The A-list actresses choosing deeds not just words
spent the Christmas festivities with the flu. This was not a severe cold. This was proper, nightsweats-and-feverdreams-and-will-i-ever-get-better flu. It was horrible.
When I finally emerged, wobbling and blinking into the light of New Year’s Day, it was to discover that, while I’d been viral, the internet was also going viral with a new hashtag. The phrase #TIMESUP was all over my social network feeds like a rash, the capital letters lending it a curious sort of urgency, meaning that I suddenly worried that Donald Trump might have pressed the big red nuclear button overnight.
It turned out this was actually the name of an initiative formed by 300 prominent actresses and Hollywood power players to fight systemic sexual harassment. However, what was new about it was not just the high-profile reputations involved (Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria and Natalie Portman, to name a few) but the stated aim to combat discrimination in blue-collar workplaces beyond the gilded pantheon of celebrity.
A legal fund, backed by $13million in donations, had been set up to help less privileged women – such as nurses, waitresses, farm and factory-workers – to protect themselves from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.
It’s an empowering and progressive move. How refreshing it is to have women visibly coming forward in solidarity with each other and raising their voices in defence of the more vulnerable, particularly in an industry famed for its competitive bitchiness (have you been watching Feud about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford?). Not only that, but they have the money readily available to back up their intentions. I have my concerns about the name because, well, it’s a terrible name – the sort of thing a lazy commissioner would call a Seventies BBC Two panel game, fronted by Lionel Blair – but this is a minor quibble.
I firmly believe the Harvey Weinstein scandal was a tipping point because, once the groundswell gathered, many of his accusers were successful women in their own right. They were people such as Gwyneth Paltrow or Angelina Jolie, women who had the insulation of celebrity and personal financial security. Their media presence meant they could not easily be silenced and gave the story further momentum. It meant they got attention and that we were more likely to listen to what they had to say. Their money ensured they could take the risk of a hit on future earnings or afford expensive legal teams should the need arise. In short, they had power. That’s the key. Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults were not just about undoing his bathrobe and getting his end away; they were about power. The misuse and abuse of it. The exploitation of an imbalance of it. The knowledge of what power could get him. That’s the case with most sexual aggressors: they get their kicks not from titillation but from exercising control over someone they perceive as weaker than them. That’s what they get off on.
But in the midst of the subsequent #metoo campaign, what about all those other women, older and younger, lower down the pecking order, who were not being listened to or had been unwilling to speak out in the past for fear of losing their job? The office worker sleazed over by her more senior colleague. The waitress who works for tips being harassed by a customer. The hotel chambermaid on a zero-hours contract being groped by her boss, and so on. Nowhere was this contrast between the powerful and the powerless more starkly in evidence than in the case of Trump’s accusers. Remember them? They were the 19 women who came forward to allege everything from unwanted kisses to aggressive grabbing and who seemed to sink without trace from the news headlines after Trump was elected to the White House.
It’s pretty astonishing to look back at those allegations in a post-weinstein climate, and realise that nothing has ever come of them. This, despite the fact that Trump was actually recorded on tape in 2005 boasting of his ability to grab women “by the pussy”.
In fact, if there was one incident that summed up the strange topsy-turviness of 2017, it was that Kevin Spacey, an actor who played a fictional US president in the Netflix series House of Cards, was axed from his job after denying allegations of sexual assault, while the real-life president, who has actually bragged about grabbing women, was left safely installed in the White House.
Why has nothing come of the Trump sexual assault claims? Well, there is, of course, the possibility that he didn’t do any of it. His own defence has been that all the women are lying publicity-seekers, although I would counter that the similarities between their stories suggests, just like Weinstein, a pattern of behaviour spanning the decades.
I suspect it’s more likely that Trump’s accusers are, by and large, junior reporters, former air hostesses or beauty pageant contestants. They do not have the wattage of star power. They are being confronted by the might of one of the world’s most powerful men (and a vastly independently wealthy one at that). Who, in their right mind, would want to take that on?
Until we address the inequity at the root of sexual assault, we are doomed to keep making the same mistakes. We are fated forever to be locked into a narrative of the powerful versus the powerless.
That’s why Time’s Up, by putting its money where its mouth is, offers the chance for real, lasting change.
As women, we can speak louder when we have one voice – and louder still when there’s cash in the bank.