1: THIS IS NOT A POST DEFENDING HARVEY WEINSTEIN OR HIS ACTIONS
2: The #MeToo #TimesUp movement is about to hit critical mass if this Aziz Ansari mess is any indication.
It’s January 20th 2018. As a woman who has been twice sexually assaulted and sexually harassed on innumerable occasions, I’m already fatigued. I could fill a ten thousand word essay with just notable names. Honestly.
Roman Polanski. Bill Cosby. Bill Clinton. Donald Trump. Roy Moore. Al Franken. John Besh. James Toback. Terry Richardson. Woody Allen. Mark Halperin. Kevin Spacey. Micheal Oreskes. Jeremy Piven. Dustin Hoffman. Brett Ratner. Ed Westwick. Steven Seagal. Louis C.K. Andrew Kreisberg. Matt Zimmerman. Russell Simmons. Jeffery Tambor. Glenn Thrush. Charlie Rose. Matt Lauer. Tavis Smiley. James Levine. Mario Batali. Paul Haggis. Casey Affleck. Ben Affleck. James Franco. The Roman Catholic Church.
I’ve barely scratched the surface. This is just the more notorious men of prominence whose alleged sexual impropriety have made headlines. I could continue but a google search will confirm what I previously stated.
I could fill a small book with just names.
In as many recent weeks and months it seems almost every other day another accusation is brought to light and this begs several questions given the now obviously pervasive nature of this problem.
Where do monsters come from?
The title of this post was chosen not for the salacious knee-jerk reaction it elicits, but because its now a verb. It is now synonymous with a systemic culture of misogyny and sexual immorality and its pervasiveness in modern society.
And like many women, when the cracks in the dam began to become overwhelming, I was surprised but not in the way so many have expressed. I say that to mean I don’t know a woman who hasn’t been sexually harassed or assaulted.
That’s the truth. Every woman that I know personally has been verbally, physically, indirectly, directly sexually harassed, myself included or has been sexually assaulted, again, myself included.
And what that really means, what many people have failed to realize is that the behavior that allows for this to be, is not an anomaly but the NORM. It’s not statistically rare. 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.
Let me put it this way; the next time you go to Target or work or, I don’t know, outside, you will likely encounter a woman who was forcibly sexually engaged. That’s not even mentioning harassment which is the lesser of those two evils but evil none the less. Again, if this is what’s normal, and what so many of us have experienced, where did these monsters come from?
Very few monsters are born.
Psychopathy can be hard to test and so can sociopathy and the behaviors of sexual predation fall into these two categories. While the statistics vary, a search of medical journals will yield that generally speaking, in men, less than 5% of the population suffers from clinical psychopathy/sociopathy. The expressed experience of women though do not then support a claim that these men ( meaning greater than just 5%) are all irredeemable monsters, so, allowing for the possibility that the multitude of offenders are not on the spectrum for mental predisposition to sexual criminality, again, where do monsters come from?
Well, monstrous behavior, like most behaviors is learned. Any psychologist will tell you this.
Sexual culture has long been a broken thing in society. In every culture and most religions, its a tool, meant to enforce subjugation. Not to paint all religions with a broad stroke, but the general attitude of ‘if-you-have-sex-outside-of-marriage-you-will-die……or go to hell……or-possibly-go-blind’ has been the foundation on which sexual attitudes were built. To this day, slut shaming and victim shaming are the norm.
Men are still held to a different standard than women. Openly so. Is it better than it was say, 50 years ago? Yes. Absolutely. At a systemic level is that true? No. If I were to report being raped right now, questions such as my sobriety, manner of dress and my sexual history would all be fair game in determining the veracity of my claim. I’m not saying every claim should be believed without due process. Like all criminal claims they should be investigated. But just as one cannot invite murder, nor can anyone encourage sexual assault.
The prevalence of this idea that what women say, do, wear or how they act can engender rape culture is, for the absolute lack of a better word, asinine. So why is this behavior so normalized while simultaneously being so taboo for both men and women?
The sad truth is, if this moment is about change and accountability, then both sides have to admit some shared responsibility.
These monsters weren’t born. They were made.
And unfortunately, for re-enforced behavior to take hold, it must be re-enforced in duplicate.
I’m literally going to cite Pavlov here.
In human beings, sexual stimulation will often result in a flood of dopamine, (which makes you high with pleasure) serotonin, (which literally renders one ecstatic) and oxytocin which makes you want to physically lay claim or connection to a person. In men, vasopressin is a neurohormone that in tandem with testosterone, enforces feelings of possession.
Literally.
It is the reptilian part of the male brain saying ‘I licked it so its mine now’. Vasopressin is a strictly male released hormone tied to sexual chemistry.
You might think, ‘ well there! There’s your answer! Men literally cannot help but see women as possessions! Destroy the Patriarchy!’ The science is there but the same science means we all still have our appendixes which at this point in our evolution are more of a nuisance than anything and the millions of men who manage to go their entire lives without being perverse or rapey make the point of science here subjective at best.
Human beings feel a million impulses a day. If we all acted on them, society would dissolve into anarchy on a global scale immediately. So how then have these monstrous behaviors become so normalized? Well, as Pavlov observed, the innate biological response (as outlined above) can either be negatively or positively elicited but must also be rewarded and the reward can be either positive or negative. Psychological conditioning allows for a biologically potent stimulus (the human sexual imperative and all it entails) to be paired with a neutral stimulus. The neutral stimulus then becomes enough to elicit a response once exclusively elicited by the potent stimulus.
So what is the bell in this instance? The answer is simple and obvious but it might be worth mentioning that any doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, scientist worth their mettle will tell you that perpetrators of sexual impropriety don’t behave the way they do out of some insatiable need to get off.
Very few people suffer from the kind of sexual dysfunction that leaves them permanently dissatisfied. Those are outliers who often fall into certain facets of fetishization and sexual deviancy yes. They are often promiscuous and recklessly so but when you think of famous cases of this such as Eric Benet, or Tiger Woods who allege sex addition, very rarely do the impulsively hard to gratify force sexual interactions with others, far less unwitting individuals. From Brock Turner to Harvey Weinstein, all these instances had nothing to do with sex or sexual pleasure.
This is because the neutral stimulus, the bell so to speak, is power. Men don’t rape because they need to get off. That’s why they masturbate. And when powerful men force women that they know they can bully and intimidate, to witness or partake of any such sexual action, it’s not because they enjoy the sexual aspect of it. It’s because the power they wield is more intoxicating than any relief that any woman willing or not could ever give that man. And this power high was positively reinforced by other men and a society that allowed powerful men to use that power to silence women but it was also negatively reinforced by women’s silence as well.
The argument is strong for why women generally stay silent. I will not speak for any other woman. In my own experience of being on the receiving end of unwanted sexual acts, I personally did not cry foul. Aside from feelings of idiocy and fear, it was my word against American men. As an immigrant and as a woman, I had a strong feeling I would be told that I was ‘overreacting’ and though I had come to this country legally, anti-immigrant sentiment has long been stirring. I had no interest in opening that can of worms when that could be leveraged against me.
I didn’t want to cause trouble at my job. I was a struggling student. I needed the money and as an immigrant I could’ve sought work elsewhere yes but the time in between employment could have been a real blow I might not have recovered from.
And I hadn’t been outrightly raped.
That was my rationalization. In the grand scheme of things being touched and grabbed inappropriately seemed a minor thing to suffer when paying bills and keeping a roof over your head and being able to feed and clothe oneself is at stake. Now this is the part where some self righteous asshat does something like quote the good Dr. King and says, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy” or “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.
To those people, I say, unequivocally, fuck you.
I spent a good deal of my formative years being armed with a generally broad and comprehensive education, but it wasn’t like our teachers and professors at any time during my 21 years of schooling laid out a syllabus that included: ‘Managing the power dynamics and politics of the workplace in a western democracy where systemic misogyny means that even though you’re getting the same education as your male peers and your white female peers you will be paid approximately 63 cents on the dollar to your white male counterparts for the same education and work: overcoming these challenges in the modern economy’.
If that was a class anyone who reads this was able to sign up for during their elementary through tertiary education, by all means comment below and make known your experience with that. But for me no part of high school or college or university was ‘2:30pm – 3:45pm International Business Management 101 4:00pm – 5:15pm Navigating the Patriarchy post 2010′. So that aside, I made a decision millions of disadvantaged people make every day: lose this battle.
Maybe one day I make it to the reckoning’. Every person who stands down in the face of injustice isn’t just telling themselves “well, this is just the way things are” they’re also secretly hoping that they get walloped with the kind of good fortune that allows them to confront and maybe effect actual change so that others don’t have to endure the things they once endured.
We live in a very polarized time right now where even things that are not black and white have to somehow become either because there is no room for grey areas. The same breath that says ‘Oprah and Meryl Streep knew’ must acknowledge that if they didn’t bite their tongues for long enough they would not have become the mega forces in their respective industries capable of giving a voice to this all right now. I can’t imagine what women in positions of power now had to endure to get to where they are. I can’t imagine how much morally grey ground they had to cover and how often they directly or indirectly crossed that line from passive to active participation in the problem itself.
Again, I cant speak for these women. I don’t know their specific experiences. For myself, I know that even if I did speak up, the machine that I would be confronting would ensure that there was no way that I could say it fast enough or loud enough that it would matter. The current atmosphere has emboldened nobodies like me and I’m grateful. Silence has also been normalized by entire institutions. The Roman Catholic Church anyone? Penn State? The USA Gymnastics Board? Hitler was only one man. The only power he had was that given to him by millions who supported and believed as he believed.
Why it always takes the breaking of a dam for the collective who’ve allowed these transgressions to go unpunished for decades before anyone goes ‘yeah, that was our bad’ is something I cant unpack. I honestly cannot. I’m sure if Sandusky’s first accuser was Joe Paterno’s son, he wouldn’t have had decades to do the damage he did. If Larry Nassar’s first accuser to report the issue to the gymnastics board all the way back in the late 90’s was the daughter of some VIP, his death warrant would have been signed then instead of now.
And while, I’m all for dismantling any one sided approach to the power dynamic, the problem with letting the dam get to the point of breaching, is that that pendulum is inevitably going to swing back. The women’s marches, the slut walks, the ‘ The future is female’ T-Shirts….if men have been in charge this whole time and the state of the world being what it is and if we’re all so eager for change, then the feminist movement has to concede a few things in the demand for change at a systemic level. The premise of feminism is that we are all fundamentally equal and should therefore be treated as such. Are there degrees to this? Absolutely. A 5 ft 2” 115 lbs female soldier and a 6ft 5” 280lbs male navy seal are equal in their human value but they re not equal in their capabilities. The premise of the value of human life is our humanity hence the basic push for a foundation of equality.
If men and women are equal and if the gender spectrum is broader than the long held male/female dichotomy then in terms of sex (femmes, non-binary, the list goes on), if so many of us are for this equality, why has this culture of misogyny and sexual impropriety thrived for as long as it has? Some cite the fact that many were unaware of how widespread and systemic the problem was. The problem is that the current onslaught of rooting out the evil that gave birth to the monster is not taking into account that Al Franken and Harvey Weinstein are not the same. For one, at least one of these men takes responsibility for his actions and acts accordingly while the other outrightly denies it. The same way there are degrees for the worst transgression (murder? Anyone?) we have to agree that what Louis C.K has been accused of is a lesser offense than say, what Bill Cosby has been accused of. The light being shone on the pain that all these women were subjected to is not diminished by that fact and yes all their experiences are valid and the culture that allows for any of this behavior must be uprooted and removed from our society if equality and justice are things we truly want to strive for.
But
We must be careful not to lump in idiots with truly perverse men. For example, recently Matt Damon ( who gained Hollywood fame and fortune working for Weinstein) suffered from saying the right thing, in the wrong way, at the wrong time and being the wrong person saying it. A straight white Man in a position of power who has on occasion displayed prickly (at best) attitudes towards women as someone with some clout in Hollywood is the last person anyone wants to hear it from. Imagine Daniel Pantaleo trying to wax poetic on the degrees of reasonable suspicion and the reasoning behind using excessive force to Esaw Garner. No. Just, no.
There’s a lot to unpack here. For instance, and I know I’m horrible for saying it, but a lot of the accused men share a similar aesthetic. No one has come forward accusing Brad Pitt or Chris Evans or Ryan Gosling. Are beautiful men immune to bad behavior? No. But I’m guessing Bradley Cooper and Idris Elba don’t suffer from any kind of sexual deficit and being insanely physically attractive wields its own kind of power. It’s as if the fugly bullied kids are wreaking havoc with their powers as powerful men now. The U.S.S Callister anyone? I’m just saying.
And then there is the problematic business of the claims lobbed against Aziz Anzari which shows that aside from speaking up, and men not being sure how consent works 100% of the time, women it seems are unsure how sexual harassment works. You can read the article she wrote here which describes an awkward and uncomfortable sexual encounter with someone not too keen on how to read physical chemistry and while that makes him a dolt, it does not make him a predator or an abuser.
Having read the account detailed in the Babe.net article was, for me personally, problematic for several reasons. First, the reason she shared her experience which happened in September of 2017 was that, in light of the explosion of the ‘MeToo’ movement and the concurrent ‘TimesUp’ effort touted at the Golden Globe awards, she felt triggered.
Seeing Mr. Ansari wearing a ‘TimesUp’ pin pushed her hemming and hawing over whether what she experienced was assault or not, past the point of remaining silent. She felt compelled to rather explicitly outline and document her experience anonymously.
Reading that piece of writing, a few things stand out. One, as far as what she describes, as a young female photographer, residing in Brooklyn she wasn’t actively working with or pursuing a professional relationship with Ansari. Now, mind you while access to someone like him might mean access to the spaces and persons that would allow her to further her career, the fact that she had gotten his number in the first place meant she had some degree of access to those opportunities already.
She vaguely outlines the flirtatious exchanges they had before going on a date in New York City. The nature of those texts are not revealed at all besides being flirtatious. They were flirtatious enough to warrant a first date, which started with dinner at a restaurant. By her account there was no inappropriate behavior then but that she felt rushed and while she did not enjoy dinner, when he suggested going back to his place, she said yes.
This is the first instance that tells me there is more that she failed to disclose. This man had not threatened her by her account. They were not professionally involved by her account. As a woman who has had bad dates, by the end of dinner I often have the go to fail safe of either ” I don’t feel so good. I’m going to call it a night but thanks so much for dinner. I’ll call you soon.” Or even the Sex and the City approved best friend fail safe where I excuse myself to the restroom, call my best girlfriend and tell her to call me in 10 minutes screaming and crying, claiming some emergency and therefore in either instance, hurt feelings are spared and I’m done with an unpleasant experience.
So while ‘Grace’ was already unhappy with dinner, she decided to go back with him to his apartment. Was she giving him another chance to be who she had flirtatiously texted? Was she hoping his demeanor would change? Was she trying to spare his feeling at the expense of her own comfort? She doesn’t say. She goes to his apartment and then the second, more disturbing claim is made. He offers her a drink as one does when invited to their home. He only had white wine. She preferred red but he only had white to offer. Now, as someone who was once forcible thrown against a bed, pinned downed and had a man shove his hand inside of me and cover my mouth with his other hand and only stopped when I pulled a Mike Tyson and drew blood when I bit his ear, while, as previously stated, there are degrees to all things, of all the things she explicitly outlines in describing “the worst night of her life” (her words directly, not mine) its hard for this woman to not come off as a woman who hoped a celebrity date would have gone as she planned and not how it did, like a spoiled millennial brat.
Maybe she wanted to be romanced more? Maybe the nature of her texts were completely misunderstood by him? ( after all intonation is impossible to translate via iMessage) she does not say. What becomes exceeding clear having read the article was that this woman failed at communicating clearly in the moment and was able to articulate and sort her thoughts and feeling on the encounter after the fact. She kept mentioning the non-verbal cues she kept trying to use to communicate her unease with his behavior, none of which included LEAVING. Per her account he never cornered her, threatened her, forced her or insinuated that if she didn’t acquiesce that he would do any of those things. In fact the account makes Ansari sound exactly as she described him: a horny man-boy, gleeful at his celebrity ability to pull hot young tail. However a lack of game and not being sexually suave and being a shit date does not make a man a criminally sexual deviant. Having no sexual game which based on his actions it sounds like Ansari sorely lacks any kind of romantic skill, is another issue entirely and is probably partially due to the epidemic of again women being silent. The same way faking an orgasm doesn’t buttress good male sexual skill, crying assault in what is a very grey colored account even from her point of view (the article is entirely from the point of view of ‘Grace’ and her friends) doesn’t much help the MeToo cause. The account is not black and white. She even admits so. More than anything it seems both she and Ansari were on a “celebrity date” just not the kind they had imagined.
Everyone I’ve spoken to who read this article has uniformly had the same response. ” it sounds like she had a bad date with a jerk who doesn’t know how to seduce a woman”, “if she was so uncomfortable why didn’t she leave? Why did she go back to his apartment? This isn’t like Weinstein. He wasn’t holding sway over her career.” “He even apologized when she finally said something the next day. He got her an Uber. She had many options she chose not to use.”
I admit to feeling the same and being annoyed. A part of me is tempted to understand why she felt the way she did and why she decided to voice her concern over the experience when and how she did. Culturally women are conditioned to acquiesce. To be nice. To be soft. Anything other than that and you are automatically labeled a bitch which is often to our detriment. Maybe that’s why she didn’t leave. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t verbally and physically forceful in her dissent. Maybe she was concerned that he might bad mouth her, though he said and did nothing to suggest that. None of those things though, are Ansari’s fault. Those things speak to the larger cultural problem we have with gender roles and sexual politics and the roles gender play when navigating sexual interactions. The way men and women are taught to use their agency to both protect themselves and benefit themselves and their interests are things we could talk about for days especially when talking about society’s role in these things at a cultural and institutional level.
And yes while the argument that Ansari, as a public figure of some authority should be more sensitive to how others might be affected by his behavior and should be more informed therefore, on what is and isn’t appropriate is valid, in that same vein, saying that all men and women are created equal, as a child of this new millennium, ‘Grace’ should have made use of her agency, been more direct, verbally explicit, and backed her feelings of discomfort with proportionate action. She should have left. She should have said explicitly “I don’t mind hanging but I’m not fucking you. And if you do that gross and uncomfortable thing with your fingers one more time I’m leaving”. All would’ve been preferable to subjecting him to a full on Weinstein.
Failure to accurately call a thing by its name and to therefore treat it accordingly will shake the foundation of this new women’s movement. Bad enough that men see the empowering of women as the emasculating of men (as much a false equivalency as white America makes the empowering of any minority as something that happens to the detriment of white Americans). Hopefully we are able to remain objective and clear eyed so that we identify the root of the problem and stop new monsters from being made as opposed to making monsters where there are none. The same oversight that would have prevented Harvey Weinstein is critical to prevent the architects of this new women’s movement from becoming drunk with this new-found power and becoming new Harvey Weinstein’s themselves.
Justin Challenger 