Pervs in Power
For handsy creeps, there’s no biz like showbiz
AT last check, 47 women have now said they were sexually harassed and/or assaulted by the producer Harvey Weinstein. That number is certain to grow. There’s no way a psychopath with a 30-year history of meeting with young women alone in hotel rooms clad only in a bathrobe only had 1.566 such assignations per annum.
These astounding numbers do not suggest, as many now are, that Weinstein is a representative figure of American maleness in our time. It’s precisely the opposite: His is a story of demonic excess that is so horrifying because it is so exceptional.
In that sense, it tracks precisely with the Bill Cosby story, who stands accused by dozens of women of having drugged and then molested them. These are habitual and repetitive fetishistic behaviors that make Weinstein and Cosby more akin to serial killers than to the handsy creep down the hall or the sleaze who dangles a job prospect even as he’s asking for a date.
Cosby and Weinstein have something else in common, of course. They work in show business. And here, too, the habits and behaviors of powerful men in show business set them apart from other men in almost every other profession (save, perhaps, election-campaign politics, which has a libertine sexual culture similar to the entertainment industry’s).
Unlike most other industries, the entertainment industry runs on scarcity. The unemployment rate in the United States is 4.2 percent right now. But for people who want to go before the cameras or stand at center stage, it’s closer to 90 percent — always has been, always will be.
What’s more, the jobs performers do get are mostly shortterm and evanescent. This means the power imbalance between the person who doles out the work and the person who is looking for work is more extreme than in almost any other situation you can think of. Un- less you’re a huge star, you’re often a supplicant. You live a life of almost constant rejection.
Unlike other creative endeavors, you can’t even ply your trade for free. Writers get rejected but they can still write. You can’t put on a play without a theater. And until the advent of cheap highquality digital cameras and YouTube made the release of inexpensive self-made short movies possible, there were astoundingly few routes to just getting yourself on film.
Imagine, then, the impact of being told you have a meeting with a powerful producer or actor — or even having a social encounter with someone at a party. It’s like a person who has been traveling across a desert being told he has an appointment with the gatekeeper of an oasis — and if he does well, he will be allowed to go inside and drink some water.
This is the unique horror that attaches to what Weinstein did, what Cosby likely did, and what everybody who has ever taken advantage of the legendary “casting couch” has always done. They turn the thirst of those who have literally no way to drink against them.
Even a consensual act of submission in such situations is ambiguous. What does consent even mean under such psycho- logical circumstances?
Lord Acton said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely — and while someone like Weinstein didn’t actually have absolute power, for those who wanted to make their mark in their field, he probably appeared to.
Power corrupting is what leads to more conventional sexual harassment of the kind we’re now hearing about from those who are declaring “me too.” If it can tamp down and alter the unacceptable behavior of tawdry boy-men in other industries, it will be a step forward.
But the Weinstein case is something apart. And show business is something apart. It has always been something apart. The fact that it is so alluring is also what can make it so spectacularly unhealthy for those who dare to attempt to make it their profession.
“Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington,” sang Noel Coward in 1935. “The profession is overcrowded and the struggle’s pretty tough, and admitting the fact she’s burning to act isn’t quite enough.” Wise words, then and now.
That is, until Coward proceeds through four more verses to call Mrs. Worthington’s daughter fat and stupid.