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The Real Fallout from Weinstein
Set aside the revulsion or shock over what Weinstein did. Set aside too the anger over the hypocrisy of those who knew of what he did and let him get away with it anyway. Instead, spare a thought for those whom Weinstein damaged without ever meeting them. I speak of the very youth of America who will ultimately bear the brunt of the punishment for the fools and power brokers who ever have covered for the creeps among the powerful.
The system that allowed Weinstein to flourish will likely remain unchanged, as the powerful will ever and always be protected and shielded until the dam breaks, while the national outrage instead ever further confuses and separates the relations between men and women, leaving honest and decent young men confused and afraid, and honest and decent young women even more unprotected against offense.
Why is this likely? Because it keeps happening. I came of age in the wake of the Clarence Thomas nonsense and public hysteria over sexual harassment. Set aside the question of whether Anita Hill was honest in her accusations, the fact was that her accusations were national news and endlessly discussed. Schools, colleges, and businesses nationwide, seeing the damage wrought merely by an unproven and ultimately unprovable accusation, reacted rapidly to create and enforce sweeping new policies governing the interactions between men and women in order to mitigate against charges directed their own way. In many respects this reaction went entirely too far.
I do not in any way mean to downplay the fact that sexual harassment has always been a problem (the world is full of rotten people), but the form the reactions took was positively militant, and especially so against men. Entirely normal relations between the sexes, such as complimenting another’s appearance or asking someone out on a date, were declared improper. The new prohibitions and their enforcement were aimed almost entirely at male behavior, as the news media effectively declared that only men were guilty. And the rules, worded as they were in vague terms like “unwanted advances,” placed the judgment of what was improper onto the alleged victim. In other words, to be charged was to be guilty.
To prevent the new rules from going too far, administrative procedures were also established, requiring significant documentation of every alleged offense. And an unspoken prohibition emerged on victims attempting to settle things in conventional ways. Better, it was thought, to grind everything through procedure and thus avoid lawsuits than to allow or encourage people to handle things themselves. For genuine victims, this unfortunately twisted matters as they would not want to go through the bureaucratic wringer and “make trouble,” especially if they could produce no evidence. That others could and did abuse the system with false or exaggerated charges only further harmed the real victims.
This very much trickled into the schools of the time, and people my age had a fear of sexual harassment charges drummed into us from an early age. My school, formerly all boys, went coed for my 10th grade year. The year before this change was a curious one for all of us. We knew the girls were on their way, and there was a certain frisson of excitement about them (not to mention cold sweats from us more awkward types), but this was quickly dampened by a series of seminars, workshops, and harangues by various teachers and guest speakers.We all well remembered especially the one where we spent nearly an hour being effectively told that all men were potential rapists (as in, “any of you could turn out to be a rapist”). We spent the entire year being browbeaten with how bad men are, and how uncontrollable our impulses are. Of course, the school had a “zero tolerance” policy in place too. Far from being taught respect for women, we were taught to fear ourselves, and to fear that any wrong move would find us drummed out of the place.
For us, on the cusp of adulthood and desiring to date women, this was socially debilitating. Could we ask the girls out or would that be too offensive? Could we compliment them on their appearances or would that land us in the klink? Those of us inclined to be generally law-abiding (and of an easily guilty conscience) rather took the lectures to heart, and spent the remaining three years avoiding even attempting to ask the girls out. It took being free of the place to see how the real world interacted.
Today’s youth, 25 years on from that time, have yet more miserable confusion tossed upon them: the bane of tolerance and “understanding.” Many of us have tales of dealing with bullies. In my case, I slugged the guy and was done with it. The school knew what happened and why, and wisely said nothing. They knew that they would never catch the bully in question, and that a quick and decisive application of force would be the only thing to stop him, and that was that.
Today, schools cannot let such matters go. For one, there is the omnipresent risk of parental wrath and lawsuits. (How dare you let my innocent baby get hurt?) But the Tolerance creed dictates that they have to now treat the bullies as somehow also victims. Thus, they have to engage in ridiculous tolerance exercises, counseling, and emotional sharing between bullies and victims — a system easily perverted into treating the victims as being to blame for getting bullied in the first place and punishing those who stand up for themselves, or for others.
This is made worse by the current national hysteria over bullying, cyberbullying, and so forth. You cannot easily punish the real offender without mountains of evidence, you cannot allow a victim to defend themselves because violence is bad, and tolerance dictates that you treat both parties as somehow in the wrong. For the lazy and jaded, it is therefore all too easy to blame the victim for “making trouble,” and let the matter slide. For the overzealous or overly fearful administrators, it is all too easy to convict the accused without any due process.
This itself has ultimately twisted the very systems set up 25 years ago, ostensibly for the protection of women against harassment, into punishing women for being harassed (or far worse), encouraging certain women to wield the threat of a harassment or rape charge against men, confusing young men to the point where they seem to be afraid of women, and failing entirely to prosecute the actual thugs. For the powerful and connected, like Weinstein, their protections are amplified.
Yet the pressure to “do something” about people like Weinstein will likely lead to yet more agonized layers of administrative procedures, more proscribing of any interactions between the sexes, and more harm to the millions of young men and women who have done nothing wrong, and likely never will. For the powerless majority in America, better to avoid taking any risks at all, and if you are hurt, better to stay silent than endure being blamed for letting it happen, or for failing to show “tolerance and understanding” for your persecutor. Weinstein will be punished, other predators like him will skate free, but everyone else will bear the brunt of yet more anti-harassment measures and worthless administrative procedure.
I leave you with the following picture. It illustrates what is known as the “Hover Hand.” For millions of regular people, this is what we’ve come to — a fear of even innocuous physical contact. Better to play it safe, as young men, than to risk the wrath of a false charge. And for the women who have been hurt? Better to stay silent and not bring trouble or humiliation on themselves.
[edited to fix duplicate sentence]
Published in General
Teeth-gnashing and heart-rending all at once, Skip; well-done!
I’ve always mocked hover hand, but I never actually took the time to think about why it’s become so prevalent. Normal relationships between men and women have become taboo for my generation. Even I have been harassed over the years, both in-person and online, about the fact that I cook for my husband and try to do sweet things for him that I know he’ll like. It’s as if some percentage of women woke up and suddenly decided that men deserve nothing but scorn and aren’t real human beings with feelings or needs.
I so agree with this. On the one hand women complain that men are afraid of commitment, but they’ve made it so they’re too scared even to tell you you look nice today, let alone ask you out.
It’s a crisis of self-government at every level where an organization exists. People may recognize the organization is legitimate & useful–but in truth it’s impossible to get people to stop trying to ruin it with lawsuits. Soon, the fear of lawsuits itself does the work, & self-gov’t is over.
On the other hand, there’s the principled organization of hysteria–everyone’s experience should be included somehow in organization, even if it’s not even possible to have self-gov’t anymore. You gotta reassure everyone with a worry. But to include the experiences of the worried, the busybodies, & the victims is ultimately to abstract from an organization, with its particulars & circumstances, to a perpetual suspicion of malice. The organization ends up being about not getting blamed, instead of whatever its original purpose was.
Thanks for sharing the “hover hand.” That’s hilarious. Since the kids are smiling it can’t be all that bad, can it? My kids aren’t much older than the two lovebirds in the photo, and I don’t think they or their peers ever subjected themselves to those precautions. If anything, widespread awareness of harassment issues has encouraged judiciousness in choosing whom to associate with, and has instilled a certain amount of mutual respect and self-enforcement of acceptable behavior. Nobody wants to be the boor.
I’m constantly reminded how mature today’s younger generation is compared to my own generation at that age. I’m not claiming that this is universal, but I don’t think that college kids are as disoriented as we are constantly led to believe. I guess I’m just a little bit more optimistic.
I refuse to be intimidated! RightAngles, you look nice!
We were told at the Dayton Tire Plant in OKC, “If she like your comment it’s fine today. If, tomorrow she takes offense at the same comment, that’s harassment.”
So what’s a fellow to do? If he has any good sense at all he doesn’t speak to females. Kind of makes for an awkward work environment don’t you think?
From whence cometh the conflation of harassment, assault, and rape?
Unwelcome words =/=unwelcome touch =/= forced sexual penetration, society’s declinist harpies notwithstanding.
Sure does. Because by not taking to females you create a hostile work environment.
So . . . you are not allowed to say anything they find offensive, and you are not allowed to not say anything and they decide what is offensive. I’d conclude good luck is more important than good sense.
Seawriter
BTW – I should add that this post was based off of a recent conversation on iWe’s post, and credit is due to @midge for making some points there that I incorporated here.
Skip,
You don’t realize how much worse it all was. First, Clarence Thomas never said a word in his own defense so it was not he said she said. Second, there never was any need to prove or disprove allegations as Anita Hill was questioned extensively and from her testimony alone you could discount the entire incident. This isn’t a transcript but from memory, as I watched it on CSPAN. If you could get the transcript I don’t think I’d be far off.
Q: What exactly happened?
Hill: After I had gone to work for Thomas in an executive position at the top of a Federal Regulatory agency for six months Thomas approached me and asked me out to dinner. I declined. About 1 week later he came up to me ‘over the water cooler’ and made a strange remark to me.
“I must be like Long Dong Silver with a pubic hair on my coke can.”
Q: When this happened what was your response?
Hill: I was upset by it for about a week.
Q: Did you tell anyone? A friend. A co-worker. A relative. Another lawyer?
Hill: No.
Q: Did anything else happen after the one incident that involved the one strange comment?
Hill: No.
Q: Did he demote you in any way? Did you lose status at the job? Were you given a bad evaluation?
Hill: No.
Q: You have been a Law School professor for these last 10 years. Did Thomas give you a recommendation for the job?
Hill: Yes.
Q: Was it a weak recommendation?
Hill: No. He gave me a very strong recommendation.
Q: For the entire time you were employed under Thomas were there any other incidents except the one?
Hill: No.
Q: Ms. Hill in your professional opinion did Thomas’s behavior constitute sexual harassment?
Hill: No.
Q: Ms. Hill you have been a Law School professor for 10 years. In your professional opinion should the sexual harassment law be changed so that what Thomas did would be considered sexual harassment?
Hill: No.
Q: (exasperated) Then Ms. Hill, why are you here?!
Hill: (diffident) Senator, I’m here because you asked me to be here.
Skip, there were no allegations at all. No one but Hill, male or female, had a single negative thing to say about Thomas and it was obvious that the Democrats were desperately looking for someone to do him in. The entire insane proceeding was all innuendo manufactured by an immensely biased press. Through it all Thomas kept his cool and dignity. Calling it Kafkaesque was being kind.
(cont)
This. So much this.
Some youthful sexual misconduct is just a result of kids misinterpreting signals, perhaps because they’re under the influence (of alcohol, most likely). Misconduct is misconduct, even when it shouldn’t be a crime, and it’s not something conservatives should make excuses for. But that kind of misconduct seems positively innocent compared to the misconduct of sexual predators, who aren’t blowing past the boundaries of propriety because they’re clueless and disinhibited, but because that’s how they bully and manipulate others.
If you’ve learned from the school of hard knocks that defending yourself against a bully, or even talking about his bullying, gets you, not the bully, in so much trouble it’s best to neither fight back nor say a word about what he did (and some kids do learn this lesson – understandably – it’s what the system is often set up to teach), you’ve also learned the lesson that you should neither defend yourself from sexual predators, nor speak up about what they’ve done. That is a very hard lesson to unlearn in the heat of the moment just because the bullying has turned sexual.
These young women today are being fed so many mixed signals by feminism it’s a wonder they can keep their heads on straight. First it’s “I am woman, hear me roar, don’t offer me a seat on the bus or I’ll punch your lights out,” and next it’s “That mean man hit on me! Now I need years of therapy and a lawsuit for ten million dollars in pain and suffering.” They’ve trivialized real sexual harassment by expanding the definition of it like they do with everything else, so that now a little boy pulling a girl’s pigtail on the playground gets him suspended for “sexual harassment.” After a while the words lose all meaning.
The sexual harassment we had to put up with before the term was coined would curl your hair. We just each had to deal with it ourselves. If this weren’t on the main feed, I have a doozy or two for you from my own life.
(cont. from #11)
My guess is that Thomas asked her out to dinner and she blew up in his face. Accusing and lecturing him because he was a bad Republican and she was a pure as snow Democrat. He said nothing at the time because what was there to say. He does a slow burn for a week and then makes a sarcastic comment to her just to get back at her, a mistake.
For this one minor misstep which she certified not to be sexual harassment and certified that it shouldn’t be made sexual harassment by changing the law, he was humiliated in front of an audience of 300 million people. The country owes Clarence Thomas an apology and so does Anita Hill.
Regards,
Jim
My thoughts exactly. And that leftwing cesspool HBO actually dredged the whole sorry mess up again and made a movie out of it, starring Kerry “The Republicans Want to Take the Vote Away From Women” Washington. Truly vile.
RA,
The HBO thing is a total fabrication. I watched most of the proceedings on CSPAN. The were many women who worked with Thomas at the EEOC. All of them came to the hearing and vouched for him, not against him. The only witness I found interesting was a black guy who had been assigned as her “tutor” at Yale. Let into Yale as a twofer, black and a woman on affirmative action, she got special free tutoring. The guy actually said she was very difficult to work with and not very bright.
Thomas was incredible. He never said a word about her or in his own defense. The Senator questioning Hill was Arlen Specter a very moderate Republican who finally became a Democrat. Specter had cast the deciding vote against the Bork nomination. This time after questioning Hill and her incredible lack of a coherent complaint of any kind, Specter voted for Thomas and he was confirmed!
Regards,
Jim
Agree. I watched the whole thing too, even though it made my blood boil. I find it easy to believe the guy who said Hill wasn’t very bright. That’s how she came across on CSpan.
Key sentence. This can be applied generally across the national map.
I was on a playground committee for a year as part of a group of parents who were trying to raise money to get more playground aids. As part of that work, I monitored recesses for a month. I came away from the experience deeply disturbed, as were my friends on the committee, at how wrong the teachers always got things. Over and over I watched them side immediately with the person who came to them first.
The only answer we could come up with was to have more supervision in those places where children were on their own: the buses, playground, recess, locker rooms, and the lunchroom. If you are on the scene, the kids can’t manipulate you.
The places where children are most likely to be harmed are in the least supervised places.
I called the department of education in Boston and asked about this. The woman I spoke to said, “You’re right. We have student-to-teacher ratios for classrooms but nowhere else.” I said, “It’s survival of the fittest out there for the kids. It’s not right.”
I drove all three of my kids to and from school because of this supervision problem. I went on field trips, and generally hung around the schools. The schools, in all fairness, needed more adult help.
The only way we can prevent this is to be on the scene. Otherwise, we are dealing with the kids’ retelling of events.
That always leads to injustice, in my experience.
It’s one reason I wish schools would spend a lot of time with the kids studying the Bill of Rights. Children and their teachers need to understand basic principles of justice.
I came across a very interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly a couple of weeks ago discussing Thomas in his EEOC days. They hated him before he was ever nominated. Get this: they thought he spent too much on feminist issues and not enough on racism.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1987/02/a-question-of-fairness/306370/
My husband told me once that Thomas deserved (my husband was telling a good joke, but he was right, it turns out) in some ways the Anita Hill mess because Thomas was the author of the crazy and sloppy sexual harassment regulations in the first place. :)
I went looking around the Internet to see if there was truth to that claim. It turns out there was. And his strong support for women in the workplace is probably why Bush 41 stood by him to the bitter end.
For a truly shocking account of his tenure at the EEOC, shocking in relation to what has been said about him, read this:
http://www.nwitimes.com/uncategorized/at-eeoc-thomas-was-women-s-champion/article_40a13c5e-79f3-50ed-a516-dcc31f3dc856.html
Traditionally, a man is not supposed to offer his hand to a woman for a handshake. He’s supposed to wait and let her offer her hand, if she wants. Doing it this way has often been seen in recent years as old fashioned or even sexist…until now maybe. The old fashioned Archie Bunkers are suddenly on the same side of this kind of thing as the feminists.
I was taught not to offer handshakes but to wait for the woman to proffer. Even more so with hugs.
Especially with the hugs, this is something I notice having also been raised fairly traditionally. I don’t mind so much with handshakes as I feel the man is treating me as an equal, but unprompted hugs from a man who isn’t my husband skeeves me out quite a bit.
Firstly, @skipsul, you have duplicate sentences at the end of the first paragraph, and comprising the second.
Regarding Thomas-Hill, let’s not forget that Hill told Susan Hoerchner that she had been harassed six months before every having met Thomas, and it’s likely the whole thing is based on the actions of the guy she worked for before Thomas.
Those were not originally in there, I think the eds, when correcting the stock photo I originally used, had created that problem.
I think I fixed it now.
The lesson I learned was that some people cannot be dealt with within the rules, and that as a result, taking justice into my own hands was necessary. The Law achieved nothing in 5 years. I ended it in two strikes.
That the Law then turned on me simply revealed that Thrasymacus is correct, and that Justice is simply what the strong do. Therefore it is of no binding power in its own right, but only prudentially. Is this a point on which I am strong enough to resist? Or is this an area where it is coincidentally the case that strength and right actually coincide. Or in extremis, is this a point where the law can hang and I’ll do it anyway, chance the consequences.
The most damning thing about this whole story is that if the reporter Weinstein threw down the stairs had leapt to his feet and counter-attacked Weinstein, our law would have come down harder on the reporter.
From this comes contempt for the law. I see no reason in this story to revise my views.
Now I’m trying to remember if I hugged anyone at the Montana Meetup, besides Jason and TG. Melissa probably, but I’m sure she was willing.
I more meant strange men, but you most certainly weren’t creepy. Sorry if I gave you that impression. :)
@marcin: do you really believe that even more adult involvement is the answer? Like, there isn’t enough helicopter parenting as it is, and we need even more?
In the school and neighborhood I grew up in, it was taken for granted that if you hit somebody, or physically assaulted anyone in any way, you would get hit back hard. The result was, that there was virtually no violence of any kind. In the rare instances where violence did occur, running and telling an adult about it was out of the question: even our own parents would have had contempt for us if we had done that. So, if you were the victim of a bully, you fought back. You didn’t expect an adult to solve the problem for you, you fought back. I can count the number of instances of physical violence that occurred on one hand; it virtually never happened, because would be bullies were apparently more afraid of their victims than they now are of adults.
I don’t have children, and I will be the first to admit that there are lots of things about kids that I don’t understand, but I was a kid once, and it just seems to me that in this particular case, the old way of dealing with things-meaning, adults stayed totally out of it-worked a lot better than the new way of adults sticking their noses into everything.
One of my cousins is a veteran and a state trooper; he has taught both his son and his daughter self defense. One day, some kid on the bus put his 12 year old son in a headlock, but luckily, my cousin had taught his son how to escape from a headlock. My cousin’s son escaped from the headlock, and in the process broke the kid’s nose. He was brought to the police station, but even so, both his parents totally supported him and they told him that they were proud of him.
I don’t know what consequences my cousin’s son had to face for defending himself, but after what he did, I am pretty sure that bullies don’t bother him anymore. There are things in life far more important than not getting in trouble with the powers that be. I totally support the way my cousin and his wife handled this: kids need to know that their parents will back them up when they defend themselves.