Owning up
Women coming forward is result of more than 40 years of fighting sexual harassment
Comedian and actor Louis C.K. admits that allegations of sexual misconduct are true and he acted ’irresponsibly,’
Forty years ago this month, Ms. magazine put sexual harassment on its cover for the first time. Understanding the sensitivity of the topic, the editors used puppets for the cover image — a male hand reaching into a woman’s blouse — rather than a photograph. It was banned from some supermarkets nonetheless.
In1977, the term sexual harassment had not been defined in the law and had barely entered the public lexicon. And yet, to read that Ms. article today, amid a profound shift in discourse, is to feel haunted by its familiarity.
It describes an executive assistant who quit after her boss asked for oral sex; a student who dropped out after being assaulted by her adviser; an African-American medical administrator whose white supervisor asked if the women in her neighbourhood were prostitutes — and, subsequently, if she would have group sex with him and several colleagues.
Citing a survey in which 88 per cent of women said they were harassed at work, the author said the problem permeated almost every profession, but was particularly pernicious “in the supposedly glamorous profession of acting,” in which Hollywood’s casting couch remained a “strong convention.”
“What we have so far seen,” the article stated, “is only the tip of a very large and very destructive iceberg.”
Four decades later, as allegations against Harvey Weinstein and others continue to metastasize, it feels as if we have crashed into the iceberg. Disaster metaphors — tsunami, hurricane, avalanche, landslide — seem to be in endless rotation to describe the moment, but the point is that a great many powerful men have seen their careers disintegrate. A great many women — and some men, too — have also spoken out more openly and more forcefully than ever before about what happens behind closed doors or even in the open spaces of studios, newsrooms and other workplaces. Companies have rushed to reassert zerotolerance policies and whipped together training programs.
We have seen this movie before. Sexual harassment complaints to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission increased 73 per cent in the year after Anita Hill’s televised testimony about Clarence Thomas’ behaviour in 1991. Still, Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, while Hill went quietly back to being a law professor in Oklahoma. In the ensuing years, the issue cycled between headlines and whispers in a seemingly endless loop.
But this sequel seems to have a surprise ending, or at least a plot twist: The public outrage is deeper and more sustained, and the dominoes continue to fall.
Maybe it’s that the accusers this time were famous, media-savvy and mostly white actors with more star power than the accused (unlike, say, Paula Jones versus Bill Clinton). Maybe it’s reflective of a period in U.S. history, in which working women of a new generation — those who had grown up with working mothers — decided that enough was enough.
Certainly, the endlessly expanding power of social media plays a role: The #metoo hashtag has been used in millions of posts over the past few weeks; been translated into Italian (#QuellaVoltaChe, or “that time when”) and French (#BalanceTonPorc, or “out your pig”); and inspired a congressional spinoff.
Several experts likened it to a dam breaking, the cumulative effect of harassment claims over decades and especially the last few years. Some see it as the other shoe dropping after Donald Trump’s taped boasting about offensive behaviour did not block his path to the presidency: He may have gotten away with it, but women were no longer going to let that boss, that mentor, that colleague get away with it, too.
“There is no doubt that having an accused sexual predator in the White House is hanging over this,” said Jaclyn Friedman, author of Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All, scheduled for publication this month.
“In the women’s movement of the 1970s we had this phrase ‘the click moment,’ ” Barbara Berg, a historian and author of the 2009 book Sexism in America: Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future, said.
“This is the click moment. It’s like, ‘Enough.’ And then there’s a snowball effect: Once you see women speaking truth to power and not being told, ‘This is just what you have to put up with,’ then it encourages other women to stand up.”
With Weinstein, the accusers were on the record, poised, and more of them seem to emerge each day, so no individual had to bear the burden alone, as Hill had.
But behind these famous faces was an army of ordinary voices, too, using social media to collectively tell their stories — but also for action.
If this is a moment of historical social change, it is worth looking at what led us here. It was two years after that Ms. magazine cover, in 1979, that Catharine A. MacKinnon published a groundbreaking legal argument: that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was based on a legal theory she had developed while in law school.
That legal argument was tested with Mechelle Vinson, one of a number of African-American women who were involved in early sexual harassment lawsuits — this one a bank teller who said she was repeatedly raped by her married boss. In 1986, her case, with MacKinnon’s help, was part of a Supreme Court ruling that enshrined the harassment-as-discrimination theory into law.
Then came Hill, whose televised testimony about Thomas, her former boss — at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of all places — was, Berg said, in effect “home-schooling a generation of Americans in what sexual harassment was.” Almost immediately, the phone hotline for 9to5, a support group for working women, began ringing off the hook.
“People were almost bewildered,” the group’s director told the New York Times in 1992. “You mean this is sexual harassment? You mean I could do something about this?”
After Hill came Jones, whose lawsuit against Clinton was dismissed. Others won in court but struggled in the aftermath: Paula Coughlin, a Navy lieutenant who was sexually assaulted by drunken officers, was sidelined and ultimately quit her job. Rena Weeks, a law secretary who was harassed by a partner, never worked again.
In her 2017 book, Butterfly Politics, MacKinnon adapts a concept from chaos theory in which the tiny motion of a butterfly’s wings can trigger a tornado half a world away. Under the right conditions, she posits, small actions can produce major social transformations.
“Ashley Judd is the butterfly of this moment,” MacKinnon said of the actor who began the recent groundswell of accusations against Weinstein. “She is the one who broke it open, who has made this possible for so many other women.”