Beasts like Weinstein are everywhere
Sexual harassment is all about power. One person has it, the other doesn’t. This makes it commonplace. Add a conspiracy of silence and the cake is baked.
Here’s one example, a relatively minor but telling incident I recalled as the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal unfolded. I was watching a scene in One Mississippi, the American Tig Notaro’s rather grim Amazon TV series, in which a boss masturbates behind his desk in front of a horrified young woman. (Did this happen to Notaro? She has suggested that comedian-adversary Louis C.K. come clean.)
Later, the woman tells Notaro about having been previously harassed in a “date-rapey” theatre company. Does this happen everywhere? Notaro wonders. “What about jewellers? “Don’t buy jewelry alone ever,” the woman says, halfjokingly. “Independent booksellers?” “They’re fine.” Ha ha. I suddenly remembered. The first time I was ever sexually groped was by an independent bookseller. The storeowner, a friend of a friend of my mother who was looking for a teenage girl to help do inventory, was probably in her 40s. But I was 16, so in my eyes she looked like all adults did, about 102.
The store was closed for the day as we bent between the shelves, counting books and noting numbers. She repeatedly touched and stroked my breasts, apologizing each time. It happened three or four times.
What a clumsy lady! I thought. Even by teenage standards I was remarkably clueless. I didn’t know what lesbians were. Sex Ed in those days was vivid instructional videos on menstruation (wash and repeat) and childbirth (don’t let this happen to you).
A year later, on a winter night on an empty Ontario Northland bus outside Porquis Junction, alone with a belt-busting bus driver droning on about his girlfriend giving oral sex to men for money — such easy money, he kept saying — I would completely miss the guy’s message.
I didn’t tell my mother about the bookseller or the bus driver because she wasn’t the kind of mother you told things to, and also I didn’t understand breasts and why anyone would want to touch them. They had appeared over the course of six months when I was 13. I found them inconvenient and embarrassing. As I say, I was very young.
I mention these moments because this is my dream: abusers will stop and victims will talk. But abusers won’t, and maybe victims shouldn’t, as I learned later in life to my cost.
The wealth and power of Donald Trump, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Clinton and endless other men planet-wide obscures a central point about abusers.
They are everywhere. Yes, it’s generally older white conservative misogynists, but it’s also young men, it’s politicians of every brand, it’s women, and gays, it’s janitors and jewellers, priests, bankers, journalists, senators both Canadian and American, hedge funders, CEOs and prime ministers.
The people who worked for Weinstein, who guided victims into rooms that contained him, were the molluscs attached to his greasy hull. They were like the birds that live between a crocodile’s jaws, travelling in high style as they clean its bloody teeth.
They go along to get along. Most of us do.
Victims are selected for their vulnerability. Our enemy is shock. When we are sexually harassed — the hand squeezing the thigh beneath the desk, Weinstein’s semen about to hit the restaurant’s potted plant, the reward being offered — we freeze rather than exiting and taking notes. Always start a file.
This is why sex education should begin early in school so that children understand bodily independence and how to protect it, however much this angers hyper-religious parents. It builds confidence and caution.
Women should learn to trust their gut instincts, as Gavin de Becker wrote in a very handy book called The Gift of Fear. If it walks like a brute . . .
It would help if media coverage didn’t allow Weinstein-types to follow old furrows in the dirt road, for instance, blaming “sex addiction.” It’s more of a “sexual abuse addiction” as the Guardian’s Marina Hyde pointed out in her Lost in Showbiz column. Grotesquely, Weinstein’s lawyer called him “an old dinosaur learning new ways,” as though he were trying to break the sex crime habit endemic to his generation.
At one point, Weinstein reportedly offered to go to Europe for rehab, where they have special towels or Alps or something, though he appears to be in Arizona at the moment. Journalists should call it what it is, “fleeing the country,” otherwise known as Doing a Polanski or Pulling an Assange. Women in whatever sex sanitarium he lands in should fear this wretched man. We all know people like that.
The men who signed an open letter supporting the Swiss-detained Roman Polanski in 2009 — they include Weinstein, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen — are at worst apologists for child rape, at best morally confused by their on-set milieu.
And no, it doesn’t help to have daughters. How could the Obamas, such loving parents, have sent their daughter Malia, 19, to intern for Weinstein, who had been notorious for decades? Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow came from influential families; it did not rescue them.
What will help? Firing abusers will help. So will not hiring them. So will jailing them. Not electing them president would have helped, but it’s too late now. The beast thrives.