Entitled men behaving badly
Donald Trump’s impeachment, and the ongoing drama of Harvey Weinstein’s trial for rape and other sexual offences, are all about the thin line between civilised and criminal behaviour. We could yet be dismayed at both outcomes.
Prince Andrew refuses to help an investigation into his former, now dead, buddy Jeffrey Epstein. So there’s a glimpse of three entitled men currently who’ve felt themselves to be above social norms because of birth, power, money or all three at once.
Such people have always been able to bargain or buy their way out of embarrassment. I hope the tide is turning, and that their criminal behaviour will be seen for what it is.
Civilised behaviour, however, is unenforceable by the law. We don’t wave our knife around while talking at the table or chew with our mouths open because we observe table manners, a mark of civilised behaviour, which tends to consider others ahead of our own impulses. Boorish people are by definition uncivilised. They let it all hang out.
Weinstein is uncivilised because he’s accused by more than 80 women of treating their bodies like a buffet at Valentine’s. His sense of entitlement comes from being able to make or destroy women’s careers depending on whether or not they’re prepared to be humiliated.
That may have delighted him, but it’s well beyond ill-mannered. Whether it’s criminal is a matter for a jury to decide, and they may think it’s down to a very fine line.
Weinstein seems to have thought the women were OK with it, which suggests a lot about his vanity and delusion. Consent, or at a lesser level switched-off compliance, isn’t true consent when it stems from coercion and fear. Surely it’s not consensual when a large, determined and powerful man throws you on a bed and has his way with you. Do you have to have fought like a wild beast to make that rape? And what of your career afterwards?
On the most cynical level there’s a shabby quid pro quo going on, which I’m sure his lawyers will argue. You get parts in movies, he gets sex. On the level of civilised behaviour that’s crass and disgusting and wrong, but civilised behaviour is not what we go to the law for, and we’ll be disappointed if we expect it.
That’s why women don’t report these experiences. We are realists. We know what rape is because we experience it, but a jury could decide Weinstein did nothing wrong in presuming consent when it wasn’t given.
The women were unwise to trust him to behave in a civilised fashion, but his breaches of trust are inexcusable. Pandering to him with superficial friendliness afterwards was a survival tactic. They couldn’t let him know what they really thought of him.
There are other ways of being victimised in the workplace. Trump’s treatment of former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is an example of what can happen when a bunch of guys take a dislike to a professional woman with an unblemished record of 33 years in American public service. A visual recording of Trump – with two men he claims never to have met – shows him abusing his power to destroy her career.
One of the men tells him she refused to hang his picture in the Kiev embassy, which she denies. She also denies ‘‘telling everybody’’ Trump would be impeached.
I believe her. But without asking for her side of the story Trump is reported to have simply said, ‘‘Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Do it.’’
This is Mafiosi-speak. Yovanovitch is still alive, but he killed her career.
That was merely disgraceful, but it ought to be a crime.