The ABCs of fighting sexual harassment
When Harvey Weinstein tried to explain away his decadeslong habit of sexual harassment and assault, he was mocked — deservedly — for claiming that he was a product of the zeitgeist.
“I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” he wrote. “That was the culture then.”
This was a transparent attempt to cast blame for his own pathologies. And yet, it’s such a convenient excuse that it makes you wonder how future generations of badly behaving men might rationalize their misdeeds. Maybe like this:
I came of age in the 1990s, when the internet normalized pornography, so I thought that’s how you treat women.
I came of age in the 2000s, when everyone was sending naked selfies.
I came of age in 2016, when a reality-show star talked about grabbing women’s genitals, and still got elected president.
Sexual harassment is eternal. As long as men and women have long-standing power imbalances, it will be with us. The question, at least for those of us hoping our daughters inherit a better world, is what we are planning to do about it.
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“We have to stop making it OK,” said Julia Horak, a Silicon Valley middle-school science teacher who chatted with me Wednesday about her hopes for changing the harassment culture. “Harvey Weinstein had a whole institution working for him. There was an infrastructure that somehow enabled him.”
Each semester, Horak spends a couple weeks teaching her seventhgraders a fact-based sex-ed curriculum, Teen Talk, developed by the Northern California educational group Health Connected.
The lessons conform
boy with a penchant for salty language, naturally adored the Dodgers.
“I go way back. I’m talking about Brooklyn, I’m talking about Ebbets Field.”
And, naturally, he couldn’t stand the now-San Francisco Giants.
“We kids who grew up in Brooklyn as Dodgers fans, we hated the New York Giants,” Lloyd said. “I don’t mean to tell you we disliked them. We haaaated them.”
The Giants’ early 20th century Hall of Fame manager, John McGraw, had a nickname he hated: Mugsy. Lloyd and his pre-teen boys feasted on that hatred and waited for him to leave the ballpark. As he made his way to his Buick, Lloyd said, the boys were there.
“We waited until he came out, and we’d say, ‘Aw, you Mugsy bastard!’ and run for the subway,” Lloyd said. “We had done our rite of passage. We were real Dodger fans.”
Lloyd glanced around at the crowd around him and grinned mischievously.
“I have to watch my language here,” he said. “Because I’m from Brooklyn, you see, and we were very naughty with our language. It was considered ordinary conversation.”
He would watch the game, he said, and try to behave himself. As far as baseball goes, he has strong opinions on how the game should be played and relishes saying so.
“I don’t guarantee my politeness,” he said. “I will contain myself, but if you hear four-letter words being spewed at the player who makes an unnecessary error, it’s me.”
Lloyd attended Wednesday’s game at Dodger Stadium with his longtime friend Tim O’Connor, who said the actor told him midgame that he was intrigued by one major difference between this World Series and the one 91 years ago: the noise. In Lloyd’s youth, the spectators were always silent as they watched the slow-moving game, until something extraordinary happened.
Wednesday’s wild, extrainnings game — which the Astros won 7-6 in the 11th — was certainly theater. As a quickly extinguished brush fire and an apartment fire burned near the stadium, the teams battled, game-tying home run to game-tying home run.
Fans screamed in joy, only to be screaming in horror minutes later. In the stands, a young boy in a Dodgers shirt melted down, screaming and crying, burying his face in his mother’s shirt as the Astros took the lead.
Lloyd and O’Connor left just a tad early, when it looked as if the Dodgers would win it. He is 102, after all.
But, watching the extra innings on TV, Lloyd was not happy. He declared himself the team’s good-luck charm and kicked himself for leaving.
He’ll be watching as the Dodgers head to Houston on Friday. And he’s got a strong opinion about it.
“The Dodgers,” he said, “should never lose.”