Every woman has had a Weinstein moment
Sexual harassment is alive and kicking but those who try to expose it put their careers at risk, writes Jenni Russell.
Enough already. I don’t want to read any more anguished accounts of Harvey Weinstein sexually attacking and bullying dozens of women over decades, ensuring their petrified silence with the implicit or explicit threat that if they tried to speak out he would destroy their credibility and careers.
That’s not because I don’t think this matters: it is hugely important. It’s because the focus on Weinstein’s story, Weinstein’s monstrosity and who is or isn’t denouncing Weinstein is a convenient diversion from the infuriating truth that sexual harassment isn’t a Hollywood problem, or a historic problem, or a distant problem; it happens to women all the time and all the same factors that allowed Weinstein to act with impunity are operating here and now.
It’s not enough to put Weinstein in the stocks and savour his disgrace. We need to think about identifying and halting all the mini-Weinsteins who are getting away with bullying women now.
The question that keeps being asked about Weinstein’s targets is why they didn’t denounce him at the time. They are accused of complicity or cowardice or of letting other women down, as if it was their responsibility to police a man’s aggression, or as if this were some kind of consumer situation where they could report Weinstein as easily as if he were a malfunctioning car.
Women who are harassed are caught in multiple traps that make it difficult for them to be believed, and their aggressors know it. The first is the fact of proving what happened in private.
The second is that a woman who goes public is exposed to instant humiliation. Women have had a long struggle to get society to take them seriously as people, not sexual objects. A woman who has to describe a situation in which she has been tricked into thinking that she is being treated as a professional or a friend, only to find herself confronted by a naked man, or bullying demands for sex, is pitched back into a framework in other people’s eyes that she has spent a long time trying to escape.
It’s not enough to put Weinstein in the stocks and savour his disgrace. We need to think about identifying and halting all the mini Weinsteins who are getting away with bullying women now.
A man’s sexual aggression may add to his public stature; a woman’s sexual humiliation has never, historically, added to hers. Think of poor Monica Lewinsky, defined for decades by an encounter with Bill Clinton that caused no essential damage to his reputation at all.
A woman who does have the courage to talk about what’s happened to her risks being publicly ridiculed for it. Her sexuality and attractiveness are frequently used to erode her credibility, wherever she is thought to stand on the scale. If she’s attractive she may be accused, as the fashion designer Donna Karan accused women this week, of ‘‘asking for it’’. If she’s less so she can be dismissed with the Donald Trump defence, that he wouldn’t have wanted a woman like that.
Outrageously, women are caught either way, either so appealing that they are complicit in a man’s behaviour, or so unattractive that they must be attention-seeking liars. They become the target.
The third factor is that men harass women only when they calculate that they are powerful enough to get away with it. Their targets will, by definition, be weaker than they are; younger, less well-established and less influential. Which means that women who think of complaining are immensely disadvantaged. They are unlikely to be taken seriously and they risk damaging their working lives just as they start.
It may only be years later, when they have established themselves as worth listening to, that those who have experienced harassment feel they have sufficient standing to speak and be believed.
So the public accounts are always going to be much more skewed to what’s happened in the past than what’s happening now.
I’ve been talking to women in law, finance, advertising and business about their experience. Every single one was terrified of saying anything that might identify them, but all had miserable accounts of professional dinners with bosses or clients that turned into insistent sexual invitations, men touching them sexually, being the object of sexually humiliating conversations or innuendo, finding themselves iced out of social occasions or office promotions if they declined to submit to sexual power games.
The worst is a young woman who finds her necessary professional messages to bosses during the day routinely ignored, but whose evenings are ruined by crude and insistent texts from her married male managers asking why she hasn’t joined the team at the pub and listing the many ways in which they want to f..k her.
Several of these companies have impeccable codes of conduct. Yet not one woman had dared to report this routine intimidation because they could see how personally destructive that would be. Their bosses might be cautioned but if their work was valuable they wouldn’t be sacked and the women would become the focus of resentment and revenge. It was their careers that would be sabotaged, subtly and insidiously, not the men’s. Bleakly, they could see no way out.
It is this reality that I hope the Weinstein scandal could change, just as the child abuse scandals gave a voice to those long ignored. It’s not enough for companies to have codes that abusive men can ignore, knowing penalties scarcely exist.
Weinstein might just change the public’s perception of how corrosive and extensive the bullying of women can be, making its targets credible and greatly increasing the reputational risk for men and businesses who have been able to pretend it isn’t going on.
I hope harassers are scared. They may be next.