It turns out that in the tallest skyscrapers and plushest hotels of the most advanced economies, many high-profile men have been acting the part of feudal lords, demanding droit du seigneur from their vassals, the vassals in this case being their female employees and others wishing entry into their fiefdoms. Evidently there’s been a covert system of taxation on female advancement in the work world, with the unluckier among us obligated to render not just the usual fealty demanded by overweening bosses but varying degrees of sexual homage too, from ego-stroking and fluffing (which is gross enough), to being grabbed and groped, to the expectation of silence about full-on rape.
.. historians have written extensively on the importance of gossip and its venues, such as coffeehouses, in fomenting previous revolutions
.. Every revolution has its weapons of choice—once it was muskets and guillotines, this time around it’s “sharing” and media exposure. It wasn’t heads that were rolling, it was careers: contracts yanked, deals canceled, agents quitting, e-mail accounts shuttered.
.. When the Times recently compiled the names of twenty-four prominent men accused of sexual harassment, it did rather bring to mind the spectacle of heads on a pike in a public square
.. If recent events tell us anything, it’s that power is a social agreement, not a stable entity. The despots had power because they did things that were socially valued and profitable, but the terms of the agreement can shift abruptly.
.. Social upheavals like the current one—chaotic and improvised, yet destined—happen when certain echelons retract their consent to existing conditions and make new demands. Gramsci calls it “war of position.” Toppling power isn’t about storming the Bastille these days, it’s about changing the way people talk and think. If our upheavals come dressed in different garb, creating a crisis of authority for those in power is still how the world changes.
.. But speaking of unlikely agents, that one of the more significant battlefield wins recently was achieved by a former Miss America, Gretchen Carlson, is tough for those who’d prefer their feminist victories to come from women with better feminist credentials.
.. Unfortunately you won’t learn any of this from Be Fierce—you don’t get $20 million without a nondisclosure agreement.
.. It’s from Sherman we learn that Carlson secretly recorded her meetings with Ailes on her phone for a year and a half—including his remark that the two of them should have had sex long ago to resolve their differences, spoken sometime before she was fired (after an eleven-year stint as a newscaster) and sometime after she lodged complaints about the climate of sexism at Fox, for which Ailes labeled her a “man hater” and demoted her.
.. The less job security you have, the worse it is; fast food workers are especially vulnerable.
.. Women who come forward are likely to be passed over for promotions and good assignments, or find their jobs mysteriously eliminated.
.. On rare occasions when a boss-harasser is actually fired, the woman who brought him down often gets treated like a leper by his allies. The majority of those who report harassment end up in different jobs, which makes it understandable that, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 70 percent of women who are harassed don’t report it.
.. Have a plan before you go to HR or you’ll find your options predetermined; you may have a mandatory arbitration clause in your employment contract you don’t know about
.. Trump himself boasts of barging into dressing rooms in the Miss Teen USA contest to gape at unclothed teenage girls. Upon purchasing the Miss USA franchise, he says, he “made the heels higher and the bathing suits smaller.”
.. The “idealized pedestal” Miss America gets put on is itself a form of disempowerment, Carlson eventually came to realize. True, and if you flip to your local Fox affiliate, you’ll see the same compliant femininity distilled to its purest iteration. Like beauty contestants, the women of Fox are hired on the basis of looks, then laminated into near mannequins.
.. The point is that the way Ailes expected “his” women to dress makes clear the role they were expected to play: receptacles
.. If those who signed on had difficulty speaking out about harassment in the workplace because they felt shame regarding the trade-offs they’d made—and many have said that they did—shame is what women are meant to feel in this equation.
.. The convenience of misogyny is that men are spared from hating themselves because they have women to hate instead.
.. You want to know when to tell someone to shut up and when to jump out of a moving car.
This would also involve the ability to distinguish between force and power.
.. Those who didn’t buy into it seem to have fared better. The actress Lupita Nyong’o recalled several encounters with Weinstein in an essay for The New York Times. When he trotted out his familiar moves, she refused to play the expected role: when he asked to give her a massage, she turned the tables and gave him one instead, consciously putting herself in control of the situation. When he tried taking off his pants, she walked to the door, not giving him the satisfaction of seeming intimidated. And he backed down. She seems to have understood that Weinstein may have had power over her career, but he didn’t have power over her, and making that distinction gave her more options for negotiating a bad situation.
.. Anthony Weiner has been the public face of the sexual tic for some years now: a man of demonstrable intelligence under the sway of a compulsion so intellectually disabling that after a string of previous life-wrecking exposures, he still allowed himself to be set up once again, this time by a fifteen-year-old. Anyone could have seen from ten miles away that it was a frame—anyone but Weiner, that is. (The girl later said she was trying to influence the course of the 2016 presidential election, which she probably did—James Comey reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails after seizing Weiner’s computer once his new friend turned him in.)
.. feminist Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976): the problem for men is that they had mothers.
.. Mother-dominated child-rearing, thought Dinnerstein, is the reason behind men’s loathing of women and everything culturally inscribed as female
.. men can’t give up ruling the world until women cease to have a monopoly on ruling childhood. To push Dinnerstein’s speculations to an even gloomier place: do mothers take out on their sons the abuses they themselves have suffered at the hands of men?
.. Online feminism is itself a playground of bullying and viperishness, most of it under the banner of rectitude.
Al Franken’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ era was full of jokes disparaging women
On the sixth floor of 30 Rock, women have long been portrayed as sexual conquests, victims or aggressors, live on Saturday nights. During the 1990s in particular, SNL excelled at celebrating male libido and a get-away-with-anything approach to sex, while reducing women to their sexual function. The show consistently cheered male sexuality and reinforced its boundlessness (consent be damned), while shaming women who reached for power or were unlucky enough to be publicly associated with sex.
The SNL writers’ room is famously collaborative, so it’s hard to know how many such bits Franken specifically wrote. But as a writer on 285 episodes from 1976 to 2008, he undoubtedly influenced the zeitgeist of the show during that era.
.. Again, the laughs: Thomas’s sexual inadequacy is what’s supposed to be funny. SNL imagines that sexual harassment is hilarious and that unattractive women deserve it... One 1996 skit about O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark portrays her as an erotomaniac or “fatal attraction type” — a derogation hurled at women during the 1990s, including at Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky, to discredit them and weaponize their sexuality. Clark, played by Nancy Walls, is less interested in the case’s outcome than forcing fellow prosecutor Christopher Darden to sleep with her, or “take the black bronco down the 405,” as the show put it. “The only thing I’m guilty of is being extremely horny,” Walls says. “Please remove your pants.”.. If SNL women weren’t sexual victims or erotomaniacs, they were not real women at all. Will Ferrell’s career was made in part by his “Janet Reno’s Dance Party” sketches, which rendered the first woman attorney general as a gangly man with an awkward deep voice, skirt and pearls... Ferrell said in an interview that he wouldn’t have played Reno the way he did if she were a “normal woman.” In other words, because Reno didn’t always fit neatly into the stereotypical roles SNL ascribed to women — sexually aggressive like Clark or sexually victimized like Hill — the country’s chief law enforcement officer became a fake woman, just Ferrell in drag... What’s clear, in truth, is that American comedy culture has used sexual abuse as fodder for too long... From Franken and Harvey Weinstein to Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, women are reckoning with the painful reality that powerful men recently accused of sexual misconduct have long been the media and cultural gatekeepers in America.They’ve been the arbiter and the lens, determining what is newsworthy, what is socially acceptable and, in Franken’s case, what is funny... You can tell an awful lot about a society based on what it thinks is funny.
If Hollywood stars really want to fight harassment, here’s how they can start
Gadot, whose Wonder Woman is the lone real breakout superhero of the DC movie franchise, reportedly declared that she wouldn’t sign for future installments unless the movies were no longer financed by RatPac-Dune Entertainment. RatPac is co-founded by director and producer Brett Ratner, who has been accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault by a number of women.
.. Actors in Hollywood work on contract. Often, that makes them vulnerable: By preventing a woman from getting cast in new projects, super-producers such as Harvey Weinstein can start a slide that derails her entire career. But the reverse is also true.
.. So for those with power in Hollywood who want to make a difference, here are some places to get started:
1. Transparency around sexual harassment cases and settlements:
.. his behavior stayed a secret because of the non-disclosure agreements his lawyers wrote into those settlement contracts. If Weinstein hadn’t been able to do that, maybe his alleged victims wouldn’t have received financial compensation. But his misconduct also might have come to light much sooner.
.. what if actors asked that productions provide a full accounting of whether anyone in a supervisory position on a production has been charged with, sued for or paid a settlement involving sexual misconduct? That wouldn’t just protect people at the top of a production; it would let folks in every department on set know whom they’re working with.
..
2. A reverse “key man clause”: Roger Ailes, the former chief executive officer of Fox News, tried to entrench himself at the network with something called a key man clause in his stars’ contracts. That legal language meant that if Ailes left the company, other people who worked at Fox News would have an opportunity to renegotiate their contracts, and it was intended to create a disincentive for the network to force Ailes out.
.. But maybe stars could negotiate clauses that, rather than protecting them from being fired, allow them to walk off a production without penalty if one of their colleagues reports being harassed or assaulted, or if an independent outside monitoring group says that harassment is happening on set and victims are being blocked from making reports.
..
3. An end to arbitration and confidentiality clauses
.. Big stars such as Gadot could not only refuse to sign contracts that force them into arbitration and require them to keep silent about anything that happens to them on the job. They could also refuse to work on any project that requires any employee at any level to abide by such provisions. By doing so, they’d preserve their co-workers’ right to sue if they were harassed and make it harder for studios and directors to hush up misconduct.
.. If an actress can progressively raise her salary, that gives her more leverage in future situations, more financial independence from a director, producer or studio head who might try to sexually harass her, and more ability to sign with a new agent should hers misbehave.
Blast of besieged blowhards: I will sue!
The longtime judge surely knows that he has no case against The Post; that he’d have to prove the newspaper knowingly published falsehoods or proceeded with reckless disregard to the truth
.. When former Fox News chief Roger Ailes first came under fire in 2016 for sexual harassment, he attempted to deny the allegations against him. An internal review corroborated the stories of the women.
.. O’Reilly, we learned last week, once had a contract stipulating that he couldn’t be fired for sexual harassment unless it was proven in court.
.. On the other hand, he has used his own wealth to silence his accusers via non-disclosure agreements and that clever contractual stipulation.
.. “This is everybody’s No. 1 fear — facing a defamation suit.”
.. Moore & Co. know what they’re doing. They’re attempting to intimidate the reporters and the accusers who threaten to further diminish their reputations. If they further alienate their followers from the U.S. media in the process, well, that’s just the price of good crisis communications.