Even sexual predators play the victim in Hollywood nowadays
Harvey Weinstein is the product of a dishonest culture in which no one takes personal responsibility for their own actions, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
IN medieval times, evil was blamed on literal devils with pointy horns and forked tails. In modern times, it’s blamed on metaphorical ones. Whether that’s progress or not is a matter of debate.
Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was typical in that respect, when, faced with multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and assault — as well as three allegations of rape, which he denies — he declared that he needs to “learn more about myself and conquer my demons”. Here’s a thought experiment. What if Harvey Weinstein is telling the truth?
Not just that he absolutely believes what he says, which is unknowable to anyone but him, but that he’s actually right, and that he is in the grip of forces that he neither understands nor can control? Demons, if you will.
Ridiculous, his detractors will say. Weinstein must take personal responsibility for his actions. He should have been able to resist whatever compulsions he felt. He’s a 65-year-old, successful, high-functioning man, not a child. His behaviour is not an illness from which he suffered, but a crime that he inflicted on others.
It’s not that hard to not force oneself on members of the opposite sex, after all. They’re right.
But then it’s just as much within another individual’s control not to mug an old lady for her pension money, or not to run down pedestrians in a van in the city centre in the name of Allah. Yet excuses are perpetually made for those individuals. Criminals are excused as victims of an unequal economic system. Terrorists are adduced to be merely responding to global political injustice; if we didn’t invade and bomb their countries, the argument goes, then they wouldn’t be “forced” to blow themselves up on Tube trains and knife passersby. Violence at political protests is tolerated because the participants are deemed to “care” so much about austerity or police brutality or racism or water charges.
Addicts, meanwhile, blame their genes, or their parents. Mummy didn’t love them enough. Daddy used to hit them. The drugs made me do it. It was Pre Menstrual Tension. It’s my culture; you wouldn’t understand. If they can all be classified as victims, then why not Harvey Weinstein too?
His attempt to paint himself as a casualty of this affair, either because he’s in the grip of certain atavistic drives, or because he hails from a time when such behaviour might have been indulged, and so never learned to control it, is what happens when personal responsibility is systematically eroded.
It may be easy to shoot down the notion that he’s a sex addict, but that’s mainly because, as clinical psychologist David Ley, author of The Myth Of Sex Addiction, patiently explains, there’s no such thing.
“I’m not sure when being a selfish, misogynistic jerk became a medical disorder,” is how Ley puts it bluntly, and those deriding Weinstein will cheer him to the rafters for saying it. But do they take no personal responsibility of their own for helping to create a culture in which everyone’s a victim and a person’s failings and neuroses are seen as the result of grand forces outside their control?
Being reluctant to make value judgements about other people’s behaviour, or to say what’s right and wrong, rather than morally relative, or to demand self discipline — all are part of the same malaise.
Culturally speaking, Harvey Weinstein’s response to being exposed as a serial abuser is not uncommon. He’s speaking the slogans which those who denounce him have normalised. “I realise I need to work on myself and to change,” is how he put it. “I am in intense therapy and counselling.” This is the formulaic language of a million celebrity rehab stories. “I gotta get help. You know what, we all make mistakes.” The cliches keep piling up. Weinstein’s spokesperson has even talked of him getting a “second chance” when all this is over.
The language of therapy has replaced that of morality, and, while the movie mogul’s excuses for subjecting what would seem to be scores of women over the years to his unwanted advances are manifestly specious and pathetic, the logical next step is surely to press on and acknowledge that the excuses which are habitually made for others who transgress the boundaries of acceptable conduct are equally worthless.
Society doesn’t make anyone commit crime. Global injustice is not a blank cheque to commit acts of violence.
Just as importantly, being offended by something does not automatically make one’s response to a perceived affront justifiable, though that point seems to be getting increasingly lost in the contemporary rush to take umbrage at so-called “micro aggressions”, and to lash out accordingly.
Those who make excuses for the misdemeanours of selected groups of victims seem to believe that they should get to decide who is the beneficiary of sympathy, but that’s not the way it works. Once personal responsibility becomes negotiable, it’s open to everyone to play the same game, as Weinstein shows.
It’s certainly not unthinkable that a man in Harvey Weinstein’s position, facing the odium of friends and family, and the loss of power in an industry that he once dominated, might take his own life. When he says that he is “profoundly devastated” and that “I have lost my wife and kids, whom I love more than anything else”, there’s no reason to doubt him. Police called to his daughter’s house following a family row last week said they were told that Weinstein was “suicidal and depressed”.
Should the unthinkable happen, would the high priests of the victim culture accept then that he was a victim too? Harsh as it sounds, they shouldn’t. Whatever action he took in response to exposure would also be his responsibility; but then that goes for plenty of others too who are ushered into the big tent of victimhood and told that, there, there, it’s not your fault, dear, you couldn’t help it, society’s to blame.
Ironically, in seeking to push on from the original story of Harvey Weinstein to a wider debate about how men in general behave, commentators might even be allowing men such as him, and there are plenty of them, to subsume their own behaviour into a collective narrative. Right now, the consensus is that there needs to be a wider discussion about “toxic masculinity”, the implication being that his behaviour might be appalling, but that it’s typical of how men in general, especially those in positions of power, behave around women.
There’s something to be said for that argument too. If Weinstein’s downfall has exposed anything, it’s that “rape culture” and “male entitlement” are not simply feminist catchphrases, but daily realities for women, even rich and powerful ones. There is such a thing as toxic masculinity, which, if unchecked, can warp healthy male traits into pathologies. The past days, as similar stories of exploitation and humiliation were shared by other women, have felt revolutionary in chipping away at that facade.
There needs to be many more of them. Now the lid is off, there should be no hurry to put it back on again. Many powerful men will be worried right now. Good. They should be. The tables need to turn.
We still ought to be careful, though, not to spread the net too wide by blaming all men, and indeed maleness itself, for creating the problem. That risks diluting the justified horror at Weinstein’s misconduct into a broader backlash against men’s shortcomings as a whole. One woman’s experience of everyday sexism is not the same as another’s ordeal at the hands of a predatory sexual abuser. Both acts may be on a spectrum, but treating them as if they are the same is deeply unhelpful.
It’s nobody’s intention that a discussion about the deficiencies of a certain brand of masculinity should minimise Weinstein’s culpability, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen anyway. Harvey Weinstein, sunk in self pity as he appears to be, is probably thinking just that: “I’m not a sexual predator. I’m just suffering from toxic masculinity. Now find me a therapist who can make me feel good about myself again.” Therapy is a business as well as a branch of knowledge, after all. The patient must come out of it thinking better of themselves or they might be less inclined to cough up for further sessions. Toxic masculinity could easily become just another excuse.
What’s astonishing is that the pronouncements of celebrities such as Harvey Weinstein — and the armies of enablers who covered up for him for decades, of which there can be little doubt, given the stories which have emerged — were ever deemed worthy of attention, rather than being scorned as patently hypocritical, self-serving twaddle. Whether it’s sounding off about President Trump, or global warming, or refugees, or feminism, why were these ludicrous people ever encouraged to wallow in the delusion that they’re shining moral arbiters of our world?
Weinstein was once one of that self-righteous cabal, declaring that: “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.” It sounds obscene now, but the trick is not to see it for what it was with the benefit of hindsight, but to recognise it as a monstrous conceit while it’s happening.
Incredibly, it’s still happening. Even as the storm around Weinstein grew last week, there was widespread praise for rapper Eminem when he used a hip hop awards ceremony to deliver a sting- ing attack on President Trump.
The late-night US chat shows loved it. Ellen DeGeneres sent the rapper heart emojis on Twitter. It generated over two million tweets in two hours. CNN published the lyrics in full. Have they learned nothing to make them pause for one second in a celebrity worship which only encourages those on the receiving end of this undeserved adulation to think of themselves as better than the rest of us?
Everyone seemed to have forgotten that Eminem’s music has often been laced with homophobic malice, or that he once rapped about murdering his ex-wife: “Quit crying, b***h, why do you always make me shout at you?... Now bleed, b***h, bleed. Bleed, b***h, bleed! Bleed!” These are our guides in troubled times? No wonder we’re in such a mess.
Eminem was rehabilitated, forgiven, because he too went away and exorcised those demons. He became a better person, so he got his second chance. That’s how a narcissistic culture of responsibility-dodging works. Is it any wonder if Harvey Weinstein thinks that he can follow the same path?
All Eminem’s admirers saw last week were some buzzwords about Trump, and they started salivating automatically, like Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of a dinner bell. Taking people at their word because they say the right things, strike the right poses, espouse the right causes, is what allowed Harvey Weinstein to hide in plain sight for so long. Avowedly progressive celebrities think they’ve forged a better world than the censorious, curtain-twitching one it replaced, but they’ve simply replaced one set of abusers with a different cast.
Harvey Weinstein’s downfall has temporarily knocked them off their pedestals, and it would be foolish to let those who are now turning on him, despite knowing for decades what he was doing behind locked hotel doors, to clamber back up on them and lord it over the peasants again. They’re only throwing the former master of their universe under a bus in order to stop it mowing them down.
They’re desperate to save themselves by denouncing him, but the reason he got away with it for so long is because plenty of bystanders sanctioned him to do so; and the only reason they could have for that is because he might have been the worst, but he was far from the only one wallowing in that sleaze.
Drain the swamp, was Trump’s cry at the election. The fact that his own comments about women showed that he was pretty much neck deep in an ethical swamp too don’t mean he was wrong about Washington. There’s another swamp on the west coast that could do with some draining too.
‘Many men will be very worried right now. Good. They should be’