Fears fade in war on harassment
Weinstein case may be catalyst to shout: ENOUGH!
“Who’s next?” isn’t the only question around the table this Thanksgiving after the fall of Harvey Weinstein. There’s also “Why now?”
Why did the Weinstein case start a landslide of sexual harassment accusations and admissions, when allegations involving other famous men — Clarence Thomas, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump — did not?
A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that almost half of women had experienced “unwelcome sexual advances or verbal or physical harassment at work.” Last year, a federal re- port concluded that 75% of employees with such complaints didn’t voice them, especially when sex was involved. Instead, they avoided the harasser, denied or downplayed the gravity of the harassment or tried to “ignore, forget or endure’’ it.
They were afraid.
Why that fear has eased, bringing the problem out so suddenly, frequently and publicly, is a tougher question.
“I can’t explain how these things get started,” says Brian Balogh, a historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center on Public Affairs. “But this is a real moment.’’
It might help to think of it as a butterfly moment.
This year, Catharine A. MacKinnon published the book Butterfly Politics, a title that alludes to the idea that a small change can make a big difference; the flapping of butterfly wings in West Africa can begin a chain reaction that eventually causes a hurricane in South Florida.
The Weinstein moment has many butterflies, factors that combined, connected and collided to turn Harvey into a hurricane.
The traditional standoff — “she said/ he said” — has given way (with exceptions such as Roy Moore in Alabama) to “she said/he apologizes.”
Conduct that once would have had the societal impact of a construction worker’s wolf-whistle has brought down cultural leaders such as actor Kevin Spacey and TV host Charlie Rose, and embarrassed George H.W. Bush, whose family admitted he sometimes patted women’s bottoms, and the memory of the late Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel, accused of sliding his hand down to a woman’s butt during a photo op.
Taken together, the cases of Cosby, Ailes and O’Reilly built momentum for what was to come.
“What we’re seeing now had been building for a long time,” MacKinnon says. “Every woman who brought out what was done to her has prepared the way.”
Trump won the presidency despite accusations by a dozen women of sexual harassment.
But the Electoral College doesn’t always reflect the zeitgeist. Millions of women were mad about the candidate’s alleged conduct; when he won, they got even madder.
MacKinnon says the election “had something to do with many women coming to the end of our tether about how much sexual abuse of women is trivialized.”
Noreen Farrell, director of Equal Rights Advocates, a women’s rights group founded in 1974, calls it “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Millennial women (roughly those born since 1980) grew up after the women’s liberation movement, and many see sexual harassment very differently than their mothers did. They don’t regard a lecherous boss or colleague as someone to be tolerated.
“This is a generation whose members reveal themselves and talk about themselves,” Farrell says. She says her daughter recently asked her what a sexual predator is. The girl is 8.
Such conversations often take place on social media, which may not cause revolutions but seems to enable them.
Facebook, Twitter and other platforms were electrified by the first posts about the Weinstein case from people such as actress Alyssa Milano, who encouraged women to tweet about their own experiences.
Around the world, millions have. The #metoo hashtag showed victims they weren’t alone.
“It allowed women to validate each other’s stories,” Farrell says, “and thereby encouraged even more women to speak out.’’
Everyone knows there’s safety in numbers. The question, always, is how many? What’s the tipping point at which fear fades?
For many, Weinstein was the tipping point. That includes his own professed victims — more than 80 — and millions who say they were victimized by others. As Meryl Streep put it, “This is a door that will not be closed.”
The tipping point occasioned an avalanche of complaints that seems to be gaining momentum, feeding on itself because of what Farrell calls “the pace of the reveal.”
Our most famous image of the Thanksgiving table was painted by Norman Rockwell in one of his Four Freedoms illustrations during World War II. Rockwell depicted a scene in which a huge turkey is set on a dining room table lined with family members. He called his painting Freedom from Want.
This year, the scene may better be described by the title of another picture in the series: Freedom from Fear.