November 18, 2017
Our entire society has been buffeted by a blizzard of revelations of men who have sexually harassed and assaulted women with impunity. We have simultaneously been buried in an avalanche of lies; victims of a President and an entire executive branch unable and unwilling to tell the truth about any issue, large or small. Trump lies even when recordings, other people or his own words offer easy refutation. The result is that we live our lives in a state of vertigo, profoundly disoriented by the fact that so many in government lack any moral compass and that so many we revere have been revealed to be incapable of resisting the temptation to abuse the power we have given them.
In some corners, the credulous among us cling to faith in their dime-store magnate President. They choose to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he will look out for their interests. They choose to believe that policies that shred every aspect of the safety net and destroy every ladder of opportunity in this society, if combined with policies that weaponize antipathy to people of color, will magically restore their primacy in American society. Some of them even choose to dismiss the numerous women who testified of Roy Moore’s predation of underage girls. They have been conditioned by years of Republican propaganda to distrust august institutions like The Washington Post, which cited thirty sources for its article exposing Moore’s execrable behavior.
In other quarters, we vainly try to make distinctions among those accused of sexual harassment and assault, particularly when the perpetrator is someone we admire. We queasily recognize that our impulse to exculpate the gifted artist or the social justice champion is partially responsible for this behavior going unchecked for so long. We worry about a “backlash” or, that gendered term, a “hysterical” overreaction, We worry that powerful men will adopt the Mike Pence rule and simply shut down any contact with women outside of the office, making it even harder for the ambitious among us to build the informal networks so critical to success. Some of us fear that some worthy man’s career will be ruined by a false accusation, a real, but statistically remote possibility.
Fear and worry has some of us already doubting disclosures based on the identity of the accuser. We forget that it has scarcely been a month since The New York Times and The New Yorker brought down Harvey Weinstein. Reckoning with the pervasive toll of empowered toxic masculinity has been long in coming and it won’t be resolved by expedience or by silencing disfavored voices. Only by clearly viewing the problem will we see a path to the solution. The problem is the tendency of far too many powerful men to view women as nothing more than prey to be pursued; devoid of utility beyond our sexual attractiveness. The problem is an absurdly lopsided distribution of power, where women constitute only 19.4% of Congress and 7% of the directors of the top 250 Hollywood films (Source: “Study: Female Filmmakers Lost Ground in 2016,” by Gregg Kilday, The Hollywood Reporter, 1/12/17). The answer lies, not in silencing women, but in privileging our voices. The answer lies, not in accommodating fragile men who cannot distinguish between friendliness and seduction, but in empowering women. Look around us. We can’t possibly do any worse by putting women in charge.