Sex, Consent, and the Dangers of "Misplaced Scale"

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

14 December 17

hirty-three years ago, Gayle Rubin, a cultural anthropologist and feminist activist, observed that, during certain times in history, humans tended to renegotiate the sexual order. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in England and the United States were such a period; the nineteen-fifties, when the popular imagination linked the threat of Communism to homosexuals, was another. In her still influential essay “Thinking Sex,” Rubin didn’t offer a hypothesis to explain why these periods called for a rearrangement in the sexual sphere, but she noted that they produced laws, institutions, and, most important, norms that governed sexuality for decades after.

It’s possible that we are living through such a period now. It is also possible that, like previous renegotiations, this one has been brought on by the fear of a world careening out of control. “The time has come to think about sex,” Rubin wrote in the opening lines of “Thinking Sex.” “To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.” Fast-forward to 2017: we are living with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, but we seem to be spending significantly more time discussing the sexual misbehavior of a growing number of prominent men than talking about North Korea or climate change.

Rubin did not expect good things to come from the renegotiation of the sexual sphere. The problem, she wrote, was “the fallacy of misplaced scale”: sex loomed so large that any sexual transgression, or imagined transgression, might bring extreme punishment. She quoted Susan Sontag, who wrote that “everything pertaining to sex has been a ‘special case’ in our culture.”

Consider the case of the former Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey, who is scheduled to appear in federal court in Oklahoma City on Thursday to plead guilty to child trafficking. Shortey, who is thirty-five, married, and politically very conservative, was arrested in March in a motel room where he apparently planned to have sex with a seventeen-year-old boy whom he had met on Craigslist. They had negotiated sex for payment before coming to the motel. According to investigators, Shortey had been advertising for young men for a number of years, and had sent “commercial pornography” to some he had met online in exchange for naked pictures of them. The age of consent in Oklahoma is sixteen, and all the teen-agers involved were at least that old. But federal laws on child pornography and child prostitution cover people under the age of eighteen, and “pornography” doesn’t necessarily mean pornography: any naked photo may be prosecutable, and “trafficking” doesn’t mean trafficking—no movement, capture, or pimping need occur. Because Shortey was facing prosecution for child trafficking and several counts of child pornography (every photo can be a separate crime), he was looking at life in prison. As a result of the plea deal, he will go to prison for at least ten years—for what appears to have been a series of entirely consensual encounters between legal adults. This is an example of “misplaced scale.”

Consider a very different example. Glenn Thrush, a White House reporter for the Times, was suspended in advance of the publication of a story, by Vox, that described multiple instances in which Thrush made sexual advances toward younger women. In one, he kissed a woman on the ear (at the time, the woman seemed to have shrugged it off); in another, there was a consensual but aborted sexual encounter. All of the incidents appear to have involved consumption of alcohol, none occurred in the workplace, and none involved force. None of the women reported to Thrush, who, as a reporter (then at Politico), was nobody’s boss. The Times announced that it was suspending Thrush because of accusations of “inappropriate sexual behavior.” This is another example of “misplaced scale”: employers do not normally appoint themselves arbiters of appropriate behavior outside the workplace. It is hard to imagine a non-sexual example of non-work-related behavior that would get a reporter preëmptively suspended in the absence of any crime or misdemeanor.

Rubin’s essay was written during a period now remembered as the “feminist sex wars.” The women’s movement had split into two camps: a less audible and less visible sexual-liberationist wing and a dominant wing that was highly, militantly suspicious of sex. The latter wing strove to tame and defang sex so that it would not contain even a hint of power.

The feminist sex wars raged largely unnoticed by the larger culture. The battles, though, concerned a lot of the issues directly relevant to the current moment of sexual renegotiation. One such issue is consent. One side argued that no consensual act should be punishable by either law or social sanction. The other side focussed on the limits of consent, arguing that consent was sometimes—or even most often—not entirely freely given, and that some things, like injury sustained during S & M sex, could not be the object of consent.

The idea that consent is irrelevant is clearly present in the Shortey case: the young men had reached the age of consent and had given their consent, but the federal government still views them as victims. The story on the basis of which Thrush was suspended muddies the waters on consent: one of the women has clearly said that she had consented to an encounter, and two others rejected Thrush’s advances, successfully withholding consent. Still, all the women are cast as victims—including the woman who clearly stated that she does not consider herself a victim.

The conversation we are having about sex began with incidents that involved clear coercion, intimidation, and violence. Paradoxically, it seems to have produced the sense that meaningful consent is elusive or perhaps even impossible. On Tuesday, the band Pinegrove announced that it was suspending its tour because its front man, Evan Stephens Hall, had been accused of sexual coercion. The details of that particular accusation are unclear. But, on the group’s Facebook page, Hall posted a statement that seemed to sum up his sense that women, at least when faced with a famous man, cannot make adult choices: “i have been flirtatious with fans and on a few occasions been intimate with people that i’ve met on tour. i’ve reached the conclusion now that that’s not ever appropriate—even if they initiate it. there will always be an unfair power dynamic at play in these situations and it’s not ok for me to ignore that.”

The timing of this current sexual renegotiation makes sense. Sex is one area where, it seems, we can change something. In this way, sex is different from a nuclear holocaust or a climate disaster. But, while we think we are moving forward, we may be willingly transporting ourselves back to a more sexually restrictive era, one that denied agency to women.

In the past, sexual laws and regulations have most often been strengthened in the name of protecting children. “For over a century, no tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to protect children,” Rubin wrote in 1984. Sometimes the children are symbolic: anti-gay crusades are almost invariably framed in terms of “saving the children”— not specific children, but just the children who have to share a country with queers. In the current American conversation, women are increasingly treated as children: defenseless, incapable of consent, always on the verge of being victimized. This should give us pause. Being infantilized has never worked out well for women.

The Fempire Strikes Back: #MeToo

By Ann Jones, TomDispatch

14 December 17

Sometimes I wonder what school I went to. I mean, I know perfectly well. I attended a place I never wanted to go: Yale. But when I was 17 years old, my parents -- and a familial urge to be upwardly mobile -- more than overwhelmed my personal and private desire to go elsewhere. So, in 1962, I ended up at that all-male college in New Haven, Connecticut, and, despite the education I received, much of which I genuinely enjoyed, I’ve regretted it ever since. It was that school’s particular version of all-maleness that did me in -- an elite, powerful style of masculinity that I found painful and eerily shameful even then (though men, or boys pretending to be men, didn’t admit to such feelings in those years or, until recently, in these).

I’ll never forget the bravado, the grim over-the-top bragging about what you had done to women. I remember, for instance, my roommate, a rare working-class kid at Yale in those years who had absorbed the ethos of the place, returning from spring break and shouting -- I was in our room on maybe the third floor and could still hear him from the courtyard of our quad -- that he had done it, lost his virginity, including other grim details of his conquest. The bragging never seemed to end. I was, in those years, unbearably shy when it came to sex, or perhaps to my own lack of experience and pure ignorance about it, and repelled by the version of it that seemed to be the essence of that world of boys being oh-so-male. My only recourse -- the only one I could at least imagine then -- was to fall into an expressionless silence when the braggadocio began until I could figure out an excuse to leave the room. This, however, proved to be another kind of disaster, since it was more than once mistaken for experience, which meant, for instance, that my roommate would later pull me aside and confess that the “conquest” he had just spent the last day bragging about had actually been a total horror show.

I knew a little of his history before he blew his brains out 40-odd years later and he had, by then, turned into a Roy Moore-style predator, which I always blamed on the world we had both emerged from at Yale. I’ve never forgotten its style of masculinity or, in a way, recovered from it -- from the feeling, that is, that I wasn’t a man but just some sort of sorry failure.

While I did, in the end, go on to graduate school, I evidently didn’t go to the one that any number of the men of my generation and after seem to have attended -- you know, the one that, as TomDispatch regular Ann Jones explains today, taught you how “manly” and perfectly appropriate it was to enter a bathroom while a woman was in the next room and reappear naked to make grotesque sexual demands.

All I know is that now it’s somewhat easier, thanks to the bursting dam of news about the grotesque (and grotesquely repetitive) experiences that women have had with male predators, to see what that world of supposed maleness was all about and why it felt so shameful to me, even if I then thought that the fault, the lack, was all mine. We are now, it seems, in a different moment. However, let’s remember that, as Jones suggests today, sometimes such moments -- take, for instance, that of the first black president of the United States -- aren’t followed by a kind of enlightenment but by the angriest of backlashes.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

The Fempire Strikes Back
#MeToo

irst, 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 (lesser) 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.

Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of several pioneering feminist books, including the classic Women Who Kill, Everyday Death, Next Time She’ll Be Dead, and with Susan Schechter a handbook for women who made the mistake of marrying predatory and violent men: When Love Goes Wrong. She is also the author of the Dispatch Book They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars -- the Untold Story.

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