Lately, I can’t seem to avoid reading about sexual harassment. Which I guess is kind of fair because for the first half of my life (so far) I heard the phrase maybe twice (in English, and once in Japanese, where the ever-global locals call it “seku haru.”) Not that the subject was never mentioned. On the contrary, it was a constant topic of conversation among women and girls, including but not limited to “The Talk” that most of the girls I knew got from their mothers (and sometimes their fathers) around age 11. It wasn’t just about harassment, of course; it was about not getting raped, and not losing one’s “reputation.” I don’t know whether my male age-mates ever got any comparable Talk from their parents, much less what it would have consisted of.
What I do know is that most of the discussions treated “The Problem” as something between a trivial annoyance and an occasional catastrophe, depending mostly on female ingenuity in handling it. People took for granted, usually with some humor, that male bosses might ardently pursue female employees, but that the employees could usually outsmart them, and often prided themselves on being able to do so. It was just part of the working world. It was a game. I don’t recall ever hearing about male teachers hitting on female students, though I did occasionally read about serious romantic relationships between adult male teachers and their more-or-less adult female students, like Abelard and Heloise, or Will and Ariel Durant. Those sounded really cool, but not the sort of thing I could ever expect to encounter.
I didn’t date much in high school, and had no trouble setting boundaries for “making out” on those occasional dates. College was something else altogether, but mostly involved a lot of the same female ingenuity that tv-show secretaries were always demonstrating. I was pretty good at it. Most of what I did was get very good at listening. If there is one thing adolescent males want from women more than sex, it’s listening. I found it educational. After a while, I went out of my way to hang out with guys who were studying, or even actually doing, stuff I found interesting. Since this was all pre-feminism, I figured that was the closest I was going to get to doing interesting stuff myself. So I dated business students, divinity students, medical students, techies, and musicians. Some of them liked to talk about sex. I treated it the same way I treated engineering, theology, psychiatry, and music when the guys talked about those--”gee, isn’t that interesting!” A lot of it was, and actually prepared me quite well for some of the more obscure corners of my law practice many years later. I understand that nowadays that kind of thing is considered sexual harassment, and was probably even intended that way at the time by the men involved. Maybe I was just too clueless to see, but that was sort of a protection. When I finally lost my virginity, in my senior year, it was for clearly-thought-out reasons of my own--not the best reasons, but at any rate my reasons. The next year, I moved in with the man I ultimately married, and I naively figured that would spell the end of any “seku haru” scenarios.
It didn’t, of course. Eventually I stopped being surprised when a man talked endlessly about his wife and kids and then propositioned me. It was part of the package, even when I talked about my husband. It guaranteed limits on whatever this guy had in mind. Mostly it was just talk. I got seriously groped a couple of times, and just acted as if nothing had happened. On these guys, it worked. I understand now that there are guys it doesn’t work on. I was, in short, lucky.
I know several women who were out-and-out raped, by strangers or almost-strangers. Some of them are friends of mine, and a few were clients. So far as I know, none of my friends and acquaintances were pursued by the powerful men in their professional lives in the vicious way that we are now hearing about. But it doesn’t surprise me when I do hear about it.
I don’t know, and probably none of us will ever know, the extent and prevalence of this kind of “personnel relations” in the first half of the 20th century, much less before that. We do know that it was not limited to heterosexual behavior—Churchill’s scornful dismissal of the hallowed traditions of the British navy as “rum, sodomy, and the lash” tells us that much. Female farm laborers and domestic servants, and sometimes their male counterparts, had to put up with much the same depravity. Read the novels of Thomas Hardy. Watch Downton Abbey.
Nor is it unique to the Western hemisphere or Christian culture. In the Muslim tradition, it is taken for granted that when a man employs or enslaves a female, he has legitimate sexual access to her. This is probably no longer recognized by civil law in Islamic countries, and maybe not even practiced much, but it still lurks in the culture. It is also, of course, present in the Bible, especially the “Old Testament.” Read the Book of Ruth. In much the same way that we enlightened liberals have enthusiastically accepted that “love is love,” power is power. And usually has nothing much to do with love.
And, being historically literate about FDR and JFK, I was not especially surprised or disappointed to find out that Democrats do it too. ”Power,” said Henry Kissinger’s wife, who ought to know, “Is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Not only in the sense of making women fall for powerful men, but of making powerful men fall in love with themselves to the point where they feel entitled to the attentions of any woman who appeals to them at the moment.
Was I being intellectually dishonest about Bill Clinton? So far as I know, all of his victims were adult women, though Monica was cutting it close. But most of them were his subordinates one way or another. And I was more outraged about the investigations than about the behavior that supposedly instigated them. Starr as good as said “I know this guy’s dirty, and I’m going to prove it any way I can,” which is hardly the behavior of an impartial investigator. I believed then and I believe now that the Democrats could have conclusively won the 2000 election by running as the party of minding your own business, on the platform that no American will ever again be placed under oath to testify about sex between consenting adults. Consenting. Adults. So far as I could tell, that covered most of the subject matter of Ken Starr’s investigations. Senator Gillibrand is, in hindsight, probably right in saying we would all be better off today if Clinton had resigned and let Gore take over. Gore would almost certainly have conclusively won re-election in 2000, if he had. But that’s a political judgment, not a moral one.
Most important, I really believed that a man’s conduct in his private life does not invalidate his talents and virtues in his public career. That’s partly because, as I said earlier, there aren’t very many powerful men who can keep their private lives clean. Power is a moral minefield. It leads its bearers through temptations, to all of the seven deadlies and then some, which most of us can never dream of. Pride—that’s the biggie, obviously. As Dante explained at length, it is the root of the other six deadly sins. Gluttony--maybe not so much now that the quality of official food preparation has declined so badly in many places. Anger--when one’s pride is not being validated. Greed--ditto. You get the idea. And finally, of course, lust. So it’s a good thing for all of us when a powerful man can keep his private vices out of his public life.
Do I still believe this now? Yes and no. The problem is that sex has become a part of people’s public life in ways that it never used to be. Now that women are being allowed and sometimes encouraged to aspire to equality with men in the public realm, what happens to them with those same men in the “private” realm isn’t so private any more, and can have serious repercussions in the public realm. The equality we are entitled to is placed in serious jeopardy by these collisions with older male privileges. Rape, and on-the-job sexual harassment, and date rape, were never right. We are now in a state of transition between the misogyny of the past and the equality of the future. To make that transition, we need to stop teaching girls and women to negotiate around male privilege, and start teaching boys and men to give up that privilege in favor of shared power. Power is power, yes. But love is love.