of Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, and Bill Cosby, among others. Many more disclosures are likely to come, as the politics, technology, news, and entertainment industries come to terms with the pervasive problems of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in their ranks.
It’s rather sad they waited until now to come to terms with the pervasive problems of sex discrimination and sexual harassment in their ranks. It’s not as if no one knew about them.
Up to 85 percent of women say that they have been sexually harassed at work, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The problem appears to be particularly acute in service industries, in which employees rely on tips and interface frequently with customers; in low-wage industries, in which employees have little power to begin with; and in industries dominated by men, like construction.
Which leaves…um…does it leave anything?
Sexual abuse is a consistent and pervasive feature of the modern workforce, but despite how consistent and pervasive harassment is, there is scant data and public information about it. Women tend to keep the knowledge of such incidents to themselves, for one. They more often than not do not report them, due to a fear of not being believed, a sexist culture in the workplace, a belief that nothing would happen or change, and reasonable concerns about retaliation.
Yeah that pretty much covers it. People who are bullied are afraid of more and worse bullying.
Within workplaces, too, a lack of recognition of the problem is common as well—helping foster a lack of accountability and a lack of repercussions for harassers. Take the case of Wieseltier, for instance. Numerous women have said that he had touched them, propositioned them, or made inappropriate sexual comments to them while he worked at The New Republic. (Wieseltier has apologized for “offenses” that made his former colleagues “feel demeaned and disrespected,” and Emerson Collective, which owns a majority share in The Atlantic, has cancelled his forthcoming publication.) In a piece by Jason Cherkis at HuffPost, former New Republic editors described a workplace culture in which male leaders declined to act on what was happening.
Wieseltier is important and they’re not.
The flood of public revelations about bad behavior in tech, media, and politics—from Susan J. Fowler’s whistle-blowing on the workplace culture at Uber to the stories about Weinstein and others to the Cosby allegations—has shown that sunshine can sometimes act as a disinfectant. Women coming forward to share their stories begets other women coming forward to share their stories begets consequences, in some cases and in some industries at least.
Maybe, and yet…here we still are, after all this time. I’m not brimming with optimism.
Academia, scientific research, medicine.
I’ll ask around here in the classical music world, but I’m not hopeful.
Sexual access to women has been the main perk of fame and riches since forever, regardless of the prevailing mores and norms of the day; Scarface said it best: “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.” It’s pretty incontrovertible that many men seek fame and/or riches primarily for sexual access to women, whether or not these women actually want to have sex with them. It’s been the rich assholes’ American Dream since well before America even existed.
Changing the rules of this system, taking away this incentive, defeats the whole purpose of the enterprise of hot-shot living for far too many men. “You mean I’ve amassed all of this wealth and influence, made all of this art or built this business, for NOTHING?”
There are a lot of men who fear that feeling, men who’ve devoted years to climbing the ladder of success in order to grab the prize by the pussy. There are many more men who aspire to start climbing the ladder, and yet *more* men who worry that, without enough men climbing the ladder, the whole world economy will collapse, which would be a Bad Thing.
We need to break this system, to build a model of success that does not guarantee pliant consent-orthogonal sexual access to less-powerful women (and, less often, men, and sometimes, most distressingly, children). But people cannot imagine a world where success, or at least where celebrity, does not automatically entail sexual gratification, and so they will fight against building such a world. I don’t know how to do it, but I know it must be done.
As an addendum, one could argue that my sketched-out idea above partly explains why women in the workplace took such a long time; industrial society couldn’t imagine women having any real sexual agency, and hence no sexual desire, and hence no need to ‘succeed’ in order to secure sexual access, and hence no need to work (or write or direct or paint or play music or do anything else to accrue enough power to secure limitless sexual access), and hence no need to deprive a man of such an opportunity.
(Except of course that women have always worked, just like women have always fought, and their achievements have often either been forgotten or simply stolen by men.)
Librarians, which are dominated by women. Except…there was a revelation a year or so ago that women librarians are being sexually harassed at ALA conferences and other places. So, being in an industry dominated by women doesn’t help. If there is even one man there, they will find a way to harass a critical mass of women.
Especially since the power structure, even in female dominated fields, is usually dominated by the males. Librarians are a huge majority women, but a lot of the top level directors, etc, are men. Physical therapy is dominated by women, but the top positions, the supervisors, are predominantly men.
I can think of no industry without harassment. If there’s an evil silver lining it’s my experience that sexual male predators are also assholes to men (at least men like myself). Unfortunately i’ve seen harassment of women by women (not sexual) and that can be vindictive with lifelong scars.
Iknklast @6: When I was in library school a professor (female) presented a paper on this very topic and there was a lot of discussion in the professional literature about whether librarianship was a feminist or “feminized” profession. The consensus was that it should be described as “female intensive” rather than “female dominated.”
Julia, that probably is a better description. My husband was a librarian for many years (retired now) and while most of the professional librarians he worked with were women, the library directors were almost always men. As I said, I saw the same pattern in physical therapy when I was working for a recruiter that specialized in PT jobs.
There is one place where men probably don’t harass women – beauty parlors. But there, as Kevin Henderson suggested, you might get a lot of smacking down of “improper” women by the local morality brigade.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1701788526506268/?type=3&theater