My Aunt Paula said, Read this. So, I read it. The article, by a libertarian-oriented writer, Claire Berlinski, is a subjectively phrased, yet thoughtful piece that owes more to Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis than she may have wanted us to know. I share Ms. Berlinski's concerns, of course, and it is why I quote Bill Maher's line, We men are now playing with five fouls.
I think what troubles Ms. Berlinski, and, frankly, me, too--pun intended--is that it is seemingly impossible to define boundaries when issues of sex and romance are hung up within too many interactions between men and women, whether in the workplace or any other human gatherings. To run words or a touch through an anti-discrimination or sexual harassment lens is to sometimes overcorrect, overshoot, and over interpret what has happened, and the years-later-remorse which Ms. Berlinski discusses is a very troubling phenomenon as it amounts to a denial of cultural due process--where culture changes and people have a hard time understanding how people behaved in a previous cultural environment; e.g. "Baby, It's Cold Outside" being a wonderfully illuminative example.
But I come back again and again to my jurisprudential mind: The purpose of legal policy is to determine who should hold the gun of abuse. Until the rise of sexual harassment lawsuits, it was men who held the gun of abuse, particularly men in superior hierarchical positions in the workplace. Now, with the #MeToo movement especially, we have handed the gun to the woman, often not in a power position in our still largely patriarchal society. We guys now have to live with the abuse, and maybe that is better, though, as Ms. Berlinski correctly makes the point over and over again, that is a powerful weapon ripe for abuse. Women can now destroy men's careers and lives in a ways that are profound in a society that requires one to earn a living--though, again, haven't women been telling us for ages how this sort of behavior from men has kept down women? Yes, and maybe it is time for us men and some women to acknowledge how sexual harassment and sexual hierarchies may sometimes play a role in holding down women from achieving economic independence and just and equal compensation. Not always, and not in a direct reductionist way, but it's out there.
Overall, Ms. Berlinski's article does not allow us to say, "Ah-ha! There is a solution to this conundrum!" No, at this particular point in time, there is not. At least not a clean solution. I think sex and romance make us all a bit crazy. I think Jesus had it right when, in the context of adultery and stoning of a woman who was in an adulterous relationship, he said, Who here will cast the first stone? I think Jesus was the first modern Western oriented thinker to see the cruelty in "slut-shaming." So, maybe the solution is that we gain more perspective about ourselves and others, and have more willingness to see past the Minnie Driver argument that "...there is no hierarchy of abuse," a remark from an otherwise thoughtful actress that lent itself to saying a joke made with sexual innuendo is the same thing as rape. I think, in fairness to Minnie Driver, what she was trying to say is that the cumulative effect which women receive from men is something we men, as a sex or gender, have little understanding of, and should be careful not to demand a set standard. For me, the more I thought about Ms. Driver's remarks, she was making the equivalent to Ellis Cose's brilliant book from the 1990s, "The Rage of a Privileged Class," where Cose pointed out how small slights can add up over time and frequency for middle-class African-Americans, and how white folks are simply not sufficiently sensitive to this phenomenon all too common in the modern African-American experience.
But having said all that, we ought to recognize the current state of social media tends toward the casting of mass amounts of stones in the form of emojis and tweets filled with invective and snark. So, I end with this: As Bette Davis memorably said in "All About Eve," "Fasten your seatbelts. It's gonna be a bumpy night." And, again, count me in as someone who thanks Ms. Berlinski for writing what she did, and Professor Kipnis, too. Their essays are part of deepening our cultural perspectives in this cultural moment.
