The rot at the core
It’s not so much about sex as it is about work, Rebecca Traister points out.
[I]n 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.
It’s like dogs pissing on the shrubbery. “This is ours.” You can leave the house if you insist, but then we’re gonna piss on you. These recent accounts have been about the workplace.
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.
In workplaces like that, a sexual overture is never just a sexual overture. It can’t be.
I would say that it isn’t just the powerful men; the men who have sexually harassed me have not always been that powerful, they have been men, and tended to be believed, or else the idea was “what’s eating you, girl? It’s very flattering, no?” No.
You don’t have to work with or for powerful men, or even men who have power over you…the power structure is set up so that the woman who is your supervisor might be unable (or unwilling) to act on complaints, even about those who are equivalent in status to the woman doing the complaining, and subordinate to the woman in the supervisory position. It’s such a part of our culture, it’s hard for many people to even see it as a problem, and those that do are often scared to address it.
Meanwhile, we get told that is the price for working with me. Because men can’t control themselves around women, right? That’s the same thinking that puts women in burkas in the Islamist world, though of course I am not suggesting that our issues are the same as being put in a burka. They just spring from the same mindset – boys will be boys, and it is up to girls to police themselves so the boys don’t get tempted.
For me, I’m sick to death of it – and I’m sick of being told (even by liberal male friends) that it’s only the extremists who see it as a problem when a man puts his hand on the knee of a female colleague.
1) If it wasn’t a problem, women would be putting hands on men’s knees too.
2) It’s not just powerful men, as iknklast says. It’s also not some kind of white men thing. I really get fed up with so many people thinking the horrific humiliations of misogyny need some kind of reflected legitimacy from anti-racism.
Have you derps ever been to India? China? Africa? the whole goddamn Middle East? Latin America?
Give me a break.
#2 quixote,
YES. I hate this so much. I got into a huge argument on Facebook about this just yesterday. There’s this giant liberal blind spot where any discussion of patriarchy must include a conversation about white supremacy, but any discussion of white supremacy is considered legitimate on its own. (Which it is, don’t get me wrong.)
iknklast #1
Exactly. To borrow another useful distinction from Margaret Heffernan it’s not just about authority, but also conformity. Unlike obedience/submissiveness to authority conformity feels voluntary (or “voluntary”) and doesn’t presuppose any imbalance in formal rank or status (hence the expression “peer pressure”), only the normal fear of conflict, embarrassment, or social isolation. And even female bosses are not immune to the influence of their male peers as well as patriarchal society at large.
On a deeper level I guess conformity can be understood as a form of obedience/submissiveness to the authority of the perceived majority. I say “perceived” because the people “setting the standard” don’t even have to be in a real majority. One of the concepts I remember from my old bachelor’s degree in media studies is the Spiral of Silence in which people who, whether or not it’s true, feel like they’re in a minority tend to self-censor, thus making their own views seem even more marginalized and on the fringe, when they may not actually be fringe at all. All it takes [1] is for a few loud and assertive people (and as we all know the male sex has more than its fair share of those) to make their opinions known at an early stage without being contradicted, and everyone else tends to just accept their views as representative of the group as a whole.
There’s also a lot of slippery slope-type dynamics going on: On the spectrum from sexist jokes to all-out sexual assault we never cross an obvious “boundary” where things abruptly and instantaneously change from “definitely OK” to “definitely not OK”. If you have already accepted steps a,b,c as normal and acceptable it’s very difficult to make a consistent argument that steps d,e,f are “crossing the line”. By the same logic once you have accepted steps d,e,f as normal and acceptable it’s very difficult to make a consistent argument that steps g,h,i etc… etc… This is why there is no “safe level” of sexism. The “jokes”, the “banter”, and the “locker room talk” are all part of the enabling apparatus allowing the Trumps and Weinsteins of the world to go all the way to x,y,z.
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1. Actually it doesn’t even take that much. All it takes is the (perfectly reasonable) assumption that the group in question isn’t radically different from the rest of society.
quixote #2 Cressida #3
That’s an astute observation indeed. It’s as if even many self-identified “progressives” don’t see the discrimination of women as enough of a problem in itself to worth addressing in its own right.
Now, I don’t accept that it’s ever racist to criticize ideas and behaviors as long as the criticism doesn’t have anything to do with where the people engaged in said ideas and behaviors are from, what they look like or who their ancestors were [1]. If you wouldn’t tolerate certain behaviors and attitudes toward women from a white man it’s not racists to not tolerate the same behaviors and attitudes from a non-white man. I therefore don’t accept that there is ever a real conflict between feminism and anti-racism as long as we are careful to define our terms.
But even if there were such a conflict, even if a case could be found where the equality of women and the equality of non-white people were unambiguously in direct conflict, why should the latter trump the former? Why is it automatically the case that the feminists are racists? Why isn’t it the case that the anti-racists are sexists?
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1. It’s obviously racism to single out certain ideas for special criticism because they are associated with certain ethnicities, but the racism is still aimed at people, not the ideas and behaviors themselves.
Well, in this culture Whiteness and power are conflated. So, in the current flood, white perps are natural exemplars of several kinds of social horror.
But the worst behavior is still not that far from ‘normal.’ It is bone-chilling to reflect that the majority of white women voted for Trump…and Moore.
And I haven’t seen any follow-up on the photographically documented behavior of Jesse Jackson reported in Jezebel.
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