Women who don't trade some kind of
sexual access for money and power have often been penalized for our decision
not to put out. We lost good grades; we lost jobs; we lost opportunities. We
didn't do it, but we did witness other women doing it, and advancing themselves
thereby. I would have to have been blind in that senior-year creative writing
class not to recognize that the pretty but dumb blonde was doing something
other than pumping out depthless prose. Our leering lecher of an instructor,
who proudly announced to us that he wrote for Playboy¸ assigned an A
grade to this student whom he lathered with tender attentions he never showed
to the rest of us. We had to content ourselves with B and C grades from a
strutting rooster who apparently never bothered to read our work, never mind
critique it.
Graduate school was at least as corrupt
as Weinstein's Hollywood. The Indiana University South Bend Chancellor
H. Daniel Cohen responded to charges of sexual assault with, "Have you
ever noticed that almost all of the women who claim to be sexually harassed are
physically ugly?" The university had to work very hard to remove Cohen; he
had tenure.
Lower down the academic pecking order, a
graduate student who was the protégé of the most powerful professor in the
department pled guilty to child pornography charges. I was astounded when a
fellow grad student demanded that we all gather in support for the criminal. I
never received a similar email demanding that we support a grad student who
couldn't afford medical care or who was reliant on food banks.
Then there was the professor who all the
other professors knew assaulted any female graduate student alone with him for
more than five minutes. Somehow letting new graduate females know never to be
alone with this man was not information any professor felt conscious-bound to
share.
Academic Sodom includes willing female
participants. A fellow graduate student, who needed funding, said to me,
"I'm wearing this blouse today because I have an appointment with [a
powerful campus official] and I need cash." Did the blouse remain
buttoned? I preferred not to know. But she got the cash.
There was the story of the young
applicant who showed up for an interview for a tenure-track position and almost
immediately pushed apart the senior professor who interviewed her and his
long-term spouse. Yes, she got the job, and she also acquired the formerly
married professor. There was the ambitious grad student who allowed herself to
be seduced by a married senior professor, and then drove him to divorce and a
suicide attempt.
One might think that study of so serious
a matter as the Holocaust would require rectitude on the part of scholars. I
was told on one campus that the "go-to" person was Prof. X. I met
with her; I remember, only, her breasts and buttocks. She wore a tight, low-cut
blouse and a tight, slit, miniskirt. Wondering if I remembered her correctly,
and fairly, I just googled her name, a quarter century after our meeting. She's
now at an Ivy League school. In her official photo, she is wearing a low-cut
blouse and she is bending forward in a position that enhances her cleavage. Her
long hair flies about her face; perhaps she is standing over a wind machine.
Sex sells. A male friend who has held
powerful positions in international corporations assures me that such
experiences were part of daily life in the business world. Women sales
personnel, more than once, offered him sexual favors in exchange for large contracts.
And then there's the matter of false
accusations. One professor, a deeply compassionate, ethical, and giving person,
faced a fabricated charge of making the campus unsafe for Muslims. How? The
professor was openly homosexual. Given the accuser's religion, the university
walked on eggshells. Had a Christian student made a similar complaint about a
gay professor, the university would never even have met with that student. In
the Woke power structure, gay trumps Christian but Muslim trumps gay. And this
distribution of power by identity is another problem with Me Too.
"It's not about sex; it's about
power." We hear that often. And yet Me Too didn't adequately address male
victims of power abusers. For Weinstein, says Zelda
Perkins, a former employee, "Sex was an expression of power. He also
enjoyed eviscerating men with terrifying tirades. The more people who saw him
doing it, the better he liked it." Men can be victims, too. Any real
answer to sexual harassment will have to entail solutions for male victims of
abusive bosses.
The modern left doesn't just reject, it
works to dismantle traditional gender roles. Men are not to be chivalrous or
protective. Men are not to be socialized to regard their predatory urges as
something that must be recognized and restrained through a larger
civilizational narrative. Women are not to be modest or to proceed with
caution. Weinstein used these very attitudes in his manipulations. He ridiculed
any woman who objected to being alone with him in a hotel room. Perkins reports
"The first time I was left alone with him on an evening shift, he came
into the hotel room in his underpants. I was shocked. He said: 'Don't be so
prissy. If you're going to work for me you'll have to be less of a
prude.'"
It's somehow a "sexist" violation
to speak of men as predators, women as prey, and women's chastity as a valuable
commodity. The father who wants to have a chat with his daughter's date, and
demand that he bring his daughter home at a reasonable hour is condemned a dinosaur.
Women are supposed to be as sexually predatory as men. To warn young women
that, say, getting drunk at a frat party is a dangerous thing to do, is judged
as sexist. This rejection of traditional gender roles has rendered women and
girls much more vulnerable than those of us raised under more
"old-fashioned" standards.
At the same time that acknowledgement of
women's greater vulnerability is condemned as "sexist," media pumps
out images of female superheroes who solve their problems, in a traditionally
masculine way, by beating up their opponents. Any number of films depict petite
actresses, like Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, and Black Panther's
Dora Milaje, as being able to beat much larger males into submission. In real
life, female athletes are forced to compete with males like Lia Thomas who hold
obvious biological advantages, advantages that Woke demands we deny.
I saw betrayed female vulnerability in
my students. When I was a young, it was not just acceptable, it was expected,
for a girl to say "No" to any demand for sexual intercourse before
marriage. From what my students reported, nowadays it is much more difficult
for a girl to say no to immediate demands, including humiliating group sex or
sadomasochistic acts in which the girl is physically endangered. Female
students reported depressions, abortions, and suicidal thoughts inspired by the
delusion, "I thought he loved me."
It's a big, complicated mess. The Me Too
movement, at least as I was reading about it, in place of taking on these tough
questions, offered a simplistic "solution" of denouncing all men as
perpetrators of "rape culture," a confused image of women as both utterly
disempowered victims, and as genderless superheroes, and a demonization of male
sexuality, with a special focus on white men as being uniquely evil.
The mirror to demonization of men was
"Believe Women," the idea that women are blameless. Those victimized
by Ghislaine Maxwell would beg to differ. Harvey Weinstein, just like Jeffrey
Epstein, deputized
female enablers to facilitate his crimes. Not just lowly assistants but
powerful lawyer Lisa
Bloom, daughter of feminist champion Gloria Allred, worked for Weinstein. Attorney
Roberta Ann Kaplan, a Me Too activist, was implicated
in an attempt to discredit an accuser of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Why would Kaplan betray her fellow woman in this way? Kaplan is an activist for
same-sex marriage. Cuomo was a vocal proponent of same-sex marriage. Real-world
politics conflicted with loyalty to a victim of sexual harassment.
Me Too's "solutions" struck me
as doomed; inevitably they will crumble under a tidal wave of hormones. Women
want to be perceived as sexually alluring, and they work to gain power and
resources thereby. Women are protected, to the extent that they are, by
institutions like the church, the police, courts of law, and journalism, which
are dominated by men and a male sense of justice and protection – our supposed
enemies. Of course all these institutions are flawed, and have failed victims
repeatedly, but outside of these institutions, women and other vulnerable
people have virtually no protection at all, except vigilantism. The solution is
not to demonize institutions, but rather to improve them.
I also didn't want to see She Said because
I felt that Me Too had had its moment. It's not like the New York Times, crusading
journalists, or Hollywood actresses are hurting for attention. We live
in a world where any number of crises call out for cameras, screenplays, and
audiences. Where is the big-budget, awards-season movie, for example, about
women in Iran willing to risk their lives simply by removing their hijabs?
As I took my theater seat, I was ready
to criticize, not enjoy.
I loved She Said. I hung on every
scene. I never looked at my watch. I cried. I can't wait to see it again. She
Said is not for everybody. One male reviewer called it "overly earnest;"
another male reviewer called it "a
bore." I love earnestness. I was never bored. While watching, I
relived my own experiences of sexual harassment and assault and the decisions I
made to survive. I also relived my own attempts to research and write true,
important, but controversial stories, and the price I paid for doing so. I
understand why a couple of male reviewers could not relate, but I saw myself in
this movie.
She Said is a low-key film about two women
reporters chasing leads and checking facts. There are no gunshots, no
explosions, no dance numbers, no love scenes, no superheroes, no fabulous
costumes, and no laughs. There are no rape scenes, and you never see the face
of an actor depicting Harvey Weinstein. I loved both choices. I really don't
need, ever, to see another rape scene. Rather, She Said focuses on the
aftermath: how victims react in the initial moments after violation, and how
they piece their lives back together over the course of years. She Said offers,
alas, no quick fixes. She Said is a tightly focused film. It never
strays from its two main characters. It makes no attempt to address the big
questions I asked, above, about "Me Too."
There's a good reason for the film's
tight focus. In an interview, Jodi Kantor said, "There are three questions
about Me Too that remain totally unresolved. One is, what is the scope of the
behaviors under scrutiny? Are we only talking about really severe cases of
sexual assault, rape? Or is this about bad dates? Second of all, how do we get
the facts right? How do we get to the bottom of what really happened? What kind
of information do we trust and not trust? And the third is, what do punishment
and accountability look like? And all three of those questions are really
controversial. The contribution that we can make is that we are journalists,
and you can't solve a problem you can't see." When it comes to the motto,
"Believe women," Twohey says, "If your mother tells you she
loves you, check it out."
Jodi Kantor's drive to find the truth is
inspired by her personal history. "I grew up around people with numbers on
their arms. My grandparents are Holocaust survivors. It led me to think about
the big questions we often ask in investigative journalism … You're always
trying to redeem what can be redeemed, to ask the big questions about how could
something like this have happened? What was the system? You know, what were the
mechanics? Why didn’t anybody try to stop it? How could people have thought
this was OK?" The same factors that inspired Kantor inspire me. I have
loved watching her in interviews and I was deeply moved by the cinematic
portrayal of Kantor in She Said. Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia Kazan,
plays Kantor with both feminine vulnerability and steely resolve. When she
cried onscreen, I cried with her.
She Said never depicts Kantor or Twohey as
glamorous or even especially daring. Their superpower is day-to-day grunt work.
They wear minimal make-up and low-budget, business casual attire. They chase
leads while making breakfast for their kids. Twohey is shown struggling with
post-partum depression, a condition that begins to lift when she returns to
journalism after a break. Kantor, who is, in real life, a "proud
member" of a Brooklyn synagogue, is shown around the table, with her
husband and children, honoring
the Sabbath. Kantor's and Twohey's husbands are shown cooking, taking care
of the kids, and, yes, feeling neglected.
I loved nerdy, drab, idealistic,
hardworking Twohey and Kantor as I have loved few Hollywood heroines. I could
identify with them in a way that I could never identify with more decorative or
frivolous leading ladies. Many reviewers compare She Said to other
journalism films like All the President's Men or Spotlight. She Said reminded
me of a 1977 Andrzej Wajda film, Man of Marble. In that film a crusading
female journalist struggles to uncover the fate of a naïve bricklayer
celebrated and then destroyed by Stalinism. I love onscreen heroines who work
hard to tell difficult but necessary stories.
She Said's victims are also not glamorous. The
Academy-Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow is important to the plot, but
though she is mentioned many times, especially by Weinstein, who is clearly
Paltrow-obsessed, she never appears. Rather, the film focuses on low-level
Weinstein victims I had never heard of.
In She Said's opening scene, a
carefree Irish girl strolls along a beach. She stumbles upon a film crew. They
are shooting a tall ship and sailors in eighteenth-century costume. You can see
the wonder in the girl's eyes, her sense of "Ooo, aaa." The film
crew, rather than shooing her off, gestures for her to enter this magical
world. She does. The next scene shows the horrified girl running down the
street, crying, grasping her clothes to her chest.
This girl is Laura Madden. Madden will
be played, later in the film, by Jennifer Ehle. As a naïve, 22-year-old Miramax
employee, she was, she says, assaulted by Weinstein. Another key victim is
another obscure underling, Rowena Chiu. Chiu was a recent Oxford graduate from
a traditional Chinese family, and a devout Christian. She was unworldly and
unprepared. "Just one thrust, and it will all be over," Chiu alleges
Weinstein said to her, as he overpowered her. When she tried to report the
assault, she says, authorities laughed in her face. "Who would ever
believe us over the most powerful man in Hollywood?"
Samantha Morton plays Weinstein
assistant Zelda Perkins. For fans of great acting, Morton's performance alone
is worth the price of admission. It is certainly award-worthy. Morton is
onscreen for a mere nine minutes, but she owns the screen for every second.
Zelda Perkins, Rowena Chiu, and Laura
Madden are not celebrity names. They were not famous, ambitious, glamorous
actresses. They were working girls, all in their early twenties. They were
groomed, isolated, manipulated, and overpowered by an obese, six-foot-tall sadist,
bully and "full
blown psychopath."
An extraordinary feature of so many of
these accounts is how not erotic they sound. Weinstein comes across as a
pathetic and desperate species of vermin. In some encounters, all he manages to
do is masturbate somewhere in the vicinity of a disgusted witness. He rolled in
dirt even as he was married to two beautiful women, wives by whom he fathered
daughters.
After assaults, when victims sought
justice, they confronted a machine honed to protect Weinstein. This machine
included former
intelligence officers. Weinstein's lawyers included Lanny Davis (Peter
Friedman) and Lisa Bloom (Anastasia Barzee). Bloom is the daughter of feminist
icon Gloria Allred. Lanny Davis was a Clinton family advisor. Manhattan
District Attorney Cyrus Vance, whose office
"argued on behalf of billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein," declined
to prosecute even after he received carefully police-prepared audio on
which Weinstein made self-incriminating statements. New York Governor Andrew
Cuomo ordered an investigation into Vance. Vance and Cuomo are both Democrats.
Vance may
have been influenced by financial contributions. Cuomo himself was accused
of sexual harassment of underlings. In short, Weinstein was at the center of a
spider web of corrupt power, and he was protected by the Democratic façade of
being the party for women's rights. Weinstein selected victims like Chiu,
Perkins, and Madden, young women in their twenties who didn't stand a chance
against the legal, political, and public relations juggernaut that supported
his abuse.
In She Said's most riveting
scene, Zelda Perkins outlines to Jodi Kantor the legal prison erected by Team
Weinstein. Actress Samantha Morton is chillingly effective in describing this
trap. Perkins and Chiu were coerced into signing a restrictive document that
they were not even allowed to possess. The document threatened dire
consequences if Chiu or Perkins even so much as sought therapy. Perkins, years
later, defied the NDA she wasn't even allowed to own and cooperated with Twohey
and Kantor.
The one celebrity actress who makes a
brief appearance in She Said is Ashley Judd. Judd plays herself in the
film. After much thought and prayer, Judd decides to go on the record, saying
that as "a woman and a Christian," she knows it is the right thing to
do. Laura Madden, facing breast cancer, also makes a last minute decision to go
on the record.
She Said celebrates men, as well as women, who
took a stand against Weinstein. Andre Braugher makes much of his small role as
editor Dean Baquet. Weinstein is a manipulative psychopath who causes lesser
people to crumble. Baquet, as played by Braugher, will have none of this. He
speaks, over the phone, to Weinstein in a dismissive way. Braugher's Baquet
refuses to be a bit player in Weinstein's histrionic drama. One wishes that
everyone handled bully Weinstein as Baquet is shown doing in this film.
Irwin Reiter was an accountant who
worked for Weinstein for twenty-eight years. Reiter and Kantor connected over
their shared Jewishness. Reiter is a son of Holocaust survivors. "Men in
positions like mine can and must help by exposing the sexual misconduct of
their peers, co-workers and bosses and ensuring that abusers are exposed and
held accountable … I know I should have publicly spoken up sooner … My daughter
Shari … insisted that I act. She made clear that it would be cowardly to remain
silent. She was right … Weinstein responded by trying to bully me into silence
with false accusations," Reiter wrote in the L.A.
Times. Weinstein's bullying of Reiter reveals that men, too, are
victims of serial abusers.
Reiter, as played by Zach Grenier, meets
with Kantor and provides her with damning evidence. Thanks to whistleblowers
like Reiter, Perkins, and Madden, Kantor and Twohey are able to publish their
Weinstein exposé. At roughly the same time, that is, October, 2017, The New
Yorker also published an expose by Ronan Farrow.
The real-life Zelda Perkins is on a
mission, and it is one of the few concrete suggestions to come out of Me Too
that strikes me as possibly proving effective. Non-disclosure agreements are
used extensively to silence victims of abuse. They aren't just used to silence
female abuse victims; they are used to silence males, as well. The Catholic
Church used NDAs with abuse survivors. In 2002, Catholic bishops forbade any
new NDAs. In 2018, the Catholic Church in New Jersey released
pre-2002 NDA signers. They were free to name their abusers.
Unfortunately, writes attorney Anne
Bachle Fifer, "NDAs are still common on the Protestant side. An NDA
featured prominently in the Ravi Zacharias scandal; a woman abused by him
settled a lawsuit in 2017 that included an NDA … his estate refused to release
her from the NDA, preventing her from participating in the subsequent
investigation into his widespread sexual abuse. [NDAs] can gag a party for life
… NDAs have been used by … Willow Creek, Mars Hill, Dave Ramsey Ministries,
Cru, and Acts 29 … many churches and ministries have NDAs in their employee
handbooks."
If NDAs were banned in abuse cases, that
might provide one concrete step to protecting young and naïve abuse victims
like Perkins and Chiu.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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