Sorry, but a clumsy pass over dinner is NOT sexual harassment
THE shaming of Harvey Weinstein has, in many ways, held up a mirror to society. In particular, it has taught us a lot about modern-day morality and the politics of sex.
some of it we already knew. It’s no surprise, for example, to discover that Hollywood is full of sleaze-bags.
other aspects have been more shocking, in particular the extent to which Weinstein’s behaviour was an ‘open secret’ in the entertainment industry and the degree to which others — many of whom consider themselves feminists — ignored and even facilitated his atrocious behaviour.
The hypocrisy, too, has been alarming. I kept waiting for nicole Kidman to mention the allegations against Weinstein during her appearance on The Graham norton show last Friday — but strangely the conversation never got around to it. and yet she worked with Weinstein on numerous film projects, including Cold Mountain, The others, nine and Lion — for which she received an oscar nomination.
Did she really have no opinion to offer on the biggest story to hit Hollywood since Marilyn Monroe was found dead next to an empty bottle of sleeping pills at the age of 36?
Meanwhile Hillary Clinton, in the uK to publicise her new book, professed herself outraged at the notion that Weinstein’s generous financial donations to her Democratic campaign might seem at odds with her image as an advocate for women’s rights.
nor, for that matter, did she seem unduly preoccupied by the glaring parallels between Mr Weinstein’s behaviour and that of her predatory husband during his time as president of the united states of america.
But perhaps even worse than all this has been the shameless way in which so many have jumped on the bandwagon of Weinstein’s fall from grace, and used the suffering of the women he abused as an opportunity to indulge in two of the greatest vices of our social media age: virtue signalling and look-at-me-ism.
one conduit for this indulgence is the #MeToo hashtag — the latest incarnation of all those absurd ‘Je suis’- type hashtags that start trending after any terrorist atrocity or freak weather event.
The ‘ MeToo’ protest was initiated by actress alyssa Milano, who played one of the witchy sisters in long-running TV show Charmed. Last Friday she tweeted: ‘If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.’
SINCE then, predictably, it has gone viral, and been joined by celebrities from Lady Gaga to Lily allen. The female commentariat, no doubt hoping to boost their chances of making it onto the Woman’s Hour power List, has also expressed its approval of #MeToo.
But not one of those who’ve contributed to it appears to have stopped to consider the repercussions of their desire to land a part in this gruesome drama: how, by clambering onto its hashtag bandwagon with their own often utterly banal stories, they risk trivialising the suffering of victims of genuine abuse.
It’s as if a clumsy pass at a dinner party is now sex harassment.
This thought struck me when the BBC correspondent rajini Vaidyanathan was interviewed by sarah Montague on radio 4’s Today programme.
Her #MeToo trauma consisted of finding herself left alone in a restaurant with a colleague and him telling her that he felt very attracted to her. of course the experience was unpleasant for her, but if that’s sexual harassment then I wonder what on Earth she would have made of the incident that occurred 20or-so years ago in the female changing area of stoke newington swimming pool, when a naked woman entered my cubicle with amorous intent (#itsnotalwaystheman’sfault).
The truth is that most of us — male and female — will at some point have been the subject of unwanted sexual attention. This may have made us feel embarrassed, uncomfortable — or, as in my case, rather surprised.
But to compare incidents such as this with the awful things some of Weinstein’s victims had to endure is to belittle the very serious nature of the crime of sex abuse and the suffering of its victims.
Lumping together every woman’s experience of goatish men via some stupid hashtag like MeToo is an act of intolerable insensitivity. It is also, in many ways, as damaging as maintaining a conspiracy of silence.