social media campaign erupted here almost simultaneously with the appearance of #MeToo in the United States — except French women took it further with #balancetonporc, which loosely translated means “squeal on your pig.” As in the United States, after women began naming and shaming their attackers, some of the most prominent men in French public life stood accused of sexual assault.
.. On Sunday, thousands of women — and men — marched through the streets of nearly every major French city to voice their anger and demand an end to sexual harassment and assault.
.. “Women are now more educated than men, have high responsibilities, are supposed to be equals in rights, and yet they are still underpaid, overloaded with family chores, and on top of that they are treated like sex objects? Enough is enough indeed.”
Not all bullies are sexual predators or sexual harassers. But most sexual harassers and predators are bullies.
.. I met Mark Halperin around the time I met Wieseltier. Halperin, too, had a reputation for mistreating women. Until now, I hadn’t heard specific accusations. But I could see with my own eyes that he was a bully who, lacking Wieseltier’s charm, enjoyed power plays over colleagues and other journalists. Our president, likewise, routinely attempts to humiliate aides and opponents alike; is it any wonder that he has also boasted of assaulting women?
asked respondents whether they believed that Trump “probably has or has not made unwanted sexual advances toward women.” Sixty-eight per cent of registered voters believed that he had; only fourteen per cent believed that he had not. Forty-three per cent of likely voters in the poll said that they would vote for Trump, suggesting that a significant portion of Trump’s supporters think that he’s lying, and do not care.
.. Even in his denials, Trump is acting like Trump, offering a string of epithets and diminishments that reinforce the idea that preying on women is a normal thing to do. It seems entirely clear that these allegations disturb Trump only because they inconvenience him. He has not once spoken about the matter as if he understands that groping women, in itself, is wrong.
.. That makes twenty-four women who have corroborated Trump’s own boasting, twenty of whom have offered up their identities.
.. consider the time he told ABC that he had advised his friends to “be rougher” with their wives
.. This isn’t sexual misconduct as much as it is the language of a man who doesn’t believe that such a thing really exists.
.. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, said that, “by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse,” and then he threatened revenge over the story.
.. As Trump has done, Cohen refuted an allegation of sexual violence in an alarming tone that immediately brings sexual violence to mind. “What I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting,” he said.
.. he worked with many of his accusers, and even the witness produced by Trump’s campaign to discredit Leeds—a man who, by the way, once boasted about arranging underage sex parties for politicians—acknowledged that Leeds and Trump were sitting next to each other on the plane.
.. At the Greensboro rally, he addressed Leeds’s story in a similar manner: she wasn’t hot enough to be preyed on. “Believe me, she would not be my first choice,”
.. He and his team have repeatedly defended themselves by invoking the idea that women with assault stories are looking for “some free fame,” as Trump said at the Greensboro rally, or “free publicity,” as Hope Hicks said about Kristin Anderson. Trump raised the issue again at Wednesday night’s debate, saying that the accusers had been brought forward by the Clinton campaign to enjoy their “ten minutes of fame,” as if any person could possibly find this enjoyable.
“Ailes, O’Reilly, Weinstein, Halperin were some of our culture’s key storytellers, shaping our ideas of gender, authority, power & much more,” noted Jodi Kantor, the New York Times reporter who broke the Weinstein story
.. mostly decent men of a certain age (60-plus? 50-plus? What is the generational divide here?) as they realize that the behaviors they perceived as all-in-good-fun were, in fact, only half in good fun — their own half. For decades, the women on the receiving end weren’t having any fun at all.
.. Is this a moment of #MeToo? for George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States? An actor named Heather Lind said she was “sexually assaulted” by the jolly old fellow with the fun socks, who apparently touched her butt while posing for a photo.
.. “To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke — and on occasion, he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner,” said a spokesman for Bush on Wednesday, while noting that the former president’s wheelchair posture keeps his arms at butt-level.
.. the president asked her to guess his favorite magician, and then, as he squeezed her rear end, revealed that the answer was “David Cop-a-feel.”
.. David Cop-a-feel. Ugh. Gabby dad humor mixed with grabby sexual overtones: a cocktail whose taste many women would recognize but that many men would be shocked to learn they had been mixing and serving all along.
.. In journalism, there’s a term called “notebook dump,” the process of throwing together all your reporting — every note taken, interview conducted, scene observed.
.. The women of America are currently engaged in a notebook dump of epic proportions, releasing the anecdotes they’ve been carrying since puberty.
.. women experiencing harassment don’t particularly want to also be in charge of educating harassers.
.. “What we need to start talking about is the crisis in masculinity,” the actor Emma Thompson told the BBC.