You can't have real equality — certainly not income equality — for a group when it is subject to the whims of others because the latter will act because of their own interests, not principles. That's a fundamental lesson from the current backlash against sexual harassment and assault in work environments.
Companies ignored or covered the actions of people like Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and so many others because of value calculations. The big names were big rainmakers who brought in massive amounts of hit movies, audience, and advertising revenue. They were the cash cows that executives didn't want to disturb. The women in question weren't as valuable in corporate or executive eyes, so they were sacrificed in back room deals. Those who resisted often faced organized campaigns to destroy their reputations and careers.
Much of the attention has been on entertainment and media. However, only a fool would think that other industries and sectors haven't harbored such ugly events and actions.
Politics has been a source of sexual scandals in the United States since at least the 1770s (including Alexander Hamilton). Often the story has been one of affairs, but sexual harassment and assault claims have been many.
Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), and Rep John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) are all out of office. Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-NV) and Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) still have their jobs but face pressure to leave. Donald Trump was voted into office with a scandal dogging him and Roy Moore might be elected to the Senate with multiple claims that he seemed unnaturally interested in dating younger teenagers when he was in his 30s.
I've seen many people, both in major media, on social media, and in my own circles, argue that these cases are significantly different. Some on the left say that Franken was railroaded and that, while vulgar, he didn't do anything all that terrible. Some go so far to say that some of the claims may have been manufactured as a form of political assassination, and that he's been an effective senator and shouldn't be forced out. Plus, everyone knows what USO shows are like. (No, actually they don't.)
There are those on the right who claim that the evidence facing Moore has been manufactured, that he's been an upstanding person for many years, and it's too important to have a conservative voice in the Senate and not to cut the existing GOP majority at all.
There are also many Democrats who say Franken must go and Republicans who will not support Moore, But these groups are split. To some, the issue is one of principle and recognition that at some point your interests must give way to principles you claim as guiding lights. There are also the ones on both side ready to sacrifice their own out of political expediency, who act in reaction to impractical baggage, not in response to a sense of wrong. (The Republican National Committee's decision first to pull funding from Moore's campaign and then to reinstate it was a particularly egregious example.)
Stand outside the presumed strict political duopoly and you can see similarities in both sides. Not in the scale of accusations toward Moore and Franken; they differ significantly — and heaven forbid I evoke the knee-jerk "false equivalencies" line that so many have learned to use in their haste to bat away any criticism of their team.
Similarities lie in the nature of responses from Democrats, Republicans, and many corporations in their handling of sexual harassment and assault claims against those powerful cash cows.
As countless others have pointed out, sexual harassment and assault aren't strictly about sex. Someone wealthy, desperate, and unwanted could always go pay for his or her favorite form of relief. Harassment and abuse are a sexual expression of power. These creatures who prey on women (and men, not to forget them) want to impose their nature on those less powerful. They have obtained some importance acknowledged by others and now think they deserve the license to act in whatever way they want, whether that is propositioning a teenager 16 years or more their junior or patting the gluteus maximus of some neighboring comely young individual and then gleefully getting away with it.
However, the enablers — those who protect or at least turn away from the perpetrators — have a completely different motivation. They run a company that depended on the money associated with the person or had a career that the offender could aid or deter or, as screenwriter Scott Rosenberg wrote about his time with Weinstein:
As the old joke goes:
We needed the eggs.Okay, maybe we didn’t NEED them.
But we really, really, really, really LIKED them eggs.
So we were willing to overlook what the Golden Goose was up to, in the murky shadows behind the barn…
Women and men have been sacrificed — and that's exactly what it was and is, a sacrifice of opportunity and talent and personal future and dignity as well as outright personal violation — because, in the end, those in charge or operating in subordinate positions were too afraid of what they themselves might lose by standing up for what was right.
The results are commercial transactions that traded in the well-being and humanity of those who never asked to be put in terrible positions and took no part in a bargain. The victims frequently have their lives torn up, go on to be punished in their occupations, and find themselves tossed to the side.
If you paid attention to the #MeToo responses in social media, you should be aware of the number of women, and smaller yet still significant number of men, ill-used. And in the news we've largely heard only of the higher profile cases, not of the so many more that happen in the dark where no one sees and apparently few are interested.
Those who assume that women make significantly less than men because of their choices of occupations and positions and time spent at work might try thinking differently. Realize that the issues of sexual harassment and assault at work, whether the job takes place on a movie set, in the halls of Congress, or at a restaurant or hotel or massive corporate office, take a toll. This is a form of wealth transfer from the victims through the perpetrators to the many others who don't want to lose out.
The solution won't be "raising awareness." As the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr wrote in Moral Man and Immoral Society: "[W]hen collective power, whether in the form of imperialism or class domination, exploits weakness, it can never be dislodged unless power is raised against it."
Neibuhr could have added entitled organized groups as well. Good thoughts, prayers, and exhortations will do nothing, as history so frequently has shown. The form of power in this case is people who dare to call out the behaviors, drag them screaming into the light, and demand solutions without deferring to their own personal comforts and opportunities. Only in the insistence of a standard of what should bbe basic adult behavior will the protections of privilege loosen, offenders face stiff penalties, and others begin to realize that the old regimen will no longer serve.
