The Reckoning in Three Phases

Phase I of the Reckoning is over.

It began with Harvey Weinstein and ended with the Ford Motor Company.  It was three months of dizzying revelations that revealed the widespread presence of sexual harassment and abuse, a rarely acknowledged reality that women have endured for ages.

Every day new women came forward, speaking up, testifying about their experience.   Perpetrators were routed.  Those who had operated for decades under the safe cloak of entitlement were exposed.  It was a heady time, even thrilling, mostly because something remarkable had happened:  women were believed.

Finally, women could speak, tell their stories about male assault, and be believed.  Accusations were not reflexively met with the usual suspicion and contempt.  This time, for the first time, it wasn’t ‘all in our minds.’  We weren’t accused of ‘imagining it,’ ‘over-reacting’, ‘being too sensitive,’ or worse, ‘provoking the attacks.’   We finally got a taste of the standing men have enjoyed worldwide, a standing that’s based on possessing the simplest of values — credibility.

But only a taste.   Lest we get too giddy, it still takes several women’s testimony before any one individual woman’s accusations are taken seriously.   That’s progress I’ll embrace, considering that just three years ago, it took over fifty women to come forward before any one woman was believed in the Bill Cosby matter.

Phase II was predictable.   I clock its arrival with legendary film actress Catherine Deneuve’s public letter rebuking the #MeToo movement for overreach.  Deneuve and more than a hundred Frenchwomen denounced #MeToo for conflating clumsy, boorish flirting with sexual assault.  They asserted that the situation had gotten out of hand.   Accusations were flying too fast and furious with too little regard for scope and degree.  All male boorish behavior was being painted with the same broad brush.   The destruction of careers, reputations, and families was at stake.   It didn’t matter that just days later, Deneuve apologized and halfway recanted.   Her sentiments found an audience among a huge swath of American women who voiced similar concerns that things had gotten out of hand.   The status quo was reasserting itself.   This is what backlash looked like.

There was a lot of discussion about the reckless destruction of men’s lives.   But had any man’s life been irretrievably destroyed?   These calls for caution, these entreaties against overreach sounded a lot like…well, ah…overreach.  Calling men out for sexual assault is not equivalent to the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.  No man is being hauled to the guillotine.  It’s also not equivalent to a Salem witch-hunt.

In fact, try and name three men whose lives have been permanently destroyed, who have been arrested, charged, imprisoned, left flat broke, deserted by family and friends alike.  I can’t come up with one.   Even Harvey Weinstein, whose wife reportedly left him, has not been criminally charged with anything.   The Weinstein Company fired him.   And for now, he has gone away.   But it’s not inconceivable that after a suitable time away and a little self-flagellation — compliments of 20/20 or 60 Minutes — he’ll be back making movies.  Americans love a good turnaround story.

Powerful men don’t get destroyed so easily.   Even those men who have lost their jobs – like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose – may not have lost their careers.   Time will tell.   For now, they’ve simply been fired and ejected into gilded retirements.   And what about Louie C.K., a comedian/producer who admitted to inviting women up to his hotel room so that he could masturbate in front of them.   Just a few weeks ago (1/7/18), the New York Times reported that F/X concluded an internal investigation of Louie C.K. “and found no evidence of workplace misconduct.”  F/X’s statement read like cover for a future announcement about a new season of Louie.

And now we arrive at Phase III which may end up being the most consequential part of this Reckoning.  I mark its arrival with the Aziz Ansari-date-gone-wrong story.   While at the 2017 Emmy Awards After-Party, Ansari met a young woman.  They flirted, exchanged numbers and later set up a first date.  The details of their date-gone-wrong are well-known so there’s no need to rehash them.   Suffice it to say that expectations about sex by both parties were not aligned.   They both performed some clumsy iteration of oral sex.   But when Ansari wanted to go farther, she did not.   Despite her protestations both verbal and non-verbal, Ansari would not stop pressuring her for intercourse.   So she left his apartment, ending the date abruptly.  Ansari does not dispute her version of the story.  He even expressed contriteness.

So in Phase III, the subject has shifted, or rather expanded, from rape to dating.  If we are willing to examine sexual coercion – and the common place it has in dating culture — all sorts of questions arise.

Do the attitudes that allowed Weinstein et al to get away with their behavior suddenly stop at the door of consensual relations?   Or do more difficult-to-name versions of those attitudes seep into consensual relations between men and women?

How consensual is consensual if the social stage upon which women and men date is tilted toward male sexual entitlement?

I have a platonic friend who once explained to me that if sex didn’t happen by the third date, he’d probably move on.   And he wasn’t looking for just a hook-up.   He wanted a serious relationship.  The buried assumption was that his available dating pool could provide sex within three dates, usually fewer.   He can ‘move on’ because he knows there are plenty of women out there who will comply.  Women know this too.   And those who don’t think this knowledge pressures women into having sex before they want it are fooling themselves.

If you perform sex because it’s the only way to secure the interest of a potential partner, then you are not a free agent, but an object of someone else’s free agency.

The cultural context in which men and women interact remains distorted by long-standing, normative inequities.  So the terms of dating are played out in a sexual culture that prioritizes male pleasure and female compliance.  Daring to question this orthodoxy risks not just ridicule (of prudery) but also ejection from the dating world.

Phase III involves shining a light on sexual coercion.  I hope we have the stamina and the curiosity to remain in this phase long enough to examine some hard truths about putative consent.  They’re worth looking at if we’re genuinely committed to equal rights within the intimate sphere, a place where the sexes come with so much hope and trepidation.

Men and women want and need each other even though sometimes it doesn’t look that way.   We come together risking our tender hearts, yearning for comfort, understanding, security, pleasure.   Sometimes we even create a family and share the epic responsibility of launching the next generation.   Dating is the stage on which this drama begins.  Maybe it’s time to explore if sex might be the destination of a relationship and not the currency to get into one.