The Fempire Strikes Back: #MeToo
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
By Ann Jones, TomDispatch | News Analysis
First, for the record, let me tell you my story about another of those
perversely creepy Hollywood predators, a sort of cut-rate Harvey Weinstein:
the screenwriter and film director James Toback. As I read now of women he
preyed upon year after year, I feel the rage that's bubbled in the back of
my brain for decades reaching the boiling point. I should be elated that
Toback has been exposed again as the loathsome predator he's been for half a
century. But I'm stuck on the fact of elapsed time, all these decades that
male predators roamed at large, efficiently sidelining and silencing women.
Toback could have been picked up by New York's Finest when he hit on me in
or around 1972. But I didn't call the cops, knowing it would come to
nothing. Nor did I tell our mutual employer, the City College of the City
University of New York. I had no doubt about which one of us our male bosses
would believe. I had already been labeled an agitator for campaigning to add
a program in women's studies to the curriculum. Besides, to any normal
person, the story of what happened would sound too inconsequential to seem
anything but ridiculous: not a crime but a farce.
I didn't know Toback. I must have seen him at infrequent faculty meetings,
but we taught in different writing programs. There was no reason for our
paths to cross. Ever. So I have no memory of him until the day I flung open
the door of my Chinatown loft in response to a knock, expecting to greet my
downstairs neighbor, and in walked Toback. My antennae went up. How had he
managed to get past the locked street door? I remember talking fast, trying
to get him out of my place without provoking a confrontation. He agreed to
leave with me -- to go out for tea or lunch or some little excursion I
proposed -- but first he insisted on using my bathroom, from which he soon
emerged naked. I remember the way he listed the many things he had in mind
for me to do for him. Among them, one demand persists in memory, perhaps
because it was at once so specific and so bizarre: that I suck and pinch his
nipples.
I beat him to the door, furious at being driven from my own loft. I think I
threatened to come back with the cops. Something scared him anyway. From a
shop on the street, I watched as he left my building on the run, waddling
away at top speed.
Reader, if you think that nothing really happened, then you are mistaken.
This incident took place almost 50 years ago and though I hadn't thought of
it in ages -- not until his name popped up in the media -- the memory
remains remarkably raw. I still want to see him marched naked through the
streets of Manhattan and Los Angeles to the jeers and uproarious laughter of
women.
At the time, Toback was no more than 25 years old, while I was nearly 10
years older, a thoroughgoing feminist, and luckily faster on my feet than
him. But recent reports say that, in the 1980s and later, Toback routinely
focused his attacks on very young women, some of them teenagers, using
promises of film stardom (sound familiar?) to lure them into encounters that
left them sodden with shame. He is now in his seventies and, although women
have reported his predation several times in major magazines, he was still
on the prowl last month and had never before been called to account for his
actions.
What could be more despicable than this: that for more than four decades,
while he and his kind were allowed to practice undeterred, he only got
better at his game of assaulting women.
A Catalogue of Violations
Not long after my run-in with Toback, a university professor from whom I was
taking a writing course came calling to discuss my "extraordinary work" and
emerged from that same Chinatown bathroom in a similar state of nakedness.
(Do they follow some instruction manual I've never seen?) By then I was
writing and photographing as a freelancer for the travel section of the New
York Times, an unpaid task that entitled me to receive midnight phone calls
from the drunken travel editor detailing the things I might do for him to
insure a "real job" with the Times. That's when I became a freelancer
elsewhere, always ready to cut and run. I've been a loner ever since.
I could tell you stories of other professors, editors, journalists, and TV
hosts. But they would be much the same as those we read almost every day now
as women go public with their own stories of sexual harassment and worse at
the hands of powerful men in the film industry, major media outlets, Silicon
Valley, and Congress, among other places. In response, almost every day come
new denials, excuses, or half-baked apologies.
Some commentators are now reconsidering Bill Clinton's record in the sharper
light of the present moment. Others ask if the current "witch hunt" for
sexual predators has gone too far. Expecting inevitable backlash, some
recommend that women exercise restraint -- as all of us have been taught to
do for so many eons -- lest some unsubstantiated accusation discredit the
stories of thousands of women reporting #MeToo. I don't share such tender
concern for the reputations of men, especially not that of the president,
the self-congratulatory pussy-grabber-in-chief whose followers seem to
mistake his behavior for the norm, if not an aspirational ideal.
Discussion of these matters quickly becomes political, eliciting erratic,
gender-bending partisan judgments. Some prominent Republican men called for
former judge Roy Moore of Alabama, accused of harassing and assaulting
teenaged girls when he was a 30-something assistant district attorney, to
end his campaign for the Senate, while many Republican women in that state,
including many who are presumably the mothers of daughters, continue to
stand behind him.
At the same time, Democrats parse which of Bill Clinton's accusers to
believe and which not. And who hasn't thought again about Clarence Thomas?
He was elevated to the Supreme Court by an all-white male Congressional
committee despite the thoroughly credible testimony of harassed law
professor Anita Hill and the accounts of many other women, similarly
violated and ready to testify against Thomas, but never called. Given his
long misogynistic history on the court, isn't it time to look at his
testimony again? Did he commit perjury to gain his seat? And if so, what's
to be done about his consistent judicial record inimical to the common
interests of women?
It's Not Just Sex
Little or none of male harassment and predation is truly about sex, except
insofar as men weaponize their sad libidos to pin women to the floor.
Monstrous men commit what's called sexual harassment and sexual assault not
because women are irresistible but because they can't resist the rush of
power that rises from using, dominating, degrading, humiliating, shaming,
and in some cases even murdering another human being. (Sexist, not sexual,
may be a more accurate adjective.)
Often -- especially when the woman is better looking and more talented or
qualified than her assailant -- he gets an additional powerful kick from
having "taught the bitch a lesson." A smug sense of power ("When you're a
star... you can do anything") colors the phony apologies of accused
predators. ("It was never my intention to leave the impression I was making
an inappropriate advance on anyone.") Though a man may be truly sorry to be
found out, it's next to impossible for him, after that blast of solid-gold
supremacy, to pretend to even a particle of remorse.
The times call for accusations to be scrupulously accurate. Yet it's
misleading to think of sexual harassment and sexual assault as separate and
isolated indignities when in real life one so often segues into the other.
Such terms arose in the course of intensive work by feminists of the
so-called second wave, which is to say feminists like me who began work in
the 1960s and 1970s. One of our tasks was to expose and document the extent
of violence against women in the United States. At that time, misogyny
emanated from the pores of patriarchal men, poisoning the very air we
breathed. We found overwhelming the violence such men committed against
women and girls of all colors who did not conform to their notions of
decorative and deferential "femininity."
The fact that male violence methodically constricts female lives is so
appalling that most women simply couldn't acknowledge it. Psychiatrist
Judith Lewis Herman, in her landmark study Trauma and Recovery (1992),
described things as they were at the time: "Most women do not... recognize
the degree of male hostility toward them, preferring to view the relations
of the sexes as more benign than they are in fact. Similarly, women like to
believe that they have greater freedom and higher status than they do in
reality." Beneath the revelations of sexual harassment and assault today lie
the same hard-rock foundations of male hostility that Herman described a
quarter century ago.
To document male violence and depict how it works in daily life, second-wave
feminists tried to break it down into its component parts: discrimination
and domination -- psychological, sexual, and physical -- in the home, the
schools, the workplace, the church, the courts, the prisons, and public
life. We wrote the history of male violence against women, while exploring
its effects at that time and its future prospects. Our generation produced
groundbreaking books on patriarchy (Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, 1970),
rape (Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 1975), sexual harassment
(Catherine McKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women, 1979), pornography
(Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981), the battered
women's movement (Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence, 1982), men
murdering women (Diana Russell, Femicide, 1992), and feminist consciousness
(Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within, 1993). I wrote a history of
American women who did not conform: Women Who Kill (1980). For countless
women of my generation, this documentation and the movement for change
became our life's work.
The next generation of women thought differently. Many younger women, even
some who call themselves feminists today, were persuaded by the hostile
counterattack against the women's movement (meticulously deconstructed by
Susan Faludi in Backlash, 1991) that we uptight "man-haters" had wildly
exaggerated the violence women face. They, on the other hand, proudly
proclaimed their youth, intelligence, ambition, and control of their own
lives. They would not be victims or feminists either. We knew how they felt,
for we had felt that way, too, when we were young. Then they went out to
work and met the monsters.
To understand what actually happens to women, you only have to listen to or
read any of the accounts pouring forth right now to denounce "sexual
harassment." The stories are laced with fear about immediate physical
threats and, more pointedly, with anger and despair about the potential
demolition of their jobs, future careers, and life as they had envisioned it
for themselves.
From the stories of individual women, it's clear that predators violate the
neat categories of feminist scholarship, shifting seamlessly from harassment
to coercion to physical assault, rape, and worse. The "sexual" strategies
exposed by these repetitive accounts are similar to those described in
police reports on battered women, seasoned prostitutes, and women subjected
to incest, trafficking, rape, and femicide. These are stories of the lives
and deaths of millions of women and girls in America.
Behind all of them is the deafening sound of a silence that has persisted
throughout my long life. But these past weeks have been startlingly
different. By now, we -- both women and men -- should have heard enough to
never again ask: "Why didn't she come forward?" Let this be our own "open
secret." We all know now that a man who assaults a woman does so because he
can, while a woman who comes forward, even with our support, is likely to be
violated and shamed again -- as were the women who came forward to accuse
presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.
Now What?
None of this is new, though we tend to act as if it were. Just last week,
for instance, I heard three young women radio reporters explain that women
back in the 1970s or 1980s accepted "unwanted male attention" in the office
and in life "because that's just the way things were." (Harvey Weinstein
offered the same excuse: "All the rules about workplaces and behavior were
different. That was the culture then.")
Please, can we get this straight? Back in those ancient times -- the 1960s,
1970s, and 1980s -- we did not accept violence against women in the
workplace or any place else. It's true we hesitated to report it to
employers or the police, because when we did, we had to watch them laugh it
off or send us packing. But we did call it out. We named it. We described
it. We wrote books about all forms of violence against women -- all those
"man-hating" books that these days, if anyone cares to look, may not seem
quite so obsolete.
We worked for change. And now only 40 or so years later, here it seems to
be. Los Angeles Times reporter Glenn Whipp broke the story of James Toback's
predation based on the complaints of 38 women. Within days that number had
grown to 200. By the time I emailed him my story, the number reporting
Toback assaults had hit 310. In a follow-up article, Whipp mentioned that
the Manhattan District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit wanted to hear from women
Toback had attacked in their jurisdiction. I called and left a message,
making good my threat to bring in the law after only about 45 years.
For the first time, someone other than my best friends might listen.
Somebody might even call me back. But today, as I write, New York Times
reporters Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor, Susan Dominus and their colleagues
describe in hair-raising detail "Harvey Weinstein's Complicity Machine," a
catalogue of "enablers, silencers, and spies, warning others who discovered
[Weinstein's] secret to say nothing." With their collaboration, Weinstein,
like Toback, has preyed upon women since the 1970s.
The Times reports that among Weinstein's closest media pals is David J.
Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns The National
Enquirer, a gossip rag whose reporters Weinstein could use to dig up dirt on
his accusers. Reportedly, Weinstein was "known in the tabloid industry as an
untouchable 'F.O.P.,' or 'friend of Pecker.'" It's no surprise to learn that
another predator who shares that untouchable F.O.P. status in the tabloids
is Donald "grab 'em by the pussy" Trump.
The question is unavoidable: If serial sexual predation disqualifies a man
from being a film producer, screen writer, movie star, network newsman, talk
show host, journalist, venture capitalist, comedian, actor, network news
director, magazine editor, publisher, photographer, CEO, congressman, or
senator, why shouldn't it disqualify a man from being president of the
United States? Shouldn't sexist serial sexual assault constitute an
impeachable high crime or misdemeanor?
We may find out. Time magazine passed over the president as its "person of
the year" to name instead the "Silence Breakers" -- the brave, outspoken
women who inspired the #MeToo campaign. Pictured on the cover along with
actress Ashley Judd and pop star Taylor Swift is a Mexican strawberry
picker, using a pseudonym for her safety. Her presence and the arm of an
unidentified hospital worker seated just out of the frame signal that we
might yet learn how this cultural awakening is playing out in ordinary
America for women working in the far less glamorous worlds of fast-food
chains, nursing homes, hospitals, factories, restaurants, bars, hotels,
truck stops, and yes, strawberry fields.
So where do we go from here? This train has left the station and rolls on.
In some photos of those smart young relentless women journalists at the
Times, I've noticed that their footwear tends not to stilettos, but to
boots, which as every woman knows, are good for marching and for kicking
ass. That's promising.
But since I've traveled this route before, you'll have to excuse me for
thinking that when this big train passes, it could leave behind a system --
predators, enablers, silencers, spies, and thoroughly entrenched sex
discrimination -- not so very different from that of the 1970s. And if that
happens, no doubt those lying dead on the tracks will prove, upon official
examination, to be female.
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Ann Jones
Ann Jones is an independent writer and photographer. She is the author of
Kabul in Winter, War Is Not Over When It's Over, and the feminist classic
Women Who Kill, among other books. Her journalism appears most often in The
Nation and online at TomDispatch.
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