The depressing impasse of #MeToo

 

The #MeToo movement only started last October. On one hand, it feels like it has been around for much longer, perhaps because of the sheer volume of words written on it - and here I go, adding to those words, which will inevitably cause some eyes to roll, I am sure. But on the other hand, it feels like the #MeToo car, which was on an empowering ride, has crashed into a brick wall, like a prosaic and mundane alternative ending to Thelma and Louise.

We see progress with the arrest of Harvey Weinstein and one can only hope the wheels of justice turn surely and fairly. But while he is a grotesque warping of the leading man role, the one at whom we can all wave our pitchforks, it still feels like nothing much has changed. For the past seven months, the same arguments are going round and round on an eternally unconstructive hamster wheel.

When the men that we rather like are accused, we don't want to believe the allegations. Instead, we seek out alternative narratives, the accounts from those who thought he was delightful, a proper gentleman, when they met him. When eight women came forward to accuse Morgan Freeman of inappropriate touching and harassment and CNN ran a detailed report, nobody wanted to think about a man who has literally played God being the next one to fall by the wayside in a shameful pile along with Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey.

And so the same arguments keep breaking out ad infinitum. 

"Poor men! They're too scared to even ask a woman out now!" is a pretty common howl, as if all human relationships have suddenly ground to a halt since last October, as if some unseen force has caused Tinder to freeze and nobody is getting laid anymore. If a man wants to ask a woman out (or vice versa), all he has to do is politely ask. If she says yes, they can go on a date. If she says no, he should accept her rejection graciously and move on with his life. This is not hard or oppressive to men. 

The same goes for sex - why is striving for a world where consent is given freely and clearly, where men and women are comfortable and confident enough to say yes without fear of judgement or say no without fear of assault, such a terrible thing? Why are we instead setting the bar so low for men and women?

"Why was she in a hotel room with him in the first place?" is another common question. Hotel rooms are often used for meetings. I've conducted interviews in hotel rooms where I've been alone with a man. These interviews have never ended up in bed and I have never been harassed or propositioned in any professional situation in a hotel room. The closest shave happened in 2006 when a creepy guy on a press trip to Ireland called my room and asked if he could come in and give me a massage. I told him: "Good God, no!" and hung up the phone. 

I should not feel like I need to breathe a sigh of relief because this is how my life has panned out, that I have never been groped or harassed or raped in a hotel room in the line of duty - it is simply the way it should be. 

And even if every woman in the world refused to have professional meetings in hotel rooms, even if it was illegal to have meetings in hotel rooms, that wouldn't stop the problem of sexual abuse. The abuse would simply move to other locations, in much the same way that banning abortion in Ireland didn't stop Irish women having abortions. It merely moved the abortions to England. Sexual predators have an awful habit of finding a way to do what they do in all manner of places. It's just that "hotel room" has seedy connotations that "meeting at Costa" does not - but that doesn't mean women aren't harassed over coffee. Hell, Max Clifford allegedly groomed one of his victims at the Wimpy burger joint down the road from my place. He didn't need to book a suite at the Dorchester. 

Or there are the inevitable non-sequiturs - "Why are all the feminists making a fuss about this and not about female genital mutilation/the kidnapped girls in Nigeria/the raped Yazidi women/child marriage?" - except that "all the feminists" is not a homogenous blur. "All the feminists" covers a diverse group that transcends national borders, religion, ethnicity, body type, socio-economic status and so on. And plenty of feminists speak out about issues apart from #MeToo and do some incredible work with girls and women all over the world - women are capable of being angry about more than one thing at a time and taking action. We are pretty damn amazing in that regard.

The #MeToo movement does need to go beyond the world of celebrity so women who have been exploited, harassed, abused and raped in all industries can speak out and get justice. We should stand behind every actress who has been abused and equally we need to stand behind the waitress who is being groped by her boss on the promise of better shifts, the nurse who gets her arse pinched in the hospital corridor as she tries to do her job, the immigrant cleaner who is raped in exchange for her silence on illegal workers.  

And then there are those who worry about men's careers being ruined. If someone is found guilty of harassment, abuse or rape, his career is not going to be at the top of things I'm especially worried about. This plays into the narrative of false accusations - which are terrible but rare. Seriously, think it through, everyone - the shit women go through when they speak out or try to report such crimes is frequently horrific. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this and there would be no need for a #MeToo movement.

Then there are those who claim that all these women are coming forward because they want to be famous. Here's a test - without Googling, tell me the name of the woman - first name and last name - who accused Bill Cosby in the court case that led him being found guilty of drugging and indecently assaulting her. Go on, it was just last month.

While all this is going on, guess what? Men are getting away with it. There have always been men who get away with it. A self-confessed pussy-grabber was elected president, for God's sake.

Roman Polanski may not be able to come back to the US any time soon without being arrested but that has not stopped him making award-winning films - and it certainly hasn't stopped plenty of celebrated actresses from working with him and singing his praises. Rob Lowe was caught out in a sex tape scandal in 1989 after he claimed to have no idea that one of the two participants in the threesome was actually 16 years old. But since then, he rehabilitated himself as slick Samuel Seaborn in The West Wing and too-good-to-be-true Chris Traeger in Parks and Recreation. Enough water seems to have passed under that particularly seedy bridge that he even made a parody of the sex tape in 2016. Hey, we should all be able to look back and laugh at the time we shagged a minor, right?

And Morgan Freeman? My prediction is that the worst thing that might happen to him is the reconsideration of a lifetime achievement award. He will still die a wealthy, multi-award-winning actor, and because he is one of the guys that nobody wants to think ill of, his films will be rewatched over and over again. He may be a sex pest, he may not be - but what I do know is that when people come forward with accusations, they need to be taken seriously. This is not the same as all accusations being automatically believed - but if #MeToo is going to mean anything, allegations require proper investigation. Sweeping it under the carpet may have been the way it used to be in the "good old days", but the more we learn about what used to go on, the more we realise that for many girls and women, the "good old days" were bloody horrific. 

Photography by stock.tookapic.com

Post-Hef-post-Weinstein confessions of an ex-men's mag employee

I suppose I should be grateful to Hugh Hefner. With Playboy, he created the market that created a job for me from 2003 until 2006 - in those years, I was working as a sub editor at the Australian edition of FHM, the men's magazine which launched in 1985 and, ultimately, was eaten alive by the internet.

But in my time there, I worked with people who actually had ethics. I received nothing but support from male colleagues after I was followed by a man in a car when I walked home alone one night after a 15-hour day in the office, or when my terrible neighbours were having drug-fuelled arguments outside my flat door at 3am and I turned up to work looking like death, and when there was a family tragedy. The office fell silent and sad when we looked at our watches and realised that a young Australian man had just been executed for drug trafficking in Singapore in mitigating circumstances in 2005, and when a member of staff was sent the video of the beheading of Kenneth Bingley in 2004.

There was was one bad apple who was on staff briefly. He was a very junior member of staff, who I later discovered behaved in a sexually aggressive way towards a friend. He ended up being struck off my friends' list when he revealed himself to be a racist worshipper of Stefan Molyneux. And a member of staff, who worked across other magazines in the company, was dealt with severely, and rightly so, after he called one of the entrants in an FHM modelling competition after spotting her phone number on the back of the photo she sent in, back when people still entered competitions by post. I still remember how appalled the guys in the office were when word got out about that incident.

When it comes to writing, there are very few sacred cows in the barn when you work on such a magazine and everyone is under constant pressure to be the funniest person in the room. But jokes about race or rape or paedophilia, for example, did not find their way into the pages. A lot of the jokes were self-deprecating jokes about men written by men.

There were lines in the sand. We didn't really need to be told where the lines were, and if anyone was unsure they'd run it past someone else, or it would be filtered through the editing process, because we were essentially decent human beings. FHM was an excellent example of media self-regulation, something which tends to cause panic among fans of censorship and restrictions on press freedom.

Sure, there were gags in bad taste - I made a few crass jokes myself in the line of duty - but there was an innate sense of decency even amid the farts, belches, hangovers and comedowns.

We did not exploit the women who appeared in the magazine. Nobody was forced to pose for photo shoots in bikinis or lingerie against their will. The women who appeared in FHM all had agency and were treated with respect. I supervised many photo shoots myself and I can honestly say nothing bad happened to the women on any of them.

Yet I am not going to worship at the altar of Hugh Hefner.

Yes, Playboy published many excellent articles, genuinely good and groundbreaking journalism, witty opinion pieces from men and women. He paid writers well and, in many cases, they were pieces which would not have found their way to press anywhere else. 

Yes, Hugh Hefner gave airplay to black writers, activists and entertainers through publication of their work and interviews.

Yes, Hugh Hefner donated extensively to civil rights causes.

Yes, the Playboy Foundation funded the first rape kits in America, which are essential for evidence-gathering in such cases.

Yes, Playboy was one in the eye for prudish conservatives and lovers of censorship.

But here's the thing. Hugh Hefner could have achieved all of the above without doing anything from the list below.

He didn't have to sleep with Dorothy Stratten to apparently further her career, with the support of her obsessive husband, Paul Snider. Snider, by the way, ended up shooting her when she was just 20 years old, before turning the gun on himself. Nor did Hefner have to ensure she posed for Playboy when she was still 17.

He didn't have to publish full frontal nude photographs of a 10-year-old Brooke Shields posing in a bathtub, her face plastered in makeup.

He didn't have to publish photographs of 11-year-old Eva Ionesco in the Italian edition of Playboy in 1976.

He didn't have to refuse to wear condoms during his sex parties at the Playboy Mansion.

He didn't have to pay Marilyn Monroe a pitiful $50 for her Playboy shoot, a shoot from which he profited handsomely over the years.

He didn't have to be a douche in death by spunking $75,000 for the crypt next to Marilyn Monroe's final resting place.

He didn't have to impose controlling rules such as 9pm curfews, restrictions on social life, and insistence on sex on demand, on the women in the Playboy Mansion. If you seriously think every woman in there genuinely loved her time in the mansion or truly had a wide range of life choices available to her, you're deluded. Plenty of women came out of the mansion physically or psychologically damaged - it's not sex-phobic or prudish to say so. It's reality.

And so here we are, in the post-Weinstein era, with Hugh Hefner barely cold in his grave, and plenty of men are whining about how they just don't know what to do with themselves anymore. Apparently, for these poor little petals, a new culture where girls and women are not afraid to speak out about the whole spectrum of sexually abusive and inappropriate behaviour, will be the death of flirting and will prevent people from having relationships.

Except that nobody has said that flirting or touching or sex with consent should be banned, or that workplace relationships will suddenly stop. Hell, I met my own husband at work without either of us exploiting the other. If the right to say no does not exist, the right to say yes is meaningless. If the right to give consent disappears, we live in a wilderness where entitlement to the bodies of girls and women reigns supreme.

Men do not have to rape women, or harass women even after they have told them they are not interested, or stalk women after break-ups, or follow them home as when they walk alone, or call them sexually explicit and unasked-for names in the workplace, or kerb-crawl them, or demand they smile when they have the temerity to not beam like a beauty queen at all times.

All the things we are asking of men are not onerous demands, just as Hugh Hefner did not have to do any of the awful things he did when he was alive.

So I am not going to sit here in eternal gratitude for Hugh Hefner. Even if his legacy never happened, even if FHM never happened, I am pretty sure I still would have found work in publishing and, more importantly, progress in areas such as civil rights and rape case investigations still would have happened. And I am pretty sure the men I worked with at FHM would still be decent human beings and not exploiters of women and underage girls.

Photography by Alan Light