Women are not always powerless

Did you watch the Oscars? I didn’t but let me guess: was it a carnival of sanctimony in honour of #Metoo? Perhaps the red carpet was graced by a burning effigy of Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman.

Over the weekend Brafman took a pin to this bubble of selfrighteousness by speaking out about the casting couch. ‘‘If a woman decides that she needs to have sex with a Hollywood producer in order to advance her career ... that’s not rape. You made a conscious decision that you’re willing to do something that is personally offensive in order to advance your career.’’

Brafman’s remarks will have had the Hollywood set quivering with indignation. Certainly, the comments sit uncomfortably with what we have heard of Weinstein: his habit of blocking doorways, grabbing, snarling and generally acting like a large poisonous human toad. I do hope his cosy room at an Arizona sex addiction clinic is soon swapped for something a little more austere.

Yet Brafman raises an uncomfortable truth that has been lost in the Metoo noise. In relations between men and women, the latter can also use their assets to exploit the other party.

Young, attractive women wield immense power over men, which they sometimes use to their own advantage. The women’s rights campaigns currently being waged are in denial of this. They want to reduce much of what is complicated about sexual interaction to a simple predatorvictim picture – and it isn’t the truth.

Whenever one writes on this subject there must come the disclaimer that what follows does not refer to actual coercion, rape or sexual assault. No woman is ever ‘‘asking for it’’; refusing sex immediately wipes out all earlier flirtation; physical force is always entirely inexcusable.

Beneath this, though, is a whole swathe of grey-area behaviour now routinely cast as exploitation: drinks, flirts, consensual activity between senior men and less senior women that are seen as abuses of power. There is something oddly patronising in this. It ignores the fact that a lot of the time women are not only complicit in a useful flirtation but at the controls.

I have not, thank goodness, had cause to say ‘‘Metoo’’ to stories of abuse – but if there were women who came out admitting that their youth or looks had at some point been advantageous, it would get a ‘‘Metoo’’ from this corner. That doesn’t mean sleeping my way to the top (I wouldn’t even sleep my way to the middle); rather that during those years of sharpelbowed advancement in my twenties, it was clear that simply being a young woman could open doors closed to men.

For years I was a researcher in Parliament. There were downsides to being a young woman in Westminster; mainly being patronised by older men. The flipside to this irritating old codgery was that as a twentysomething woman I tended to stand out against my male counterparts. As a woman you may not be unaware of this advantage. You will try to be nicely turned out and pleasant to gain an entree into various people’s orbits – from which position you can then prove you have a brain too.

This is the truth of a lot of malefemale interaction, but alas it doesn’t fit the predator-victim line pushed by the Metoo campaign.

Of course, the charge levelled at politics, showbusiness and other industries is that men, more than women, tend to be the granters of opportunities, status, money and thus hold the power that obliges women to bat their eyelashes. I agree this needs to change, and slowly but surely it is, as more women reach senior positions.

The key thing is female choice, as Brafman stated. When a woman is choosing to flirt and fluff a man’s ego, she is no helpless victim of the patriarchy.

So let us stop this patronising insistence that men are always the predators and women always the victims – and admit that ‘‘exploitation’’ can cut both ways.

❚ The Times