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shadowkatThe Me#Too Movement has raised some interesting and disturbing societal problems...which I've always been aware of, and had resigned myself to long ago. But never really thought too hard about or addressed.
I was reading a review of The Tale -- which is a memoir about a child rape. What jumped out at me while reading the review, and what apparently upset the reviewer is this:
Now, as a child, I remember running into various dangerous situations that I barely avoided.
A group of guys getting stoned in the creek across from where we lived reading and enjoying child pornography. We, me and my friends, actually went in to find out what they were reading -- we were curious. We were no more than 10 or 11 at the time. I didn't confront them, my two friends did -- and they ran. We met up later, looked at the mags, freaked out and left them in the creek. I went home and conveyed the story to my mother -- because I was scared and my Mom was my safe place. (I was lucky, neither of my friends felt that way about their mothers.) My mother, as a result, went out into the street and picked up all the magazines she could find and put them in a garbage can. It took her two hours. Then she told my Dad that they needed to move out of this neighborhood as soon as possible. (About a year later, we moved to another state, far away and not near any problems like this. Or so we thought.)
I had two teachers. One was a math teacher, who was also the photographer for our swim team. He took pictures of us. I was a photogenic kid, not as much now, but then, very much so. And the man made me uncomfortable. I ended up having him as my math teacher in middle school -- when I was a teen. He made my uncomfortable then. I kept putting space between us. Once he told my mother that he felt he'd finally gotten my trust when I let him touch me once. I was horrible at math in school -- got C's and D's. Anyhow, I finally left his classes and graduated to the next level. That's when it came out that he'd been sexually molesting several of the kids he photographed, and taking nude photos of them. My mother asked me if he'd done anything to me, but to my knowledge nothing. I'd never let get that close. The other was a biology teacher, who I had one year, also in middle school, and about six years later -- I learned that he was molesting kids, mainly young girls, in the back of his van.
And, I remember seeing various films as a child -- depicting teen girls as sex objects or sexually aggressive.
Scale up a few years, and I'm in college. I go to England, twice. Both times, I'm sexually harassed by strange men, the first round we, the other women in the group and myself, are constantly harassed by white male construction workers who are ten years older than we are. We are 18-20 years of age. Every day, we have to pass through a guantlet of cat-calls, whistles, and groping. They'd moved up to groping the girls. Thinking it's just fun. I used to go out the door and take the long way around the building just to avoid them. Until one day I finally had it -- and confronted them, one took my wrist and tried to yank me towards him to force a kiss and a grope. I twisted his wrist and freed my hand and gave him the look of death. (I am six foot, and at that time around 165-170 pounds give or take, built a bit like a Viking, so I am intimidating. Also when I give a look of death, I convey that I will not only kick you in the balls, I will find a way to do maximum damage so you aren't walking for a week. You will hurt my friend. You will scream little whiny boy.) He backed off. And I told him that his behavior was rude and unnecessary. He nodded with an awkward smile and let me go. I heard them laughing at me later. About a week later, a friend of mine came to visit and she ripped me a new one for being rude to the poor construction workers. They are only flirting she said. And being polite. What's your deal? When I told her my story she handwaved it -- that's what guys do.
A year later, I came back to Britain, and this was in Wales. Everywhere I went, I had men come on to me. One guy I met on a bus, we went to a movie and he tried to stick his tongue down my ear. Another B&B owner, old enough to be my father, with a wife and grown children, came on to me on the Moors, and groped me, I pulled back and talked him out of it, I don't know what I said. I just said whatever came into my head and did not stop talking until I got out of his car, ran to the room I had, locked it, put a chair in front of it, and took a shower. The next morning I tried to check out without breakfast, but his wife insisted and what I was I to do. So I had it, and it sat like a lump as I raced to another local, far far away from that one. I hooked up with my brother, who sort of handwaved the whole thing. As did my mother to a degree. It happens. Not a big deal. Other's I told did the same. No one was shocked. It was typical.
Meanwhile, back in college, I started attending date-rape seminars as a journalist for the school paper. During one of them, the counselor, a male counselor, said something interesting that I've never forgotten...the exact phrasing my be off, but the gist is this: "A man can't be a true feminist and every man is a potential rapist. We all have that in us. We all have the ability to go down that road." I remember questioning him on it at the time. Because I was raised with a progressive father and brother, who did not objectify women and steered clear of it or the temptation to do so. But, he said, in his experience the potential was always there and our society excused, enabled, and in some respects encouraged it. I did not want to think what he said was true, but... We were having the seminars because there'd been an outbreak of rapes on campus. Women were given a black rape whistle, just women, freshmen year. I still have mine. One out of Five of every friend I had in college had been date-raped, molested, or in a situation in which they barely escaped it. Most in fraternities while drunk. They never reported it -- how could they? Who would have believed them?
Scale up a few years to law school. I had been doing Domestic Violence Coalition for a few years by then, and in each case it was made clear that we had to use specific language and wording to avoid running into a problem with the Missouri Constitutional Law Books. In Missouri -- under the old property law, a woman is the property of her husband. He can do with her as he pleases. It was hard to argue against this horribly outdated law. Think about that for a minute. Men put that law in place. And women let them do it.
In law school, I took Litigation and we did a rape case. I played both the counselor for the defense and the victim. I found it gut-wrenching and painful. The professor told us he'd picked this case for the moot trails because it shows how difficult it is to fight a case when the evidence is not present or clear. In most rape cases, the victim is put on trial. OR has been up until recently. And our media and society up until recently pushed the perspective that the woman or victim is lying, or manipulating it for their own gain. This perspective has been pushed in television shows, books, movies, and music for well over four decades. David Mamet wrote a play in which the women claiming harassment is portrayed as the manipulator and villain. Women are shown in media as teases, as the aggressor. He was right -- when I did the case, it was a date-rape. We couldn't prove he raped the woman, it was her word against his. As a result, he got off to do it again, and again, and again. The system was set up to protect his rights, not hers.
Scale up a few more years, about five to six years ago. I'm doing the Vagina Monologues for Church. And as a group we go to another play, this one a musical, by the same writer, Eve Ensler. Emotional Creatures. And at the end of the play, they ask the audience something we had chosen not to ask -- "Please stand up if you have ever been sexually assaulted or raped?" About 50% of the audience stood. It was a sold out house, over a hundred people there. The next question was please stand up if you know anyone who has? The entire audience stood up. They've done this question in auditoriums with thousands in attendance, the same results.
And that brings us to another disturbing article, this one on Morgan Freeman. A journalist began researching the sexual harassment allegations against Freeman after how he'd treated her at a party, making her uncomfortable.
I thought after I read it how many times I've heard similar remarks at work. Seemingly innocuous. I mean I get this stuff all the time. Lando is notorious for his " off-color" remarks. And our society is founded on raunchy, and off-color humor. So, I don't know if she is over-reacting or not. And that disturbs me. The fact that I'm not sure and my immediate response is well this happens a lot. I don't think she is, though. And the fact that I experience this behavior daily and have my entire working life -- to the point that I've gotten used to it and give as good as I get, disturbs me.
And Freeman to be fair to Freeman is just another case of it. That generation and my own were raised to think this way. I'm thinking back over the John Hughes films that Molly Ringwald starred in -- in which she points out that she was made to feel uncomfortable at times, as were others. And how women were objectified in his films, and he was one of the better ones. If you look at most of the films made between 1910 and now, women are more often than not the sex symbols in them. They are usually thin, pretty, with nice curves. Men -- can be any body type on the planet. Women can't. The lines Freeman gave that journalist at the party, which made her uncomfortable, I've heard on television and film -- delivered as raunchy jokes.
It's not helping either gender -- hurts us both, I think. And it is learned behavior over time. Freeman obviously didn't think he was doing anything wrong and was just cracking a joke, like he'd seen others do on various occasions. Now, as to the rest of the allegations -- that's another story.
And what keeps popping out to me is the way our society handwaves it or excuses it, well that's what heterosexual guys do. Or why does it matter? We've always done it. And women do it too -- except women aren't in power. Women don't tend to rape men. It's a little hard to do it, I'm not saying it can't be done or never has been done, but you do have to really really really work hard at it. (Think of the scene in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fool for Love, where Buffy asks...how come he was able to get me? Spike states, well, love, you have to go find a weapon, I already have mine. She has to reach for a stake, he already has his fangs. It's like that.) We have different muscles. We think about sex differently. Women tend to need more than a visual while often for a guy, a visual is all that is required. Our anatomy isn't the same. I saw a post once on how women were rapists too and we shouldn't just be going after guys. And I thought you really are naive if you think that, and guess who has been drinking the kool-aid? No. Most of the men who have been raped, actually 90% of the men who have been raped have been raped by men. Women can molest and do it...and have. But not as easily or frequently. That argument doesn't help the situation. We live in a society that likes to deflect blame. Our leaders do it all the time.
Mom: You broke the vase.
Charlie: Yes, but Sally told me to do it.
or
Mom: You wrecked the car.
Charlie: You've done it too.
or
Mom: You broker my vase.
Charlier: Sally wrecked your car.
See? We don't take responsibility for our own actions, we deflect it. That's what people do in rape and sexual harassment cases. When the wife confronts her powerful Hollywood writer hubby on his actions in her blog, he responds, it's not my fault that there are so many attractive and aggressive women on my sets. What was I to do. I just couldn't help myself. And she's a bit nuts, I'm not saying anything else to protect the family.
Or, in date-rape case. "She didn't have to come to my room. Or she let me in to her apartment, what was I suppose to think."
And it works, I think, because...of what we want to believe. Not what is true. We don't want to believe the woman or the victim. And because we don't want to believe her -- he has all the power. We've given him that power. He didn't take it, that's the disturbing part, we as a society handed it to him, and it is up to us as a society to take it back, to remove it. And it's not going to be easy to do. Not easy at all. It means questioning what we like and how we perceive the world. And giving up things we may have once loved.
I was reading a review of The Tale -- which is a memoir about a child rape. What jumped out at me while reading the review, and what apparently upset the reviewer is this:
Teen girl sexuality is often packaged as a dangerous, irresistible elixir wielded by wiser-than-they-seem temptresses in bikinis, lustily grooming themselves poolside. Coquettish. Precocious. It’s a putrid myth we’re taught about ourselves, that if in teenhood a man finds himself hopelessly attracted to us, the kernel of essential badness and transgression comes from us, not from him.
I’m so used to seeing — reading, hearing, knowing — that girlishness through hypnotized male eyes that I didn’t even blink at the early flashbacks of “The Tale,” as we see adult Jennifer (Laura Dern) remember being a 15-year-old Jenny (Jessica Sarah Flaum), taking horseback-riding lessons and basking in the attention of the seemingly fascinating teacher Mrs. G. (Elizabeth Debicki) and a local running coach, Bill (Jason Ritter).
But then the flashback cuts. No, says her mother (Ellen Burstyn). You were younger than that. She hands adult Jennifer a photo album. “That was 13,” she says, tapping a photo.
Now, as a child, I remember running into various dangerous situations that I barely avoided.
A group of guys getting stoned in the creek across from where we lived reading and enjoying child pornography. We, me and my friends, actually went in to find out what they were reading -- we were curious. We were no more than 10 or 11 at the time. I didn't confront them, my two friends did -- and they ran. We met up later, looked at the mags, freaked out and left them in the creek. I went home and conveyed the story to my mother -- because I was scared and my Mom was my safe place. (I was lucky, neither of my friends felt that way about their mothers.) My mother, as a result, went out into the street and picked up all the magazines she could find and put them in a garbage can. It took her two hours. Then she told my Dad that they needed to move out of this neighborhood as soon as possible. (About a year later, we moved to another state, far away and not near any problems like this. Or so we thought.)
I had two teachers. One was a math teacher, who was also the photographer for our swim team. He took pictures of us. I was a photogenic kid, not as much now, but then, very much so. And the man made me uncomfortable. I ended up having him as my math teacher in middle school -- when I was a teen. He made my uncomfortable then. I kept putting space between us. Once he told my mother that he felt he'd finally gotten my trust when I let him touch me once. I was horrible at math in school -- got C's and D's. Anyhow, I finally left his classes and graduated to the next level. That's when it came out that he'd been sexually molesting several of the kids he photographed, and taking nude photos of them. My mother asked me if he'd done anything to me, but to my knowledge nothing. I'd never let get that close. The other was a biology teacher, who I had one year, also in middle school, and about six years later -- I learned that he was molesting kids, mainly young girls, in the back of his van.
And, I remember seeing various films as a child -- depicting teen girls as sex objects or sexually aggressive.
Scale up a few years, and I'm in college. I go to England, twice. Both times, I'm sexually harassed by strange men, the first round we, the other women in the group and myself, are constantly harassed by white male construction workers who are ten years older than we are. We are 18-20 years of age. Every day, we have to pass through a guantlet of cat-calls, whistles, and groping. They'd moved up to groping the girls. Thinking it's just fun. I used to go out the door and take the long way around the building just to avoid them. Until one day I finally had it -- and confronted them, one took my wrist and tried to yank me towards him to force a kiss and a grope. I twisted his wrist and freed my hand and gave him the look of death. (I am six foot, and at that time around 165-170 pounds give or take, built a bit like a Viking, so I am intimidating. Also when I give a look of death, I convey that I will not only kick you in the balls, I will find a way to do maximum damage so you aren't walking for a week. You will hurt my friend. You will scream little whiny boy.) He backed off. And I told him that his behavior was rude and unnecessary. He nodded with an awkward smile and let me go. I heard them laughing at me later. About a week later, a friend of mine came to visit and she ripped me a new one for being rude to the poor construction workers. They are only flirting she said. And being polite. What's your deal? When I told her my story she handwaved it -- that's what guys do.
A year later, I came back to Britain, and this was in Wales. Everywhere I went, I had men come on to me. One guy I met on a bus, we went to a movie and he tried to stick his tongue down my ear. Another B&B owner, old enough to be my father, with a wife and grown children, came on to me on the Moors, and groped me, I pulled back and talked him out of it, I don't know what I said. I just said whatever came into my head and did not stop talking until I got out of his car, ran to the room I had, locked it, put a chair in front of it, and took a shower. The next morning I tried to check out without breakfast, but his wife insisted and what I was I to do. So I had it, and it sat like a lump as I raced to another local, far far away from that one. I hooked up with my brother, who sort of handwaved the whole thing. As did my mother to a degree. It happens. Not a big deal. Other's I told did the same. No one was shocked. It was typical.
Meanwhile, back in college, I started attending date-rape seminars as a journalist for the school paper. During one of them, the counselor, a male counselor, said something interesting that I've never forgotten...the exact phrasing my be off, but the gist is this: "A man can't be a true feminist and every man is a potential rapist. We all have that in us. We all have the ability to go down that road." I remember questioning him on it at the time. Because I was raised with a progressive father and brother, who did not objectify women and steered clear of it or the temptation to do so. But, he said, in his experience the potential was always there and our society excused, enabled, and in some respects encouraged it. I did not want to think what he said was true, but... We were having the seminars because there'd been an outbreak of rapes on campus. Women were given a black rape whistle, just women, freshmen year. I still have mine. One out of Five of every friend I had in college had been date-raped, molested, or in a situation in which they barely escaped it. Most in fraternities while drunk. They never reported it -- how could they? Who would have believed them?
Scale up a few years to law school. I had been doing Domestic Violence Coalition for a few years by then, and in each case it was made clear that we had to use specific language and wording to avoid running into a problem with the Missouri Constitutional Law Books. In Missouri -- under the old property law, a woman is the property of her husband. He can do with her as he pleases. It was hard to argue against this horribly outdated law. Think about that for a minute. Men put that law in place. And women let them do it.
In law school, I took Litigation and we did a rape case. I played both the counselor for the defense and the victim. I found it gut-wrenching and painful. The professor told us he'd picked this case for the moot trails because it shows how difficult it is to fight a case when the evidence is not present or clear. In most rape cases, the victim is put on trial. OR has been up until recently. And our media and society up until recently pushed the perspective that the woman or victim is lying, or manipulating it for their own gain. This perspective has been pushed in television shows, books, movies, and music for well over four decades. David Mamet wrote a play in which the women claiming harassment is portrayed as the manipulator and villain. Women are shown in media as teases, as the aggressor. He was right -- when I did the case, it was a date-rape. We couldn't prove he raped the woman, it was her word against his. As a result, he got off to do it again, and again, and again. The system was set up to protect his rights, not hers.
Scale up a few more years, about five to six years ago. I'm doing the Vagina Monologues for Church. And as a group we go to another play, this one a musical, by the same writer, Eve Ensler. Emotional Creatures. And at the end of the play, they ask the audience something we had chosen not to ask -- "Please stand up if you have ever been sexually assaulted or raped?" About 50% of the audience stood. It was a sold out house, over a hundred people there. The next question was please stand up if you know anyone who has? The entire audience stood up. They've done this question in auditoriums with thousands in attendance, the same results.
And that brings us to another disturbing article, this one on Morgan Freeman. A journalist began researching the sexual harassment allegations against Freeman after how he'd treated her at a party, making her uncomfortable.
She had been sent to cover a publicity event last year for “Going in Style,” a film starring Mr. Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin. Ms. Melas, who was pregnant at the time with her son Leo, said that Mr. Freeman looked her up and down and made several remarks along the lines of “I wish I was there,” one of which was captured on video. She reported the incident to CNN, which then informed Warner Bros., the studio behind the film. Warner Bros., which like CNN is a division of Time Warner, responded later that it could not corroborate the account because only the one comment was recorded and other Warner Bros. employees said they had not seen anything.
I thought after I read it how many times I've heard similar remarks at work. Seemingly innocuous. I mean I get this stuff all the time. Lando is notorious for his " off-color" remarks. And our society is founded on raunchy, and off-color humor. So, I don't know if she is over-reacting or not. And that disturbs me. The fact that I'm not sure and my immediate response is well this happens a lot. I don't think she is, though. And the fact that I experience this behavior daily and have my entire working life -- to the point that I've gotten used to it and give as good as I get, disturbs me.
And Freeman to be fair to Freeman is just another case of it. That generation and my own were raised to think this way. I'm thinking back over the John Hughes films that Molly Ringwald starred in -- in which she points out that she was made to feel uncomfortable at times, as were others. And how women were objectified in his films, and he was one of the better ones. If you look at most of the films made between 1910 and now, women are more often than not the sex symbols in them. They are usually thin, pretty, with nice curves. Men -- can be any body type on the planet. Women can't. The lines Freeman gave that journalist at the party, which made her uncomfortable, I've heard on television and film -- delivered as raunchy jokes.
It's not helping either gender -- hurts us both, I think. And it is learned behavior over time. Freeman obviously didn't think he was doing anything wrong and was just cracking a joke, like he'd seen others do on various occasions. Now, as to the rest of the allegations -- that's another story.
And what keeps popping out to me is the way our society handwaves it or excuses it, well that's what heterosexual guys do. Or why does it matter? We've always done it. And women do it too -- except women aren't in power. Women don't tend to rape men. It's a little hard to do it, I'm not saying it can't be done or never has been done, but you do have to really really really work hard at it. (Think of the scene in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fool for Love, where Buffy asks...how come he was able to get me? Spike states, well, love, you have to go find a weapon, I already have mine. She has to reach for a stake, he already has his fangs. It's like that.) We have different muscles. We think about sex differently. Women tend to need more than a visual while often for a guy, a visual is all that is required. Our anatomy isn't the same. I saw a post once on how women were rapists too and we shouldn't just be going after guys. And I thought you really are naive if you think that, and guess who has been drinking the kool-aid? No. Most of the men who have been raped, actually 90% of the men who have been raped have been raped by men. Women can molest and do it...and have. But not as easily or frequently. That argument doesn't help the situation. We live in a society that likes to deflect blame. Our leaders do it all the time.
Mom: You broke the vase.
Charlie: Yes, but Sally told me to do it.
or
Mom: You wrecked the car.
Charlie: You've done it too.
or
Mom: You broker my vase.
Charlier: Sally wrecked your car.
See? We don't take responsibility for our own actions, we deflect it. That's what people do in rape and sexual harassment cases. When the wife confronts her powerful Hollywood writer hubby on his actions in her blog, he responds, it's not my fault that there are so many attractive and aggressive women on my sets. What was I to do. I just couldn't help myself. And she's a bit nuts, I'm not saying anything else to protect the family.
Or, in date-rape case. "She didn't have to come to my room. Or she let me in to her apartment, what was I suppose to think."
And it works, I think, because...of what we want to believe. Not what is true. We don't want to believe the woman or the victim. And because we don't want to believe her -- he has all the power. We've given him that power. He didn't take it, that's the disturbing part, we as a society handed it to him, and it is up to us as a society to take it back, to remove it. And it's not going to be easy to do. Not easy at all. It means questioning what we like and how we perceive the world. And giving up things we may have once loved.