Let’s not get out over our skis just yet.
This is a step, or maybe even several, in a non-negative direction.
We have an almost unimaginably long way to go before we’ll see ‘clean’, much less get there.
That said, the situation does incite some optimism.
Fiskars makes excellent pruning shears.
Just sayin’.
It’s almost as though patriarchy is actually a thing!
I’ve been waiting to hear Thomas mentioned.
High-tech lynching, my shiny white ass.
I’d be curious to hear Ms. Lewinsky’s thoughts.
There’s certainly no greater disparity of power than that between PotUS and an intern. I think her experience would be reasonably indicative of the larger trend of Bill’s behavior.
The only thing missing was a second woman. I am more comfortable with a pattern of sleazy behavior than with just 1. Like with Cosby - a lot of people were a little uncertain with the first one. But when the second, third, fourth, 30, 40, 50, it was clear that there was a serious problem. Thomas skated. I believed Anita.
" Thomas skated. I believed Anita."
I did too. That was when my mom, the nurse, told me that many doctors were self-entitled bastards with a penchant for leaving bruises on bottoms and breasts.
Apparently it wasn’t as bad in the 70s as the 60s, but it was more a distinction than a difference. Sometimes I wonder if that is why I chose a woman as my PCP before the turn of the century and haven’t changed.
Tom Cruise? Probably not. He might be the next Kevin Spacey.
Boy, I was thinking, “Wasn’t there a Hamilton Fish IV who was a congressman?” You know, not like this is the kind of name you’d generally give in a normal family.
Totally-- this is the congressman’s son. the Vth.
I know-- most guys aren’t abusers. But most guys need to make that more clear by calling out abusers and pointing at them and saying, “Shame! Stop that!”
And, uh, making the default assuming the woman might be honest, rather than assuming otherwise.
Will a credible, reputable liberal publisher PLEASE buy this magazine? Please?
Wow…this is almost like…men didn’t listen to women for DECADES and this behavior was just…accepted.
You’d think they’d have worked all the kinks out of the design by the time they got to the Mark V model.
I’m thinkin’ equal pay would please the little darlins
Correlation is not causation.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I think harassment isn’t a key ingredient in success, but rather success is a key ingredient in harassment.
Once someone has success and power, primal urges also have increased power over others. So the urges get played out…and nobody stops them, out of fear, because of that power.
I don’t think it’s the majority of men, but I do know it’s prevalent in a great number of situations, unless things have changed a great deal in the past few years. It doesn’t take a majority of men to make the behavior appallingly prevalent and almost unavoidable; it takes only one or a few in each case. My experiences were mostly in quite large organizations. If one posits that something like psychopaths are 4% of the average population, and higher in competitive (e.g. corporate) situations, you can figure on any largish organization having plenty of those seeded through it, so that for a women working there is something like walking through a minefield. I’m not saying that sexual harassers are psychopaths, but the stats may be somewhat similar, and probably overlapping. I have never been a specially attractive woman, just acceptable (cleaned up ok), and always carefully dressed and behaved modestly and professionally, so I can’t think I was a particular target. Smaller organizations may well be ok, just depending on the luck of the draw re the people on their staff. I’ll also note that often the women affected are very careful not to let these situations be known internally, lest their careers be destroyed; while the men may or may not mutually gloat about them. I’ve heard way, way too many stories from women over my lifetime to doubt it’s really prevalent. Your bosses being women is one element that may well help keep this behavior minimal in your organization; women in such organizations are lucky-- all they have to deal with then is the many other ways men (and sometimes other women) assert power and feed their greed. Men like you may never even know this stuff goes on, as you’ve seen many of Weinstein’s and other assaulters’ male colleagues assert that they knew nothing. I suppose some of them didn’t, some didn’t recognize it when they saw it or even when did it themselves (yep, that’s a thing too), and some simply turned an intentional blind eye, while some entered into the “fun”. I’ve seen all of these circumstances at one time/place or another.
Equal pay would empower the little darlin’s! The years and decades of knowledge that you will never catch up to what the male version gets paid… .if you do they’ll just raise his pay some more or lay you off and hire a greenhorn at higher pay yet… has a grinding effect on one’s confidence and self-esteem, not to mention one’s power to stare down that entitled male nincompoop who occupies the chair that YOU earned with blood, sweat, and tears. There’s a pervasive practice in the corporate world… never pay a new hire more than 10% over his/her pay from a previous job. That means that if you have been grossly underpaid due to gender in one job, you can virtually never ever catch up again. If it should (rarely) happen to a guy, you can bet they’ll find some way to fast track him to catch up. Not for a woman.
I have two sets of comments about this:
First, yes, you’re absolutely correct, and it’s not just males who are susceptible to this sort of power surging; I’ve known a number of women who also became addicted to this drive for power – in some cases including sexual exploitation of male subordinates and colleagues.
Second, there’s a yin/yang factor going here too: Power, even little bits of power, attracts groupies, who are only too eager to suck up and try to leech some of that power/glory for themselves. Any male certainly who gets elected to office, and the more so the higher the office, will have groupies hanging off every word and ambushing and trying to seduce him at every turn. A man in this situation who lacks strong self discipline and/or a different and powerful focus is very likely to get drawn into sexual encounters even if he doesn’t figure he’s entitled by his power to go for them anyway. He’s an idiot to do so (even HW has been outed now!) but there have certainly been plenty of idiots in that sense, proactive and reactive, in the White House. JFK got away with almost nonstop adultery because the press and his colleagues were complicit in keeping the cover on that information. (Gary Hart later shattered forever that kind of coalition.) And no spouse is going to have the 24/7 moment to moment influence to prevent it either, even if she could be there at his heels all the time; it just can’t be done; Jackie knew that and just rolled with the situation. The sex drive is the strongest drive in nature short of survival itself, so lots of luck finding any legitimacy in blaming the spouse for the hubby’s straying.
IMO short of unquestionably nonconsensual assault, the sexual behavior of our political figures needs to be relegated to the French style level of unimportant gossip, not relevant to political qualifications. I never saw the least sign that dear little (23-year-old!) intern feared or in the least tried to avoid her encounters with the Pres; far to the contrary. But it didn’t prevent her from exploiting it to the hilt later, and continuing to do so today, claiming that he “exploited” her. Riiight.
I know that many woman physicians want there to be no gender preference. As a patient, I prefer a physician of my gender. I am a guy. I have an issue on the nether portions (no more need being said). I was seeing my PCP, and mentioned that I wanted him to look at my southern quadrant (lotta euphemism for that section of the bod). I dropped trou, and he looked. Had it been a woman, I would have done the same, but it would have taken me longer to get to that point.
I work with physicians, and work with med students. The balance of ob-gyn is shifting to women. Were I a woman, I can’t imagine having a male ob-gyn. While professional behavior is the norm, you do wonder.
When one is pregnant in a small town there often is no choice, and once this barrier has been breached it becomes more or less a non-issue-- so long as the doc behaves professionally. In practice I detested the only two female docs I tried (one probably incompetent but at least didn’t care; the other slightly sadistic), and had only one disquieting experience with a male physician. At this point I probably slightly prefer a male doc based on my experiences. But then I hated public showers in my high school gym class too, so it isn’t much easier for me to disrobe for a woman than for a man.