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In the past few months, our understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment has been put under considerable strain.
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We must hope the newly proposed Hollywood-led US Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, to be chaired by Anita Hill (who brought charges of harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991), is more effective. Ironically, in the light of recent developments, it also noted that a ‘moral complaints bureau’ had been set up by the Screen Actors’ Guild to deal with ‘casting couch complaints’. It destroys the mind’s capacity for reverie.Īs far back as 1984, in their pamphlet Sexual Harassment at Work, the National Council for Civil Liberties – the antecedent of Liberty – described harassment as an ‘intentional assault on an individual’s innermost privacy’. Harassment is always a sexual demand, but it also carries a more sinister and pathetic injunction: ‘You will think about me.’ Harassment brings mental life to a standstill. However scarred the modern city, it can be a place of relative freedom where a woman can muse and fantasise. The aim of harassment, this suggests, isn’t just to control women’s bodies but also to invade their minds. They were excited by her distress (one target of Weinstein’s advances said he was clearly roused by her fear). It wasn’t exactly that men could read her thoughts, but certainly she felt that they were picking up on her vulnerability, seizing their moment to probe an open wound. Vanessa Grigoriadis, a writer at the New York Times Magazine, had often been whistled at and cat-called as she walked through the city, but when researching her book on sexual harassment on campus in 2016, she noticed that men seemed to be stopping and harassing her even more than usual. It is just one facet of this ugly reality – one more thing to contend with – that while attention to violence against women may be sparked by anger and a desire for redress, it might also be feeding vicariously off the forms of perversion that fuel the violence in the first place.Īs feminists have long insisted, sexual harassment occurs whenever women find themselves in the vicinity of men in positions of power. The initiative is now seen as a costly failure the number of rapes recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo, on which their attention was focused, rose in the following year and hasn’t significantly decreased since. Remember the images of Angelina Jolie walking across the stage, hand outstretched to greet William Hague at their ‘summit’ on rape as a war crime in London in 2014? It struck me then that she was being offered as a trade-off or collateral damage in the effort to bring such violence to an end. This is just one reason why celebrations of the present moment as a historic breakthrough should be met with caution. Or being paraded across the red carpet on Oscar night. I couldn’t help feeling that the actresses were once again being asked to audition for their part.
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More institutions and public figures were to follow – from news anchors and comedians to MPs, publishers, schoolteachers and Benedictine monks – but they had less screen potential.
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Pictures from the archive of Weinstein with one smiling actress after another, his arm proprietorially around various parts of their bodies, deepened the offence – and undermined scattered accounts of resistance to his behaviour, since everyone looked as if they were having such a good time. That of course is a pleasure on which the cinema industry thrives and which made these women vulnerable in the first place. A t the very least we need to ask why it took the fall of Harvey Weinstein to turn the sexual harassment of women into front page news, and whether the endless photo spreads of his female targets weren’t so much designed to provoke outrage or a cry for justice as to grant the voyeur his pleasure.