To move forward, we’ll need to admit that the problem doesn’t lie with a few bad apple abusers but with a whole culture that imagines that women don’t really have sexual desire, that we need to be cajoled, persuaded, seduced, manipulated, blackmailed or even outright forced into it. There will be need to be complicated and prolonged conversations between young men and young women about what constitutes consent, what is an abuse of power, why we encourage men — who are already taller, stronger, more muscled — to be the sexual aggressors, while still presuming that girls will make themselves pretty and wait around to be asked.
These prolonged conversations will feel awkward and unsexy. They will slow us down, and seem unnatural. Men may feel a little “more inhibited about flirting.” So might women. We might have to actually ask, yes, ask, “would you like to kiss me?” “Would you like to have sex?” Like many verbalizations of important and necessary social change the words may feel odd in our mouths until we have said them again and again. But we will practice, until it feels easier. The alternative — trying to cram all this ordure back into its closet and forget we ever saw it — is, I hope, unthinkable.
The Deep Confusion of the Post-Weinstein Moment
Naomi Alderman
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/opinion/fallon-resign-weinstein-harassment.html
Last week, as the post-Weinstein revelations of sexual abuse and harassment rolled onward, the British defense minister, the right honorable Sir Michael Fallon, M.P., resigned his position over “inappropriate flirtation.” One might reasonably wonder whether that could be all there was to it; flirtation hardly seems a resigning matter. (Indeed, reports have come out in the days since indicating there’s likely more to come.) In any case, such wondering would have to be brief — there’s not enough time to take in and reflect on the name and nature of one alleged sexual harasser before another, as it were, comes up.
What this speed means is that a number of different things are being conflated. Mr. Fallon resigned in part because his name reportedly came up on a “sex pest” list that has been circulating among the British public; the list includes abusers who’ve made inappropriate advances on aides or forced staff to have abortions. It also includes people who have “odd” sexual penchants, or have had consensual affairs. In other words, it includes both actual criminal offenses alongside, perhaps, the kind of kinky sex that a British tabloid might enjoy exposing for a bit of prurient titillation and some 1950s-style condemnation. It’s emblematic of the moment we’re in — our sexual morality and ethics have been changing, but we’re still caught in a confusing, muddled space between the old world and the new.
The women’s movement has been the most successful bloodless revolution of modern times. Since Mary Wollstonecraft fought for the crazy notion that women were humans and could have rights, feminism has been moving the world forward. There’s been a series of ratchets — times when the law or public opinion changed so conclusively that it seemed there could be no going back. Even the “pussy-grabbing” president isn’t calling for women no longer to have the vote, for girls to be denied admission to school and college, for married women to become their husband’s property, for women to be forced to give up their jobs if they become pregnant. We may be in one of those ratchet moments now, a time that pushes history onward by changing the way we think.
It does feel like a dam has burst — Harvey Weinstein was the long, dark crack in the foundational wall. The sheer force of numbers of men accused of sexual assault, harassment and predation over the past couple of weeks has been staggering: journalists, authors, TV personalities, producers, technologists. Even Elie Wiesel has been accused of grabbing someone’s butt, for God’s sake. Elie Wiesel! I’d make a joke about the pope being next except … it just wouldn’t be funny.
But I do wonder now what comes next. The dam burst is cathartic. The stories are important. But social change happens not in grand moments but in the less easily detectible changing of minds. Can we navigate through this moment to a new, better place?
Times of social change are unsettling. There’s a sense now that “no one is safe” — a phrase with two meanings in this case. Women have known for a long time that there are no particulars that guarantee a man to be safe — not saintly Holocaust activism nor having produced “Kill Bill” nor being the president of the United States. But there is another meaning emerging. Many men are feeling a certain unsettled sense that perhaps there are things in their recent or distant pasts that, looked at a certain way, might not bear as charitable an explanation as they had been tempted to give them in their own minds. Among some, there’s already a growing sense of panic. (See: A column in this weekend’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, in which the male columnist declares that “women are now on top” and begs that they do “not crush us.”)
There is an inexorable logic to these situations; we have seen it before. In order to distance oneself from “those terrible abusers,” there will be bandwagon jumping and mob joining. Men who have faint doubts about some incident in their past may be tempted to speak out, all the more vigorously, against anyone accused of even the mildest acts. As demonstrated by everything from the predictable regularity with which the most vocally homophobic senators turn out to be gay to the child-abusing police officers working in child protection departments, one great way to make yourself seem innocent of a “crime” — real or imagined — is to accuse others of being guilty. Among women, there are those who will take up the defensive position of those who don’t want to admit their vulnerability: “It happened to me and I’m fine, I don’t know what the big deal was, just laugh it off, brush it off, slap his cheek.”
There will be two tides working against each other: Some people reflexively defending anyone who is accused of sexual harassment or assault — and some taking to social media to condemn anyone about whom there is the faintest whisper of a rumor. The language of the “witch hunt” is both inappropriate and inflammatory; witches hadn’t actually done anything, abusive men really have. But the temptation to rush toward certainty is very human — we’d rather be able to say that there were a few bad apples, we’ve got rid of them and now we’re done, than stand a while in our discomfort and undertake the long process of re-examining a whole culture.
And I can guarantee that among the host of very real and genuine accusations and revelations, there’ll be an exaggeration or two, perhaps an outright lie. That’s just what happens. When it comes out, some will be tempted to use them to discredit the whole movement. A lot of people voted for President Trump, unperturbed by his stance on women. The people who gained power from that base will already be looking for ways to undermine and devalue this moment. This backlash will happen — we might as well try not to be surprised when it does.
When I feel hopeful, however, I think we’re on a long journey to a more nuanced way of thinking about sex and relationships. We know that the old rules of sex were all wrong, but we played by them for a long time. Cinema, television, novels, the infamous locker room talk, promulgate the view: grab her, kiss her, she’ll like it once you’ve started — as it turns out, that’s a dangerous sex culture to live in, for everyone, men and women. But we haven’t reached consensus yet on what the new rules are.
There is a lot to celebrate about the moment that we’re in, but we also have a long road ahead. To move forward, we’ll need to admit that the problem doesn’t lie with a few bad apple abusers but with a whole culture that imagines that women don’t really have sexual desire, that we need to be cajoled, persuaded, seduced, manipulated, blackmailed or even outright forced into it. There will be need to be complicated and prolonged conversations between young men and young women about what constitutes consent, what is an abuse of power, why we encourage men — who are already taller, stronger, more muscled — to be the sexual aggressors, while still presuming that girls will make themselves pretty and wait around to be asked.
These prolonged conversations will feel awkward and unsexy. They will slow us down, and seem unnatural. Men may feel a little “more inhibited about flirting.” So might women. We might have to actually ask, yes, ask, “would you like to kiss me?” “Would you like to have sex?” Like many verbalizations of important and necessary social change the words may feel odd in our mouths until we have said them again and again. But we will practice, until it feels easier. The alternative — trying to cram all this ordure back into its closet and forget we ever saw it — is, I hope, unthinkable.