Briefing | The politics of sexual assault

It’s not just the powerful

Privilege lets predatory men get away with a lot, be they rich and famous or not

She shouldn’t have to make nice with the creeps
|AMSTERDAM, LOS ANGELES, PARIS AND ROME

“WOMEN: tweet me your first assaults. They aren’t just stats. I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.” Kelly Oxford, a screenwriter and blogger, was not sure whether her tweet in response to Donald Trump’s open-mic bragging about sexual assault would get any responses at all. In fact it got hundreds of thousands. Many, like Ms Oxford’s initial tweet, describe offences remarkably similar to those Mr Trump brags about: crotch-grabs and tongues forced into mouths. Other women tell of rapes. A striking number were first assaulted before reaching their teens.

By so clearly associating himself with such memories Mr Trump has deepened the degree to which women dislike him, and may have denied himself the presidency (see chart). There is a well-established gender gap in American politics, with men favouring the Republicans, but its current level is unprecedented. Recent polls show women favouring Hillary Clinton by 49% to 34%; men favour Mr Trump by 42% to 39%. Female Collective, a feminist brand, is rush-printing T-shirts depicting a snarling cat and the words “Pussy grabs back”; they urge women to wear it to the polling booth on November 8th.

Michele Paludi of Excelsior College in New York state, who has written widely about sexual harassment, says that “moments like this can change a culture.” She points to Anita Hill’s testimony in Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee, in 1991. Ms Hill’s account of her former boss’s unwelcome sexualised talk and repeated propositions (which he strongly denied) broadened conceptions of what constituted sexual harassment. New laws and stiffer penalties were brought in. Many private companies created anti-harassment policies in response. Could Mr Trump have created a similar moment?

Some of the response to the tape shows the need for such a change. Many reports focused on Mr Trump’s vulgarity, rather than his ugly meanings. The Washington Post, which broke the story, described the recording as an “extremely lewd conversation”; the Guardian referred to it as a “sex-boast tape”. Fox News said that Mr Trump “uses a vulgar anatomical term and discusses trying to have sex with an unidentified, married woman.” Mr Trump’s defence, such as it was, took a similar tack, apologising for “locker-room banter” outside the locker room.

But, as many women pointed out on social media, the really offensive word was not “pussy”—even though, of all the demeaning words used for women’s genitals, it is the one most commonly used to describe women collectively as sexual objects and prey. The word that stung was “grab”. “You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?” Anderson Cooper, one of the moderators of the presidential debate held in Missouri on October 9th, asked Mr Trump. Mr Trump denied any such thing.

Responses from senior Republicans missed the mark in other ways. Many cited their wives, daughters and so on as their motivation for denouncing Mr Trump’s words. “Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified,” said Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, in a textbook example of what feminists call “benevolent sexism”: a belief in the wondrousness of women that perpetuates harm by casting them as weak.

Since the tape’s release, women have come forward who say they were indeed groped and unwillingly kissed by Mr Trump. In general, though, Deborah Cameron, the author of “The Myth of Mars and Venus”, a book about how men and women speak, cautions against always interpreting words like Mr Trump’s as accounts of things that actually happened. Their boasts, coarse language and demeaning of women are not necessarily used to convey facts, she notes. They are there to build fraternal bonds—in this case with the television presenter Billy Bush and their shared entourage. The woman under discussion plays the same role as the fish in a fisherman’s tale, or the enemy in an old soldier’s.

But to describe the exchange as locker-room banter does not excuse it, says Ms Cameron. Such talk can pave the way to harassment and assault. Research on fraternities and sports teams suggests that, by reducing women to objects and ostracising men who do not join in, banter can make sexual assaults more likely—and make it less likely that men on the scene will intervene, or report the culprits later.

The recording reveals how this works at a less extreme level. Mr Trump says he may force a kiss on Arianne Zucker, the actor they are about to meet, and refers to her as “it”. The tenor of the conversation shapes what follows. Mr Bush urges Ms Zucker to give “the Donald” a “little hug”. He demands one too and asks whom she would date. “Both,” she replies, with a false laugh. “She’s obviously been here before,” says Ms Cameron. “She obviously sees making nice with creeps as going with the job.”

“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Mr Trump assures the craven Mr Bush. As Ms Oxford’s Twitter timeline attests, many perfectly ordinary men feel a similar entitlement to women’s bodies. And most sexual offenders, famous or obscure, get away with it. Their crimes are rarely reported, let alone prosecuted. Many men are oblivious to the level of harassment and worse women have to put up with, as some bewildered responses to the revelations on Ms Oxford’s timeline showed. Coping mechanisms and a sense of powerlessness keep the scale of the problem hidden.

Famous and powerful men have extra protection. The fact that they have favours to bestow can lead to acquiescence. It can also lead to accusations of opportunism if victims risk public shaming by speaking up. When Mike Tyson, a boxer, was tried for rape in 1992 his legal team tried to paint his accuser, a teenage beauty-pageant winner, as money-grubbing. Asked why she waited 32 years to come forward, Janice Dickinson, a former model who is one of dozens of women to have accused Bill Cosby, an actor, of sexual assault, said on “Entertainment Tonight”, a television show: “I was afraid of being labelled a whore or a slut and trying to sleep my way to the top of a career that never took place.”

If not now, when?

Sexual harassment and assault are more common in places where women are heavily outnumbered and the most powerful positions are disproportionately held by men, says Stefanie Johnson, a management professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In most places politics as a whole fits her description very well, with no party or ideology enjoying a monopoly on malfeasance. Ali Goldsworthy, one of four women who accused a British politician, Lord Rennard, of unwanted sexual touching in 2013, said she heard similar stories from women across the political spectrum. (Lord Rennard denied the accusations; an internal investigation by his party, the Liberal Democrats, found that “the evidence of behaviour which violated the personal space and autonomy of the complainants was broadly credible.”)

Mr Trump’s supporters like to point to the sexual misconduct of Mrs Clinton’s husband, Bill. Mr Trump brought several women associated with Mr Clinton to the debate, including Juanita Broaddrick, who has accused him of rape (he has never been charged or tried in the matter). It is an uncomfortable comparison for Democrats convinced that, if they were forced, like Republicans, to choose between victory and a sexually predatory presidential candidate, they would make the right choice.

In 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then the managing director of the IMF and a likely Socialist candidate for the French presidency, was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a maid. The charges, eventually dropped, unleashed a torrent of stories about Mr Strauss-Kahn’s predatory behaviour, which had been known about by journalists and politicians, but barely discussed in public. The affair appeared to break a taboo of silence and Mr Strauss-Kahn’s career was ended. But little seems to have changed as a consequence.

Last year over a dozen female journalists wrote in Libération, a newspaper, of the way they are treated by male politicians. From suggestive comments—“it would be better if you were wearing nothing underneath”—to gross physical advances behind closed doors, they still face sexist behaviour daily. “We thought that the [Strauss-Kahn] affair had changed the situation and that macho habits…were on the way out. Alas...” they wrote.

Earlier this year Denis Baupin, the deputy speaker of the National Assembly—which is 73% male, with half the members over 60—resigned after women in his party accused him of sexual harassment and aggression (which he denies). Those accused of sexual harassment, Catherine Le Magueresse, a lawyer, told French television earlier this year, “are often convinced that they are entitled to women’s bodies and that their power permits everything.”

Powerful men do not always have to impose themselves on women in order to indulge their appetites inappropriately. Mr Clinton’s best-known sexual transgression was with Monica Lewinsky, an intern who actively sought the affair. Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former prime minister, while debauched, does not appear to have had a taste for assault. That said, catching Mr Berlusconi’s eye was worthwhile, in its way. In 2010, while he was still in office, it emerged that he had been hosting “Bunga Bunga” parties attended by many pretty young women, some of them prostitutes. In his book “Being Berlusconi: The Rise and Fall”, Michael Day, a journalist, reports that some of the guests were offered coveted jobs presenting weather forecasts on one of the six free-to-air television channels the tycoon politician controlled.

Up to the Bunga Bunga revelations Mr Berlusconi’s many female supporters appeared not to care about his attitude to women; some continued not to. But the scandal inspired a wave of protests under a slogan borrowed from the title of a novel by Primo Levi: “If not now, when?” In response the country’s political parties increased the number of female parliamentary candidates; the number of women in government rose. In 2014 the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi, formed a cabinet of which half the members are women.

Getting more women into politics at the highest level should help make sexual harassment rarer. But formal policies are needed, too. Here, the private sector has done more than politicians. One former researcher at the European Parliament describes how she lost her job after complaining that her boss asked her to go for a drink but then took her to a strip bar. She now works in the corporate world and is struck by the lack of such harassment.

Many firms have banned socialising in strip clubs, which intimidates or excludes female employees. High-profile dismissals can help ensure that such anti-harassment policies have bite. Mr Bush has been suspended from his television job and looks likely to be sacked. The board of American Apparel, a clothing retailer, ousted its founder, Dov Charney, for alleged misconduct, including sexual harassment, in 2014. After numerous allegations of harassment and abuse Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, resigned in July. He now advises Mr Trump’s campaign.

The misogynist banter that facilitates so much assault and harassment is unlikely to be swept away by formal measures. But what is acceptable in private conversations can be shifted, says Ms Cameron. The sort of racist remarks that would once have been commonplace have become much rarer, as fewer listeners let them go by unchallenged. Homophobic remarks also seem to be on their way out. For misogynist ones to follow, the many men who have publicly declared themselves disgusted by Mr Trump’s words need to start making that clear in private, too.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "It’s not just the powerful"

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