by Richard King
The Harvey Weinstein affair cannot be brushed aside as the culture of the casting couch. It is not one more story from the Hollywood fiction factory. It must not be allowed to be another tawdry milestone. It must be the watershed.
Well, that's a win for The Guardian, I guess. For whatever else the Weinstein scandal tells us about our culture, there is no denying that it is "a watershed" of sorts – that the reaction to it has catalysed a particular way of doing politics (and, I would argue, further marginalised others). I still can't envisage a future tome entitled, oh, The Women's March: A History of the Struggle for Female Equality from Mary Wollstonecraft to the Harvey Weinstein Scandal. But I am beginning to see this moment as a significant one on the liberal/progressive side of the aisle.
Why has l'affaire Weinstein so captured the progressive mood? The answer, surely, can be given in three words: "Donald", "J.", and "Trump". Trump, the Pussy-Grabber in Chief, was not supposed to win the election, not least because of his taped admission to a busload of media boofheads and hangers-on that his fame afforded him pussy-grabbing privileges. But not only did he win the election, he won it against a very "qualified" woman, whose success was supposed to blaze a trail for women and girls the world over. The Women's March was in many ways an expression of profound frustration that a man with such regressive attitudes could win an election in 2016, and much of the commentary of the past ten months – from the characterisation of Bernie Sanders and his followers as "brogressives" and "brocialists" to the remarkable reaction to an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale – betrays a comparable exasperation. That is the essential difference between the Weinstein scandal and its analogues. It has come to light in the year of the Donald.
The thousands of acts of solidarity that comprise the #MeToo campaign, and the way the scandal has spread as a consequence to encompass yet more public figures, is thus a political phenomenon in a way that, say, the Cosby saga is not. And it is as a political phenomenon that I would like to critique it, not in the spirit of attempting to minimise the seriousness of the allegations made against the co-founder of Miramax, or any of his fellow harassers, but in the spirit of constructive analysis. To be clear, my aim is not to deplore, as some have, the "witch hunt" mentality of the commentators: quite apart from the inappropriateness of the metaphor (witch hunts were, more often than not, themselves misogynistic in nature, as was the anatomisation of the condition that is said to characterise them, "hysteria"), it isn't in my nature to argue for a calmer, more conciliatory politics. No: I want to take issue with the form and content of the politics on display – to analyse its character and its limitations. This is a watershed all right; but of what sort?
The first thing to note is that the current stage in the battle for sexual equality is focussed overwhelmingly on the media, or on men who have high public profiles and are thus subject to the media maelstrom. This may seem like an incidental point, even a tautological one, for why would be talking about this stuff at all if the perpetrators weren't known to us in some way? But it raises the important question of whether or in what ways the lives of the rich and famous can be taken as a paradigm for the lives of the relatively poor and unknown. The Guardian's sister paper, The Observer, declared itself in no doubt on the matter. "Hollywood isn't a world apart," it op-eded at the height of the scandal; "it holds up a mirror to who we are." But in what sense is this true?
A very limited one, would be my response. For while the "power of stories" paradigm is perhaps inevitable in an age of celebrity and social media, and may be used to good effect, it is also clearly stacked in favour of those whose "stories" are, to some extent, already public property. Yes, the experiences of an Ashley Judd may resonate with those of the McDonalds staffer being felt up by her prick of a boss. But I can't quite see how "awareness" of those experiences benefits both parties equally. The assumption seems to be that the fallout from the first thing will illuminate the second one. ("When a movie star says #MeToo," says Time, "it becomes easier to believe the cook who's been quietly enduring for years.") But since the McDonalds manager doesn't depend for his position and power on his public image, calling him on his behaviour is not going to have the same effect as it does on a Louis C.K or a James Toback. It seems to me that the call-out model applies a thick layer of gloss over this distinction, assuming a connection between women and girls, regardless of their class and culture. Rather like Hillary Clinton's campaign, it posits a sort of "trickledown" model of female advancement/sexual equality.
Conferring its mantle of "Person of the Year" on what it calls "the silence breakers" – i.e. the women and men (mostly women) who have blown the whistle on the assorted scumbags exposed in the course of the #MeToo campaign –Time Magazine frames the Weinstein scandal in the following, decidedly trickledown, terms:
When movie stars don't know where to go, what hope is there for the rest of us? What hope is there for the janitor who's being harassed by a co-worker but remains silent out of fear she'll lose the job she needs to support her children? For the administrative assistant who repeatedly fends off a superior who won't take no for an answer? For the hotel housekeeper who never knows, as she goes about replacing towels and cleaning toilets, if a guest is going to corner her in a room she can't escape?
Solint's approach is to emphasise what she calls an "extreme version of masculinity", and I've no doubt such a thing exists. But I'm also convinced that a politics that regards this masculinity as something that can be separated from the power imbalance between, say, boss and worker – and I mean by that all bosses and all workers, of whatever sex or race or gender – is reductive and ultimately self-defeating. For surely it's that power imbalance that allows the extreme masculinity to thrive – to find an outlet in the material world of human bodies and inhuman conditions. It's no coincidence that O'Reilly, Ailes, Weinstein and their analogues stand accused, not just of sexual abuse, but also of workplace bullying more generally. Theirs was an abuse of power, after all, and that the power they abused was used to abuse others, in non-sexual ways, is hardly surprising. My point is not to minimise the misogyny on display in these cases. It is rather that in order to shrink the imbalance between men and women in the workplace we also need to shrink the imbalance between the positions in which they are, respectively, over- and under-represented in the workplace.
In a fascinating interview for The Hypocrite Reader, the writer and activist Yasmin Nair has this to say on the political uses of storytelling and "trauma" in progressive politics:
I can see [this sharing of personal stories] as having emerged as a response to a time and a discourse where all of that was actually erased. I get that! I get the historical reasons why people have been encouraged to reveal their trauma, I totally get it. In the US, for instance, until recently, women in marriages could not be raped, legally speaking. So I get the historical reasons why all of this is important, but it makes for shitty organising, and it makes for really shitty analysis.
Yes, the personal is political, but the political isn't personal, or cannot be reduced to such. Stories are important, certainly; but they do not translate seamlessly into change. I would add that I think the personal story, and certainly its celebration in the liberal prints, is itself, increasingly, the ideological projection of a class that retains its sense of moral outrage about certain kinds of inequality and injustice but has swallowed whole the late capitalist idea that it is only through the individual that progress – moral, economic – is made. Much is made – and rightly so – of the thousands of small acts of "solidarity" shown in the course of the #MeToo campaign, but that word, which used to describe an understanding that one's personal (and material) advancement was tied to the advancement of others, is going to ring very hollow indeed when we hear, as we surely will down the road, that employers have been checking the social media accounts of prospective employees for claims of workplace sexual harassment, and hiring (and not hiring) accordingly.
Harvey Weinstein is rich. He's also a bully. These facts have been known forever and a day. That he is now revealed as a sexual predator has led many to ask how he could have insinuated himself into the liberal Hollywood milieu, with its fundraisers and broadly tolerant atmos. And the answer they've given, more often than not, is that misogyny is no respecter of boundaries: it cuts across political lines. But a politics that still retained a notion of how class and class power shape society would have had nothing to do with such a man in the first place, nor, I imagine, him with it. Of course misogyny is everywhere, but some things facilitate it, make it worse, and the role of radical politics should be to make the things that make it worse better. The progressive class appears to think it can do that with "a conversation". I say it's living in the city of broken dreams.
*
Visit me at The Bloody Crossroads.