Weinstein’s claim of an age of innocence about sexual abuse is pure fiction
There is so much to condemn about Harvey Weinstein, but let’s focus on the opening paragraph of the statement he released in response to the New York Times’ revelation of his serial sexual harassment. “I came of age in the 60s and 70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” he wrote. “That was the culture, then.”
Most reaction to those words has focused, rightly, on the absurd implication that there was ever a time when it was acceptable for a man to abuse women the way an ever-expanding group of individuals – and a covert audio recording – say Weinstein abused them.
But let’s concede that there was indeed a time when Hollywood studio bosses regarded young female actors as chattel, human props that they owned and could therefore prod, grab and humiliate at whim. Even if you give way on that point, it does not help Weinstein. For this earlier age that he invokes in his defence, an era supposedly innocent of the demand that men refrain from treating women as loofahs – an aid to take into the shower – does not include the period when he was committing his alleged crimes.
The New Yorker has interviewed 13 women who say “that, between the 1990s and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them.” For that opening statement of his to make sense, Weinstein needs us to believe that “all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different” then. But they were not.
On the contrary, this period came immediately after two events that between them served as a long, mass-audience lesson in sexual mores – and which, even at the time, were seen to have triggered “a seismic shift in social values” that helped “define the meaning” of sexual harassment.
The best known of those was the 1991 battle over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the supreme court, and the testimony of Anita Hill against him. A former colleague, she said that after she had rebuffed Thomas’s repeated requests that they go on a date, he repeatedly talked about sex, including hardcore porn and his own sexual prowess, at work. Thomas denied her claim and made it to the supreme court but it was through those senate hearings that the notion that a “hostile working environment” constituted a form of sexual harassment entered the language and the American cultural bloodstream.
But the episode with even greater relevance for Weinstein is the Bob Packwood affair. Though a Republican senator, Packwood was a social liberal with an especially progressive record on women’s issues – just like Weinstein. In November 1992, the Washington Post published the evidence of 10 women, many of them former aides, who all said that the supposedly feminist senator from Oregon had abused and assaulted them.
Their stories made huge news. The country was both appalled and riveted by the details: how Packwood had ambushed women, grabbing them with no warning, forcing his tongue down their throats, pulling back their hair, tearing at their underclothes. The Packwood affair dragged on for three years, until he finally resigned from the senate under threat of expulsion in October 1995.
I lived in the US in those years and I remember the impact of both episodes well. Packwood, like Thomas, became the perennial butt of the late night TV comedians, as did the out-of-touch boys club of senators that had indulged them. These events permeated the popular culture, as did the whole question of sexual harassment. New lines were drawn. Publicly, at least, it became clear and known to everyone what counted as acceptable behaviour in work situations – and what did not.
Which is why it is so laughable for Weinstein to claim that today’s standards did not apply in the period when he was telling women to rub him or watch him. The Thomas and Packwood affairs were a quarter of a century ago. He was around when they happened. When America went through its collective lesson in sexual harassment, Weinstein was in class: he just wasn’t listening.
So Weinstein cannot call on the defence some in Britain deployed to explain the inaction over Jimmy Savile and other 1970s entertainers: that the culture was different back then. Weinstein can claim no naivete or innocence. When it comes to the abuse of women by powerful men, America lost its innocence long ago. Which only makes him more guilty.