Revelations are no big surprise – Hollywood is just like anywhere else

WOMEN have started sharing their Harvey Weinstein-style encounters on Twitter. For what it’s worth, here’s mine. When I was 18 I worked in a London hotel for a summer, as a chambermaid. Every day we were assigned to our stations, with our work trolleys and vacuum cleaners.

One day my vacuum cleaner stopped working. I called the hotel’s sole maintenance guy. He was a man in his 50s – and thus, to me, as old as the hills. He arrived up to the room, closed the door and outlined his terms. He would fix it, he said, if I agreed to call him “sugar” henceforth. Each day, when I arrived in the canteen, I was to dip my finger in his cup of tea (to sweeten it, he said), in full view of the staff, and hand it to him.

I naturally refused his deal, on the grounds it was crazy and creepy. But to my exasperation, he didn’t fix the vacuum cleaner. Instead, each lunchtime he hovered by the tea cups grinning at me. The standoff went on for a week. Then I told the hotel manager. The man was ultimately fired, as it turned out this was the latest in a string of similar offences.

So it was over. The only real damage was to the carpets on the floor of the hotel, which remained uncleaned for a week. In retrospect I was lucky I was believed. I was well aware the fact I was a college-educated caucasian certainly helped that happen. It was my first instance of workplace harassment, but sadly not the last. Harassment does not require a swanky setting, or a movie mogul, or a bathrobe, or a starlet. It thrives in multiple, mundane, unglamorous settings. It thrives wherever there is a power imbalance, a person willing to exploit it, and another too timid to report it. The fabled casting couch of the film industry may be a high-profile instance of these abuses – and there are few areas of endeavour where power is quite so blatantly concentrated in the hands of so few, almost invariably male, individuals – but it’s definitely not the only one.

All over the world, in offices, in hotels, in bars, in restaurants there are men (and I concede, some women) who are sufficiently unscrupulous to deploy whatever power they hold to undermine, intimidate and harm others, and there are women (and also some men) who feel sufficiently disempowered to have to put up with it and shut up.

It all places some context on the responses we’ve seen this week to the Weinstein saga. We need to ask: how shocked are we? Are there really so many of us who were convinced that Hollywood operated in an entirely different manner to the rest of the world?

I am very sorry Weinstein appears to have behaved so unconscionably to the women he encountered. I have nothing but empathy for their plight as they tried to work up the courage to speak against him. It must have taken some guts to go public.

But Hollywood’s acting elite can pretend to be shocked all it likes – they are actors after all, so they are good at pretending.

The fact is Weinstein’s (alleged) antics are anything but surprising. Let’s hope the next generation of young women experiences a different reality.